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Events
Jan. 9 | Call for papers: Identities and Technocultures
A 2-day conference about American culture and technologies that examines how new technologies dominate and define Americaness in the US and abroad. Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts (CESA) and the Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA).
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Rúa, Mérida. "Claims to ‘The City’: Puerto Rican Latinidad Amid Labors of Identity, Community, and Belonging," Program in American Culture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, May 2004.
The purpose of this study is to examine the complex ethno-racial dimensions of identity and space in order to tease out the multiple meanings of latinidad from a historical and ethnographic perspective. By doing so, I focus on the daily lives of Latinos who are situated and situate themselves in a shifting ethno-racial landscape - the city of Chicago. The dissertation elucidates the historically contingent productions of space as a proxy for social relations and geographic terrain. This is undertaken through an examination of the ‘constructedness’ of ‘the city’ and ‘the neighborhood’, and anchoring expressions of latinidad in time and place. By specifically looking at the case of Puerto Ricans in Chicago from the late 1940s to the present, I explore the labors involved in continuously constructing, restructuring, and transforming place through discourses of ‘belonging.‘ While the dissertation underscores everyday social practices of identity in Puerto Rican Chicago, these practices are situated in the context of interracial experiences between Puerto Ricans, other Latinos, and non-Latinos. Explicitly, Chicago’s Puerto Ricans deploy a Puerto Rican identity in relation to Mexican migrants, immigrants and residents of the city. Therefore, I suggest the emergence of a Chicago Puerto Ricaness that surfaces in recognition of a latinidad. Merging bodies of research that have independently investigated the geography of “the city” and “latinidad,“ this dissertation examines transculturized articualtions of “Puerto Rican latinidad” and the fabric of sociospatial development in the city of Chicago. The dissertation profiles how Puerto Ricans claim “the city,“ and simultaneously produce historicaly informed instantaneous renditions of latinidad in everyday battles for housing, neighborhoods, and community, as well as public and personal negotiations of identity.
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