Abstract In 1970, a Puerto Rican woman named Juanita Serrano was elected to serve as a chair of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) after spending numerous years organizing poor women in Cleveland, Ohio. In this role Serrano joined welfare rights organizers from across the country as they protested the social, economic, and political conditions faced by poor people. This article provides a history of Puerto Rican women's contributions to welfare rights organizing in the United States. It argues that Puerto Rican women activists within the welfare rights movement articulated a vision of collective care that insisted that working-class people should have control over social welfare institutions and that welfare recipients should dictate the forms that care took in their communities. Their vision also addressed Puerto Ricans’ experience as colonial citizens, migrants, Spanish speakers, and people of color. The article examines how demands for collective care were advanced both in organizing to improve social welfare programs in the United States and Puerto Rico, and in leftist political mobilizations that contested capitalism and colonialism. Thus, one of the particularities of Puerto Rican welfare rights activism was that it was often closely linked to broader struggles for colonial migrants’ rights and for the decolonization of Puerto Rico.
Abstract After the 1959 revolution, Jewish migrants joined the waves of emigrants exiting Fidel Castro's Cuba. They developed a close-knit community in Greater Miami as their parents and grandparents had done when they immigrated to Cuba decades earlier. Analyzing oral histories, newspapers, and Cuban and US community records, this article uncovers an often-untold history and reconceptualizes diaspora by exploring the local influences on Cuban Jewish diaspora formation for a population belonging to multiple racialized groups. In the decades after arrival in Greater Miami, Cuban Jews transitioned from Cuban nationals to Cuban exiles to US residents and citizens. They found affordable housing in the white-designated Miami Beach and carved out an enclave, connecting Cuban Jewish newcomers and grounding them in the city. To integrate, the migrants felt they had to prove their worth to the larger society, and they embraced respectability politics to defuse their perceived otherness—which contained a complex combination of racial, ethnic, and religious elements—while maintaining their Cuban identity. Cuban Jews forged a double diaspora rooted in an entangled Cuban Jewish identity born from Jewish life in Cuba, cultural adaptation to the US socio-political environment, and interactions with other Cuban exiles and Miami residents.
Abstract Donald Trump fueled a political rise by exploiting the issue of immigration. Rejecting the liberal narrative of a “nation of immigrants” that had long portrayed the United States as a land of opportunity for all and a haven for the oppressed, Trump turned the idea of immigration into an existential threat to the nation itself. He dehumanized people crossing American borders with wild abandon, calling them criminals, drug dealers, “dog-eaters,” invaders, rapists, pollutants of the nation's blood supply, and monsters capable of entering the kitchens of citizens to “slit their throat.” In his first run for the presidency in 2016, he promised to build a massive wall on the southern border. In his second inaugural address, in 2025, he declared a national emergency at the border and said he would send military forces to “repel a disastrous invasion.” Why did Trump do this? Why did he turn immigrants—both undocumented and legal—into extreme threats to the nation? Was he simply a radical xenophobe or racist seeking to keep America mostly white or Anglo-Saxon? And where did this extreme form of hostility come from? This essay seeks to probe these issues and offers an interpretation of matters that will be debated for years to come. It argues that in his rhetoric and deeds, Trump's immigration policies need to be understood as more than a resort to traditional forms of American xenophobia and racism. His narrative of immigration as a peril was a means to a larger end that sought to overturn liberal democracy in the United States with a form of authoritarianism.
Abstract This article argues that post-1965 immigrant New York is often analyzed through two largely parallel literatures—migration and community formation, on the one hand, and religion and transnational devotion, on the other—and that reading them together clarifies how belonging in the outer boroughs was made through overlapping material and moral infrastructures. Bringing the urban scholarship of Nancy Foner, Steven Gregory, Madhulika Khandelwal, and Pyong Gap Min into conversation with work on immigrant religion by R. Stephen Warner, Peggy Levitt, Prema Kurien, and R. Scott Hanson, it demonstrates that labor markets, housing corridors, and neighborhood politics frequently intertwined with ritual calendars, congregational institution-building, and everyday ethics of obligation and care. This article, then, uses the relative absence of the Indo-Guyanese community of Richmond Hill, Queens (“Little Guyana”) from both literatures to probe the limits of frameworks that privilege either “settlement” or “transnationalism.” Drawing on Queens-based community and ethnic press coverage of Phagwah/Holi and Diwali, municipal recognitions such as permits, proclamations, and street co-namings, documentation of mandir-building and temple openings, and oral histories with mandir participants and organizers, it traces devotional circulation between Queens and Guyana as a form of neighborhood-making. This Richmond Hill case shows how ritual processions, institutional expansion, and public commemoration make belonging legible through urban space while sustaining obligations and attachments across borders—treating the neighborhood less as an end point of migration than as a node in a wider devotional circuit.
During the interwar period, Black American newspapers featured hundreds of articles about deportation, many of which took a profoundly global approach to the subject. This article explores the forms of Black internationalism that featured in stories on the relationship between immigration control, racism (and anti-Blackness specifically), and imperial violence. In particular, I demonstrate how the Black press frequently presented migrant expulsions (broadly construed) as a common tactic of imperial control. In doing so, they condemned European colonial regimes in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, but also highlighted the role of deportations across sites of American empire, both formal and informal. Additionally, the Black press was highly attentive to how deportation and other forms of forcible expulsion operated to build and maintain the global color line in nations around the world. Black American travelers and migrants, they noted, were the victims of an expanding global migration control regime, not only in Europe and white settler nations, but across the world. Across articles, editorials, and letters, Black commentators argued, through a transnational and-importantly-bi-directional focus, that deportation was more than an American phenomenon. Instead, it was yet another mechanism for the maintenance of the global color line and imperial control. This article explores these discourses, arguing that they not only reveal often-overlooked Black perspectives on migration, but also offer a productive opportunity to expand our understanding of the global nature of the early twentiethcentury deportation regime.
