Organizing Puerto Rican Domestics: Resistance and Household Labor Reform in the Puerto Rican Diaspora after 1930

2015 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 67-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Amador
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Domestic Work ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Contract Work ◽  
Employment Agency ◽  
Puerto Rican Women ◽  
Labor Exploitation ◽  
Puerto Rican Diaspora ◽  
History Of

AbstractOn November 28, 1946, a group of Puerto Rican women picketed the Chicago offices of Castle, Barton, and Associates, a private employment agency that had brought them to the city to become domestic workers. They protested low wages, long hours, and deductions from their pay for transportation and other costs. Their resistance challenged the Puerto Rican and United States governments to both recognize local labor exploitation and grapple with Puerto Rican rights as those of migrant United States citizens. These women made demands on the Puerto Rican state to regulate migrant contract work and sponsor training programs for domestic work. They would succeed as colonial subjects to gain recognition as workers. Nonetheless, they failed to win well-paid, safe, and desirable jobs. This history of Puerto Rican women's domestic work and their struggle for regulation illuminates a formative moment in the history of Puerto Rican women's organizing and activism for labor rights.

scholarly journals Granice rzeczywiste i symboliczne. Przypadek Portoryko.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Kaganiec-Kamieńska
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Main Part ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Us ◽  
Puerto Rican Diaspora

Borders and Boundaries, Real and Symbolic: The Case of Puerto RicoThe aim of this article is to outline the real and symbolic borders and boundaries, of geographical, political, cultural and racial nature, in the history and present of Puerto Rico, and their role in shaping and transforming the Puerto Rican identity. The main part of the article focuses on the borders and boundaries between Puerto Rico and the United States. The second part looks at the lines dividing the population in the island and the Puerto Rican diaspora in the US. Granice rzeczywiste i symboliczne. Przypadek PortorykoCelem artykułu jest zarysowanie rzeczywistych i symbolicznych granic, geograficznych, politycznych, rasowych i kulturowych, wpisujących się w historię i współczesność Portoryko oraz ich roli w kształtowaniu się i przekształcaniu tożsamości portorykańskiej. Główna część artykułu skupia się na granicach biegnących między Portoryko a Stanami Zjednoczonymi. W drugiej części wskazano linie podziału powstałe między mieszkańcami wyspy a diasporą portorykańską w USA.

The Puerto Rican Diaspora to the United States

Puerto Rico ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Duany
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Puerto Rican Diaspora

What is the Puerto Rican Day Parade? The Puerto Rican Day Parade (Desfile Puertorriqueño) in New York City is the most visible display of Puerto Rican identity in the United States. The parade was first held in 1959 as an offshoot of the...

US Imperialism and Puerto Rican Needleworkers: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Women's Labor in a Deep History of Neoliberal Trade

2020 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 142-172
Author(s):  
Aimee Loiselle
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
Puerto Rican Women ◽  
Us Imperialism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Operation Bootstrap ◽  
A Site

AbstractIn 1898, US occupation of Puerto Rico opened possibilities for experimentation with manufacturing, investment, tariffs, and citizenship because the Treaty of Paris did not address territorial incorporation. Imperial experimentation started immediately and continued through the liberal policies of the New Deal and World War II, consistently reproducing drastic exceptions. These exceptions were neither permanent nor complete, but the rearrangements of sovereignty and citizenship established Puerto Rico as a site of potential and persistent exemption. Puerto Rican needleworkers were central to the resulting colonial industrialization-not as dormant labor awaiting outside developmental forces but as skilled workers experienced in production. Following US occupation, continental trade agents and manufacturers noted the intricate needlework of Puerto Rican women and their employment in homes and small shops for contractors across the island. Their cooptation and adaptation of this contracting system led to the colonial industrialization, generating bureaucratic, financial, and legal infrastructure later used in Operation Bootstrap, a long-term economic plan devised in the 1940s and 1950s. Labor unions and aggrieved workers contested and resisted this colonial industrialization. They advocated their own proposals and pushed against US economic policies and insular business management. Throughout these fights, the asymmetrical power of the federal government and industrial capital allowed the colonial regime to assert US sovereignty while continually realigning exemptions and redefining citizenship for liberal economic objectives. Rather than representing a weakening of the nation-state, this strong interventionist approach provided scaffolding for Operation Bootstrap, which became a model for the neoliberal projects called export processing zones (EPZs).

Default signals further slide for Puerto Rico in 2016

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Control Policy ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Public Agencies ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
Puerto Rican Diaspora

Significance The island's government and public agencies hold 72 billion dollars of debt obligations, but migration to the mainland United States, political unwillingness to cut spending and constitutional difficulties have triggered a severe crisis. Federal US and Puerto Rican lawmakers are concerned that austerity-driven cuts to public services would only exacerbate the problems of the commonwealth. Impacts The Puerto Rican diaspora in Florida may punish Republicans at the ballot box in the event of federal inaction. Anti-gun-control policy 'riders' may scupper congressional efforts to aid Puerto Rico in March. Relief for Puerto Rico may become a vote-winning issue for Democratic presidential candidates in the party primaries.

The Puerto Rican Diaspora to the United States

Puerto Rico ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Duany
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
York City ◽  
Puerto Ricans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Puerto Rican Diaspora ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Who were some of the most prominent Puerto Ricans who moved to the United States during the late nineteenth century? Several political exiles from Puerto Rico sought refuge abroad, mainly in New York City, after the failure of the Grito de Lares, the Island’s insurrection...

Conclusion Current Struggles against U.S. Colonialism and Empire

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
JoAnna Poblete
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Puerto Ricans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sugar Plantations

This book offers an alternative perspective to the standard narrative that views the history of labor in Hawaiian sugar plantations as an interesting sidebar to U.S. history, arguing that such a marginalization of the islands ignores the role of colonialism in the overall story of the nation. It also challenges the practice of distinguishing sharply between continental versus overseas U.S. expansionism, and especially the claim that the expansion of a nation to contiguous continental areas was a natural part of the development of a country. As it has demonstrated in this text, U.S imperialism manifested in the daily lives of Puerto Rican and Filipino laborers in Hawaiʻi. The book concludes with a discussion of two significant ways that U.S. colonialism still has an active influence on the daily lives of Puerto Ricans and Filipinos: the push for a change in Puerto Rico's temporary territorial relationship with the United States; and the quest for the return of the bells of Balangiga, taken as war booty in 1901 and currently displayed at a U.S. war memorial in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Caring for Labor History

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-69
Author(s):  
Emma Amador
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Reproductive Politics ◽  
Domestic Worker ◽  
Puerto Rican Women ◽  
History Of

This essay charts how the author’s interest in labor history and the history of care work were inspired by her own family history of migrations from Puerto Rico to the United States. It considers how her grandmother’s stories about being a child needle worker in Puerto Rico and a migrant domestic worker in New York led her to think critically about the connections and overlap between the home and workplace in the lives of Puerto Rican women. As a student, investigating her personal history led her to discover a rich tradition of Puerto Rican feminist labor history that raised questions about reproductive politics and caring labor that remain pressing in our contemporary moment.

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