Gilberto Gerena Valentín is one of the key figures in the development of New York’s Puerto Rican community between the 1940s and the 1970s. Gerena Valentín actively worked on the foundation and development of the main post-war Puerto Rican organizations, including the Congreso de los Pueblos, the National Puerto Rican Day Parade, the National Association of Puerto Rican Civil Rights, the Fiesta Folklórica Puertorriqueña, and the Puerto Rican Community Development Program. During this period, he was also the Director of the City Commission on Human Rights and New York City Councilman. Gerena Valentín was a pioneer in creating coalitions with the top civil African-American civil rights organizations, playing a key role in mobilizing Puerto Ricans in the famous 1963 and 1968 marches in Washington, D.C., and in the 1964 New York City School Boycott, the largest in the history of the United States. In his memoirs, Gilberto Gerena Valentín takes us to the core of the ongoing union, political, social and cultural struggles set forth by Puerto Ricans between the years following the Great Migration and the 1970s.

Soy Gilberto Gerena Valentin: memorias de un puertorriqueno en Nueva York (Spanish Edition)

Biographies & Memoirs

Gerena Valentin, Gilberto

Memoirs

Centro Press

The AmeRican Poet: Essays on the Work of Tato Laviera is a collection of thirteen essays, an introduction and a foreword by fifteen established and emerging scholars. Known as a Nuyorican poet, Laviera is more appropriately celebrated as an AmeRican writer of national and international prominence. As a whole, the essays discuss diverse aspects of Laviera’s life and substantial body of work that includes five published collections of poetry, twelve written and staged plays, and many years of political, social, literary and healthcare activism. They focus on Laviera’s use of language; relationship to writers from the island (Luis Pales Matos, Jose Luis Gonzalez, and Luis Munoz Marin) and mainland (Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman); his concern for mestizaje; Afro-Latinoness; music, sound and rhythm; utopian spaces; code switching; Civil Rights and feminist movements; Mexican migrant students and homeless people, among others. Uniquely, the anthology features a testimonio composed of interviews in which the author speaks in English, Spanish and Spanglish, four unpublished poems, and the play King of Cans. This collection confirms Tato Laviera’s much deserved reputation as a major poet in any language.

The AmeRican Poet: Essays on the Work of Tato Laviera

Literature & Fiction

Puerto Rican Studies, Center

History & Criticism

The State of Puerto Ricans, 2013 collects in a single report the most current data on social, economic, and civic conditions of the Puerto Rican population in the United States available from governmental sources, mostly from the U.S. Census Bureau. The report presents a picture of endurance and resiliency in the midst of declining opportunity.

The State of Puerto Ricans 2013

Politics & Social Sciences

Vargas-Ramos, Carlos

Social Sciences

Gilberto Gerena Valentín is a key figure in the development of the Puerto Rican community in the United States, especially from the forties through the seventies. He was a union organizer, community leader, political activist and general in the war for the civil rights recognition of his community. In his memoirs, Gilberto Gerena Valentín takes us into the center of the fierce labor, political, civil rights, social and cultural struggles waged by Puerto Ricans in New York from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Gilberto Gerena Valentin: My Life as a Community Activist, Labor Organizer an Progressive Politician in New York City

Leaders & Notable People

The Stories I Read to the Children documents, for the very first time, Pura Belpré’s contributions to North American, Caribbean and Latin American literary and library history. Thoroughly researched but clearly written, this study is scholarship that is also accessible to general readers, students and teachers. Pura Belpré (1899-1982) is one of the most important public intellectuals in the history of the Puerto Rican diaspora. A children’s librarian, author, folklorist, translator, storyteller and puppeteer who began her career during the Harlem Renaissance and the formative decades of the New York Public Library, Belpré is also the earliest known Afro-Caribeña contributor to American literature. In The Stories I Read to the Children, Lisa Sánchez González has collected, edited, and annotated over 40 of Belpré’s stories and essays, most of which have never been published. Her introduction to the volume is the most an extensive study to date of Belpré’s life and writing.

