"We were poor but we had everything we needed," reminisces Do?a Epifania. Nonetheless, when a man she knew told her about a job in Philadelphia, she grasped the opportunity to leave Coamas. "He went to Puerto Rico and told me there were beans to cook. I came here and cooked for fourteen workers." In San Lorenzo, Do?a Carmen and her husband made the same decision: "We didn't want to, nobody wanted to leave. . . . There wasn't any alternative." Don Florencio recalls that in Salinas work had gotten scarce, "especially for the youth, the young men. . . . The farmworker that was used to cutting cane, already the sugar cane was disappearing," and government licensing regulations made fishing "more difficult for the poor."Puerto Rican migration to the mainland following World War II took place for a range of reasons-globalization of the economy, the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, state policies, changes in regional and local economies, social networks, and, not least, the decisions made by individual immigrants. In this wide-ranging book, Carmen Whalen weaves them all into a tapestry of Puerto Rican immigration to Philadelphia.Like African Americans and Mexicans, Puerto Ricans were recruited for low-wage jobs, only to confront racial discrimination as well as economic restructuring. As Whalen shows, they were part of that wave of newcomers who come from areas in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia characterized by a heavy U.S. military and economic presence, especially export processing zones, looking for a new life in depressed urban environments already populated by earlier labor migrants. But Puerto Rican immigration was also unique, especially in its regional and gender dimensions. Many migrants came as part of contract labor programs shaped by competing agendas.By the 1990s, economic conditions, government policies, and racial ideologies had transformed Puerto Rican labor migrants into what has been called "the other underclass." Professor Whalen analyzes this continuation of "culture of poverty" interpretations and contrasts it with the efforts of Philadelphia Puerto Ricans to recreate their communities and deal with the impact of economic restructuring and residential segregation in the City of Brotherly Love. Author note: Carmen Teresa Whalen is Assistant Professor of Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University.

An indelible portrait of three children struggling to survive in the poorest neighborhood of the poorest large city in America Kensington, Philadelphia, is distinguished only by its poverty. It is home to Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel, three Puerto Rican children who live among the most marginalized families in the United States. This is the story of their coming-of-age, which is beset by violence—the violence of homelessness, hunger, incarceration, stray bullets, sexual and physical assault, the hypermasculine logic of the streets, and the drug trade. In Kensington, eighteenth birthdays are not rites of passage but statistical miracles. One mistake drives Ryan out of middle school and into the juvenile justice pipeline. For Emmanuel, his queerness means his mother’s rejection and sleeping in shelters. School closures and budget cuts inspire Giancarlos to lead walkouts, which get him kicked out of the system. Although all three are high school dropouts, they are on a quest to defy their fate and their neighborhood and get high school diplomas. In a triumph of empathy and drawing on nearly a decade of reporting, sociologist and policymaker Nikhil Goyal follows Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel on their mission, plunging deep into their lives as they strive to resist their designated place in the social hierarchy. In the process, Live to See the Day confronts a new age of American poverty, after the end of “welfare as we know it,” after “zero tolerance” in schools criminalized a generation of students, after the odds of making it out are ever slighter.

The statistics of "Immigration and passenger movement" are included in the report on foreign commerce to 1895, and for 1893-1894 are also published separately.

Race. The mere mention of the R-word is a surefire conversation-stopper. In this book about AmericaÆs most divisive social issue, Dominic J. Pulera offers a compelling roadmap to our future. This accessible and penetrating analysis is the first to include detailed coverage of AmericaÆs five "racial" groups: whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. The author contends that race will matter to Americans during the twenty-first century because of visible differences, and that differences in physical appearance separating the races are the single most important factor shaping intergroup relations, in conjunction with the social, cultural, economic, and political ramifications that accompany them. Pulera shows how, why, when, and where race matters in the United States and who is affected by it. He explains the ongoing demographic transition of America from a predominantly white country to one where nonwhites are increasingly numerous and consequently more visible. The advent of a multiracial consciousness has tremendous implications for AmericaÆs future, because the racial significance of almost every part of the American experience is increasing as a result. The author concludes on a note of cautious optimism as he explores whether the visible differences dividing Americans are reconcilable.

The contributions of the black population to the history and economic development of Puerto Rico have long been distorted and underplayed, Luis A. Figueroa contends. Focusing on the southeastern coastal region of Guayama, one of Puerto Rico's three leading centers of sugarcane agriculture, Figueroa examines the transition from slavery and slave labor to freedom and free labor after the 1873 abolition of slavery in colonial Puerto Rico. He corrects misconceptions about how ex-slaves went about building their lives and livelihoods after emancipation and debunks standing myths about race relations in Puerto Rico. Historians have assumed that after emancipation in Puerto Rico, as in other parts of the Caribbean and the U.S. South, former slaves acquired some land of their own and became subsistence farmers. Figueroa finds that in Puerto Rico, however, this was not an option because both capital and land available for sale to the Afro-Puerto Rican population were scarce. Paying particular attention to class, gender, and race, his account of how these libertos joined the labor market profoundly revises our understanding of the emancipation process and the evolution of the working class in Puerto Rico.

"This handbook is organized by various themes with the study of U.S. Latina/x/o Christianities. Keeping in mind that the Oxford Handbooks are geared toward graduate students and professors, the organization and layout of this handbook provides a thorough examination of interlocking themes within the academic study of Latina/x/o Christian histories, sociologies, and anthropologies. These essays, taken individually and collectively, pay attention to both the diachronic (over time, historical) as well as the synchronic (contemporary). Moreover, the essays cover the major U.S. Latina/x/o ethnic groups as well as major Christian denominations and movements. Finally, essays in the handbook attend to important intersectional realities that include empire, migration, diaspora, hybridities, borderlands, and gender"--