Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T06:49:25.086Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

DISPATCHES FROM A COLONIAL OUTPOST

Puerto Rico as Schema in the Black Popular Press, 1942–19511

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2011

Carlos Alamo
Carlos Alamo*
Affiliation:
Departments of Sociology and Latin American and Latino/a Studies, Vassar College
*
Carlos Alamo, Vassar College, Department of Sociology, 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604. E-mail: caalamo@vassar.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Over the last few decades social movements and race scholars have begun to uncover and critically examine the social, economic, and political linkages shared between Puerto Ricans and African Americans. Much of this literature has focused exclusively on the period of the Civil Rights Movement with particular emphasis on the Young Lords and Black Panthers. Despite this rich and informative literature, we know very little of the connective social histories and relationships between African Americans and Puerto Ricans that preceded these later social movements. This article traces the historically contingent and multifaceted ways in which African American journalists, between 1942 and 1951, found new political meanings in Puerto Rico as the island underwent a massive economic and social transformation, and how they used that knowledge to reconceptualize challenges to Black personhood in the United States. Examining the Black popular press in Puerto Rico during this period reveals that Black journalists took an active interest in the island because it represented a useful point of comparison for understanding the internal colonial model of social inequality hampering the U.S. African American community during the first half of the twentieth century. The racialized nature of U.S. colonialism experienced by the island, the sociopolitical and economic effects of its monocultural sugar economy, and the second-class citizenship of Puerto Ricans were among the most salient factors that led African American journalists to a broader anti-imperialist understanding of racism, illuminating the lack of civil and economic rights Blacks experienced within the United States.

Keywords

Puerto RicoRaceAfrican American JournalistsInterracialismConnective Histories
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Spring 2012 , pp. 201 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Eve Dunbar, Merida Rúa, Tyrone Forman, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Kiese Laymon, Avery Gordon, and George Lipsitz for their valuable comments and suggestions as I worked through various revisions of this article.

