Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Citizen, Student, Soldier
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1968
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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NATIONALITY:
https://new.oberlin.edu/arts-and-sciences/departments/comparative_american/faculty_detail.dot?id=21083 * http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520233683
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
n 2004039285
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n2004039285
HEADING:
PeÌrez, Gina M., 1968-
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__ |a Citizen, student, soldier, ©2015: |b title page (Gina M. PeÌrez) page 4 of cover (Gina M. PeÌrez is a cultural anthropologist and Professor in the Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College (OH))
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PERSONAL
Born October 17, 1968.
EDUCATION:University of Notre Dame, B.A., 1990, M.A., 1996; Northwestern University, Ph.D., 2000.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Academic and cultural anthropologist. City University of New York, Hunter College, New York, NY, Center for Puerto Rican Studies research associate; Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, assistant professor, beginning 2003, then professor of comparative American studies. Has also lectured at Northwestern University.
AWARDS:Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Prize for the Critical Study of North America, Society for the Anthropology of North America, for The Near Northwest Side Story.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Gina M. Pérez is an academic and cultural anthropologist. After completing a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2000, she served as a research associate at Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies. In 2003 she began working as an assistant professor at Oberlin College, eventually becoming a professor of comparative American studies with a focus on Latino cultures.
The Near Northwest Side Story
In 2004 Pérez published The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families. The book looks at five decades of mobility and social change among Latino populations in and around Chicago. Pérez focuses on the way that transnational migration practices relate to economic, political, and social relationships, and the ways in which these communities resist power.
Reviewing the book in the Journal of American Ethnic History, Anne M. Martinez pointed out that “one of the limitations of the study is the narrow segment of the populations represented by the interview subjects in both sites.” Martinez additionally noted that the author “slights the migration experience as well by not including more extensive interviews with the returnees who were charged with disrupting the culture of San Sebastian.” Nevertheless, Martinez concluded that Pérez relays “significant findings on Puerto Ricans in a city more recognized for its Mexican population. Perhaps more importantly,” she does “not simply reproduce tried and true narratives of Puerto Rican migration and settlement. Instead,” Pérez “embrace[s] the uniqueness of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community and explore[s] new and innovative dimensions of the migration experience.”
Beyond El Barrio
With Frank A. Guridy and Adrian Burgos, Jr., Pérez coedited Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America in 2010. The twelve essays that comprise this book look into issues concerning citizenship and belonging; gender and sexuality; and political activism in Latino communities across the United States. Specific essays deal with Latino community building through common culture; cultural ties between recent immigrants and their home cultures; and creating a sense of respectability in society through military participation.
Writing in CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Carlos Sanabria observed that “the essays in this anthology highlight Latino communities across the country, including little studied ones like that in Lorain, Ohio, and the Latino gay population in San Francisco.” Sanabria commented that “the book also counteracts the concept of the barrio as an urban ghetto with all the negative characteristics this implies: social isolation, disorganization, and moral decay. As an alternative, these essays highlight Latino barrios as settings that inspire innovative cultural production, motivate progressive political activism, and foster a positive ethnic identity. In addition, the essays in this collection highlight the contributions of Latino Studies to American Studies and a better understanding of contemporary U.S. society in an increasingly globalized world.” Sanabria concluded that “Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America is an important set of academic articles by skillful scholars that makes innovative use of documentary sources as it explores the paradox of the Latino experience in the United States.”
Citizen, Student, Soldier
In 2015 Pérez published Citizen, Student, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC, and the American Dream. The account looks at Latinos in the United States and their involvement in the military. Pérez uses Latino participation in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Cadet Corps (JROTC) from Fairview High School in South Lorain, Ohio as a case study, showing that Puerto Rican involvement is notably strong as is represented at the macro level among Hispanic populations across the different branches of the U.S. Armed Forces. Pérez examines the makeup of the JROTC and also shares stories on the background and incentive for such a disproportionally large Latino involvement in the military in the United States.
Writing in Centro Voices, Harry Franqui-Rivera called the book both “timely” and “refreshing.” Franqui-Rivera observed that “Pérez identifies other reasons for the students to join the JROTC—chief among them are pride, recognition and prestige in the form of acceptance by the larger community, and a tradition of service. This is a story of empowerment and conscious choices.” Franqui-Rivera later wrote that “Pérez is well-aware of the politics of respectability and worth and of the burden that they place on Latino and Puerto Rican youth. She recognizes the agency of the cadets, their strategies to appropriate and reimagine the tenets of the JROTC, and the program’s positive influence in the cadet’s lives and their communities.” Franqui-Rivera appended: “But Pérez challenges us to find other ways, to think about economic and social policies and ‘educational programs that engender meaningful civic engagement that do not rest solely on the prestige and high regard of the U.S. military…’ and to find ‘more inclusive notions of citizenship and belonging that do not require proving one’s worth and value to the nation’. … This last point is well-taken.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Journal of Sociology, 2005, Sherri Grasmuck, review of The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families, p. 650.
CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, September 22, 2012, Carlos Sanabria, review of Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America, p. 205.
Choice, May 1, 2005, E. Hu-DeHart, review of The Near Northwest Side Story, p. 178.
Journal of American Ethnic History, June 22, 2006, Anne M. Martinez, review of The Near Northwest Side Story, p. 178.
Social Service Review, December 1, 2006, review of The Near Northwest Side Story, p. 763.
ONLINE
Centro Voices, https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/centrovoices/ (February 26, 2016), review of Citizen, Student, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC, and the American Dream.
Duke University Web site, https://www.duke.edu/ (April 23, 2017), author profile.
Oberlin College Web site, https://www.oberlin.edu/ (April 23, 2017), author profile.*
Gina Pérez
Professor of Comparative American Studies (2003)
Contact Information
E-mail:
gina.perez@oberlin.edu
Office:
King Building 141D
(440) 775-8982
Personal Office Hours:
Or by appointment
ObieMAPS:
Gina Perez
Gina Pérez
Gina Pérez
Educational Background
Bachelor of Arts, University of Notre Dame, 1990
Master of Arts, Northwestern University, 1996
Doctor of Philosophy, Northwestern University, 2000
Before coming to Oberlin in 2003 as one of the first comparative American studies faculty, Professor Gina Perez was a research associate at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. She also taught at Northwestern University, where she had her first experience teaching CBL courses through Northwestern's Chicago Field Studies Program. Her expertise is in Latino studies.
In the 2004-05 school year, Professor Perez received a grant from the CSL to teach her Situated Research Practicum, CAS 301, which students take in conjunction with CAS 300, Situated Research. Taken together, CAS 300 and CAS 301 combine classroom-based discussion of methodologies and theory with field research drawn from weekly fieldwork in an internship or placement of the student's choice.
Gina M. Pérez is Assistant Professor of Latina/o Studies in the Comparative American Studies Program at Oberlin College.
In The Near Northwest Side Story, Gina M. Pérez offers an intimate and unvarnished portrait of Puerto Rican life in Chicago and San Sebastian, Puerto Rico—two places connected by a long history of circulating people, ideas, goods, and information. Pérez's masterful blend of history and ethnography explores the multiple and gendered reasons for migration, why people maintain transnational connections with distant communities, and how poor and working-class Puerto Ricans work to build meaningful communities.
