Framing Puerto Rican Identity: Political Opportunity Structures and Neighborhood Organizing in New York City

This article examines three decades of Puerto Rican social movement organizing in three New York City neighborhoods. It begins with a look at Puerto Rican nationalist movements in the late sixties and early seventies, moves to the housing movements in the mid-seventies to early eighties and concludes with the AIDS activist movements from the mid-eighties through the nineties. It argues that mobilizing frames and trajectories of these neighborhood movements were determined by differences in the local political opportunity structure, in particular (1) the distribution of political power among competing ethnic groups, (2) the opportunity to form political coalitions, and (3) the divergent trajectories and frames of previous movements. These different frames shaped the way organizers responded to new issues, influencing in particular activists' selection of targets, alliance partners, tactics, and discourse.