Puerto Rican Womens History New Perspectives

A survey of the topics in gender and history of Puerto Rican women. Organized chronologically and covering the 19th and 20th centuries, it deal with issues of slavery, emancipation, wage work, women and politics, women's suffrage, industrialization, migration and Puerto Rican women in New York.

A broad survey of topics on gender and the history of Puerto Rican women, both on the island and in the diaspora. Organized chronologically and covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, essays deal with issues of slavery, emancipation, wage work, women and politics, women's suffrage, industrialization, migration, and Puerto Rican women in New York. Reviewing thirty years of historiographical material, the editors and contributors provide the first comprehensive study in English of gender and the history of Puerto Rican women. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American studies, Latino/a studies, Puerto Rican studies, women's studies, ethnic studies, and cultural studies.

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.

"A potential watershed in Puerto Rican historiography. . . . the only women's history work which investigates the full sweep of the tumultuous 19th century in Puerto Rico, and thus the only one which has the potential for providing true historical depth to the study of women's experience."--Eileen J. Findlay, American University Dispelling the common perception of Puerto Rico as a male-dominated society, Women and Urban Change in San Juan examines the roles of women in the economic and social changes that affected the Puerto Rican capital during the mid-19th century. F�lix V. Matos Rodr�guez studies the full mosaic of Puerto Rican women during this period, examining the ways in which the women of San Juan reacted to the pressures of race and class on their lives. Matos Rodr�guez discusses attempts on behalf of colonial officials and the local elite to modernize the city by emulating the development patterns of other American and European cities. For this effort, they enlisted the help of elite women, specifically in the areas of education, child rearing and public morality. While the women of the upper classes may have wielded more influence, working-class women, whose lives are vividly described in this book, actively participated in the process by resisting and reacting to official efforts at social control. The only book that examines 19th-century Puerto Rican women's history, this work places the experiences of urban women in San Juan within the larger framework of Caribbean and Latin American 19th-century life. Because it offers a solid foundation for discussing race relations in Puerto Rico, it will begin important conversations about broad questions of identity in the island's history. F�lix V. Matos Rodr�guez is assistant professor of history at Northeastern University. He is the author of several articles on Puerto Rican history and the co-editor of Puerto Rican Women's History: New Perspectives.

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.

Histories of the Puerto Rican experience.

"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.

"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.

"How did Puerto Rico end up in its current situation? A Spanish-speaking territory controlled by the United States and populated by the descendants of conquistadors, enslaved Africans, and indigenous inhabitants, this island (or rather archipelago) has a unique history. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo begins the book with an overview of the pre-Columbian societies and cultures that first inhabited Borikén, the indigenous name of the Puerto Rican archipelago. Though the arrival of the Spanish had a profound impact on Puerto Rico's history, he takes care to tell the story "from the shore" and not "from the boat." The Taínos were not merely passive victims; though they were enslaved and murdered during the Conquest, they also had powerful leaders like Agueybaná II who organized the Americas' first indigenous insurrection against colonial rule in 1511. When the colonial enterprise was consolidated a few decades after the Conquest, Puerto Rico became a military outpost for the Spanish Empire. By the nineteenth century, Puerto Rico was a slave colony, and it was ruled through a combination of reform and authoritarianism. This resulted in the proliferation of unsuccessful slave revolts and, in 1868, an insurrection that declared the Republic of Puerto Rico, which only lasted 48 hours. Puerto Rico's major regime change came in 1898 with the US occupation. Though being controlled by the United States has shaped Puerto Rico's history in innumerable ways, it inadvertently fostered a sense of puertorriqueñidad (Puerto Ricanness) among the Island's inhabitants. US colonization may have involved forced Americanization, but it also provoked a multi-layered resistance to those projects, from passive disobedience to armed insurrections. The creation of the Puerto Rican Commonwealth in 1952 involved using a number of institutions to create the notion of cultural nationalism that was detached from the island's colonial status, included Puerto Ricans in the diaspora and was not contingent on obtaining national sovereignty. The last part of the book focuses on more recent developments from the neoliberal turn in the 1990s to current (and likely future) socio-economic and environmental crises"--

Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization. Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history. Reproducing Empire suggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism. Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.