Synopses & Reviews
Since the invasion and colonization of Puerto Rico in 1898, all Puerto Ricans are both American citizens and colonial subjects by birth according to international law. Over a third of this population currently lives in the continental U.S. forming one of the nation's most significant "minority" communities. Yet no complete study of mainland Puerto Ricanor Boricualiterature has been written.
Until now. Boricua Literature is the first literary history of the Puerto Rican colonial diaspora.
The result of a decade of research in archives and special collections in the Caribbean and in the U.S., Lisa Sánchez González argues that the writing of the Puerto Rican diaspora should be considered an integral field of study. Covering 100 years of Boricua literary history, each chapter looks at the single writer or group of writers who are most emblematic of their respective generation, from William Carlos Williams and Arturo Schomburg, to latina feminism and salsa music. The story of an American community of color, Boricua Literature is also about contemporary critical race and gender studies.
Unlike virtually all studies concerning mainland Puerto Rican writing, Lisa Sánchez González is less concerned with "cultural identity" than with unearthing a substantive cultural intellectual history. The first explicitly literary historical analysis of Boricua Literature, this definitive study proposes a new and discreet area of literary historical research in American studies.
Review
Impressive, provocative and smart. Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship is breathtaking in its timeliness and its broad scope. - Erika Lee, author of At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 An urgent collection of essays by both activists and scholars that puts legislative and judicial histories into dialogue with activists' struggles to bring about social justice for immigrant communities. Its ever-present focus on social justice connects the specificity of individual historical struggles to broader political aspirations. - Wendy Kozol, Oberlin College
Review
"Sanchez-Gonzales presents a panorama of the writing produced by Puerto Rican Americans over the last 100 years. . . . Highly recommended."-Choice,
Review
"Sanchez Gonzalez's provacative study Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora intensely focuses on a geographically and culturally specific literary evolution by Puerto Ricans who emigrated to the east coastof the United States, a movement spanning most of the 20th century."Centro Journal -,
Review
"Lisa Sanchez Gonzalez's Boricua Literature is the first literary history of the Puerto Rican colonial diaspora, but it is also much more."-American Literature,
Review
“In the end, the most compelling scholarship lays bare the paradoxes of the past. The best historians go beyond identifying such paradoxes to redress gaps in analysis that reshape the field, and in Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship, Buff skillfully does this.”
-The Journal of American History,
Synopsis
Punctuated by marches across the United States in the spring of 2006, immigrant rights has reemerged as a significant and highly visible political issue. Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of U.S. Citizenship brings prominent activists and scholars together to examine the emergence and significance of the contemporary immigrant rights movement. Contributors place the contemporary immigrant rights movement in historical and comparative contexts by looking at the ways immigrants and their allies have staked claims to rights in the past, and by examining movements based in different communities around the United States. Scholars explain the evolution of immigration policy, and analyze current conflicts around issues of immigrant rights; activists engaged in the current movement document the ways in which coalitions have been built among immigrants from different nations, and between immigrant and native born peoples. The essays examine the ways in which questions of immigrant rights engage broader issues of identity, including gender, race, and sexuality.
Synopsis
Punctuated by marches across the United States in the spring of 2006, immigrant rights has reemerged as a significant and highly visible political issue. Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of U.S. Citizenship brings prominent activists and scholars together to examine the emergence and significance of the contemporary immigrant rights movement. Contributors place the contemporary immigrant rights movement in historical and comparative contexts by looking at the ways immigrants and their allies have staked claims to rights in the past, and by examining movements based in different communities around the United States. Scholars explain the evolution of immigration policy, and analyze current conflicts around issues of immigrant rights; activists engaged in the current movement document the ways in which coalitions have been built among immigrants from different nations, and between immigrant and native born peoples. The essays examine the ways in which questions of immigrant rights engage broader issues of identity, including gender, race, and sexuality.
About the Author
Lisa Sánchez González is assistant professor English at the University of Texas at Austin. She also produces community-based news and public affairs programs for public radio.