The Supreme Court issued its first decision on affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978. Like most conflicts about civil rights in this era, the fight over affirmative action is presumed to involve primarily Black and White Americans. But Bakke cannot be understood without including Latino participants in the origin story. During the 1970s, Latinos’ rates of university enrollment increased more than those of any other group, especially in California, where the case originated. So when Bakke’s legal challenge threatened that access, Latino lawyers, students, and higher education advocates collaborated on a strategic defense of affirmative action. They drafted legal briefs, formed regional and national committees, and took to the streets. First in California and then in the East and Midwest, Latinos worked to shape the national discussion over the value of affirmative action and to protect their hard-won gains in higher education.

This article traces the long career of the term "minority" in the United States, tracking both its continuities and its shapeshifting in the twentieth century American vernacular. I argue that the changing uses of minority reflected a protean politics of language that reflected changes in racial ideology across the twentieth century, which I explore by analyzing the evolving tension between ascriptive language and demands for self-description by Black and Latino Americans in particular. The earliest usage of minority as a social category emerged after the First World War, when Black journalists and advocates argued that African Americans needed protection as a "racial minority" in the U.S. Social scientists popularized a broader version of the term in the 1930s-which included immigrants and their offsprings-that held sway until a postwar shift in racial schema enabled second- and third-generation European ethnics to escape the minority category. The phrases "disadvantaged minority" and "underprivileged minority" gained currency around that time, entangling Black, Latino, and other "non-white" Americans in a shared but fragmented marginalized status. While the development of affirmative action policies in the late 1960s lent minority status an important form of leverage, the category continued to signal exclusions from the benefits of full citizenship. Even by the late twentieth century, members of groups labeled minorities still resided figuratively and often literally on the periphery of American society, a position from which many continued to critique and rework the language of minority to challenge its normative power.

This article argues for the importance of reframing the history of school desegregation in the United States beyond Black and white and beyond the regional frames through which this history has been interpreted. In Western states, most Latino children attended schools segregated not by law but by custom starting in the early twentieth century; Latino students also encountered de facto segregation in the Eastern and Midwestern cities with large Puerto Rican populations by the 1950s. Parents, students, advocates, and activists protested the inequality of educational outcomes for Latino children over many decades, developing distinctive strategies to address the combination of racial and language-based discrimination faced by Latino students. Yet, because they were marginalized in political debates in the 1960s and 1970s and because most national-level historical scholarship on school desegregation focuses on Black and white participants, Latinos’ role in this aspect of our national civil rights history has remained obscured.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s exquisite exploration of citizenship and displacement across two millennia draws on sources from ancient Greece and Rome as well as modern empires, including the U.S., and proposes two creative heuristic devices—the “insular scheme” and “radical inclusion”—that enable us to better understand both the marginalizing experience and the animating possibilities of immigrant citizenship. In my response to his piece, I assess the relevance of these ideas to the history of Puerto Ricans in relation to the United States. Puerto Ricans, caught in the “insular scheme” of U.S. citizenship since American citizenship was imposed on them in 1917, are the most obvious exemplars of “differentiated citizens” in the nation and have struggled in multiple ways with the question of inclusion as citizens. I examine the ways that Puerto Ricans have used the language of recognition as a way to explain the aspiration of equitable citizenship, a vision of belonging in the nation that sounds much like Padilla Peralta’s “radical inclusion.”