References

REFERENCES

Arroyo, Jossianna (2005). Technologies: Transculturations of Race, Gender and Ethnicity in Arturo A. Schomburg's Masonic Writings. Centro Journal, 17: 4–25.Google Scholar
Ayala, César (1999). American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean 1898–1934. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ayala, César and Bernabe, Rafael (2007). Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History Since 1898. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Badger, John Robert (1943). World View: Number One U.S. Colony. Chicago Defender, September 4, 15.Google Scholar
Badger, John Robert (1944). World View: Regionalsim in the Caribbean. Chicago Defender, May 20, 13.Google Scholar
Benítez, Jaime (1962). Junto a la Torre: Jornadas de un Programa Universitario (1942–1962). San Juan, Puerto Rico: Universidad de Puerto Rico.Google Scholar
Bolden, Frank E. (1942). Recognition of Color Problem Will Save United States Future Embarrassment. Pittsburgh Courier, April 4, 1942, p. 12Google Scholar
Bosque-Pérez, Ramón (2006). The FBI and Puerto Rico: Notes on a Conflictive History. New York: CUNY Center for Puerto Rican Studies.Google Scholar
Brooks, Deton J. (1943a). Jim Crow at America's Air Crossroads Sabotages Latin Good Neighbor Policy. Chicago Defender, July 3, 1, 4.Google Scholar
Brooks, Deton J. (1943b). Rise of Puerto Rico ‘Populars’ A Saga of People's Democracy. Chicago Defender, July 3, 5.Google Scholar
Brooks, Deton J. (1943c). Sugar Trust Gets Congress Aid To Enforce Puerto Rico Poverty. Chicago Defender, July 10, 7.Google Scholar
Brooks, Deton J. (1943d). Negro Fate in U.S. Tied To Puerto Rican Freedom. Chicago Defender, July 31, 7.Google Scholar
Brooks, Deton J. (1943e). Puerto Rico Up In Arms Against Colonial Status. Chicago Defender, August 7, 13.Google Scholar
Brooks, Deton J. (1943f). Puerto Rico Has No Big Race Problems. Chicago Defender, August 14, 13.Google Scholar
Brooks, Deton J. (1943g). Puerto Rico One Crop System Needs Reform. Chicago Defender, August 21, 13.Google Scholar
Brooks, Deton J. (1943h). Puerto Rico Suffers From Over Population. Chicago Defender, August 28, 13.Google Scholar
Brooks, Deton J. (1943i). Congress is Threat to Puerto Rico Reform. Chicago Defender, September 4, 13.Google Scholar
Brooks, Deton J. (1943j). Puerto Rico Is A Test Tube For Atlantic Charter. Chicago Defender, September 11, 13.Google Scholar
Buck, William (1898). Porto Rico Colonization: A Suggestion That the Colored People of America Be Given a Dhauce (sic) to Buy That Island. The Fair Play, June 17, 4.Google Scholar
Burns, Ben (1945a). 2,000,000 Labor Drop Jim Crow. Chicago Defender, October 20, 1, 8.Google Scholar
Burns, Ben (1945b). Negro Nations Well Represented at Paris Meet. Chicago Defender, October 27, 5.Google Scholar
Chicago Defender (1942). Earl Browder Breaks Silence With Warning on U.S. Fairness to Negro. July 11, 3.Google Scholar
Chicago Defender (1943a). Do You Know? April 17, 15.Google Scholar
Chicago Defender (1943b). Rethinking Our Policy. August 28, 14.Google Scholar
Duany, Jorge (2002). The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and the United States. Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Duany, Jorge (2004). Modernizar La Nación o Nacionalizar La Modernidad? Las ciencias sociales en la Universidad de Puerto Rico durante la decada de 1950. In Alvarez-Curbelo, de Garcia, Sylvia Raffucci, and de Garcia, Carmen Raffucci (Eds.), Frente a la torre: ensayos del centenario de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, pp. 177–207. Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: La Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. ([1903] 1989). The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Espiritu, Yen Le (2003). Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernandez, Johanna (2004). Radicals in the Late 1960s: A History of the Young Lords Party in New York, 1969–1974. PhD Dissertation, Department of History, Columbia University.Google Scholar
Fernandez, Ronald (1996). The Disenchanted Island: Puerto Rico and the United States in the Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group.Google Scholar
Flores, Juan (1993). Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press.Google Scholar
Flores, Juan (2009). The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Foner, Phillip (1976). Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1973. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Godreau, Isar (2002). Changing Space, Making Race: Distance, Nostalgia, and the Folklorization Blackness in Puerto Rico. Identities, 9: 281–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gonzalez, José Luis (1993). Puerto Rico: The Four Storeyed Country. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishing, Inc.Google Scholar
Gordon, Avery (1997). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Grosfoguel, R., Negrón-Muntaner, Frances, and Georas, Chloé S. (1997). Beyond Nationalist and Colonialist Discourses: The Jaiba Politics of the Puerto Rican Ethno-Nation. In Grosfoguel, Ramón and Negrón-Muntaner, Frances (Eds.), Puerto Rican Jam: Essays on Culture and Politics, pp. 1–36. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Guridy, Frank Andre (2010). Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, Winston (1998). Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Johnson, Gaye Theresa (2008). Constellations of Struggle: Luisa Moreno, Charlotta Bass, and the Legacy of Ethnic Studies. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 33: 155–172.Google Scholar
Jung, Moon-Kie (2006). Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Movement. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Amy (2002). The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Amy and Pease, Donald E. (1993). Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Kelley, Robin (1990). Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Kelley, Robin (1996). Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Lauria-Perriceli, Antonio (1989). A Study in Historical and Critical Anthropology: The Making of “The People of Puerto Rico.” PhD Dissertation, Department of Anthropology New School for Social Research.Google Scholar
Little, George (1942a). Puerto Rico, Island of Peace, Beauty And Contrasts Described By Physician. Pittsburgh Courier, February 21, 14.Google Scholar
Little, George (1942b). Pittsburgher Describes Puerto Rico as “Land of Shops, Rum, Sugar, Flowers.” Pittsburgh Courier, February 28, 14.Google Scholar
Little, George (1942c). Puerto Rican National Pride And Democracy Are Real World Models. The Pittsburgh Courier, March 7, 14.Google Scholar
Marqués, R. ([1951] 1983). La Carreta: Drama en tres actos. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cultural.Google Scholar
McAlpin, Harry (1943). Self-Rule for Puerto Rico Sought by Roosevelt. Chicago Defender, October 9, 21C.Google Scholar
Navarro Rivera, Pablo (2000). Universidad de Puerto Rico: De Control Politico Crisis Permanente. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán.Google Scholar
Negrón-Muntaner, Frances and Grosfoguel, Ramon (Eds.) (1997). Puerto Rican Jam: Essays on Culture and Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Perry, Pettis (1951). The Case of Puerto Rico and the Fight for Independence. Pettis Perry Papers, Box 3, Folder 11. New York: The New York Public Library.Google Scholar
Pittsburgh Courier (1943a). Independence for Puerto Rico. June 19, 6.Google Scholar
Pittsburgh Courier (1943b). Alas, The Poor Puerto Ricans! October 16, 6.Google Scholar
Pittsburgh Courier (1945). Puerto Rico Will Choose. June 16, 6.Google Scholar
Robinson, Cedric ([1983] 2000). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Robinson, Cedric (2007). Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Rodriguez, Victor (2005). Latino Politics in the United States: Race, Ethnicity, Class and Gender in the Mexican American and Puerto Rican Experience. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Santiago, Esmeralda (1994). Cuando era Puertorriqueña. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Santiago, Roberto (Ed.) (1995). Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings—An Anthology. New York: One World.Google Scholar
Santiago-Valles, Kelvin (1994). “Subject People” and Colonial Discourses: Economic Transformation and Social Disorder in Puerto Rico. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Sewell, William Jr. (1992). A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. The American Journal of Sociology, 98: 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soto, Pedro Juan (1961). Ardiente Suelo, Fria Estacion. Mexico City, Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana.Google Scholar
Von Eschen, Penny M. (1997). Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Von Eschen, Penny M. (2004). Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Wells-Barnett, Ida (2002). On Lynchings. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.Google Scholar
Whalen, Carmen (1998). Bridging Homeland and Barrio Politics: The Young Lords in Philadelphia. In Torres, A. and Velázquez, J. (Eds.), The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard (1994). Blueprint for Negro Writing. In Mitchell, A. (Ed.), Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, pp. 97–106. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Young Lords Party and Michael Abramson (1971). Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords 1969–1971. New York: McGraw Hill.Google Scholar