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.

This “important and well-researched” study of 1960s urban Latino activism and religion is “brimming with the ideas and voices of . . . Latinx activists” (Llana Barber, author of Latino City). In the late 1960s, American cities found themselves in steep decline, with poor and working-class families hit the hardest. Many urban religious institutions debated whether to move to the suburbs. Against the backdrop of the Black and Brown Power movements, which challenged economic inequality and white supremacy, young Latino radicals began occupying churches and disrupting services to compel church communities to join their protests against urban renewal, poverty, police brutality, and racism. Apostles of Change tells the story of these occupations and establishes their context within the urban crisis. It underscores the tensions they created and the activists’ bold, new vision for the church and the world. Through case studies from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston, Felipe Hinojosa reveals how Latino freedom movements crossed the boundaries of faith and politics. He argues that understanding these radical politics is essential to understanding the dynamic changes in Latino religious groups from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

A new history reveals how the rise of the Latino vote has redrawn the political map and what it portends for the future of American politics. The impact of the Latino vote is a constant subject of debate among pundits and scholars. Will it sway elections? And how will the political parties respond to the growing number of voters who identify as Latino? A more basic and revealing question, though, is how the Latino vote was forged—how U.S. voters with roots in Latin America came to be understood as a bloc with shared interests. In The Rise of the Latino Vote, Benjamin Francis-Fallon shows how this diverse group of voters devised a common political identity and how the rise of the Latino voter has transformed the electoral landscape. Latino political power is a recent phenomenon. It emerged on the national scene during the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, when Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American activists, alongside leaders in both the Democratic and the Republican parties, began to conceive and popularize a pan-ethnic Hispanic identity. Despite the increasing political potential of a unified Latino vote, many individual voters continued to affiliate more with their particular ethnic communities than with a broader Latino constituency. The search to resolve this contradiction continues to animate efforts to mobilize Hispanic voters and define their influence on the American political system. The “Spanish-speaking vote” was constructed through deliberate action; it was not simply demographic growth that led the government to recognize Hispanics as a national minority group, ushering in a new era of multicultural politics. As we ponder how a new generation of Latino voters will shape America’s future, Francis-Fallon uncovers the historical forces behind the changing face of America.

Large numbers of Latino migrants began to arrive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1950s. They joined a small but established Spanish-speaking community of people from Texas, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Delia Fernández-Jones merges storytelling with historical analysis to recapture the placemaking practices that these Mexicans, Tejanos, and Puerto Ricans used to create a new home for themselves. Faced with entrenched white racism and hostility, Latinos of different backgrounds formed powerful relationships to better secure material needs like houses and jobs and to recreate community cultural practices. Their pan-Latino solidarity crossed ethnic and racial boundaries and shaped activist efforts that emphasized working within the system to advocate for social change. In time, this interethnic Latino alliance exploited cracks in both overt and structural racism and attracted white and Black partners to fight for equality in social welfare programs, policing, and education. Groundbreaking and revelatory, Making the MexiRican City details how disparate Latino communities came together to respond to social, racial, and economic challenges.

Radical Solidarity tells the riveting story of Ruth Reynolds (1916–89), a white pacifist from South Dakota who became a stalwart ally of nationalist revolutionaries during Puerto Rico's long struggle for independence. Reynolds dedicated her life to ending US control of the archipelago. She testified before Congress and the UN, organized fellow North Americans, investigated the brutal tactics used by the colonial state to quash independence sentiment, and was incarcerated as a political prisoner. Lisa G. Materson introduces the concept of "radical solidarity" to describe Reynolds's powerful model for globally engaged activism. Guided by her vision of allyship, Reynolds developed deep bonds with the Puerto Rican nationalist women with whom she was imprisoned, collaborated across ideological divides with revolutionary leaders, and established lasting relationships with civil rights lawyers, political exiles, and New Left activists. Her radical solidarity enabled her to remain a tireless champion for Puerto Rico's independence through five decades of hope, disappointment, and political change. Her life reveals the price paid by those who supported an independent Puerto Rico and sheds light on the possibilities of working across differences in the face of US state-sanctioned violence and colonialism.

