Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights offers a reexamination of the history of Puerto Ricans’ political and social activism in the United States in the twentieth century. Authors Lorrin Thomas and Aldo A. Lauria Santiago survey the ways in which Puerto Ricans worked within the United States to create communities for themselves and their compatriots in times and places where dark-skinned or ‘foreign’ Americans were often unwelcome. The authors argue that the energetic Puerto Rican rights movement which rose to prominence in the late 1960s was built on a foundation of civil rights activism beginning much earlier in the century. The text contextualizes Puerto Rican activism within the broader context of twentieth-century civil rights movements, while emphasizing the characteristics and goals unique to the Puerto Rican experience. Lucid and insightful, Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights provides a much-needed introduction to a lesser-known but critically important social and political movement.

By the end of the 1920s, just ten years after the Jones Act first made them full-fledged Americans, more than 45,000 native Puerto Ricans had left their homes and entered the United States, citizenship papers in hand, forming one of New York City’s most complex and distinctive migrant communities. In Puerto Rican Citizen, Lorrin Thomas for the first time unravels the many tensions—historical, racial, political, and economic—that defined the experience of this group of American citizens before and after World War II. Building its incisive narrative from a wide range of archival sources, interviews, and first-person accounts of Puerto Rican life in New York, this book illuminates the rich history of a group that is still largely invisible to many scholars. At the center of Puerto Rican Citizen are Puerto Ricans’ own formulations about political identity, the responses of activists and ordinary migrants to the failed promises of American citizenship, and their expectations of how the American state should address those failures. Complicating our understanding of the discontents of modern liberalism, of race relations beyond black and white, and of the diverse conceptions of rights and identity in American life, Thomas’s book transforms the way we understand this community’s integral role in shaping our sense of citizenship in twentieth-century America.

An insider's view of the idealism, anger and vitality of the much-maligned group known as the Young Lords as they rose to become the most respected and powerful voice of Latin American empowerment in the US. From their emergence in the 60's to their fracture in 1972, this is the story of how one group took on the establishment - and won.

Sterilization remains one of the most popular forms of fertility control in the world, but it has received little acknowledgment for decreasing birthrates on account of its dubious use as a means of population control, especially in developing countries. In Matters of Choice, Iris Lopez presents a comprehensive analysis of the dichotomous views that have portrayed sterilization either as part of a coercive program of population control or as a means of voluntary, even liberating, fertility control by individual women. Drawing upon her twenty-five years of research on sterilized Puerto Rican women from five different families in Brooklyn, Lopez untangles the interplay between how women make fertility decisions and their social, economic, cultural, and historical constraints. Weaving together the voices of these women, she covers the history of sterilization and eugenics, societal pressures to have fewer children, a lack of adequate health care, patterns of gender inequality, and misinformation provided by doctors and family members. Lopez makes a stirring case for a model of reproductive freedom, taking readers beyond victim/agent debates to consider a broader definition of reproductive rights within a feminist anthropological context.

Fearless necessary reporting . . . Klein exposes the ‘battle of utopias’ that is currently unfolding in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico” (Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) “We are in a fight for our lives. Hurricanes Irma and María unmasked the colonialism we face in Puerto Rico, and the inequality it fosters, creating a fierce humanitarian crisis. Now we must find a path forward to equality and sustainability, a path driven by communities, not investors. And this book explains, with careful and unbiased reporting, only the efforts of our community activists can answer the paramount question: What type of society do we want to become and who is Puerto Rico for?” —Carmen Yulín Cruz, Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico In the rubble of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans and ultrarich “Puertopians” are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island. In this vital and startling investigation, bestselling author and activist Naomi Klein uncovers how the forces of shock politics and disaster capitalism seek to undermine the nation’s radical, resilient vision for a “just recovery.” All royalties from the sale of this book in English and Spanish go directly to JunteGente, a gathering of Puerto Rican organizations resisting disaster capitalism and advancing a fair and healthy recovery for their island. “Klein chronicles the extraordinary grassroots resistance by the Puerto Rican people against neoliberal privatization and Wall Street greed in the aftermath of the island’s financial meltdown, of hurricane devastation, and of Washington’s imposition of an outside control board over the most important U.S. colony.” —Juan González, cohost of Democracy Now! and author of Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America

Challenges the framing of Puerto Rican cultural politics as a dichotomy between nationalism and colonialism. Discussions of Puerto Rican cultural politics usually fall into one of two categories, nationalist or colonialist. Puerto Rican Jam moves beyond this narrow dichotomy, elaborating alternatives to dominant postcolonial theories, and includes essays written from the perspectives of groups that are not usually represented, such as gays and lesbians, youth, blacks, and women. Among the topics discussed are the limitations of nationalism as a transformative and democratizing political discourse, the contradictory impact of American colonialism, language politics, and the 1928 U.S. congressional hearings on women's suffrage in Puerto Rico.