PRLS 5710 Research Seminar in Puerto Rican & LatinX Studies (Ortíz-Minaya)

The Personal in the Academic: The Presence of Self in Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies

Guest Speaker: Peter L. Carlo Becerra is an Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Earlham College and a Bronx bred Nuyorican scholar, product of NYC public schools, CUNY, and SUNY.

Dissertation: “Which is 'white' and which 'colored'?: Notes on race and/or color among Puerto Ricans in interwar New York City".
[Best Dissertation Award, Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA), 2015].

Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation considers how racial and/or color difference among Puerto Ricans settling in New York City during the years between the two World Wars shaped their everyday lives. It does this by reading the representations of racial and/or color difference among Puerto Ricans prevailing in government censi and other official records, and in the writings and testimony by and about the migrants. These representations suggest that where Puerto Ricans lived, the jobs they held, and their likelihood to be arrested and/or prosecuted, all bore some relation to their color and/or racial classification. This was particularly the case in an area of Brooklyn referred to as the "Beach-head". There, the salience of racial and/or color difference among Puerto Ricans meshed with the "color line" in labor, residence and crime in New York City. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by addressing your request to ProQuest, 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, P.O. Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346. Telephone 1-800-521-3042; e-mail: disspub@umi.com