The interrelationship between sexuality and national identity during Puerto Rico's transition from Spanish to U.S. colonialism.

Puerto Rico has been an "unincorporated territory" of the United States for over a century. For much of that time, the archipelago has been mostly invisible to US residents and neglected by the government. However, a series of crises in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, from outsized debt to climate fueled disasters, have led to massive protests and brought Puerto Rico greater visibility. Monica A. Jimenez argues that to fully understand how and why Puerto Rico finds itself in this current moment of precarity, we must look to a larger history of US settler colonialism and racial exclusion in law. The federal policies and jurisprudence that created Puerto Rico exist within a larger pantheon of exclusionary, race-based laws and policies that have carved out "states of exception" for racial undesirables: Native Americans, African Americans, and the inhabitants of the insular territories. This legal regime has allowed the federal government plenary or complete power over these groups. Jimenez brings these histories together to demonstrate that despite Puerto Rico's unique position as a twenty-first-century colony, its path to that place was not exceptional.

Former Attorney General and former Chief Justice of Puerto Rico, Jose Trias Monge describes his island as one of the most densely populated places on earth, with a severely distressed economy and limited political freedom--still considered a colony of the U.S. Monge claims the island has become too dependent on U.S. money and argues for decolonization and movement toward more independence. 28 illustrations.

Puerto Rico is often depicted as a "racial democracy" in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaetón, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaetón musicians critique racial democracy's privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as Tego Calderón criticize the Puerto Rican mainstream's tendency to praise black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the island's black population, while Ivy Queen, the genre's most visible woman, disrupts the associations between whiteness and respectability that support official discourses of racial democracy. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaetón, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaetón's origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan's slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaetón, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora.

We Are Left without a Father Here is a transnational history of working people's struggles and a gendered analysis of populism and colonialism in mid-twentieth-century Puerto Rico. At its core are the thousands of agricultural workers who, at the behest of the Puerto Rican government, migrated to Michigan in 1950 to work in the state's sugar beet fields. The men expected to earn enough income to finally become successful breadwinners and fathers. To their dismay, the men encountered abysmal working conditions and pay. The migrant workers in Michigan and their wives in Puerto Rico soon exploded in protest. Chronicling the protests, the surprising alliances that they created, and the Puerto Rican government's response, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay explains that notions of fatherhood and domesticity were central to Puerto Rican populist politics. Patriarchal ideals shaped citizens' understandings of themselves, their relationship to Puerto Rican leaders and the state, as well as the meanings they ascribed to U.S. colonialism. Findlay argues that the motivations and strategies for transnational labor migrations, colonial policies, and worker solidarities are all deeply gendered.

The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR) understood that to successfully establish an independent nation it needed to generate solidarity across the Americas with its struggle against US colonial rule. It invested significant energy, personnel, and resources in attending regional conferences, distributing its literature throughout the hemisphere, creating solidarity committees, presenting its case to elected officials and the general public, and promoting the causes of oppressed peoples. The hemispheric outpourings of solidarity with Puerto Rican independence have been obscured by larger, later liberation movements as well as the anticolonial party's ultimate failure to achieve independence. However, as this book shows, they were nonetheless central to anti-imperialists, nationalists, and revolutionaries from New York City to Buenos Aires. Margaret M. Power's new history of the PNPR focuses on how it built a broad movement with active networks in virtually all of Latin America, much of the Caribbean, and New York City. This hemispheric view introduces a sprawling transnational network, nurtured by the PNPR from its founding in 1922 through its military actions of the 1950s and beyond that included individuals, parties, organizations, and governments throughout the Americas, and it resituates the Puerto Rican nationalist movement as a transnational revolutionary influence and force.

After the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898, the new unincorporated territory sought to define its future. Seeking to shape the next generation and generate popular support for colonial rule, U.S. officials looked to education as a key venue for promoting the benefits of Americanization. At the same time, public schools became a site where Puerto Rican teachers, parents, and students could formulate and advance their own projects for building citizenship. In Negotiating Empire, Solsiree del Moral demonstrates how these colonial intermediaries aimed for regeneration and progress through education. Rather than seeing U.S. empire in Puerto Rico during this period as a contest between two sharply polarized groups, del Moral views their interaction as a process of negotiation. Although educators and families rejected some tenets of Americanization, such as English-language instruction, they also redefined and appropriated others to their benefit to increase literacy and skills required for better occupations and social mobility. Pushing their citizenship-building vision through the schools, Puerto Ricans negotiated a different school project—one that was reformist yet radical, modern yet traditional, colonial yet nationalist.