2021 — Silver Medal, Raul Yzaguirre Best Political/Current Affairs Book – International Latino Book Awards, Latino Literacy Now An in-depth look at an emerging Latino presence in Orlando, Florida, where Puerto Ricans and others navigate differences of race, class, and place of origin in their struggle for social, economic, and political belonging. Puerto Ricans make up half of Orlando-area Latinos, arriving from Puerto Rico as well as from other long-established diaspora communities to a place where Latino politics has long been about Cubans in Miami. Together with other Latinos from multiple places, Puerto Ricans bring diverse experiences of race and class to this Sunbelt city. Tracing the emergence of the Puerto Rican and Latino presence in Orlando from the 1940s through an ethnographic moment of twenty-first-century electoral redistricting, Sunbelt Diaspora provides a timely prism for viewing how differences of race, class, and place play out in struggles to claim political, social, and economic ground for Latinos. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, oral history, and archival research, Patricia Silver situates her findings in Orlando’s historically black-white racial landscape, post-1960s claims to “color-blindness,” and neoliberal celebrations of individualism. Through the voices of diverse participants, Silver brings anthropological attention to the question of how social difference affects collective identification and political practice. Sunbelt Diaspora asks what constitutes community and how criteria for membership and legitimate representation are negotiated.

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.

Unequal Sisters has become a beloved and classic reader, providing an unparalleled resource for understanding women’s history in the United States today. First published in 1990, the book revolutionized the field with its broad multicultural approach, emphasizing feminist perspectives on race, ethnicity, region, and sexuality, and covering the colonial period to the present day. Now in its fifth edition, the book presents an even wider variety of women’s experiences. This new edition explores the connections between the past and the present and highlights the analysis of queerness, transgender identity, disability, the rise of the carceral state, and the bureaucratization and militarization of migration. There is also more coverage of Indigenous and Pacific Islander women. The book is structured around thematic clusters: conceptual/methodological approaches to women’s history; bodies, sexuality, and kinship; and agency and activism. This classic work has incorporated the feedback of educators in the field to make it the most user-friendly version to date and will be of interest to students and scholars of women’s history, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of race and ethnicity.

The epic story of Hasidic Williamsburg, from the decline of New York to the gentrification of Brooklyn "A rich chronicle of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg. . . . This expert account enlightens."—Publishers Weekly “One of the most creative and iconoclastic works to have been written about Jews in the United States.”—Eliyahu Stern, Yale University The Hasidic community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy groups of people in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of the toughest parts of New York City during an era of steep decline, only to later resist and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of the neighborhood. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a group of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely opposed the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification. By showing how Williamsburg’s Hasidim rejected assimilation while still undergoing distinctive forms of Americanization and racialization, Deutsch and Casper present both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.

Explores the modern history of Latin America using an intersectional approach, newly revised and updated. A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present, Third Edition offers a lively account of the rich political, cultural, and social history of the independent nation-states of Latin America and the Caribbean. Viewing Latin American history through the lens of social class, gender, race, and ethnicity, this accessible textbook explores the complex set of personalities, issues, and events that intersect to form the Latin American historical landscape. Written in a clear and engaging narrative style, the fully updated third edition examines specific events in different nations and periods to illustrate broader historical trends and interpretations. Concise chapters feature first-hand accounts of the life history of both prominent and ordinary people to contextualize topics such as African slavery in the Americas, the struggle for Haitian independence, the patriarchal rules governing marriage in Brazil, the construction of the Panama Canal, indigenous uprisings in the Mexican Revolution, the impact of immigration on Latin American life, the opening of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, and more. Presents documents and excerpts from fiction to serve as concrete examples of historical ideas Examines gender and its influence on political and economic change Highlights the role of music, art, sports, movies, and other popular culture in the formation of Latin American cultural identity Includes a summary of European colonialism and an overview of Latin America in the 21st century Provides end-of-chapter review questions, discussion topics, and suggested readings Part of the popular Wiley Blackwell Concise History of the Modern World series, the third edition of A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present is an excellent textbook for introductory and intermediate undergraduate students as well as high school students taking advanced/honors Latin American history courses.