Drawing from in-depth interviews with a group of Puerto Ricans who requested a certificate of Puerto Rican citizenship, legal and historical documents, and official reports not publicly accessible, Jacqueline Font-Guzmán shares how some Puerto Ricans construct and experience their citizenship and national identity at the margins of the US nation.

Drawing from in-depth interviews with a group of Puerto Ricans who requested a certificate of Puerto Rican citizenship, legal and historical documents, and official reports not publicly accessible, Jacqueline Font-Guzmán shares how some Puerto Ricans construct and experience their citizenship and national identity at the margins of the US nation. Winner of the 2015 Juridical Book of the Year in the category of ‘Essay Promoting Critical Thinking and Analysis of Juridical and Social Issues.’

By the end of the 1920s, just ten years after the Jones Act first made them full-fledged Americans, more than 45,000 native Puerto Ricans had left their homes and entered the United States, citizenship papers in hand, forming one of New York City’s most complex and distinctive migrant communities. In Puerto Rican Citizen, Lorrin Thomas for the first time unravels the many tensions—historical, racial, political, and economic—that defined the experience of this group of American citizens before and after World War II. Building its incisive narrative from a wide range of archival sources, interviews, and first-person accounts of Puerto Rican life in New York, this book illuminates the rich history of a group that is still largely invisible to many scholars. At the center of Puerto Rican Citizen are Puerto Ricans’ own formulations about political identity, the responses of activists and ordinary migrants to the failed promises of American citizenship, and their expectations of how the American state should address those failures. Complicating our understanding of the discontents of modern liberalism, of race relations beyond black and white, and of the diverse conceptions of rights and identity in American life, Thomas’s book transforms the way we understand this community’s integral role in shaping our sense of citizenship in twentieth-century America.

A crucial, clear-eyed accounting of Puerto Rico's 122 years as a colony of the US. Since its acquisition by the US in 1898, Puerto Rico has served as a testing ground for the most aggressive and exploitative US economic, political, and social policies. The devastation that ensued finally grew impossible to ignore in 2017, in the wake of Hurricane María, as the physical destruction compounded the infrastructure collapse and trauma inflicted by the debt crisis. In Fantasy Island, Ed Morales traces how, over the years, Puerto Rico has served as a colonial satellite, a Cold War Caribbean showcase, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a corporate tax shelter. He also shows how it has become a blank canvas for mercenary experiments in disaster capitalism on the frontlines of climate change, hamstrung by internal political corruption and the US federal government's prioritization of outside financial interests. Taking readers from San Juan to New York City and back to his family's home in the Luquillo Mountains, Morales shows us the machinations of financial and political interests in both the US and Puerto Rico, and the resistance efforts of Puerto Rican artists and activists. Through it all, he emphasizes that the only way to stop Puerto Rico from being bled is to let Puerto Ricans take control of their own destiny, going beyond the statehood-commonwealth-independence debate to complete decolonization.

Challenges the framing of Puerto Rican cultural politics as a dichotomy between nationalism and colonialism. Discussions of Puerto Rican cultural politics usually fall into one of two categories, nationalist or colonialist. Puerto Rican Jam moves beyond this narrow dichotomy, elaborating alternatives to dominant postcolonial theories, and includes essays written from the perspectives of groups that are not usually represented, such as gays and lesbians, youth, blacks, and women. Among the topics discussed are the limitations of nationalism as a transformative and democratizing political discourse, the contradictory impact of American colonialism, language politics, and the 1928 U.S. congressional hearings on women's suffrage in Puerto Rico.

In the second edition of Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know(R), Jorge Duany provides a compendium to the island's rich history, culture, politics, economy, and diaspora. Written in an accessible question-and-answer format, Duany covers the history of the island as well as the demographic, economic, political, and cultural features of contemporary Puerto Rico. He examines the inner workings of the Commonwealth government and the island's relationship to the United States. New material examines the multiple issues affecting Puerto Rico in the last decade, including a prolonged recession, the devastating impact of two hurricanes, and the largest migrant wave ever recorded from Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico is often depicted as a "racial democracy" in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaetón, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaetón musicians critique racial democracy's privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as Tego Calderón criticize the Puerto Rican mainstream's tendency to praise black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the island's black population, while Ivy Queen, the genre's most visible woman, disrupts the associations between whiteness and respectability that support official discourses of racial democracy. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaetón, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaetón's origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan's slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaetón, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora.

Written by an author who comes from Puerto Rican heritage, this book is the story of a people who trace their ancestry from three different races. It tells of how they went from a beautiful Caribbean island to the cities of America for a better life. From humble, peaceful beginnings to rebellion, slavery, and invasion, the Puerto Rican people have endured trials that are common to various historical narratives but aren't commonly told in Mainland American schools. This book is the beginning of a more complete education in history and will motivate readers to be more understanding of different cultural experiences.

Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s and Marta Aponte Alsina’s critical-creative work, this book explores how Puerto Rico’s affective archive of Caribbean relations, from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first, has envisioned and embodied decolonization and sovereignty in relation to the archipelagic, the sea, and Caribbean regionalism. The book’s transdisciplinary archive includes historical figures and their legacies; political and activist thought, textuality, and action as performative interventions; and performance and live arts pieces, objects, materialities, and texts as political/activist actions. Affect, Archive, Archipelago begins by delving into the historical-political figures of Ramón Emeterio Betances, Luisa Capetillo, and Pedro Albizu Campos. It then encounters the work of the live arts collective Agua, Sol y Sereno; the political/activist work of Amigxs del MAR, Comuna Caribe, Mujeres que Abrazan la Mar, and Coalición 8M; and Teresa Hernández’s transdisciplinary artistic trajectory. Finally, stemming from the book’s argument and the immediate historical-political-affective context of Puerto Rico’s summer 2019 rebellion (Verano Boricua), the book offers some reflections and proposals for furthering decolonial, sovereign, archipelagic, and reparatory horizons for Puerto Rico

Puerto Ricans maintain a vibrant identity that bridges two very different places--the island of Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. Whether they live on the island, in the States, or divide time between the two, most imagine Puerto Rico as a separate nation and view themselves primarily as Puerto Rican. At the same time, Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, and Puerto Rico has been a U.S. commonwealth since 1952. Jorge Duany uses previously untapped primary sources to bring new insights to questions of Puerto Rican identity, nationalism, and migration. Drawing a distinction between political and cultural nationalism, Duany argues that the Puerto Rican "nation" must be understood as a new kind of translocal entity with deep cultural continuities. He documents a strong sharing of culture between island and mainland, with diasporic communities tightly linked to island life by a steady circular migration. Duany explores the Puerto Rican sense of nationhood by looking at cultural representations produced by Puerto Ricans and considering how others--American anthropologists, photographers, and museum curators, for example--have represented the nation. His sources of information include ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interviews, surveys, censuses, newspaper articles, personal documents, and literary texts.