Pérez traces the changing ways that Puerto Ricans have experienced poverty, displacement, and discrimination and illustrates how they imagine and build extended families and dense social networks that link San Sebastian to barrios in Chicago. She includes an incisive analysis of the role of the state in shaping migration through such projects as the Chardon Plan, Operation Bootstrap, and the Chicago Experiment. The Near Northwest Side Story provides a unique window on the many strategies people use to resist the negative consequences of globalization, economic development, and gentrification.
"An original and significant contribution to Puerto Rican, Latino, and Latin American studies, drawing on the perspective of ordinary men and women. Gina Pérez's fine work is based on intensive research in two distant but interconnected places, conducted by a perceptive and sensitive observer-participant, herself immersed in two languages, cultures, and nations. Clearly written and cogently argued, her book will be of great interest to students of migration, ethnicity, and gender."—Jorge Duany, author of The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States
"In this fresh, textured, original, multi-sited ethnography, Pérez traces the changing ways that Puerto Ricans have experienced poverty, displacement, and discrimination, and how they imagine and build deeply rooted but transnational lives through the extended families, dense social networks, and meaningful communities. Pérez exposes the limits of citizenship for racialized minorities; the contradictory, constrained agency in community mobilizations and urban uprisings; and the often-failed promise of transnational migration as a place to build a counter-hegemonic political space."—Brett Williams, Professor of Anthropology, American University
"This is a fascinating account of transnational migration as survival strategy, one bound up in kin, region, and economic restructuring."—Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows
Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Prize for the Critical Study of North America, SANA, Society for the Anthropology of North America
GINA M. PÉREZ, Associate Professor of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College, will deliver a public lecture entitled "JROTC, Latina/o Youth, and American Dreams." Prof. Pérez is the author of Citizen, Student, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC, and the American Dream (New York University Press, 2015) and The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families (University of California Press, 2004). She is co-editor of Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America (New York University Press, 2010).
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Print Marked Items
Perez, Gina M.: Citizen, student, soldier: Latina/o youth, JROTC, and the American dream
J.E. Cote
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.10 (June 2016): p1511. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cote, J.E. "Perez, Gina M.: Citizen, student, soldier: Latina/o youth, JROTC, and the American dream." CHOICE:
Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1511. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942848&it=r&asid=836b6b4fc549fca8d0dcb00fbbd19c3e. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942848
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Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America
Dorsia Smith Silva
AZTLAN - A Journal of Chicano Studies.
38.2 (Fall 2013): p271-274. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Silva, Dorsia Smith. "Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America." AZTLAN - A Journal of Chicano
Studies, vol. 38, no. 2, 2013, pp. 271-274. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA345236042&it=r&asid=213b1f7b0e41803397ce80661617f9c7 Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A345236042
.
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Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America
Carlos Sanabria
CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. 24.2 (Fall 2012): p205. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Hunter College, Center for Puerto Rican Studies http://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/centro-journal
Full Text:
Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America
Edited by Gina Perez, Frank A. Guridy, and Adrian Burgos, Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8147-9129-5
296 pages; $24.00 [paper]
Since the mid-1960s, the Latino population in the United States has undergone dramatic changes in its size, diversity, and geographic dispersal. Today, Latinos in the U.S. number over fifty million. This is an increase of over forty-three million since 1960. In addition to over thirty-one million Mexicans and four and a half million Puerto Ricans, this population now includes nearly two million Cubans and about one and a half million Dominicans, as well as four million immigrants from various Central American nations and more than two and a half million from South America. No longer concentrated in major metropolitan centers in the northeast and southwest, Latinos can now be found in significant numbers in all fifty states, in mid-size and small cities and towns, and in numerous rural areas of the country.
The establishment of many university-based Latino Studies Centers and a growing volume of scholarly literature that traces the history and analyzes the social and economic conditions of Latino communities in the United States have accompanied the changes in the Latino population over the course of the last half-century. Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America is a welcome addition to this body of work. The editors evenly divide the twelve essays in the book into three parts that focus on issues of citizenship and belonging, gender and sexuality, and political activism in Latino communities. This is an enlightening and wide-ranging anthology of scholarly papers that are academically rigorous and highly readable. The value of this collection lies in the many topics covered and the eclectic variety of sources the authors employ as a basis for their analysis.
The essays in this anthology highlight Latino communities across the country, including little studied ones like that in Lorain, Ohio, and the Latino gay population in San Francisco. Among the many subjects the book addresses are the efforts of Latinos to create community, especially via the sharing of a common culture, and the attempts of more recent immigrants to maintain close ties to their countries of origin. Efforts to keep alive a historical memory and reconstruct community histories are other important themes taken up in this volume. In addition, community activism and struggles for social and economic justice and political rights are explored, as are the efforts to be accepted on equal terms by U.S. society and to counter a marginalized status. The book emphasizes the importance of recognizing the diversity of the U.S. Latino population in regard to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation.
Overall, this book seeks to take the reader beyond el barrio by offering an alternative vision to the contradictory mainstream images of Latinos in the U.S. as either a threat to American culture and society, or as embodying essential American values relating to hard work, family, and patriotism. Instead, it presents a more nuanced portrayal of Latino
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everyday life in America. This book also counteracts the concept of the barrio as an urban ghetto with all the negative characteristics this implies: social isolation, disorganization, and moral decay. As an alternative, these essays highlight Latino barrios as settings that inspire innovative cultural production, motivate progressive political activism, and foster a positive ethnic identity. In addition, the essays in this collection highlight the contributions of Latino Studies to American Studies and a better understanding of contemporary U.S. society in an increasingly globalized world.
Among the outstanding features of the essays in this collection is the use of a great variety of documentary sources. Radio, television, film, newspaper articles, magazine obituaries, oral history, poetry, the U.S. national anthem, the history of American baseball, ethnographic observation, and children's art are all employed as fundamental sources. The detailed depictions of the daily life of Latinos in the United States and the analysis of the transnational characteristics of Latino barrios in the country are some of the other significant features of the text.
In her contribution, "'Puuurrrooo Mexico,' Listening to Transnationalism on U.S. Spanish-Language Radio," Dolores Ines Casillas focuses on the mostly Mexican listeners of radio station Estereo Sol in Los Angeles and San Francisco. She demonstrates how Spanish-language radio represents an appropriation of public space by an immigrant, working class audience. In the process they share a sense of membership and belonging to communities in both Mexico and the United States. Estereo Sol provides Latino audiences with a transnational link to their home country by way of news and information and music from Mexico. At the same time, the announcers and public service messages encourage listeners to pursue dual-citizenship, register and vote in the United States and avail themselves of local resources to help resolve immediate social and political problems and issues in this country. Dolores Ines Casillas concludes that Spanish-language radio stations in other U.S. cities such as New York and Miami with large Latino populations serve similar purposes.