The Stories I Read to the Children: The Life and Writing of Pura Belpré, the Legendary Storyteller, Children's Author and NY Public Librarian

Sánchez González, Lisa

Race, Front and Center: Perspectives on Race among Puerto Ricans is a collection of essays that captures in a single volume the breath of research on the subject of race among Puerto Ricans, both in Puerto Rico, in the United States and in the migration between the two countries. It addresses the intellectual, aesthetic and historial trajectories that have served to inform the creation of a national identity among Puerto Ricans and how race as a social identity fits into the process of national identity-building. It also engages the process of racialization of Puerto Ricans in the United States highlighting how their race has mediated Puerto Ricans; process of incorporation in that society, how different generations of Puerto Ricans have understood their identity in the U.S. society, and how return migrants to Puerto Rico have adapted or re-adapted to island-based understandings of racial and national identities.

Race, Front and Center: Perspectives on Race among Puerto Ricans

Sociology

History of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia from 1910-1945

Before the Wave: Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, 1910-1945

History

Hernández, Victor Vásquez

Americas

Photographs of bodegas in New York City neighborhoods, as chronicled by photographer Justo Martí.

The Bodega: A Cornerstone of Puerto Rican Barrios: (The Justo Marti Collection)

Arts & Photography

Sanabria, Carlos

Photography & Video

This book is a recollection and analysis of ethnic identity in Puerto Rican politics in New York City between 1960 and 1990. The book argues that Puerto Rican politics at the community level was a politics of identity rooted in liberal democratic values. Puerto Ricans provided an example, from the ground up, that transcended the alleged incompatibility between liberalism and identity politics. This relationship was not free of problems but it was workable, contrary to what other scholars have claimed. The book deploys its evidence in the form of a historical collage to suggest that through strategic and demand-protest activities Puerto Ricans articulated and promoted a liberal form of identity politics in which ethnic identity and the idea of group rights provided a platform for the production of both individual and collective goods. The book illustrates how Puerto Ricans in New York City sought participation, recognition, redress of grievances, and inclusion along liberal democratic lines. In other words, their community politics blended liberalism and group rights, in-group identity and out-group commonality, not naturally but empirically, emphasizing the affirmation of difference and a commitment to legitimate institutional norms and values. Thus, the Puerto Rican record of community organization and collective action is a kernel of identity politics cum cultural citizenship within the shell of liberal democratic politics. In this account, the Puerto Rican addition of an identity component to social liberalism stands as a reminder of the ways in which identity politics can be a sustaining force for liberal democratic values.

Liberalism and Identity Politics: Puerto Rican Community Organizations and Collective Action in New York City

Cruz, José E

Politics & Government

The story of New York salsa—an up-tempo performance of percussive Latin music and Afro-Caribbean-infused dance—is one of cultural fusion, artistry, and skilled marketing. A multi-disciplinary collective of scholars illuminate how immigrant and migrant communities in New York City—most notably from Puerto Rico—nurtured and developed salsa, growing it from a local movement playing out in the city’s streets and clubs into a global phenomenon. The parameters of the work is expansive as it includes the numerous cultural influences of salsa as it is practiced in New York City and Puerto Rico. The papers interrogate the role of record companies and stores in supporting and promoting the 1970s salsa movement, the ways Puerto Rican nationalism and the Nuyorican Movement continue to influence lyrical content, the hybridization of dance styles, and pay close attention to the circular flows of people and ideas traveling between NYC and the Caribbean. _________ “Salsa music and dance is a powerfully vibrant and uncontainable cultural expression that emerged from the barrios of New York City in the 1960s. Coming at the forefront of political and racial strife in the U.S., salsa initially articulated the voice and cultural experience of an often unheard and disenfranchised Puerto Rican and Latino peoples. Though historically salsa was “bounded” by the confines of the barrios in New York City, over time its popularity transcended those original city blocks as Hispanic populations grew throughout the U.S. and the music began appealing to a growing international market. This diverse group of scholars explore the implications of this global movement. This innovative volume embraces new interdisciplinary examinations focused on the ways the rhythm and power of salsa music and dance remain emergent, celebrated, and transformational even in our current turbulent moment.” Christopher Washburne (Columbia University), author of Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York City.

Rhythm & Power: Performing Salsa in Puerto Rican and Latino Communities

Washington, Derrick León

Music

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