Following World War II, Puerto Ricans moved to New York in record numbers and joined a community of compatriots who had emigrated decades before or were born in diaspora. In a series of vivid images, Pioneros II: Puerto Ricans in New York City 1948-1998 brings to life their stories and struggles, culture and values, entrepreneurship, and civic, political, and educational gains. The Puerto Rican community's long history and achievements opened pathways for the city's newer Latino immigrant communities.

In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources—union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories—Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and its labor activism. While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are.

Using Puerto Rican politics in New York City as a case study, particularly focusing on political elites, Puerto Rican Identity, Political Development, and Democracy in New York, 1960–1990 argues that ethnic identity is a positive force in political development. José E. Cruz suggests that in using ethnic identity to claim and exercise social and civil rights, to pursue representation, and to access resources and benefits, Puerto Ricans sustained and enriched liberal democracy in New York City. This book shows how in carrying out politics in this way, Puerto Rican political elites placed themselves out of the margins and into the mainstream of city politics as significant contributors to urban democracy.

“A story of how a priest struggled to live the call of the Second Vatican Council, and . . . worked alongside laypeople for social justice in the Bronx.” ―National Catholic Reporter South Bronx, 1958. Change was coming. It was a unique place and time in history where Father Neil Connolly found his true calling and spiritual awakening. Set in the context of a changing world and a changing Catholic Church, The Kingdom Began in Puerto Rico follows Fr. Neil Connolly’s path through the South Bronx, which began with a special Church program to address the postwar great Puerto Rican migration. After an immersion summer in Puerto Rico, Fr. Neil served the largest concentration of Puerto Ricans in the Bronx from the 1960s to the 1980s as they struggled for a decent life. Through the teachings of Vatican II, Connolly assumed responsibility for creating a new Church and world. In the war against drugs, poverty, and crime, he created a dynamic organization and chapel run by the people, and supported Unitas, a unique peer-driven mental health program for youth. Frustrated by the lack of institutional responses to his community’s challenges, he challenged government abandonment and spoke out against ill-conceived public plans. Ultimately, he realized that his priestly mission was in developing new leaders among people, in the Church and the world, and supporting two pioneering lay leadership programs, the Pastoral Center and People for Change. Angel Garcia ably blends the dynamic forces of Church and world that transformed Fr. Connolly as he grew into his vocation. This book presents a rich history of the South Bronx and calls for all urban policies to begin with the people. It also affirms the continuing relevance of Vatican II and Medellin for today’s Church and world, in the US and Latin America. “Garcia captures the spirit of the era, and the spirit of the man.” —James Martin, S.J., author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage

The history of Puerto Ricans in the so-called "Babel of Steel" dates back more than a century. Through hundreds of images of the "pioneers"-those Puerto Rican migrants who established themselves in New York City between the 1890s and the end of World War II-we capture a glimpse of their daily lives and of their individual and collective stories. This rich collection of images from the Archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College helps to examine the history of the Puerto Rican community at a time when it was spreading its roots in New York City's social, political, cultural, and economic life.

This book offers a historical and comparative overview of the evolution of racial classifications in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The Hispanicization of America is precipitating a paradigm shift in racial thinking in which race is no longer defined by distinct characteristics but rather is becoming synonymous with ethnic/cultural identity. Traditionally, assimilation has been conceived of as a unidirectional and racialized phenomenon. Newly arrived immigrant groups or longstanding minority/indigenous populations were "Americanized" in confining their racial and ethnic natures to the private sphere and adopting, in the public sphere, the cultural mores, norms, and values of the dominant cultural/racial group. In contrast, the Hispanicization of America entails the horizontal assimilation of various groups from Spanish-speaking countries throughout the Western Hemisphere and Caribbean into a pan-ethnic, Hispanic/Latino identity that also challenges the privileged position of whiteness as the primary and exclusive referent for American identity. Instead of focusing on one Hispanic group, ethnic identity, or region, this book chronicles the development of racial identity across the largest Hispanic groups throughout the United States.

Almost All Aliens offers a unique reinterpretation of immigration in the history of the United States. Setting aside the European migrant-centered melting-pot model of immigrant assimilation, Paul Spickard, Francisco Beltrán, and Laura Hooton put forward a fresh and provocative reconceptualization that embraces the multicultural, racialized, and colonially inflected reality of immigration that has always existed in the United States. Their astute study illustrates the complex relationship between ethnic identity and race, slavery, and colonial expansion. Examining the lives of those who crossed the Atlantic, as well as those who crossed the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the North American Borderlands, Almost All Aliens provides a distinct, inclusive, and critical analysis of immigration, race, and identity in the United States from 1600 until the present. The second edition updates Almost All Aliens through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, recounting and analyzing the massive changes in immigration policy, the reception of immigrants, and immigrant experiences that whipsawed back and forth throughout the era. It includes a new final chapter that brings the story up to the present day. This book will appeal to students and researchers alike studying the history of immigration, race, and colonialism in the United States, as well as those interested in American identity, especially in the context of the early twenty-first century.