Author: Patricia Gherovici
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 9781892746757
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Winner of the Gradiva Award in Historical Cultural and Literary Analysis and The 2004 Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology During the 1950's, US Army medical officers noted a new and puzzling syndrome that contemporary psychiatry could neither explain nor cure. These doctors reported that Puerto Rican soldiers under stress behaved in a very peculiar and dramatic manner, exhibiting a theatrical form of pseudo-epilepsy. Startled physicians observed frightened and disoriented patients foaming at the mouth, screaming, biting, kicking, shaking in seizures, and fainting. The phenomenon seemed to correspond to a serious neurological disease yet, as with some forms of hysteria, physical examination failed to identify any sign of an organic origin. This unusual set of symptoms, entered into medical records as "a group of striking psychopathological reaction patterns, precipitated by minor stress," and was designated "Puerto Rican Syndrome." In this lucid and sophisticated new work, Patricia Gherovici thoroughly examines the so-called Puerto Rican Syndrome in the contemporary world, its social and cultural implications for the growing Hispanic population in the US and, therefore, for the US as a whole. As a mental illness that is, allegedly, uniquely Puerto Rican, this syndrome links nationality and culture to a psychiatric disease whose reappearance recalls the spectacular hysteria that led to the discovery of the unconscious and the birth of psychoanalysis. Gherovici beautifully and systematically uses the combined insights of Freud and Lacan to examine the current state of psychoanalysis and the Hispanic community in America. Blending these insights with history, current events, and her own case material, Gherovici provides a startling, fresh look at Puerto Rican Syndrome as social and cultural phenomenon. She sheds new light on the future of American society and argues that psychoanalysis is not only possible, but much needed in the ghetto.
Author: Lorrin Thomas
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226796108
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
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. At the center of Puerto Rican Citizen are Puerto Ricans’ own formulations about political identity, the responses of activists and ordinary migrants to the failed promises of American citizenship, and their expectations of how the American state should address those failures. Complicating our understanding of the discontents of modern liberalism, of race relations beyond black and white, and of the diverse conceptions of rights and identity in American life, Thomas’s book transforms the way we understand this community’s integral role in shaping our sense of citizenship in twentieth-century America.
Author: Mirelsie Velazquez
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252053206
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 142
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Book Description
The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children's classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago's Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican identities. Education also offered women the only venue to exercise power, and they parlayed their positions to take lead roles in activist and political circles. In time, a politicized Puerto Rican community gave voice to a previously silenced group--and highlighted that colonialism does not end when immigrants live among their colonizers. A perceptive look at big-city community building, Puerto Rican Chicago reveals the links between justice in education and a people's claim to space in their new home.
Author: Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478022094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
In The Lettered Barriada, Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workers burst into Puerto Rico's world of letters and navigated the colonial polity that emerged out of the 1898 US occupation. They did so by asserting themselves as citizens, producers of their own historical narratives, and learned minds. Disregarded by most of Puerto Rico's intellectual elite, these workers engaged in dialogue with international peers and imagined themselves as part of a global community. They also entered the world of politics through the creation of the Socialist Party, which became an electoral force in the first half of the twentieth century. Meléndez-Badillo shows how these workers produced, negotiated, and deployed powerful discourses that eventually shaped Puerto Rico's national mythology. By following these ragtag intellectuals as they became politicians and statesmen, Meléndez-Badillo also demonstrates how they engaged in racial and gender silencing, epistemic violence, and historical erasures in the fringes of society. Ultimately, The Lettered Barriada is about the politics of knowledge production and the tensions between working-class intellectuals and the state. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
Author: Iris Lopez
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813546249
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
Sterilization remains one of the most popular forms of fertility control in the world, but it has received little acknowledgment for decreasing birthrates on account of its dubious use as a means of population control, especially in developing countries. In Matters of Choice, Iris Lopez presents a comprehensive analysis of the dichotomous views that have portrayed sterilization either as part of a coercive program of population control or as a means of voluntary, even liberating, fertility control by individual women. Drawing upon her twenty-five years of research on sterilized Puerto Rican women from five different families in Brooklyn, Lopez untangles the interplay between how women make fertility decisions and their social, economic, cultural, and historical constraints. Weaving together the voices of these women, she covers the history of sterilization and eugenics, societal pressures to have fewer children, a lack of adequate health care, patterns of gender inequality, and misinformation provided by doctors and family members. Lopez makes a stirring case for a model of reproductive freedom, taking readers beyond victim/agent debates to consider a broader definition of reproductive rights within a feminist anthropological context.
