Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement
Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City
Sonia Song-Ha Lee
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 05/2014
Pages: 352
Subject: Social Science, History
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9781469614144
DESCRIPTION
In the first book-length history of Puerto Rican civil rights in
New York City, Sonia Lee traces the rise and fall of an uneasy
coalition between Puerto Rican and African American activists from
the 1950s through the 1970s. Previous work has tended to see blacks
and Latinos as either naturally unified as "people of color" or
irreconcilably at odds as two competing minorities. Lee
demonstrates instead that Puerto Ricans and African Americans in
New York City shaped the complex and shifting meanings of "Puerto
Rican-ness" and "blackness" through political activism. African
American and Puerto Rican New Yorkers came to see themselves as
minorities joined in the civil rights struggle, the War on Poverty,
and the Black Power movement--until white backlash and internal
class divisions helped break the coalition, remaking "Hispanicity"
as an ethnic identity that was mutually exclusive from
"blackness."
Drawing on extensive archival research and oral history interviews,
Lee vividly portrays this crucial chapter in postwar New York,
revealing the permeability of boundaries between African American
and Puerto Rican communities.