Deborah Paredez, on the other hand, employs a close reading and analysis of the film Real Women Have Curves and the television program Ugly Betty to argue that the absent mother in contemporary popular portrayals of young Latinas represent anxieties among the Latino establishment and U.S. society at large about the possibility of Latinas' increased economic power. Meanwhile, Adrian Burgos, Jr. and Frank A. Guridy focus on the history of baseball in the United States. They too highlight the anxieties caused by a growing Latino presence. In "Becoming Suspect in Usual Places: Latinos, Baseball, and Belonging in El Barrio del Bronx," they argue that the controversy surrounding the little league Paulino All Stars and the age of their star pitcher Danny Almonte was a xenophobic reaction ignited by the perceived threat posed by the increased presence of a non-white population in the Bronx and the emergence of Latinos as outstanding players in major league baseball.
Xenophobia and the imagined threat of Latinos to U.S. society were also at the center of the vehement negative public reaction to "Nuestro Himno," a Spanish-language rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. Recorded in the spring of 2006, at the time of the largest pro-immigrant protests across the United States in the nation's history, this is the subject of Maria Elena Cepeda's essay as she highlights the tensions rooted in the increasing transnational mobility of people, capital, and labor.
Marginalization and the struggle to belong and create community are themes central to many of the essays in this book. In "Hispanic Values: Gender, Culture, and the Militarization of Latina/o Youth," Gina M. Perez considers how Latino high school students volunteer to participate in the military's Junior Officer Reserve Training Programs in order to gain respectability and social capital. Using ethnographic methods and media analysis, she demonstrates the ways in which Latino values are identified as similar to military cultural values. The author explores the long history of U.S. military recruitment of minorities as a vehicle for social and economic mobility and the ironies this often entails.
In "Hayandose: Zapotec Migrant Expressions of Membership and Belonging," Lourdes Gutierrez Najera also utilizes the techniques of ethnographic observation to analyze how Zapotec Indians, a marginalized people in Mexico, find emotional and financial support in Los Angeles, where ironically they are also marginalized as well as stigmatized as Mexican immigrants. In informal gatherings, tandas (migrant micro-credit associations), celebrations of rites of passage such as baptisms, birthdays, weddings, and funerals, as well as in informal gatherings, visits with friends and family, telephone conversations, and collective viewing of videos, they create a sense of belonging and community that helps them maintain and reproduce their indigenous ethnic identity and counteract feelings of marginality. Lourdes Gutierrez Najera draws on her research among Zapotec immigrants to alert Latino scholars of the need to reconsider
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the increased diversity among Latinos with regard to race, ethnicity, and class.
In "Going Public? Tampa Youth, Racial Schooling, and Public History in the Cuentos de mi Familia Project," John McKiernan-Gonzalez argues that growing diversity poses a challenge to existing histories of Latino communities in Tampa, Florida, where they include not just Cubans, but Nicaraguan, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Guatemalan immigrants. This essay is also of interest because of the oral history techniques and art projects his students employ to produce biographies of their favorite family members. These biographies emphasize not just individuals, but the journeys that brought them to Tampa. Immigration to and often migration within this country are essential features of Latino life in the United States. These experiences figure prominently in many of the family histories that came out of the "Cuentos de mi Familia Project," the basis of this essay.
Latinos are now the largest "minority" population in the United States and an integral part of American society. Businessmen, politicians, and the military target them as workers, consumers, voters, and soldiers. Latinos have a long presence in this country and have played a significant role in its history, yet ironically are marginalized populations that continue to be viewed as outsiders. Beyond El Barrio, Everyday Life in Latina/o America is an important set of academic articles by skillful scholars that makes innovative use of documentary sources as it explores the paradox of the Latino experience in the United States.
Reviewer: Carlos Sanabria, Hostos Community College--The City University of New York Sanabria, Carlos
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sanabria, Carlos. "Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America." CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto
Rican Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 2012, p. 205+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA335973948&it=r&asid=24e5edd856730627d1f3dcd809d2b7c2. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A335973948
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Asian American and Latina/o college students' life stories
Mario Rios Perez and Sharon S. Lee
Journal of American Ethnic History.
27.4 (Summer 2008): p107. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2008 University of Illinois Press http://www.iehs.org/journal.html
Full Text:
Balancing Two Worlds: Asian American College Students Tell Their Life Stories. Edited by Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. xiii + 270 pp. Photos and notes. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Mi Voz, Mi Vida: Latino College Students Tell Their Life Stories. Edited by Andrew Garrod, Robert Kilkenny, and Christina Gomez. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. xiii + 262 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Despite the predominance of a black-white racial framework in the United States, demographic trends point to the reality that Asian Americans and Latinos are two of the fastest growing populations in the country. According to the 2000 census, Asians and Pacific Islanders were 4.2 percent and Latinos were 12.5 percent of the U.S. population. (1) In addition, Asian Americans and Latinos are highly visible in institutions of higher education; in 2000, Asian Americans made up 5.9 percent and Hispanics 8.9 percent of students enrolled in all institutions of higher education. (2) Regardless of this growing presence, stereotypes abound about these two groups, with media images portraying Asian Americans as model minority superachievers and Latinos as undesirable immigrants. These two edited collections provide important contributions to the literature of ethnic studies and education by centering these students' voices to challenge stereotypes and push beyond a black-white racial binary.
For both collections, students enrolled in Andrew Garrod's education course at Dartmouth College were provided with guiding questions related to their relationships, awareness of racial and ethnic identity, parental expectations, academic success, and political activism. The Latino students were also enrolled in a sociology course taught by Christina Gomez. Students were initially free to develop a narrative that evolved through individual meetings with Garrod and later editing by Robert Kilkenny. What emerges are two collections of essays detailing the complex struggles that these students undergo as they seek to make meaning of their lives.
In Balancing Two Worlds, fourteen Asian American students--eight men and six women representing Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Burmese, Pakistani, Indian, and multiracial backgrounds--share their struggles to understand their complex identities amidst external pressures such as stereotypes of being model minorities and foreigners, cultural conflicts with immigrant parents, religious influences, and traditional expectations along lines of gender and sexuality. Focused primarily on the stories of 1.5- and second-generation Asian Americans (who come to the United States at a young age or are bom in the U.S. to immigrant parents), cultural conflicts take center stage. Students detail their struggles with their parents, longings for more affectionate relationships and deeper understandings that are obstructed by cultural chasms. Particularly as the students enter adolescence and seek acceptance from their mainly white peers, these conflicts intensify. The authors also critique their parents' traditional gendered expectations and messages about the proper role of an Asian American woman in marriage and regarding familial obligations. Each student negotiates this struggle differently: there is some level of criticism based in their western Americanized values combined with great sensitivity to their parents' perspective.