Puerto Ricans’ migration into the United States has been of interest to the American public, politicians and intellectuals. What seemingly has been overlooked or overemphasized by these groups is the fact that unlike most immigrants, Puerto Ricans have US citizenship. For more than 400 years, Puerto Rico has been a colony and its people have been colonial subjects – first, under Spain, and later under the United States. When the United States became involved in the Spanish–American War of 1898, high hopes arose among various sectors of the Puerto Rican society. For many Puerto Ricans among both the working class and the elite, the United States was a model of economic progress and liberty. Immediately after the War ended, Puerto Rico became a possession of the United States. Issues of citizenship and class between a Hispanic-Roman Catholic culture versus an Anglo-Saxon Protestant ruling culture were broadly discussed among Puerto Ricans. The question of citizenship and the idea of annexing the island to the Union became headlines in the American press and a topic of ongoing debate for political leaders. Due to legal and constitutional arguments in the US Congress, American citizenship was not conferred on Puerto Ricans until 1917 – indeed, a timely correlation to the US participation in WWI. Although granted citizenship, Puerto Rican migrants had great difficulty settling into areas where they were recruited to work, such as New York City. In her book, Puerto Rican Citizen, Historian Lorrin Thomas embarks on an odyssey spanning from 1917 to 1970, that combines archival research and a critical narrative approach, to tell the story of the members of the Puerto Rican community who became key players in New York City. The book’s six main chapters are richly complemented with detailed endnotes. Each chapter evolves employing specific themes and chronological events in an interrelated manner. The author’s anecdotic approach allowed the individuals to tell their own story in their own voice; while the newspaper headlines frame the sociopolitical setting of the specific argument that the author Thomas seeks to convey. I find her methodology very appealing because it does not overwhelm the reader with data or dates. The first chapter outlines the anatomy of New York City in the 1920s, which was

Abstract Puerto Rican migrants have resided in the United States since before the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, when the United States took possession of the island of Puerto Rico as part of the Treaty of Paris. After the war, groups of Puerto Ricans began migrating to the United States as contract laborers, first to sugarcane plantations in Hawaii, and then to other destinations on the mainland. After the Jones Act of 1917 extended U.S. citizenship to islanders, Puerto Ricans migrated to the United States in larger numbers, establishing their largest base in New York City. Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, a vibrant and heterogeneous colonia developed there, and Puerto Ricans participated actively both in local politics and in the increasingly contentious politics of their homeland, whose status was indeterminate until it became a commonwealth in 1952. The Puerto Rican community in New York changed dramatically after World War II, accommodating up to fifty thousand new migrants per year during the peak of the “great migration” from the island. Newcomers faced intense discrimination and marginalization in this era, defined by both a Cold War ethos and liberal social scientists’ interest in the “Puerto Rican problem.” Puerto Rican migrant communities in the 1950s and 1960s—now rapidly expanding into the Midwest, especially Chicago, and into New Jersey, Connecticut, and Philadelphia—struggled with inadequate housing and discrimination in the job market. In local schools, Puerto Rican children often faced a lack of accommodation of their need for English language instruction. Most catastrophic for Puerto Rican communities, on the East Coast particularly, was the deindustrialization of the labor market over the course of the 1960s. By the late 1960s, in response to these conditions and spurred by the civil rights, Black Power, and other social movements, young Puerto Ricans began organizing and protesting in large numbers. Their activism combined a radical approach to community organizing with Puerto Rican nationalism and international anti-imperialism. The youth were not the only activists in this era. Parents in New York had initiated, together with their African American neighbors, a “community control” movement that spanned the late 1960s and early 1970s; and many other adult activists pushed the politics of the urban social service sector—the primary institutions in many impoverished Puerto Rican communities—further to the left. By the mid-1970s, urban fiscal crises and the rising conservative backlash in national politics dealt another blow to many Puerto Rican communities in the United States. The Puerto Rican population as a whole was now widely considered part of a national “underclass,” and much of the political energy of Puerto Rican leaders focused on addressing the paucity of both basic material stability and social equality in their communities. Since the 1980s, however, Puerto Ricans have achieved some economic gains, and a growing college-educated middle class has managed to gain more control over the cultural representations of their communities. More recently, the political salience of Puerto Ricans as a group has begun to shift. For the better part of the 20th century, Puerto Ricans in the United States were considered numerically insignificant or politically impotent (or both); but in the last two presidential elections (2008 and 2012), their growing populations in the South, especially in Florida, have drawn attention to their demographic significance and their political sensibilities.