Author: Brenda Domínguez-Rosado
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443882097
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
Language and identity have an undeniable link, but what happens when a second language is imposed on a populace? Can a link be broken or transformed? Are the attitudes towards the imposed language influential? Can these attitudes change over time? The mixed-methods results provided by this book are ground-breaking because they document how historical and traditional attitudes are changing towards both American English (AE) and Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) on an island where the population has been subjected to both Spanish and US colonization. There are presently almost four million people living in Puerto Rico, while the Puerto Rican diaspora has surpassed it with more than this living in the United States alone. Because of this, many members of the diaspora no longer speak PRS, yet consider themselves to be Puerto Rican. Traditional stances against people who do not live on the island or speak the predominant language (PRS) yet wish to identify themselves as Puerto Rican have historically led to prejudice and strained relationships between people of Puerto Rican ancestry. The sample study provided here shows that there is not only a change in attitude towards the traditional link between PRS and Puerto Rican identity (leading to the inclusion of diasporic Puerto Ricans), but also a wider acceptance of the English language itself on this Caribbean island.
Author: Samiri H. Hiraldo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813060255
Category : Black people
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"A well-rounded and perceptive analysis of why Puerto Ricans have converted en masse to Protestantism, especially Pentecostalism, as well as how the Catholic hierarchy has grappled with greater religious heterogeneity."--Journal of Latin American Studies "This book presages the new scholarship on religion so badly needed in Puerto Rican studies. ...[E]legantly weaves history, politics, and ecclesiastical endeavors into a narrative that is preeminently about faith."--Centro Journal "Records religious diversity and complexity in a town that is usually observed through racial lenses that render it homogeneous and fixed in the past. ...[C]ontributes to the understanding of the deep interrelation between religion, spirituality, identity, and race in contemporary Puerto Rico and part of its Diaspora."--Journal of the American Academy of Religion Loíza is a Puerto Rican town known for best representing the African traditions. Its mostly black population is affected by profound racial discrimination and poverty. Many Loíza residents strongly identify themselves in religious terms, strategically managing their identities through a spiritual prism that effectively helps them cope with and transform their difficult reality. Based on twelve months of fieldwork, this study shows how believers experience their religion in its various dimensions. Arguing that understanding and respecting the power of religion in this community is essential to addressing and remedying its social problems, Hernández Hiraldo contests the characterization of Puerto Rico as a culturally homogenous country with a monolithic church.
Author: Jorge Duany
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807861472
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Puerto Ricans maintain a vibrant identity that bridges two very different places--the island of Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. Whether they live on the island, in the States, or divide time between the two, most imagine Puerto Rico as a separate nation and view themselves primarily as Puerto Rican. At the same time, Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, and Puerto Rico has been a U.S. commonwealth since 1952. Jorge Duany uses previously untapped primary sources to bring new insights to questions of Puerto Rican identity, nationalism, and migration. Drawing a distinction between political and cultural nationalism, Duany argues that the Puerto Rican "nation" must be understood as a new kind of translocal entity with deep cultural continuities. He documents a strong sharing of culture between island and mainland, with diasporic communities tightly linked to island life by a steady circular migration. Duany explores the Puerto Rican sense of nationhood by looking at cultural representations produced by Puerto Ricans and considering how others--American anthropologists, photographers, and museum curators, for example--have represented the nation. His sources of information include ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interviews, surveys, censuses, newspaper articles, personal documents, and literary texts.
Author: Marisol LeBrón
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520300173
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
In her exciting new book, Marisol LeBrón traces the rise of punitive governance in Puerto Rico over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present. Punitive governance emerged as a way for the Puerto Rican state to manage the deep and ongoing crises stemming from the archipelago’s incorporation into the United States as a colonial territory. A structuring component of everyday life for many Puerto Ricans, police power has reinforced social inequality and worsened conditions of vulnerability in marginalized communities. This book provides powerful examples of how Puerto Ricans negotiate and resist their subjection to increased levels of segregation, criminalization, discrimination, and harm. Policing Life and Death shows how Puerto Ricans are actively rejecting punitive solutions and working toward alternative understandings of safety and a more just future.
Author: Martha Biondi
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520282183
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize in African Diaspora History from the American Historical Association and the Benjamin Hooks National Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work on the American Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy.