Another striking theme is the prevalence of racism and racial stereotypes as authors remember being called "Chink" or hearing anti-Asian jokes told in their presence. These "casual" incidents reveal a widespread pattern of "racial microaggressions"--the types of subtle, racially laden comments such as, "you're not like the rest of them" in reference
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to one's racial group. (3) While not being outright assaults, such comments are derogatory, and students describe their shock and offense when white friends offhandedly make anti-Asian remarks followed by the obligatory explanation of their exceptionalism. Is such a comment a signal of being "accepted" and not seen as the Asian other? The authors struggle with wanting to be white in the face of experiences that remind them that they are not. They are conscious of being stereotyped as model minority math and science geeks and desire to be seen as individuals by avoiding association with large groups of other Asians. Similarly, the theme and challenge of interracial dating also emerges as several authors express great awareness of racial ized notions of masculinity and femininity. Asian American men in particular relate their hesitation in asking a white woman out on a date for fear of an inevitable rejection.
The identity struggles of the students merit special mention. The burden expressed is palpable as the authors seek to negotiate the conflicting messages of their immigrant communities with their American lifestyles. Some writers describe their identity as a process of choosing the best of both worlds (Nguyen), while others describe the pain of "balancing on the hyphen" between Asian and American (Hirashima) and resenting these binaristic choices. In a particularly painful contribution, L. Lee writes, "I wander between the two cultures, my heart wavers then tears in two ..." (p. 111). Still others convey with great insight that they ultimately choose to seek their true selves, questioning and often rejecting binary choices (K. Lee, Rahim, Krishna, Heussner, Luckett, Ng). An especially powerful entry by Gupta describes this process as searching for a sangam, a place where bodies meet, as in the example of Kanya Kumari, a town in South India, where three bodies of water flow together. Gupta writes, "I felt very connected to these sangams. The separate waters are akin to the mishmash of different origins I have felt within myself, never knowing where I fully belong, if I fully belong. Being in Allahbad [India] and Kanya Kumari gave me some comfort with these issues, made me feel that my own distinct parts were as natural as the bodies of water themselves" (p. 127). These sangams represent a process by which the students' seemingly fragmented shards of identity can melt together, expressing the full complexity of identity along the lines of ethnicity, culture, religion, gender, and sexuality. Possibilities for new formations abound.
Similar to the organization of Balancing Two Worlds, Mi Voz, Mi Vida is composed of memoirs that center on the "the evolving lives and Latino identities" of fifteen students who attended Dartmouth College (p. i). The editors' main goal is to help the students "find their voice" through the ruggedness of student experiences in educational institutions. The book is divided into four sections--resilience, biculturalism, mentoring, and identity--each comprised of student stories that best capture each theme. Vexing questions of color, race, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, and religion are addressed by juxtaposing the experiences of students from diverse Latino groups.
Running throughout the memoirs is the opposing tension caused by the promise of social and economic progress with the aspiration to maintain an ethnic identity. Education proves to be more than purely an academic process; it is a transformative experience that alters not only political and social structures but the self as well. Navigating through the academic and social environment at Dartmouth did not call for negligible adaptations but raised critical questions concerning racial, class, gender, and sexual identities. Marissa, a Chicana from Los Angeles, began to identify the "beauty" of her ethnicity while at Dartmouth. "I had never considered anything about my looks 'ethnic' until I came to New England," Marissa asserted. "As more and more people complimented me for my features, I started to feel like those women in the telenovelas" (p. 90). In essence, this quote captures the four main themes proposed by the editors. First is resilience, which demonstrates how students' strength of character enables them to further their education. Second is biculturalism, which fundamentally questions the relation to one's racial identity. Mentoring, the theme that follows, reifies the collective support that students encounter. For some students their mentor was a new friend, a former teacher, or a sibling. These mentors provided invaluable support throughout their educational experience, which eased the tension of maneuvering through a predominantly white and upper-class student body. Marissa reminds us of the last theme, Latino identities, which most of the students discuss. Identifying with one Latino ethnic group was disputed at Dartmouth. Latinos--an umbrella term for all Caribbean and Latin Americans--became problematic when sameness was expected of individuals. While a comparative analysis at the macro level of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans may show that they speak the same language and share similar histories, the fine distinctions become evident only at the micro level.
A particular strength of these collections is their inclusion of diverse Asian American and Latino voices. Just as it may be politically efficient to lump all Latinos and Asians under one umbrella, Garrod, Kilkenny, and Gomez show that the
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locus of understanding the Latino or Asian American community stems not from perceptions of their sameness but from the rich particularities and qualities they embody. Balancing Two Worlds includes sections on the experiences of Asian American groups that are often marginalized: South Asian Americans--and particularly Muslims after September 11, multiracial Asian Americans, and gay Asian American males. And Mi Voz, Mi Vida is nicely interlaced with the experiences of students who originate from various geographic regions and Latino groups. The inclusion of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Hondurans, Cubans, Colombians, and Chicana/os from Texas, Illinois, California, and New York lend distinctive stories to similar obstacles. These works are rich in detail and personal insights.
One fundamental drawback of both books, however, lies in how unrepresentative these stories are. For example, as Vernon Takeshita astutely points out in the afterword to Balancing Two Worlds, readers should consider the youth of the writers. College students are struggling with identity at a particular time in their lives, where labels and politics can take on heightened importance. Takeshita also points out that some Asian American students judge their parents' Asian values uncritically and are limited by their perspectives as American bom. In this way, Asian American stereotypes may be perpetuated, contrasting the "backwards East" with the "progressive and democratic West." As noted above, this collection focuses on second-generation stories, where cultural conflicts are at their most raw.
A bigger limitation is the risk that the books depict these students' experiences as ordinary cases. Clearly, Dartmouth College is part of the eight elite Ivy League colleges that few students of color attend. (4) These students represent a minute fraction of all students across racial lines, much less Latino and Asian American youth in general. Data show that first-year Latino college students are overrepresented in community colleges and are scarcely found in private, elite colleges such as Dartmouth. (5) In addition, while great public attention focuses on Asian American "overrepresentation" at elite private schools, the reality is that in 2000 there were more Asian American students at public two- and four-year institutions than at schools such as Dartmouth. In fact, the greatest growth of Asian American students between 1990 and 2000 occurred in public two-year colleges. (6) Thus, if anything, the stories of Latinos and Asian Americans attending community colleges and public universities are the most common experiences. The stories presented in Balancing Two Worlds and Mi Voz, Mi Vida are more about the extraordinary rather than the norm.
Yet this discrepancy should not lead readers to dismiss readily the memoirs of those students who attend and graduate from elite institutions across the country. The history of race and racism in the United States shows that, until the past few decades, institutions of higher education closely monitored and averted the admission of nonwhite students. For the first half of the twentieth century, Jews and other immigrants groups classified as nonwhite had limited access to the most prestigious universities across the country because they were believed to be threatening white racial norms. (7) Under Jim Crow, Asian Americans, African Americans, and Latinos experienced the complicated results of this racial ideology. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were not allowed to enroll in most higher educational institutions, but those who were admitted were routinely tracked into vocational or regional institutions. (8)
Studies of students at historically white institutions (HWI) such as Dartmouth do reveal certain misunderstood experiences encountered by students of color. High levels of stress, identity struggles and cultural conflict, the complexity of adjusting in a HWI, and the disproportionate dropout rates (for Latino students) are better understood through this nuanced compendium of memoirs. (9) As Ruben Donato's historical study of Colorado shows, Latino students have always attempted to enter postsecondary institutions. (10) Nevertheless, most historians have not succeeded in showing the development and quotidian events of the Latino educational experience. And they have only begun to uncover the pre-1965 history and experiences of Asian and Asian American students in higher education. (11) Many factors contribute to these oversights, such as the lack of historical sources, the dearth of research in Latino and Asian American educational history, and the scarcity of historians who focus in these areas.