Anthropologists and sociologists have published a number of studies about Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in Chicago in the last several decades, but historians have paid scant attention to the city's Latino past. Brown in the Windy City, Lilia Fernández's recent book on Puerto Rican and Mexican communities in the postwar city, is the first of its kind by a historian: the first historical study to examine Chicago's Mexican and Puerto Rican populations in the same frame; the first to add “brown” to the black-and-white landscape of postwar racial politics; the first to consider the central role of Latino Chicagoans in the city's fabled urban planning history. Fernández offers nuanced and meticulous analysis throughout her concise and readable narrative. Her book will help guide the next generation of historians writing about Latinos in the United States. Fernández carefully establishes the separate origins of the two migrant groups, arguing though that both Puerto Rican and Mexican migrants were drawn to Chicago as the “result of the economic, social, and political dislocations that [U.S.] imperialism and colonialism have produced” (26). She traces the patterns of settlement that caused the two groups of labor migrants to converge in different Chicago neighborhoods over several decades after World War II, offering excellent demographic data on these various communities through time.

This essay explores the ways scholars of human rights, from various disciplines, contend with—or overlook—problems of consistency and precision in their subjects’ invocations of rights. Through its review of Lora Wildenthal’s The Language of Human Rights in West Germany and William Armaline et al.’s Human Rights in Our Own Backyard, the essay considers the strengths of two related analytical approaches: treating human rights as a political language; and treating human rights as an ideology rooted in a local history of ideas that shapes the way those rights operate in a particular society.

Journal Article Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States Get access Jorge Duany. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. xx, 284 pp. Cloth, $65.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 100, Issue 4, March 2014, Page 1288, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau139 Published: 01 March 2014

Research on Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the late 1940s and '50s was animated by the “spirit of reform,” which generated important but not always clear connections between social scientists and the staffs of the growing social service sector dealing with Puerto Rican migrants. But since much of the social science research relating to Puerto Ricans in this period dealt with island issues, social workers and educators in New York organized quickly to fill the void, conducting their own surveys and research to aid in their work with migrants in New York. Bolstered by academic work on the importance of the migration to island development, and by the flurry of interest in their client base, the cadre of educators and social workers who served Puerto Ricans grew exponentially in the early years of the postwar migration.

Research Article| April 01 2013 Oscar Handlin, The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis Lorrin Thomas Lorrin Thomas Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2013) 32 (3): 46–52. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.3.0046 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lorrin Thomas; Oscar Handlin, The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2013; 32 (3): 46–52. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.3.0046 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

During the worst years of the Great Depression, many Puerto Rican migrants, barely scraping by, focused only on feeding their families, on their next paycheck or next job—or a threatened eviction—and paid little attention to labor politics, much less to electoral politics. Not that migrants as a group lacked an interest in politics: many of them closely followed, and sometimes participated in, the turbulent elections, bitter political rivalries, and rancorous ideological battles of their homeland. By the early 1930s, though, colonia leftists had an easy time convincing their compatriots of the importance of everyday political struggles. The Depression itself was motivating thousands of migrants to focus on local issues, and the promise of New Deal politics changed many migrants' minds about the payoffs of political participation at the local level.

By the end of the 1920s, just ten years after the Jones Act first made them full-fledged Americans, more than 45,000 native Puerto Ricans had left their homes and entered the United States, citizenship papers in hand, forming one of New York City's most complex and distinctive migrant communities. In Puerto Rican Citizen, Lorrin Thomas for the first time unravels the many tensions - historical, racial, political, and economic - that defined the experience of this group of American citizens before and after World War II. Building its incisive narrative from a wide range of archival sources, interviews, and first-person accounts of Puerto Rican life in New York, this book illuminates the rich history of a group that is still largely invisible to many scholars and transforms the way we understand this community's integral role in shaping our sense of citizenship in twentieth-century America.