"Puerto Rican Women and Work: Bridges in Transnational Labor" is the only comprehensive study of the role of Puerto Rican women workers in the evolution of a transnational labor force in the twentieth century. This book examines Puerto Rican women workers, both in Puerto Rico and on the U.S. mainland. It contains a range of information--historical, ethnographic, and statistical. The contributors provide insights into the effects of migration and unionization on women's work, taking into account U.S. colonialism and globalization of capitalism throughout the century as well as the impact of Operation Bootstrap. The essays are arranged in chronological order to reveal the evolutionary nature of women's work and the fluctuations in migration, technology, and the economy. This one-of-a-kind collection will be a valuable resource for those interested in women's studies, ethnic studies, and Puerto Rican and Latino studies, as well as labor studies.

Pioneering novelist and short-story writer Nicholasa Mohr broke onto the literary scene of ethnic autobiography in the early 1970s, but it took another decade for other Puerto Rican women writers in the United States to follow the path that she cut. From the late 1970s on, a dynamic group of these writers have expanded the landscape of American literature. Kissing the Mango Tree is the first and only book to examine the works of the most popular Puerto Rican women writers from the perspective of feminist literary criticism. Rivera reconstructs the ethno-feminist aesthetic of Judith Ortiz Cofer, Sandra María Esteves, Nicholasa Mohr, Aurora Levins Morales, Rosario Morales, Esmeralda Santiago, and Luz María Umpierre-Herrera. In separate chapters dedicated to each of these writers, the author locates their works within the framework of feminist theory and literature, seeing them as "women with macho asserting their creative powers to record their own versions of their memories, to own their own bodies. . . They transform the way we look at the process of growing up and becoming a woman, at the relationship with our mothers and our daughters, at the fluidity of our lives, at our notions of nationhood . . ." This groundbreaking study is accompanied by a complete bibliography of the six writers' works and secondary sources of feminist, Latino, and ethno-poetic criticism and theory.

The sixteen essays in Writing Off the Hyphen approach the literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora from current theoretical positions, with provocative and insightful results. The authors analyze how the diasporic experience of Puerto Ricans is played out in the context of class, race, gender, and sexuality and how other themes emerging from postcolonialism and postmodernism come into play. Their critical work also demonstrates an understanding of how the process of migration and the relations between Puerto Rico and the United States complicate notions of cultural and national identity as writers confront their bilingual, bicultural, and transnational realities. The collection has considerable breadth and depth. It covers earlier, undertheorized writers such as Luisa Capetillo, Pedro Juan Labarthe, Bernardo Vega, Pura Belpré, Arturo Schomburg, and Graciany Miranda Archilla. Prominent writers such as Rosario Ferré and Judith Ortiz Cofer are discussed alongside often-neglected writers such as Honolulu-based Rodney Morales and gay writer Manuel Ramos Otero. The essays cover all the genres and demonstrate that current theoretical ideas and approaches create exciting opportunities and possibilities for the study of Puerto Rican diasporic literature.

In this revised and expanded second edition of The Puerto Rican Woman, Acosta-Belen has collected the most current interdisciplinary studies covering a variety of perspectives on the status of the Puerto Rican woman.

The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children's classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago's Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican identities. Education also offered women the only venue to exercise power, and they parlayed their positions to take lead roles in activist and political circles. In time, a politicized Puerto Rican community gave voice to a previously silenced group--and highlighted that colonialism does not end when immigrants live among their colonizers. A perceptive look at big-city community building, Puerto Rican Chicago reveals the links between justice in education and a people's claim to space in their new home.

Since the invasion and colonization of Puerto Rico in 1898, all Puerto Ricans are both American citizens and colonial subjects by birth according to international law. Over a third of this population currently lives in the continental U.S. forming one of the nation's most significant "minority" communities. Yet no complete study of mainland Puerto Rican—or Boricua—literature has been written. Until now. Boricua Literature is the first literary history of the Puerto Rican colonial diaspora. The result of a decade of research in archives and special collections in the Caribbean and in the U.S., Lisa Sánchez González argues that the writing of the Puerto Rican diaspora should be considered an integral field of study. Covering 100 years of Boricua literary history, each chapter looks at the single writer or group of writers who are most emblematic of their respective generation, from William Carlos Williams and Arturo Schomburg, to latina feminism and salsa music. The story of an American community of color, Boricua Literature is also about contemporary critical race and gender studies. Unlike virtually all studies concerning mainland Puerto Rican writing, Lisa Sánchez González is less concerned with "cultural identity" than with unearthing a substantive cultural intellectual history. The first explicitly literary historical analysis of Boricua Literature, this definitive study proposes a new and discreet area of literary historical research in American studies.