Another drawback of the collections is that historians might find these two books frustrating as they lack any historical contextualization or narrative, which traditionally bind essays together. What is the history of college admissions? Why Dartmouth College? And how have the educational experiences of Latino and Asian American youth changed over time? Other scholars have written books on similar subjects. The books Nuestra Voz: Memories of Our Education, edited by Roberto Calderon, and Asian American X, edited by Arar Han and John Hsu, are constructed in a similar fashion and also lack a historical trajectory. (12) Thus, as in any collection of personal essays, the main value here rests in the richness of the primary sources--the students' voices themselves. Yet without a stronger historical
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context, these books would not benefit a reader who is new to understanding Asian American and Latino issues. Paired with more standard readers in Asian American and Latino studies, the volumes might add depth and complexity. (13)
Perhaps it is unfair to saddle these stories with the burden of representing all Asian American and Latino students' experiences to avoid perpetuating stereotypes. At the same time, the diversity, complexity, and richness described help to neutralize this risk. Garrod and Kilkenny write in the preface to Balancing Two Worlds, "It is our hope that readers of this anthology will be engaged by the particularity and detail of these stories, while at the same time connecting with the individual human experiences" (p. x). What ultimately makes these anthologies compelling is not the fact that they attempt to tell a story about the ordinary, but that they show how Latino and Asian American students deal with the extraordinary and succeed at the most critical moments of their lives.
NOTES
(1.) The Asian Pacific Islander figure includes those who reported Asian or Pacific Islander as race alone or race in combination with one or more races. Profiles of General Demographic characteristics, 2000 Census of population and housing, U.S. Department of Commerce, May 2001, 3, http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2000/dpl/2kh00.pdf.
(2.) William B. Harvey and Eugene L. Anderson, Minorities in Higher Education: Twenty-first Annual Status Report: 2003-2004 (Washington, DC, 2005), 55.
(3.) Daniel Solorzano, "Critical Race Theory, Race and Gender Microaggressions, and the Experience of Chicana and Chicano Scholars," International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 11, no. 1 (1998): 121-36.
(4.) Richard Fry, Latinos in Higher Education: Many Enroll, Too Few Graduate (Washington, DC, 2002).
(5.) Steven R. Aragon and Mario Rios Perez, "Increasing Retention and Success of Students of Color at Research- Extensive Universities," New Directions for Student Services 114 (2006): 81-91.
(6.) Robert T. Teranishi, "Asian Americans and Higher Education Policy: A Critical Race Perspective" (paper presented at the Association for the Study of Higher Education Conference, Anaheim, CA, November 2006).
(7.) Marcia Graham Synnott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900-1970 (Westport, CT, 1979).
(8.) David J. Leon, "Manuel M. Corella: The Broken Trajectory of the First Latino Student and Teacher at the University of California, 1869-1874,'" Aztlan 26, no. 1 (2001): 171-79; Victoria Maria MacDonald and Teresa Garcia, "Historical Perspectives on Latino Access to Higher Education, 1848-1990," in The Majority in the Minority: Expanding the Representation of Latina/o Faculty, Administrators, and Students in Higher Education, ed. Jeanett Castellanos and Lee Jones (Sterling, VA, 2003); Gerald McKevitt, "Hispanic California and Catholic Higher Education: The Diary of Jesus Maria Estudillo, 1857-1864," California History 96, no. 4 (1990-91): 320-31.
(9.) Tara J. Yosso and Daniel G. Solorzano, "Leaks in the Chicana and Chicano Educational Pipeline," in Latino Policy and Issues Brief No. 13 (Los Angeles, 2006).
(10.) Beginning in the 1920s Adams State College, a small liberal arts school in Colorado, was sympathetic to the needs of Mexican and Hispano students. At one point, Latino students comprised 25 percent of the undergraduate student population. See Ruben Donato, Mexicanos and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities, 1920-1960 (Albany, NY, 2007). For a similar study on Arizona, see Laura K. Munoz, "Desert Dreams: Mexican American Education in Arizona, 1870-1930" (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2006).
(11.) Allan W. Austin, From Concentration Camp to Campus: Japanese American Students and World War II (Urbana, IL, 2004); Gary Okihiro, Storied Lives: Japanese American Students and World War II (Seattle, WA, 1999). See also Barbara M. Posadas and Roland L. Guyotte, "Unintentional Immigrants: Chicago's Filipino Foreign Students Become Settlers, 1900-1941," Journal of American Ethnic History 9, no. 2 (1990): 26-48.
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(12.) Roberto R. Calderon, Nuestra Voz: Memories of Our Education (Riverside, CA, 1999); Arar Flan and John Hsu, eds., Asian American X: An Intersection of 21st Century Asian American Voices (Ann Arbor, MI, 2004).
(13.) For example, Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A Histoiy of Asian Americans (Boston, 1998). See also the various articles included in the special issue of New Directions for Student Services (Jossey-Bass, 2002, no. 97), titled "Working with Asian American College Students" and edited by Marylu K. McEwan, Corinne Maekawa Kodama, Alvin N. Alvarez, Sunny Lee, and Christopher T. H. Liang. Also see Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood, Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinajy Reader (New York, 2000). On Latinos, see Juan Gomez-Quinones, Roots of Chicano Politics, 1600-1940 (Albuquerque, NM, 1994); Gina M. Perez, The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families (Berkeley, CA, 2004); and Virginia Sanchez Korrol, From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City (Berkeley, CA, 1994).
Mario Rios Perez
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Sharon S. Lee
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Mario Rios Perez holds a BA degree from UCLA and an MA degree from the University of Redlands. He is completing a PhD degree in educational policy studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he specializes in the history of race and urban schools and the history of higher education.
Sharon S. Lee (MA, History, University of Wisconsin at Madison) is a PhD student in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include Asian Americans in higher education, higher education policy analysis, issues of access and diversity, the history of education, and campus climate.
Perez, Mario Rios^Lee, Sharon S.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Perez, Mario Rios, and Sharon S. Lee. "Asian American and Latina/o college students' life stories." Journal of
American Ethnic History, vol. 27, no. 4, 2008, p. 107+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA413170636&it=r&asid=fdf8696b09ae7e70f3c8ff339f7fcc58. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A413170636
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The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families
Social Service Review.
80.4 (Dec. 2006): p763. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families." Social Service Review, vol.
80, no. 4, 2006, p. 763. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA157623957&it=r&asid=592679c7f8197041df38a994b515e8c1 Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A157623957
.
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The Experience of Return Migration: Caribbean Perspectives
Bonham C. Richardson
Journal of Latin American Geography.
