Portable roots: Latin New Yorker community building and the meanings of women's return migration in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1960-2000.

Abstract

This article examines the life histories of women return migrants to Puerto Rico. It emphasizes the cultural aspects of return migration, especially how the narrators understood and expressed their collective identity as distinctive from Puerto Ricans born and raised on the island. These informants turned their life histories into morality fables of class mobility, gender role restriction, and social rejection on the island. These tales asserted their radical differences from both middle class-islanders, whom they had joined, and the working-class diaspora in New York City, from which they had come. The narrators also built an organization which reinforced their "Latin New Yorker" identity, invented on the island.