Side by Side

Author(s):  
Marilisa Jiménez García ◽  
Sonia Nieto

Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, American youth culture and literature grew up with Puerto Rico. The contemporary US tradition of youth literature and media, along with how young people, as authors, narrate their part in social struggle, is inseparable from Puerto Rican thought and writing. Youth literature, media, and youth-led movements have played a prominent role in portraying the political and cultural relationship between the US and Puerto Rico—from the US acquisition to Puerto Rican writer’s pleas for a place in US letters and culture. During the early colonial encounter, children’s books were among the first kinds of literature produced by US writers introducing the new colony, its people, and the US’s role as a twentieth-century colonial power to the American public. Subsequently, youth literature and media was an important tool of Puerto Rican cultural and educational elite institutions and Puerto Rican revolutionary thought for negotiating US assimilation and upholding a strong Latin American, Caribbean national stance.

2021 ◽  
pp. 176-215
Author(s):  
Marilisa Jiménez García

This chapter contextualizes the contemporary era of youth literature and media in Puerto Rico and its diaspora, both those in the US and those returning to Puerto Rico. Looking at the 1980s into 2010s, this chapter analyzes the role of youth literature and culture in Puerto Rico’s contemporary struggles, including its economic crisis, public debt, the devastation of Hurricane Maria, and the political uprising which led to the resignation of former Governor Ricardo Rosello. Puerto Rican storytellers continue narrating Puerto Rico’s contemporary frontline struggles, from Broadway to comics to community-organized story times and children’s books.


2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (86) ◽  
pp. 35-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Fernando Vargas-Alzate

This paper offers an analysis of historical, political, economic, and social events on which US-Latin American relations have been based. Centered on a constructivist approach, I review the main stages for explaining the quality and intensity of the interaction between the actors under consideration. In addition, I contend that US-Latin American relations have been cyclical in nature, and that these cycles have in turn complicated the task of assessing the dynamic of the relationship over the long term.I argue that the US achieved economic and political control over Latin America from the Nineteenth century. Although the specific circumstances that governed US-Latin American relations changed throughout the Twentieth century, this basic condition of domination remained. The situation changed, however, at the beginning of the Twenty-First century, during which Washington effectively lost Latin America. Nonetheless, Washington and Latin America are currently experiencing a rapprochement. This paper explains this sequence in detail and opens new discussions.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence

Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author’s first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the “US literature of experience” and the “Latin American literature of the reader.” Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and “misencounters” between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the “common grounds” approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Kaganiec-Kamieńska

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.


2019 ◽  
pp. 146-162
Author(s):  
Sharon Erickson Nepstad

This chapter notes that American Catholics were initially quite reluctant to embrace environmentalism. It asks, after decades of political engagement with labor, poverty, peace, women’s rights, and immigration, why did US Catholics largely overlook the growing environmental problems in the twentieth century? And what caused this to change in the early twenty-first century? The chapter summarizes early Catholic efforts to promote environmentalism and describes the initial responses of the Catholic Church and its members, who often prioritized human needs over environmental matters. It also describes how the Catholic Church and Catholic laypeople started placing greater emphasis on the environment toward the end of the twentieth century. The chapter then surveys the main themes of various Catholic teachings and publications—from the US Catholic Bishops Conference’s Renewing the Earth (1991) to Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si (2015)—that have given impetus to more Catholic environmental action. The chapter concludes with a description of the work of two activist groups: the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an ecumenical organization, and Catholic Climate Change.


Author(s):  
Amílcar Antonio Barreto

Puerto Ricans, US subjects since 1898, were naturalized en masse in 1917. Congress did so to eliminate the possibility of independence from the US. That citizenship is the cornerstone of island-mainland relations for those advocating a continued relationship with the United States—either in the form of the 1952 Commonwealth constitution or statehood. The epicenter of Puerto Rican partisan life remains the status question. This remarkably stable political party system featured two strong parties of near-equal strength—the pro-Commonwealth PPD and its statehood challenger, the PNP— and a small independence party, the PIP. A core feature of the PNP’s platform has been estadidad jíbara—"creole statehood.” In theory, a future State of Puerto Rico would be allowed to retain its cultural and linguistic autonomy while attaining full membership as the 51st state of the Union.


