Side by Side

This chapter places the book’s scholarly conversation in a framework of postcolonial, decolonial, critical race, American Studies, Latinx/Puerto Rican Studies, and children’s literature scholarship. The chapter elaborates on the role of youth, both as objects and participants, and youth literature in formation of Latinx studies, particularly in the formation of the historical and current ethnic studies movements and the history of Latinx literature in relationship to a “canon” of children’s and young adult literature.

Puerto Rican Needle Workers and Colonial Migrations: Deindustrialization as Pathways Lost

The dominant narrative of U.S. deindustrialization opens with the Northeast as the definitive starting point for industry followed by a direct linear relocation to the South and then the Global South. In this framework, deindustrialization appears to have a logic, a rational pathway following cheaper and compliant labor. When Puerto Rican needleworkers become visible in the history of the textile and garment industry, however, their colonial migrations complicate deindustrialization, and its linear logic collapses. From the perspective of these colonial women, industrialization of Puerto Rico began at the turn of the twentieth century - the same time factories and mills increased in the South. Thousands of women also migrated to the Northeast mainland, especially from the 1950s to the 1970s, when many white workers were mourning the loss of textile and garment jobs. Puerto Rican women moved to the old factories of the Northeast, which had become outposts for large transnational corporations that did not relocate their manufacturing in a direct geographic path but rather spread their processes over any arrangement that offered the best cost-benefit analysis. For Puerto Rican women, employment in the plants of the Northeast during the 1960s and 1970s offered hope rather than despair, and many took pride in meeting their quotas and providing wages for their families. In the 1980s, when the Reagan administration initiated major reforms to financial policies and the practices of leveraged buyouts made closing old plants a better return on investment, Puerto Rican women mourned the loss of jobs in an industry many experts had already declared ‘dead.’ Fragmentation of the archives between Puerto Rican studies and U.S. labor history have allowed for a simplistic narrative of deindustrialization and an erasure of the losses and disappointments of women who left Puerto Rico for the promise of higher wages in the postwar Northeast mainland. When the oral histories and documents related to the migrations of Puerto Rican needleworkers become visible in the larger history of the ‘American working class’, we see deindustrialization as sprawling and contingent rather than as linear and naturalized. Puerto Rican studies scholars have written about needleworkers as part of their field with particular attention to gender as it relates to notions of motherhood, but this article sets the women as American workers into the losses of the textile and garment industry without eliding their specificity as migrating and racialized colonial labor. In addition, the women expressed grief that went beyond losing a specific job - many of these workers lost their place in the U.S. workforce and the promise of financial stability as they became associated with racialized poverty and welfare debates.

Una revisión histórico-política de la producción literaria puertorriqueña. Entrevista con Fernando Feliú Matilla / A historical and political review of Puertorriquean Literatura. Interview to Fernando Feliú Matilla

Resumen: A lo largo de la siguiente entrevista, el profesor, historiador, crítico e investigador la de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, el catedrático en literatura puertorriqueña don Fernando Feliú Matilla, nos permite establecer una visión histórica de la génesis artística llevada a cabo en la Isla a través de los diferentes contextos socio-políticos que han tenido lugar en la misma desde la aparición de una literatura puertorriqueña propia y distintiva hasta la anexión de Puerto Rico a los Estados Unidos de América como Estado Libre Asociado en 1952 y su impronta en la génesis isleña. Si bien la entrevista tiene como objeto principal la literatura boricua, también se debaten en la misma el falocentrismo cultural presente en la cultura puertorriqueña, las relaciones políticas entre San Juan y Washington D.C., la influencia de los textos diaspóricos en la producción isleña o la situación del panorama artístico actual en Puerto Rico.Palabras clave: Literatura hispanoamericana; Literatura puertorriqueña; Estados Unidos; emigración; política. Abstract: Throughtout the following interview, professor Fernando Feliú Matilla, who holds a chair in Puerto Rican Studies and Literature, offers his personal point of view after years of research about Puerto Rican literature written in the 20th century. The interview is developed from a historical perspective, which means that it starts right from the moment Puerto Rico was still a Spanish colony in the Americas, until the present day, being Puerto Rico a Free Associated State of the United States of America (also known as American Commonwealth of Puerto Rico). Besides the literature, professor Feliú Matilla also gives his opinion about the absence of female writers in Puerto Rican literature, the relationships between San Juan and Washington D.C., the cultural movements that Puerto Rican literature written nowadays is influenced by, and many other different topics such as Caribbean literature written in the United States and its connection with Puerto Rican art.Keywords: Hispanic Literature; Puerto Rican Literature; USA; immigration; politics.

Latino Studies: New Contexts, New Concepts

In this article, Juan Flores provides a historical and theoretical context for the study of Latino ethnicities. Presently, Latino Studies is at a paradoxical crossroads. While students at elite private colleges are clamoring for such programs, many public colleges and universities are cutting and consolidating Latino Studies programs virtually out of existence. As the battle to create, or preserve, Latino Studies departments rages on, the author points out the theoretical transformations that have occurred over the past twenty five years. One of the biggest differences between past university movements and present ones is the manner in which the demands have been framed by students. Very few of the earlier student mobilizations called for "Latino Studies" per se; rather, the early initiatives, which usually called for "Puerto Rican Studies" or "Chicano Studies," corresponded more directly to the political struggles for justice located within particular Chicano and Puerto Rican communities. This change in the framing of Latino Studies coincides with the more transnational and global character of Latino ethnic groups. In addition, the theoretical insights provided by feminist, post-colonial, and race theories, as well as lesbian and gay studies, have added a level of complexity that was not present in the early days of Chicano or Puerto Rican studies. Flores concludes with a call for an opening of the theoretical space within Latino Studies curricula, and the universities that house them, to allow room for these new complexities, thereby taking advantage of a unique moment in the history of Latino Studies.