Ismael García‐Colón . Land Reform in Puerto Rico: Modernizing the Colonial State, 1941–1969 . (New Directions in Puerto Rican Studies.) Gainesville : University Press of Florida . 2009 . Pp. xiii, 163. $69.95.

The dominant narrative of U.S. deindustrialization opens with the Northeast as the definitive starting point for industry followed by a direct linear relocation to the South and then the Global South. In this framework, deindustrialization appears to have a logic, a rational pathway following cheaper and compliant labor. When Puerto Rican needleworkers become visible in the history of the textile and garment industry, however, their colonial migrations complicate deindustrialization, and its linear logic collapses. From the perspective of these colonial women, industrialization of Puerto Rico began at the turn of the twentieth century - the same time factories and mills increased in the South. Thousands of women also migrated to the Northeast mainland, especially from the 1950s to the 1970s, when many white workers were mourning the loss of textile and garment jobs. Puerto Rican women moved to the old factories of the Northeast, which had become outposts for large transnational corporations that did not relocate their manufacturing in a direct geographic path but rather spread their processes over any arrangement that offered the best cost-benefit analysis. For Puerto Rican women, employment in the plants of the Northeast during the 1960s and 1970s offered hope rather than despair, and many took pride in meeting their quotas and providing wages for their families. In the 1980s, when the Reagan administration initiated major reforms to financial policies and the practices of leveraged buyouts made closing old plants a better return on investment, Puerto Rican women mourned the loss of jobs in an industry many experts had already declared ‘dead.’ Fragmentation of the archives between Puerto Rican studies and U.S. labor history have allowed for a simplistic narrative of deindustrialization and an erasure of the losses and disappointments of women who left Puerto Rico for the promise of higher wages in the postwar Northeast mainland. When the oral histories and documents related to the migrations of Puerto Rican needleworkers become visible in the larger history of the ‘American working class’, we see deindustrialization as sprawling and contingent rather than as linear and naturalized. Puerto Rican studies scholars have written about needleworkers as part of their field with particular attention to gender as it relates to notions of motherhood, but this article sets the women as American workers into the losses of the textile and garment industry without eliding their specificity as migrating and racialized colonial labor. In addition, the women expressed grief that went beyond losing a specific job - many of these workers lost their place in the U.S. workforce and the promise of financial stability as they became associated with racialized poverty and welfare debates.

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Citizens v. Clients: Working Women and Colonial Reform in Puerto Rico and Belize, 1932–45

Journal of Latin American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0022216x0300676x ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 35 (2) ◽

pp. 279-310 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

ANNE S. MACPHERSON

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Puerto Rico ◽

Puerto Rican ◽

Social Services ◽

Working Women ◽

Colonial State ◽

Labour Movement ◽

British Caribbean ◽

Wage Earners ◽

Politically Active

Marked differences in mid-twentieth-century reformers' approaches to politically active working women in Belize and Puerto Rico help to explain the emergence of colonial hegemony in the latter, and the rise of mass nationalism in the former. Reformers in both colonies were concerned with working women, but whereas British and Belizean reformers treated them as sexually and politically disordered, and aimed to transform them from militant wage-earners to clients of state social services, US and Puerto Rican reformers treated them as voting citizens with legitimate roles in the economy and labour movement. Although racialised moralism was not absent in Puerto Rico, the populism of colonial reform there helped cement a renegotiated colonial compact, while the non-populist character of reform in Belize – and the wider British Caribbean – alienated working women from the colonial state.

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Book reviews

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids ◽

10.1163/13822373-90002427 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 86 (1-2) ◽

pp. 109-196

Author(s):

Redactie KITLV

Keyword(s):