2020 ◽  
pp. 123-150
Author(s):  
Melanie C. Hawthorne

Throughout the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, women's claims to citizenship in their own right have gradually been recognized in Europe and the US, though some exceptions still remain (as charted in a parallel chronology). Yet citizenship remains tied to broad cultural assumptions about gender and enforces gender norms. The resurgence of nationalism in the twenty-first century suggests and the success of "gay pride" movements may have shifted shame away from sexual orientation and onto national belonging, but the question remains whether the underlying structural ideological isomorphism has shifted.


Author(s):  
Alexander Kitroeff

This chapter examines how Archbishop Iakovos's successor, Archbishop Spyridon, made a mistake on the side of tradition. It illustrates the limits and potential drawbacks of Greek Orthodoxy's reliance on invoking its history. It also explains how the patriarchate recovered the lost ground by appointing Demetrios as archbishop in 1999. The chapter investigates the religious dimension in several articulations of Greek American identity that was becoming more pronounced and outlines the patriarchate's involvement in Greek Orthodoxy's affairs in the US. It summarizes the Greek Orthodox Church's trajectory throughout the twentieth century and analyzes its ability to balance between adapting to the American social context and maintaining its ethnic roots, which enabled it to play a significant part in defining Greek American identity.


Significance Puerto Rico is facing a severe fiscal crunch; its general obligation bonds are rated junk status and the government has said that a 2.9 billion dollar bond issuance -- at risk because of the congressional vote -- is required to prevent a shutdown in the next three months. Impacts There is little-to-no prospect of Puerto Rican statehood while Republicans control the US Congress. Puerto Rico would gain five representatives and two senators, likely to vote Democratic. However, this may encourage some Republicans to back federal intervention on debt, to ward off calls for statehood.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 200
Author(s):  
Sara Zarei ◽  
Irvin Maldonado ◽  
Laura Franqui-Dominguez ◽  
Cristina Rubi ◽  
Yanibel Tapia Rosa ◽  
...  

Background: There are limited data on multiple sclerosis (MS) patients in underserved groups, including Puerto Rico. In this study, we analyzed the characteristic of MS symptoms and number of relapses in Puerto Rican patients. We then compare these characteristics with MS patients from the US. The number of MS relapses is highly correlated with the treatment onset and adherence. Patients in Puerto Rico have been experiencing lengthy treatment delay. We will discuss the possible causes of such delay and its impact on MS prognosis. Methods: This retrospective cohort study consisted of the evaluation of 325 medical records from MS patients attending the Caribbean Neurological Center from 2014 to 2019. We gathered symptoms and comorbidities data as binary objects. The treatment delay was calculated based on the mean value of days between diagnosis and treatment onset for these groups of patients. Results: We found that on average, the treatment delay for MS patients in Puerto Rico (PR) to receive their medication was 120 days. The most common MS subtype was relapsing-remitting 72.8%, with a mean of 1.684 relapses per year. Initial symptoms were sensory 54%, visual 33.1%, motor 28.8%, coordination 23.2%, fatigue 9.7%, memory 7.3%, depression 6.5%, urinary 4.9%, gastrointestinal 2.4%, and sexual dysfunction 1.6%. The most common comorbidities were hypertension 18.4%, asthma 13.6%, and thyroid disease 12.8%. When we compared the comorbidities between the two populations, immune thrombocytopenia had the highest percent change with the value of almost 200% (0.001% of US patient vs. 0.8% of Puerto Rican MS patients). Conclusion: Patients from Puerto Rico had a 33% higher relapse rate compared to the one reported for MS patients in the US. This higher rate may be related to the long delay in receiving their medications. They also had a higher rate of complex comorbidities such as immune thrombocytopenia or thyroid disease. Our findings provide a proof of concept that delay in receiving medications can increase the number of relapses and complex comorbidities among MS patients.


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