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.

Puerto Ricans in the United States, like other migrant minorities, face an array of linguistic judgments. They are told they don’t succeed because they don’t speak English. They are told their English is “impure” or “broken” because it has been “mixed” with Spanish. They are told that they sound inarticulate and that if they speak “correct” English, with no sign of Spanish influence—most particularly with no accent, they will get better jobs. In short, Puerto Ricans in the United States are told that the origins of their economic and social problems are linguistic and can be remedied through personal effort, when in fact their fundamental problems stem from racial and class exclusion.Concepts like “mixed” or “broken” languages, and “good” and “bad” English are cultural constructions and therefore are about more than language. In the Puerto Rican experience of devaluation and prejudice in the United States, the institutionalization of racial exclusion and class location are mapped onto English and Spanish in complex and highly politicized ways. Formal linguistic studies of bilingualism rarely engage this process in a significant way. But the place, function, and meaning of cultural constructs within the politicized communicative economy must be understood in terms of the intersections of race, class, and language that shape the lives of working-class Puerto Ricans. Working from ethnographic studies and interviews done on New York’s Lower East Side and in the Bronx, this book examines that intersection in detail.

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Product Description: Book by Alers-Montalvo, Manuel