Puerto Rico ◽

African Diaspora ◽

Latin American ◽

Land Reform ◽

Atlantic World ◽

The United States ◽

Colonial State ◽

History Of ◽

Anglo American ◽

The Impact

The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture, by Patrick Manning (reviewed by Joseph C. Miller) Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, by David Eltis & David Richardson (reviewed by Ted Maris-Wolf) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery, by Seymour Drescher (reviewed by Gregory E. O’Malley) Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World, edited by Rosemary Brana-Shute & Randy J. Sparks (reviewed by Matthew Mason) You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery, by Jeremy D. Popkin (reviewed by Philippe R. Girard) Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Arts in the Atlantic World, by T .J. Desch Obi (reviewed by Flávio Gomes & Antonio Liberac Cardoso Simões Pires) Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850, by Frederick C. Knight (reviewed by Walter Hawthorne) The Akan Diaspora in the Americas, by Kwasi Konadu (reviewed by Ray Kea) Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (reviewed by Deborah A. Thomas) From Africa to Jamaica: The Making of an Atlantic Slave Society, 1775-1807, by Audra A. Diptee (reviewed by D.A. Dunkley) Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process in Jamaica 1944-2007, by Amanda Sives (reviewed by Douglas Midgett) Caciques and Cemi Idols: The Web Spun by Taino Rulers between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, by José R. Oliver (reviewed by Brian D. Bates) The Latin American Identity and the African Diaspora: Ethnogenesis in Context, by Antonio Olliz Boyd (reviewed by Dawn F. Stinchcomb) Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic, by Kimberly Eison Simmons (reviewed by Ginetta E.B. Candelario) Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora in the Wider Caribbean, edited by Philippe Zacaïr (reviewed by Catherine Benoît) Duvalier’s Ghosts: Race, Diaspora, and U.S. Imperialism in Haitian Literatures, by Jana Evans Braziel (reviewed by J. Michael Dash) Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico, by Ramón E. Soto-Crespo (reviewed by Guillermo B. Irizarry) Report on the Island and Diocese of Puerto Rico (1647), by Diego de Torres y Vargas (reviewed by David A. Badillo) Land Reform in Puerto Rico: Modernizing the Colonial State, 1941-1969, by Ismael García-Colón (reviewed by Ricardo Pérez) Land: Its Occupation, Management, Use and Conceptualization. The Case of the Akawaio and Arekuna of the Upper Mazaruni District, Guyana, by Audrey J. Butt Colson (reviewed by Christopher Carrico) Caribbean Religious History: An Introduction, by Ennis B. Edmonds & Michelle A . Gonzalez (reviewed by N. Samuel Murrell) The Cross and the Machete: Native Baptists of Jamaica – Identity, Ministry and Legacy, by Devon Dick (reviewed by John W. Pulis) Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century, by Jonathan Schorsch (reviewed by Richard L. Kagan) Kosmos und Kommunikation: Weltkonzeptionen in der südamerikanischen Sprachfamilie der Cariben, by Ernst Halbmayer (reviewed by Eithne B. Carlin) That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, by Lars Schoultz (reviewed by Antoni Kapcia) Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, by Ivor L. Miller (reviewed by Elizabeth Pérez) Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution, by Jana K. Lipman (reviewed by Barry Carr) Packaged Vacations: Tourism Development in the Spanish Caribbean, by Evan R. Ward (reviewed by Polly Pattullo) Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century, by Emily Greenwood (reviewed by Gregson Davis) Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Annie Paul (reviewed by Paget Henry) Libertad en cadenas: Sacrificio, aporías y perdón en las letras cubanas, by Aída Beaupied (reviewed by Stephen Fay) The Trickster Comes West: Pan-African Influence in Early Black Diasporan Narratives, by Babacar M’baye (reviewed by Olabode Ibironke) Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power: British Guiana’s Struggle for Independence, by Colin A. Palmer (reviewed by Jay R. Mandle) A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora, by Samuel Charters (reviewed by Kenneth Bilby) Man Vibes: Masculinities in Jamaican Dancehall, by Donna P. Hope (reviewed by Eric Bindler)

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Una revisión histórico-política de la producción literaria puertorriqueña. Entrevista con Fernando Feliú Matilla / A historical and political review of Puertorriquean Literatura. Interview to Fernando Feliú Matilla

Kamchatka Revista de análisis cultural ◽

10.7203/kam.9.10150 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 207

Author(s):

Endika Basáñez Barrio

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Puerto Rico ◽

Puerto Rican ◽

The United States ◽

Point Of View ◽

San Juan ◽

Puerto Rican Literature ◽

Puerto Rican Studies ◽

Hispanic Literature ◽

Cultural Movements

Resumen: A lo largo de la siguiente entrevista, el profesor, historiador, crítico e investigador la de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, el catedrático en literatura puertorriqueña don Fernando Feliú Matilla, nos permite establecer una visión histórica de la génesis artística llevada a cabo en la Isla a través de los diferentes contextos socio-políticos que han tenido lugar en la misma desde la aparición de una literatura puertorriqueña propia y distintiva hasta la anexión de Puerto Rico a los Estados Unidos de América como Estado Libre Asociado en 1952 y su impronta en la génesis isleña. Si bien la entrevista tiene como objeto principal la literatura boricua, también se debaten en la misma el falocentrismo cultural presente en la cultura puertorriqueña, las relaciones políticas entre San Juan y Washington D.C., la influencia de los textos diaspóricos en la producción isleña o la situación del panorama artístico actual en Puerto Rico.Palabras clave: Literatura hispanoamericana; Literatura puertorriqueña; Estados Unidos; emigración; política. Abstract: Throughtout the following interview, professor Fernando Feliú Matilla, who holds a chair in Puerto Rican Studies and Literature, offers his personal point of view after years of research about Puerto Rican literature written in the 20th century. The interview is developed from a historical perspective, which means that it starts right from the moment Puerto Rico was still a Spanish colony in the Americas, until the present day, being Puerto Rico a Free Associated State of the United States of America (also known as American Commonwealth of Puerto Rico). Besides the literature, professor Feliú Matilla also gives his opinion about the absence of female writers in Puerto Rican literature, the relationships between San Juan and Washington D.C., the cultural movements that Puerto Rican literature written nowadays is influenced by, and many other different topics such as Caribbean literature written in the United States and its connection with Puerto Rican art.Keywords: Hispanic Literature; Puerto Rican Literature; USA; immigration; politics.

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