Centro Journal最新文献

{"title":"Becoming Julia De Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon","authors":"E. Horan","doi":"10.5860/choice.189633","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.189633","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39745,"journal":{"name":"Centro Journal","volume":"26 1","pages":"320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71027433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era","authors":"Saulo Colón","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-2352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-2352","url":null,"abstract":"Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era Edited by Clarence Taylor Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2011 176 pages; $35.00 [cloth]This book edited by Baruch College (CUNY) professor Clarence Taylor is an anthology of historical studies that contributes to and continues the scholarly discussion into what civil rights movement scholars like Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Eric Arnesen, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, and Clarence Lang are debating is \"the long civil rights movement\". This compilation effectively adds to the historical research that establishes that not only was the Civil Rights Movement temporally long but also geographically broad. Along with recent scholarship by Robert O. Self, Komozi Woodard, Jeanne Theoharis, and others this compilation, though focused on New York City, confirms not just the early, but also the varied, presence of civil rights organizations and protests in the North as well as their urgent role in helping to develop the Civil Rights Movement in the South. As the editor notes, this book \"is unique because it is the only anthology that focuses on the civil rights movement in New York City from such a variety of perspectives\" (p. 4).Due to the historical interpretation by the authors of these chapters of a diverse array of leaders, organizations, and community struggles, this book dismisses the easy periodization and false characterization of an earlier, southern, united, civil rights movement and then later, more militant, fragmented, urban, identity-based power movements. In fact, according to Taylor, \"in their challenge to the southern paradigm, scholars not only have questioned the 1954 starting date of the civil rights movement\" but have also challenged the \"portrayal of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s as a force that derailed the 'triumphant' struggle for civil rights\" (p. 2). This scholarly refutation of a political dichotomy between the civil rights movements of the 1950s vs. the identity/power movements of the 1960s has effectively defeated the view of a \"good vs. bad Sixties\" once and for all. Instead, it reaffirms the perspective of a longer and broader \"freedom struggle\" by various oppressed nations and people of color against a colonizing and racializing capitalist \"world-system.\"The book is arranged chronologically, which helps to develop one of the main themes shared by many of the book's authors. Over time, the chapters reveal the tensions between the liberalism of the post-World War II era and the civil rights movement's challenges to liberal notions of race, merit, governance, and equality. These chapters indirectly build on each other in articulating the political conflicts critical to the conceptual and organizational development of civil rights praxis. The chapters, while not organized thematically, also focus on similar topics that in their pattern of similarity reveal the main concerns of civil rights organizations and oppressed communities of color in New York City","PeriodicalId":39745,"journal":{"name":"Centro Journal","volume":"25 1","pages":"204"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71135638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Other Latin@: Writing against a Singular Identity","authors":"Ignacio Rodeño","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-4923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-4923","url":null,"abstract":"The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity Edited by Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. Lopez Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-8165-2867-7 184 pages; $22.00 [paper] Reviewer: Ignacio Rodeno, The University of AlabamaThis anthology, edited by Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. Lopez, consists of a collection of twenty essays that center on the question of identity. The aim of the volume is to showcase the lack of an essential Latino identity and the presence of a plurality of experiences that undermines the idea that Latinos are a monolithic group. It is only fitting, then, that these pieces are written in the first person narrative. The volume opens with a foreword by William Luis, and ends with an afterword by the same critic, where he discusses the labels Latino and Hispanic in relation to culture and identity, as well as the use of one or another through history. Such labels are problematic, as Luis notes, since they try to fix a concept that is, in itself, multifaceted, fluid, subject to alteration by means of its diasporic nature.By employing the first person narrative, The Other Latin@ contributes to the body of work that strives for the creation of a collective memory through the personal. The autobiographical voice, where the self reflects on a significant moment or event in his or her life, has been widely used in the so-called ethnic literatures to present such experience as something that can be read as representative of the community precisely because of its significance and relation to it. In doing so, the particular experience becomes the voice of the community, a voice that has not been regularly acknowledged by the mainstream culture in the case of Latinos. It is through reading narratives of the self as collective memory that non-hegemonic communities seek to achieve a better understanding of their origins, their history-in sum their identity. One might argue that narratives in which the particular experience is recognized as communal would result in cementing identity as fixed, homogeneous, monolithic, and this is