Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City
Lorrin Thomas
Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City unravels the many tensions — historical, racial, political, and economic — that defined the experience of Puerto Rican migrants in New York City before and after World War II. 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, forming one of New York City’s most complex and distinctive migrant communities. Building its narrative from a wide range of archival sources, interviews, and first-person accounts, 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.
The Author
Lorrin Thomas is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–Camden, where she served as Department Chair from 2015 to 2020. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania (2002) and her B.A. from Columbia University (1993). Her research focuses on Puerto Rican and Latino history, citizenship, race, and civil rights in the twentieth-century United States. She is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society. She is co-author, with Aldo Lauria Santiago, of Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights (Routledge, 2018).
The Introduction
Puerto Rican Citizen complicates 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.
The book traces Puerto Ricans’ political mobilization from the early decades of their arrival in New York City through the postwar era of mass migration. It documents how Puerto Rican activists, community organizations, and ordinary migrants navigated an American state that extended citizenship while withholding its full promises — and how their responses to that contradiction shaped political identity for generations.
The Chapters
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Puerto Ricans, Citizenship, and Recognition
One New Citizens of New York
Community Organization and Political Culture in the Twenties
Two Confronting Race in the Metropole
Racial Ascription and Racial Discourse during the Depression
Three Pursuing the Promise of the New Deal
Relief and the Politics of Nationalism in the Thirties
Four How to Represent the Postwar Migration
The Liberal Establishment, the Puerto Rican Left, and the “Puerto Rican Problem”
Five How to Study the Postwar Migrant
Social Science, Puerto Ricans, and Social Problems
Six “Juan Q. Citizen,” Aspirantes, and Young Lords
Youth Activism in a New World
Epilogue
From Colonial Citizen to Nuyorican
Notes
Index
Awards
Casa de las Américas Prize
Honorable mention
Frank Bonilla Book Award
Puerto Rican Studies Association — Honorable mention
Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award in American Immigration History
The Immigration and Ethnic History Society — Won
The Reviews
“In this insightful, well-written study of Puerto Rican New York City, Thomas provides perhaps the best study of Puerto Rican political mobilization, migration, and politics in the post-WWII US to date.”
— Choice
“Written with simple elegance and brilliantly engaged with the politics of dignity and recognition, Puerto Rican Citizen represents an important achievement — one that I am convinced will assume its rightful place among the best examples of scholarship on Puerto Rican history, Latino studies, and the broader history of citizenship. Puerto Rican Citizen is a powerful work of original scholarship that should attract a broad audience among academic and general audiences alike.”
— David Gutierrez, University of California, San Diego
“Lorrin Thomas’s book is an extremely well-researched, clearly written, and impressive account of the struggle of Puerto Rican migrants and their offspring to take advantage of their status as U.S. citizens to gain political, economic and social rights in the complex racial and ethnic landscape of New York City in the twentieth century. This is an original and sensitive volume that will be an important addition to the growing scholarship on Latino history. I believe this book will become the standard work in the field.”
— George Sanchez, University of Southern California