Defending Their Own in the Cold

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Zimmerman
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Puerto Ricans ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Puerto Rican Literature ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Puerto Rican Culture ◽  
Literary Performance ◽  
Cuban Americans

This book explores U.S. Puerto Rican culture in past and recent contexts. The book presents East Coast, Midwest, and Chicago cultural production while exploring Puerto Rican musical, film, artistic, and literary performance. Working within the theoretical frame of cultural, postcolonial, and diasporic studies, the book relates the experience of Puerto Ricans to that of Chicanos and Cuban Americans, showing how even supposedly mainstream U.S. Puerto Ricans participate in a performative culture that embodies elements of possible cultural “Ricanstruction.” The book examines various dimensions of U.S. Puerto Rican artistic life, including relations with other ethnic groups and resistance to colonialism and cultural assimilation. To illustrate how Puerto Ricans have survived and created new identities and relations out of their colonized and diasporic circumstances, the book looks at the cultural examples of Latino entertainment stars such as Jennifer Lopez and Benicio del Toro, visual artists Juan Sánchez, Ramón Flores, and Elizam Escobar, as well as Nuyorican dancer turned Midwest poet Carmen Pursifull. It includes a comprehensive chapter on the development of U.S. Puerto Rican literature and a pioneering chapter on Chicago Puerto Rican writing. A final chapter considers Cuban cultural attitudes towards Puerto.

Flowing through My Veins

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isar P. Godreau
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Puerto Ricans ◽  
National Pride ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Puerto Rican Culture ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter discusses how the scripts of blackness developed in tandem with discourses of race mixture that supported populist forms of governance and cultural policies in the 1940s and 1950s. The biological definition of Puerto Ricans as a mixture of three races—the Taíno, the Spanish, and the African—had been circulating since the nineteenth century in both criollo and U.S. writings about Puerto Rico, but before the 1950s, this was not institutionally constructed as an object of national pride. It was after the 1950s that the ideology of race mixture was taken up as a populist State discourse and implemented through the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. Indeed, race mixture became a central part of the state's cultural program of development and modernization for Puerto Rico.

The Experience of the Puerto Rican Family When a Member Has HIV/AIDS

2003 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ida Roldán
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Terminal Disease ◽  
Department Of Health ◽  
Research Article ◽  
Puerto Rican Culture ◽  
Puerto Rican Families ◽  
Hiv Aids

As of June 2001, it was estimated that 22,000 people were living with AIDS in Chicago (CDC, 2001b), and 15% of these were Hispanic, of which 39% were Puerto Rican (Chicago Department of Health, 2000b). Although in recent years Chicago has seen a drop in HIV/AIDS-related deaths, HIV/AIDS is still devastating many Puerto Rican families. Many of those infected face the challenges of living with a chronic terminal disease, feeling alone and rejected by family and community. This research article summarizes the results of a qualitative study that explores the unique meanings that the Puerto Rican culture assigns to AIDS. The primary objective of this study was to capture the experience that is unique to the Puerto Rican family when a member has HIV/AIDS.

Religion and Education in the Puerto Rican Culture

1967 ◽  
Vol 150 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph A. Keefe ◽  
Robert Nash
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Puerto Rican Culture

scholarly journals Constructing Spiritual Blackness

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Omar Ramadan-Santiago
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Puerto Ricans ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Identification Process ◽  
Global Construction

Abstract In this article, I address how my interlocutors, members of the Rastafari community in Puerto Rico, claim that they identify with Blackness and Africanness in a manner different from other Black-identifying Puerto Ricans. Their identification process presents a spiritual and global construction of Blackness that does not fit within the typical narratives often used to discuss Black identity in Puerto Rico. I argue that their performance of a spiritually Black identity creates a different understanding of Blackness in Puerto Rico, one that is not nation-based but rather worldwide. This construction of Blackness and Black identity allows my interlocutors to create an imagined community of Blackness and African descent that extends past Puerto Rico’s borders toward the greater Caribbean region and African continent. In the first section, I discuss how Blackness is understood and emplaced in Puerto Rico and why this construction is considered too limiting by my interlocutors. I then address their own construction of Blackness, what I refer to as “spiritual Blackness,” and how they believe it diverges from Afro-Boricua/Black Puerto Rican identity. In the final section, I direct focus to how Africa is centralized in the construction of spiritual Blackness.

The Politics of Status

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-53
Author(s):  
Amílcar Antonio Barreto
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Puerto Ricans ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Of The Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Party System

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.

Spanish and Puertorriqueñidad

2020 ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Amílcar Antonio Barreto
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Puerto Ricans ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Language Of Instruction ◽  
Holy Grail ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
Official Languages ◽  
Puerto Rican Nationalism ◽  
Language Law

In the aftermath of the 1898 Spanish-American War, federal policymakers sought to transform Puerto Ricans from loyal Spaniards to trustworthy Americans. Public schools employing English as the language of instruction were the primary vehicles implementing this change. Behind this policy were deeply ingrained attitudes that took for granted the superiority of Anglo Saxons and, by extension, their English vernacular. Contrary to expectations, the Americanization effort backfired and even fueled Puerto Rican nationalism. The island’s intelligentsia took up the banner of preserving Puerto Rican identity (Puerto Ricanness) and canonized the Spanish language as a core feature of puertorriqueñidad. In tandem with a change in education policy was the adoption of a new language law—one that declared Spanish and English co-official languages of the Puerto Rican government. Repealing that law became a holy grail for the island’s nationalists.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document