6.1 (Spring 2007): p205. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2007 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press) http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/journals/jlag.html
Full Text:
The Experience of Return Migration: Caribbean Perspectives. Robert B. Potter, Dennis Conway, and Joan Phillips (eds.). Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2005. xii and 293 pp., tables, bibliographies, and index. $99.95 cloth (ISBN 0-7546-4329-8).
This collection of articles originated from a paper session dealing with return migration to the Caribbean at the meetings of the Association of American Geographers in New Orleans in 2003. After the meeting, the organizers decided that they had sufficient material to form the core of a book, then they augmented the papers from the conference with other unpublished articles by inviting "a further group of active scholars ... to report on their research in the field" (p. xi.)
The publisher's website provides the principal rationale for this collection's appearance: "There has been very little work published on return migration that focuses on the Caribbean." The editors elaborate the point, citing "the relative lack of research, until recently, on the multi-faceted processes of return migration and on the selectivity and diversity of return migrants, their changing character, their experiences, and societal interactions," and they quote a colleague who proclaims that "return migration is the great unwritten chapter in the history of migration" (p. 2.) Yet it is simply not convincing to assert that the topic of Caribbean return migration is somehow novel or new or neglected. Among the innumerable articles, books, reports, theses, seminar papers, conference proceedings, and the like dealing with Caribbean migration, many discuss--in great detail--issues of return migration.
The book's fourteen essays deal with subject matter from St. Lucia, Barbados, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, the French Caribbean, Jamaica, and Canada, with general essays also touching on Caribbean migrants' circumstances in the United States and Britain. With some exceptions, the book's subject matter is heavily weighted toward the English-speaking Caribbean A typical observation when reviewing such a collection--that the volume in its entirety suffers from unevenness--is perhaps less appropriate here than it usually is because two of the editors (Conway and Potter) are the authors or coauthors of seven of the collection's fourteen entries.
The Experience of Return Migration needs better organization and some consolidation, and one wonders if the publisher ever arranged for copyediting. There is little in the way of an introductory discussion to tell how the articles supposedly hang together. Every chapter has its own list of references, so that citations of the best known articles on Caribbean return migration (by Mary Chamberlain, George Gmelch, Elizabeth Thomas-Hope, and others) appear over and over again; certainly a single consolidated bibliography would have streamlined the volume. Nor are typos, misspellings, and grammatical mistakes uncommon. On pages 11-12, in the introductory essay by the three editors, a two paragraph discussion about remittances sent home by migrants abroad (beginning "Thus, it has been claimed ...") is repeated--with a very few word and phrase insertions--in Potter's article about St. Lucia and Barbados on pages 28- 29 ("Thus, it has been argued ..."). It is the kind of cut-and-paste padding that calls for threatening red ink commentary in the margins of undergraduate term papers.
Despite its flaws, the collection contains several worthwhile articles, notably about young and middle-aged returnees to the Caribbean. The book's best essays provide vivid first-hand information derived from personal interviews that are summarized in lengthy quotations or vignettes. Marina Lee-Cunin relates the experiences of five young Trinidadians
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who have reentered their "home" society after lengthy sojourns in the United Kingdom; among other observations, she is struck by their rediscoveries of an insular racism in Trinidad that was not nearly so evident abroad. Gina M. Perez discusses the tribulations, especially for young women returning from the United States, in an agricultural town in northwestern Puerto Rico; her well written essay focuses on individual adaptations that returnees make to satisfy older skeptics who have stayed behind and who consider younger people "scapegoats for larger political-economic problems" (p. 199.) Stephanie Condon describes the circulation of French West Indians between the Caribbean and metropolitan France, telling, among other things, how remittances often pave the way for eventual retirement in the islands (pp. 232-233), behavior common among those traveling from poor to rich parts of the world and then back again.
A major contribution of the volume is its discussion of "transnationalism." This conceptual term has been employed increasingly by scholars of human migration in the past decade in attempting to understand better the multi-polar, fluid, international spaces in which migrants and their families, from the Caribbean and elsewhere, carry out their lives. At its worst, "transnationalism" is little more than a buzzword, yet the term sharpens discourse and helps to channel and intensify thinking about what human migration means. In the volume's penultimate essay ("Transnationalism and Return: 'Home' as an Enduring Fixture and 'Anchor"'), Dennis Conway suggests that scholars of transnationalism usually have overemphasized links with the developed world: "Privileging metropolitan notions is one problem in this abstraction ... (D)iminishing ... the migrant's source community ... is another oversight. In short, the accumulated stocks of home-land attachments, obligations, social nets, and individual identities are assumed away" (p. 266.) Conway continues further on: "(A)s life takes its twists and turns, and migrants move to and fro, it can still be claimed that a 'home' is an enduring territorial fixture, one that provides mobile people with a sense of place, a sense of belonging somewhere ..." (p. 274.)
Conway makes a seemingly obvious yet exceptionally important point. At the time of the writing of this review, headlines abound in the United States as to how we will secure, defend, and make impenetrable our border with Mexico (and by extension the countries farther south.) Amidst fulminations touting fence construction and the formation of paramilitary defense units, there is a quieter yet persistent emphasis of the point from many quarters that a considerable percentage of "illegals" want to work in the United States yet wish eventually to return to their homes and families in Sinaloa, Oaxaca, of further south. The chance that Conway's essay could be discussed in a border issues hearing of the US Senate is slim indeed, yet politicians and policy makers could do considerably worse.
Bonham C. Richardson Tucson, Arizona Richardson, Bonham C.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Richardson, Bonham C. "The Experience of Return Migration: Caribbean Perspectives." Journal of Latin American
Geography, vol. 6, no. 1, 2007, p. 205+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA161845864&it=r&asid=b24ec8978c6143dc85b5d9fcbc673e0a Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A161845864
.
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Alla Afuera: nation and migration in Puerto Rican Chicago
Anne M. Martinez
Journal of American Ethnic History.
25.4 (Summer 2006): p178. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Illinois Press http://www.iehs.org/journal.html
Full Text:
The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families. By Gina M. Perez. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xiv + 276 pp. Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).
National Performances: The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago. By Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xiv + 289 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 (cloth); $21.00 (paper).
In the past decade, Chicana/o and Puerto Rican Studies scholars have recognized Chicago's importance for understanding these communities as a site where significant numbers of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans come together in complex and often perplexing ways. Only a handful of in-depth studies of Mexicans or Puerto Ricans in Chicago existed before 1990. These monographs by Gina Perez and Ana Ramos-Zayas contribute to a burgeoning collection of works that significantly shift our thinking about race and migration in urban areas on the eve of the twenty-first century.
Gina Perez's multi-sited ethnography of Humboldt Park, Chicago, and San Sebastian, Puerto Rico, chronicles the relationship between the two communities and the people who inhabit them. Perez conducted ethnographic research in both locations in the late 1990s and outlines the relations within and between the two communities through interviews and observations of local social, cultural, and political spaces. The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families charts half a century of movement and change in these closely related spaces. Perez considers how "transnational practices and imaginings" affect both communities socially, economically, and politically to emphasize how residents, especially women, respond to, accommodate, and resist power (p. 7).