even more the case with an anthology, which inclines us to read them as a unit. However, because of this anthology's pursuit of the opposite, it is particularly valuableIn order to start dismantling the monolithic, stereotypical image of Latinos, the anthology starts with Lisa Chavez's account of the experience of a Latina growing up in an unexpected location: Alaska. In the same vein, Joy Castro and Teresa Dovalpage illustrate experiences of Cubans who immigrated to the U.S. at different times than the ones that dominate Cuban-American narratives. Other authors reflect the linguistic limitation of Latinos who have lost their Spanish and are leftto wrestle with the notion that being Latino means having a link to the Spanish language. Precisely by describing this experience of exclusion, U.S. Puerto Rican Judith Ortiz Cofer redefines Latino to include alternative identities. Taking issue with t","PeriodicalId":39745,"journal":{"name":"Centro Journal","volume":"24 1","pages":"213"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71137257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Battleship Vieques: Puerto Rico from World War II to the Korean War","authors":"Déborah Berman Santana","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-2242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-2242","url":null,"abstract":"Battleship Vieques: Puerto Rico from World War II to the Korean War By Cesar J. Ayala and Jose L. Bolivar By Cesar J. Ayala and Jose L. Bolivar Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2011 ISBN: 978-1-5587-6538-2 220 pages; $24.95 [paper]Battleship Vieques: Puerto Rico from World War II to the Korean War is a detailed history of the U.S. Navy's establishment of its Caribbean training \"crown jewel\" on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques within the context of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. It offers a regional context and documents the profound impact of military occupation upon the social, economic, and cultural life of the people of Vieques. That occupation, while devastating in multiple ways, also provided the seeds of resistance that culminated in a massive non-violent civil disobedience movement that captured global attention and forced the Navy to leave in 2003.Following the introduction, the book is divided into seven chapters. Chapters One and Two set the regional and local contexts for the militarization of Vieques during World War II. Chapter One provides a regional overview of the German navy's activities in the Caribbean during World War II, including a blockade and attacks on oil refineries. Among other problems, the war severely disrupted shipments of foods, fuel, and other materials between Puerto Rico and the U.S. The authors discuss the importance of war-related shortages as part of the ruling Popular Democratic Party's (PPD) strategies to consolidate power through land reform (especially the breakup of large farms with absentee owners), and targeted, state-sponsored industrialization. Faced with the dire scenario of possible starvation of an \"essentially rural population\" where overspecialization in sugar cane production forced it \"to rely on food imports\" (p. 19), wartime militarization through construction and expansion of U.S. military bases provided some economic relief. This chapter also discusses base construction during the 1930s in San Juan, where the Navy's propensity for excluding local contractors and dislodging residents foreshadowed its much larger construction projects during World War II in Puerto Rico, including Vieques. The authors note that while many historians \"have emphasized the role of the insular government\" in the transformation of Puerto Rico's economy during the 1940s from plantation agriculture to rapid industrialization, federal government expenditures during the same period-particularly related to the military-\"had a profound transformative effect\" (p. 25).Chapter Two offers a brief summary of Vieques' history, from colonial \"frontier\"- with Spain struggling to maintain control despite constant attacks and settlement attempts by its European rivals-to \"plantation society.\" The latter began with sustained nineteenth-century development of a mainly sugar cane and cattle-based economy, encouraged by land grants to Europeans and dependent on formerly enslaved labor from eastern Puerto Rico an","PeriodicalId":39745,"journal":{"name":"Centro Journal","volume":"24 1","pages":"224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71135678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity","authors":"Efra n Barradas","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-4331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-4331","url":null,"abstract":"Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity By David J. Vazquez Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011 256 pages; $25.00 [paper] ISBN 978-0-8166-7327-8 Reviewer: Efrain Barradas, University of Florida-GainesvilleDavid J. Vazquez, como otros estudiosos, ha notado la sorprendente abundancia de textos de tonos autobiograficos en la literatura latinoestadounidense o latina. Por ello Vazquez habla del \"frequent - almost obsessive - use of autobiographical forms\" (p. 189) en este cuerpo literario. Esta sencilla pero contundente observacion es el punto de partida y, a la vez, la conclusion de su libro, Triangulations. Y esta observacion lo lleva a la pregunta central de su obra: ?por que esta abundancia entre escritores latinos de textos que caben dentro del amplio parametro de las narrativas del yo? De esa pregunta se desprenden logicamente otras que lo llevan a escribir unas densas doscientas paginas en las que explora el tema en detalle y ofrece excelentes ejemplos de como funciona este genero literario en textos representativos de las letras de algunos grupos latinos.Esas doscientas paginas de Triangulations se compone de una introduccion, cuatro capitulos y lo que el autor llama conclusion, pero que, en verdad, funciona como otro capitulo mas. En la introduccion el autor presenta la teoria que le servira para estudiar los textos que selecciona como ejemplos de narrativas del yo latinoestadounidenses. Vazquez propone una idea sencilla e