Puerto Rican New Yorkers: Workers, Unions and Politics in the Struggle for a Better Life, 1910s-1960s


Puerto Ricans who migrated to New York joined one of the largest concentrations of urban wage workers in the world. Most migrants were already familiar with the routines and conditions of wage work while others had to adjust to the challenges of a highly developed industrial city where both exploitation as well as opportunities for better wages abounded. Work, leisure, family life and politics consumed most of their energies, but in New York the complexity of urban, class, racial and ethnic contexts could be daunting and required a myriad of adjustments. The city offered opportunities for solidarity and new forms of organization and improvement as well as unpredictable risks and new problems. This exhibit reunites a series of blogs that will introduce many of the rich contexts in which Puerto Rican New Yorkers engaged with larger movements and struggles from the 1910s to the 1970s. The mosaic represented here includes only some of the stories.

Author: Aldo Lauria Santiago, Professor, Latino and Caribbean Studies and History Departments, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University

Commentator: Virginia Sanchez-Korrol, Professor Emerita, Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY

Bios
Aldo A. Lauria Santiago, Professor of Caribbean, Latin American and US Latino History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ



Aldo A. Lauria Santiago works as a Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is a historian of Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean and Latinos in the US. He specializes in peasant and working class history, revolution, ethnicity and race. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Chicago and his MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University. He trained as a Mexicanist at The University of Chicago but began his career as a historian of El Salvador. Contact: alauria@lcs.rutgers.edu





Dr. Virginia Sanchez Korrol Professor Emerita, Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY
Virginia is Professor Emerita at the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Brooklyn College, CUNY. Dr. Sanchez Korrol writes about the Puerto Rican experience in the United States. Among her

extensive publications, she authored From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City, and co-edited Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. Recipient of the Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Contributions to New York History, 2020, she serves as historical consultant to media projects, government and cultural institutions. She is the co-editor of Puerto Rican Studies in CUNY: The First 50 Years (forthcoming 2021). Contact: vsankorr@brooklyn.CUNY.edu, vsk@juno.com

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