Perez is deliberate in marking the distinction between transnationalism and globalization. Transnationalism, as she employs it, embodies those actions, ideas, and identities that have clear links to two or more nation-states. Globalization, in contrast, refers to those events that take place in global space that is not limited to a specific nation- state. As she notes, this "transnational perspective keeps in focus immigrants' border-spanning activities" and households (p. 13).
One of Perez's central concerns is how Puerto Ricans have been represented in the literature on migration and poverty. She counteracts static notions of immigration and settlement by focusing on stories of circular migration by numerous families, citing the social and cultural reasons people returned to Puerto Rico and back to Chicago. Perez illuminates the ways in which migration in both directions was a strategy to cope not only with economic concerns but social and cultural issues as well. She finds that these migration decisions often were made by women for their families.
One of the limitations of the study is the narrow segment of the populations represented by the interview subjects in both sites. In Humboldt Park, most of the informants were Perez's students in general equivalence degree (GED) classes. While she chose this setting to emphasize Puerto Ricans working to advance their education, skills, and options, this was far from a representative sample of young adult Puerto Ricans in Chicago.
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In San Sebastian, Perez focused on an older generation who perceived return migrants as a threat to the culture and stability of the community. As she notes, most of these subjects seemed to forget their own family's journeys to and from the mainland. Perez slights the migration experience as well by not including more extensive interviews with the returnees who were charged with disrupting the culture of San Sebastian.
Ana Ramos-Zayas examines expressions of nationalism in Humboldt Park in National Performances: The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago. Ramos-Zayas highlights two public expressions of Puerto Rican nationalist pride in Chicago: the placement of a statue of Pedro Albizu Campos and the erection of giant steel Puerto Rican flags marking the Puerto Rican presence in Humboldt Park. As Ramos-Zayas demonstrates, these representations of national identity were not just the domain of the intellectual elite. She finds that these obvious markers of Puerto Rican identity and pride also served as catalysts for discussions of class, race, gender, migration, and space within the community at large.
The nationalism demonstrated by Puerto Ricans in Chicago incorporated a citizenship identity that was used to distinguish Puerto Ricans from other Latinos in Chicago. At the same time, Puerto Ricans defined themselves against African Americans while also embracing Albizu Campos as a black compatriot. In addition, middle-class Puerto Ricans were defined as outsiders.
The term "Latino" is used to suggest social and racial mobility especially in the latter chapters. Ramos-Zayas needs to unpack this further because it is unclear the extent to which this term is hers or her informants'. In a city where large numbers of other Latinos reside, understanding the author's use of this terminology is critical.
Puerto Rican national identity is complicated by its position as a commonwealth and the racial and class implications inherent in that status. Ramos-Zayas's study is so important for this very reason. The complexity of national identity and national performances increases significantly when Puerto Ricans are transported to another space. It is even more striking to examine Puerto Rican national space outside New York City, the presumed "center" for Puerto Rican migration.
These two ethnographies are major contributions to the body of work on Latino Chicago and migration history more broadly. Other historians likely will share my frustration with the scant documentation provided by either author. I was constantly seeking sources and evidence for statements made by Ramos-Zayas in particular. Each book would also benefit from a broader view of migration and immigration to Chicago. Perez does not mention, for example, that many Polish immigrants on the Near Northwest Side were recent arrivals too. Though Poles were clearly outsiders from the Puerto Rican perspective, they experienced the same kinds of displacement and gentrification. Ramos-Zayas documents Puerto Ricans' use of their citizenship status to separate themselves from Mexicans in Chicago but does not acknowledge the long-term Mexican presence in the city which included generations of the native born.
Chicago is not necessarily appreciated for its late twentieth-century migration narratives. These books begin to demonstrate the continued existence and complexity of Chicago's thriving ethnic communities. Perez and Ramos- Zayas both provide significant findings on Puerto Ricans in a city more recognized for its Mexican population. Perhaps more importantly, these authors do not simply reproduce tried and true narratives of Puerto Rican migration and settlement. Instead, they embrace the uniqueness of Chicago's Puerto Rican community and explore new and innovative dimensions of the migration experience: the trials and tribulations of a transnational community and its powerful, if contradictory, nationalist performances.
Anne M. Martinez University of Texas at Austin NOTE
(1.) "Alla Afuera," literally "out there," is commonly used in Puerto Rico to refer to the mainland. My thanks to students in my graduate seminar for sharing their perspectives on these two books: Leah Dean, Santiago Guerra, Cheasty Miller, Tessa Nichols, Kendall Zanowiak, and especially Olga Herrera for guiding the discussion of them.
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Martinez, Anne M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Martinez, Anne M. "Alla Afuera: nation and migration in Puerto Rican Chicago." Journal of American Ethnic History,
vol. 25, no. 4, 2006, p. 178+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA406164949&it=r&asid=d5562e6989859026af41b1188e7380b4. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A406164949
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Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, Puerto Rican Families
Sherri Grasmuck
The American Journal of Sociology.
111.2 (Sept. 2005): p650. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Grasmuck, Sherri. "Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, Puerto Rican Families." The American
Journal of Sociology, vol. 111, no. 2, 2005, p. 650+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA140059809&it=r&asid=fbaab51e8ee9174e7505b12a5b5bfaa8. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A140059809
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.
The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families
E. Hu-DeHart
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 42.9 (May 2005): p1675. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hu-DeHart, E. "The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families." CHOICE:
Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, May 2005, p. 1675. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA132707951&it=r&asid=0f1d25f647b0988d2e8a7561ee98a120 Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A132707951
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Student Soldiers: Puerto Rican Youth in High School Military Programs
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Harry Franqui-Rivera
Last year (2015), I attended the American Historical Association Convention in New York City. Their welcoming package included a report on “The Role of Military History in the Contemporary Academy” (Biddle and Citino 2015). The report stated what has been painfully obvious for those of us who study the military in any of its many forms. “The phrase military history still stirs conflicted emotions or hostile reactions among those who teach history in the nation’s colleges and universities”(2015: 2). Studying military and paramilitary institutions has become an academic taboo, career suicide.
Academia’s aversion to studies on military matters only helps to further obscure our understanding of the impact of the military on civilian society (and vice versa), why people join, what they seek to gain from it, how colonial subjects and the subaltern are transformed by military service, and how they change the military itself, to name just a few topics. A plethora of themes thus is left understudied, from paths to middle class status and full citizenship to the reshaping of the American Dream as I have argued elsewhere (Franqui-Rivera 2014).
Academia’s attitude towards military matters sharply differs from that of the political establishment, mainstream media, and the general public. In short, after the first Gulf War, a hero cult started to replace the post-Vietnam War distrust of the military. The 9-11 attacks consolidated the image of the soldier as a hero. This is especially relevant for traditionally underrepresented populations such as African Americans, Puerto Ricans and Latino.