ingeniosa para explicar este fenomeno: el autor o la autora latina al construir un texto autobiografico, como un viejo marinero, construye una carta de navegacion a base de tres puntos-de ahi el titulo del libro-que le permiten navegar por el mar inhospito de la cultura dominante o de la propia cultura latina que le impone una identidad, identidad que se convierte en uno de los puntos del triangulo de su estrategia para crear una nueva y personal que, en muchos casos, es representacion de la colectiva. Para dibujar ese mapa, la autora o el autor latino niega las identidades impuestas de antemano y su labor culmina en la propuesta de una nueva forma de definirse como persona y como grupo. En todos los casos que estudia Vazquez hay tres puntos que entran en juego y le sirven al autor o la autora para negociar esa nueva identidad que crea por medio de su narrativa del yo. Tras el erudito vocabulario critico que Vazquez emplea para presentar su teoria se esconde un sencillo proceso dialectico que reproduce el ya conocido mestizaje cultural que define a toda nueva cultura. No por ello sus ideas dejan de ser ingeniosas y utiles. No me cabe duda de que estas primeras paginas de Triangulation, como la totalidad del libro, serviran de inspiracion y modelo a otros criticos.En los cuatro capitulos que componen el cuerpo del libro Vazquez nos presenta las obras que analiza y que le sirven para probar su tesis central: textos de Ernesto Galarza y de Jesus Colon en el primer capitulo, de Piri Thoma","PeriodicalId":39745,"journal":{"name":"Centro Journal","volume":"66 5","pages":"183"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72367683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Healing Dramas: Divination and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico","authors":"Iris Zavala Martinez","doi":"10.5860/choice.47-3896","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-3896","url":null,"abstract":"Healing Dramas: Divination and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico By Raquel Romberg Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009 295 pages; $30.00 [paper] ISBN: 978-0-292-72350-4 Reviewer: Iris Zavala Martinez, The City University of New York-Center for Puerto Rican StudiesThis stimulating book takes us on a meditative but also curiously pragmatic ethnographic journey into the \"drama of divination and magic rituals\" as intimately experienced and reflected upon by the author ten years after her fieldwork in Puerto Rico. It traverses through the haunting closeness of the phenomenology of the \"corporeal spirituality of brujeria\" (p. 1), defined as \"witch healing,\" to recapture the elusive and intense experiential space shared by healers and their participants. As she relives the taped interviews and re-creates her fieldwork notes, Romberg treats us to an ongoing process of self-observation and questioning of her own transformative process. For example, she wonders if the time distance from the original experience will affect her perception and attempt to provide \"important ethnographic clues\" of the spiritists' healing dramas, and privileges the reader to relive some of the author's own engaged experiences of the healing dramas and their irrepressible after-effects years later. On one occasion, she found herself mindlessly lighting a candle in memory of one who had passed. Seemingly, she too yearned for a transcendence that eluded erasure while asserting its captivating memory.Moreover, throughout this book of six chapters (and an Introduction and Epilogue), we are treated to a host of anthropological, socio-historical, philosophical, psychoanalytic, literary, and other references that infuse the work with rigor and amplitude, making for very challenging reading. Romberg observes, theorizes, analyzes, deconstructs gestures, actions, meanings. She is variously a scholar, a witness, a participant, an advocate, an accomplice, and a narrator. She intimates that her work was \"a kind of 'gossip style' anthropology\" that narrates and \"entextualizes.... experience-based discourse\" (p. 31). As such, we experience vicariously the relived and reconstructed dramas of her healers, through the \"mimetic memories of a brujo\" (Chapter 1); through the interpretative and theoretical ruminations of embodied, disembodied, healing, premonitory, and her own fieldwork dreams (Chapter 2); through the witnessing of dramatic, multiform sensuously somatized healing rituals that transmute into hypnotic trances (Chapters 3, 4, and 5); and through sojourns into nature, to the different magical spaces that potentiate healing and divination, embracing spiritual energies. The \"gossips\" of Haydee, Mauro, Ken, Basi, among others, reverberate throughout the book, but the added treat of transcribed healing sessions and photographs provide an unparalleled glimpse, if only for a fleeting moment, into the workings of the spiritual world.The dramas that Romberg documents evoke the \"pragmatics of brujer","PeriodicalId":39745,"journal":{"name":"Centro Journal","volume":"24 1","pages":"199-204"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71128489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Orlando ricans: overlapping identity discourses among middle-class puerto rican immigrants","authors":"Jorge Duany","doi":"10.5149/9780807869376_duany.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807869376_duany.10","url":null,"abstract":"Resumen en: One of the distinctive features of the recent Puerto Rican exodus to the Orlando metropolitan area is a large number of well-educated professionals and m...","PeriodicalId":39745,"journal":{"name":"Centro Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"85-115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70987627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Latino Rage: The Life and Work of Edward Rivera","authors":"Lyn Di Iorio Sandín","doi":"10.1057/9780230100800_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100800_5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39745,"journal":{"name":"Centro Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"83-100"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58210519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}