End Date :
The Heyman Center for the Humanities, Komoda Room
The Puerto Rican ‘National Minority’ and Latino New York, 1931-1951
ICLS Graduate Student Colloquium presentation by: Cristina Pérez Jiménez, LAIC and ICLS
This talk presents some of the broad themes and ideas of my dissertation prospectus, which analyzes the culture of the early US Puerto Rican community during the 1930s and 1940s in New York City. It argues that Puerto Ricans’ engagement with international frameworks during these years facilitated their incorporation as a national minority. That is, the terms of their cultural and ethnic nationalism were shaped by their participation in internationalist movements, which led, paradoxically, to their incorporation as US ethnic minorities. The prospectus also examines Puerto Ricans’ strategic adoption and uses of Latino or Hispanic identities, and proposes the decades of the thirties and forties as a key moment in the consolidation of a New York Latino cultural imaginary. The first chapter deals with the presence and influence of the Communist Party in the Puerto Rican barrios. The second chapter examines Puerto Rican’s participation in the anti-fascist movement, and the role of the Spanish Civil War as collective rallying cry for “Hispanics.” The third chapter examines the prominent role of Pan-Americanist ideals and cosmopolitanism in the creation of a ‘raza hispana’ cultural uplift discourse by upper class US Puerto Rican. And the last chapter provides a close reading of Trópico en Manhattan (1951), the inaugural novel of Puerto Rican migration to New York, which both marks the end of the period under examination, and serves as a precursors for the Nuyorican aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970s.