With the exception of Puerto Ricans, Latinos have been traditionally underrepresented in the military. This situation is rapidly changing as Puerto Ricans have kept their exceptionally and historically high enrollment rate in the military while Latinos in general are enrolling in greater numbers. Hence, a question that scholars and policy makers should contemplate is: what does military service or/and experience mean for a population which has been marginalized and demonized to the point that a leading Republican presidential hopeful openly bashes them?
It is for all these reasons that Gina Pérez’s Citizen, Students, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC, and the American Dream is a refreshing, timely and a badly needed contribution to our understanding of military and paramilitary institutions and their impact on Latino, and in particular, on Puerto Rican communities.
Pérez, a cultural anthropologist, studies the JROTC’s (Junior Reserve Officer Training Cadet Corps) cadets of the Fairview High School in South Lorain, Ohio. Latinos make a full quarter of Lorain’s population. Numbering 13,000, Puerto Ricans are by far the largest Latino subgroup representing 20 percent of the city’s total population and over 80 percent of the Latino population (p. 53). The majority of the Fairview High students who belonged to the elite JROTC Honor and Color Guard are young Latinas primarily from Puerto Rican families” (p. 6). Not only do Latinas outnumber males but they also hold the highest leadership roles in the program as exemplified by the case of Cadet Major Alana Ramos.
The socio-economic condition of the Puerto Rican community in Lorain is partly responsible for the high enrollment of Latina/os and Puerto Ricans in the JROTC. The 1970’s de-industrialization of the city led to unemployment rates of 16.2 percent compared to “7.3 in Ohio and 9.5 nationally” in the period 2008-2012 (p. 54). Roughly 22 percent of Puerto Ricans in Lorain live in poverty. Only 56 percent has attained a high school degree or higher while the population at large is 74 percent (pp. 54–5).
However, Pérez identifies other reasons for the students to join the JROTC—chief among them are pride, recognition and prestige in the form of acceptance by the larger community, and a tradition of service. This is a story of empowerment and conscious choices. The cadets have a plan which not necessarily involves joining the military after finishing high school. The female cadets in particular have plans to attend college instead of joining the military though some of them would consider the military if that was their only way to pay for college. Several male cadets, on the other hand, although proud of belonging to the JROTC, would not continue in the military beyond high school because they have witnessed the strain that multiple deployments placed on their relatives serving in the military (pp. 48–52).
In this community, Major Wise and First Sergeant Milano, the military personnel running the JROTC program, fulfill several academic and community roles. Wise and Milano’s tasks range from putting a good word for a student to get a job as a hostess at a new Red Lobster, to providing advice on college options, and writing recommendation letters for the cadets’ college applications. The cadets state that in many instances the only resource they have is the JROTC program. The JROTC program is thus a “source of support, advice, insight, and connections that students and parents appreciate deeply” (p. 51).
The program also helps the students to remain in school by teaching them leadership and self-discipline. These skills allow them to remain in school while jogging multiple jobs which in many cases they obtained because of their involvement with the JROTC. “Participating in the program, therefore, not only provides one way to meet immediate and long-term financial needs [extra income for school materials, clothes, saving and planning for college] but also gives students the added benefits of social prestige, dignity, and respect they also value” (p. 56).
Prestige and acceptance comes in many forms for the cadets. Principal Ramona Sánchez and other school officials believe that the cadets are exceptional and that is due to the program’s emphasis in character building, extracurricular activities, leadership development, community service, and high levels of parental involvement (p. 4). Pérez explains that the students have “aligned themselves with one of the most revered and trusted institutions in American public life and are the beneficiaries of the positive association and respect that accompany such affiliation” (p. 7). The positive reinforcement and assessment that the cadets receive is dramatically different from the “negative portrayal of today’s youth- and in particular youth of color- who are often characterized as lazy, undisciplined, and prone to criminal activities” (pp. 3–4)
The JORTC proudly boasts that it creates “better citizens”. Hence Pérez asks the question: “What kind of citizens are the JROTC students invited to become? And what exactly does citizenship means? How do working-class youth, and in particular young Latina/os and their families, define citizenship? And why does the language of citizenship resonate with them so powerfully?” Pérez tries to answer these questions within a framework of political and economic shifts while gauging the “ideological, social, and cultural conditions in which ideas about citizenship, obligation, and social opportunity are discussed and vigorously debated” (p. 5).
The type of citizenship that Pérez examines has little to do with legal matters. It focuses on perceptions, acceptance, and social standing. “Citizenship, is therefore, an opportunity for students to challenge the ways they and their families are regarded as being deficient, and to embody, instead, a vision of citizenship bound with reverence for the military, a commitment to service, and disciplinary practices that focus on personal and community betterment” (p. 23). The type of citizenship that the cadets seek, and perhaps obtain, in the JROTC is one that allows them to claim belonging in the United States.
Pérez reading of the JROTC contrasts with Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas findings in Street Therapists: Race, Affect, and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark (2012). In Ramos-Zayas’ study community members and recruiters actively try to persuade disconnected Puerto Rican youth in Newark (perceived by other Latin American residents as “delinquents” or “deviant”) to join the Army as way of strengthening them out and improving their worth (2012: 77–81). While in Pérez’s study the school administrators and the JROTC officers seem to value positive reinforcement and the academic development of the cadets, in Ramos-Zayas’ the recruiters and community members’ approach seems to rely on shaming and in portraying the military as maker of worthy men and women.
Traditionally, military service has been a hallmark of citizenship as citizenship has been a hallmark of political democracy- a way of improving a group’s social standing and the meaning of their citizenship (Burk 1995). The JORTC has over half a million students participating in its programs nationwide. That the JROTC seems to do better among underprivileged communities has prompted criticism accusing the program of being a recruiting tool for the military.
The active recruitment of minorities into the military, however, is a relatively new phenomenon which can be traced to the Vietnam War, precisely at the moment when avoiding military service started to lose its stigma. However, those who could avoid service without losing their social status and ranking belonged to established socio-economic and political groups such as Euro-Americans. The same courtesy was not extended to African-Americans and Puerto Ricans who to this day are still required to prove their worth, patriotism, belonging, and deservedness of citizenship by serving in the military.
Pérez is well-aware of the politics of respectability and worth and of the burden that they place on Latino and Puerto Rican youth. She recognizes the agency of the cadets, their strategies to appropriate and reimagine the tenets of the JROTC, and the program’s positive influence in the cadet’s lives and their communities. But, Pérez challenges us to find other ways, to think about economic and social policies and “educational programs that engender meaningful civic engagement that do not rest solely on the prestige and high regard of the U.S. military...” and to find “more inclusive notions of citizenship and belonging that do not require proving one’s worth and value to the nation” (p. 211).
This last point is well-taken. Different waves of immigrants and ethnic “others” have gained acceptance into the nation via military service. Latinos in general, and Puerto Ricans in particular, have been proving their worth and value for the nation by serving in the military for two centuries. It is about time that their service is recognized and the burden of proving their worth and belonging removed.
The book:
Citizen, Students, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC, and the American Dream
By Gina M. Pérez
New York: New York University Press, 2015.
ISBN: 978-1-4798-0780-2
272 pages; $28.00 [paper]
To purchase the book from the publisher click here.