Two basic forces shaped the daily lives of Puerto Ricans throughout the 20th century: colonialism and migration. In 1898, U.S. troops invaded the island as part of the Spanish-Cuban-American War. In 1902, the U.S. Supreme Court defined Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam as “unincorporated territories” belonging to, but not forming part of, the United States. In 1917, Congress extended U.S. citizenship to all persons born in Puerto Rico. In 1952, the island became a U.S. commonwealth with a greater share of local autonomy, but it remained politically and economically dependent on the U.S. mainland. Since World War II, the island has experienced a massive displacement of its people to the continental United States. Today, nearly half of all persons of Puerto Rican origin live abroad. As colonial migrants, Puerto Ricans are, therefore, distinct from other contemporary Latin American diasporas.

The books under review here approach U.S. colonialism and Puerto Rican emigration as two sides of the same coin. In Reproducing Empire, Laura Briggs examines how U.S. imperialism constructed Puerto Rican Others through the discourses of science and medicine, focusing on sexuality, gender, reproduction, and development. Briggs charges that U.S. colonial images of working-class Puerto Rican women and their families portrayed them as deviant, deficient, alien, and exotic, as well as in need of reform and, sometimes, radical change. During the first two decades of U.S. rule, public policies on the island were geared toward controlling prostitution and promoting legal marriages. In about 1920, colonial administrators began to promote birth control and, later, migration to reduce overpopulation. Since the 1930s, Puerto Rican women have increasingly resorted to sterilization to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Between the 1940s and 1960s, the island became a “laboratory” for economic development through rapid industrialization, as well as the testing ground for the contraceptive pill and other family planning methods. More recently, Puerto Rican migration to New York gave rise to Oscar Lewis’s infamous “culture of poverty” thesis, which further stigmatized Puerto Rican women, their reproductive practices, and their alleged welfare dependence.

Trained primarily as a historian, Briggs documents her arguments through the extensive use of archival and manuscript collections, especially the Rockefeller Foundation Archives, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Colección Puertorriqueña at the University of Puerto Rico. She also incorporates many references to U.S. and Puerto Rican government documents, such as the annual reports of the Governor of Puerto Rico, and to local newspapers such as El Mundo (San Juan) and La Democracia (Ponce). The analysis of these primary sources sheds much light on the emergence of an extremely coherent colonial discourse on female sexuality, in both its liberal and conservative incarnations. One problem with these sources, though, is that they seldom allow the voices of “the subaltern”—in this case, poor Puerto Rican women—to be heard. Nonetheless, Briggs skillfully weaves together the threads of various kinds of narratives (even progressive and feminist ones) that end up buttressing the racial, cultural, economic, and political hegemony of the United States over Puerto Rico.

Briggs’s work on Puerto Rico resonates strongly with postcolonial and subaltern studies elsewhere. In an informative epilogue, she discusses “why Puerto Rico is the most important place in the world,” “a place where political conditions and its people brilliantly theorize current global instabilities” (p. 195). She also argues that “in Puerto Rico, the things we normally think of as necessarily aligned to constitute a nation or a region—its people, language, geographical borders, government, economy, and myths, stories, histories, literature, and/or imagination—can be radically discontinuous, occupying entirely different spaces” (p. 196). (Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas further elaborates this point, as seen below.) Briggs is primarily interested in how U.S. natural and social scientists have produced certain kinds of knowledge about Puerto Rican sexuality, which, in turn, have helped to legitimize the island’s colonization. Here she takes a cue from Michel Foucault, Ann Stoler, Gayatri Spivak, and others who are less concerned with describing the actual sexual practices and preferences of their subjects of study than with deconstructing the political and cultural premises of dominant public discourses.

Reproducing Empire is a welcome addition to the growing literature on postcolonial, subaltern, cultural, and gender studies. It contributes significantly to understanding how colonialism has historically drawn on rhetorical strategies of sexualization and racialization to justify the territorial and ideological subordination of some peoples by others. From an ethnographic perspective, however, Briggs’s analysis is less compelling because of “the absence of the ‘real’ working-class women” (p. 208) from her narrative. “This book,” she writes, “understands the subject of these texts to be the author, not the women they wrote about” (p. 208). As a result, the impact of textual representations on people’s lived experiences is largely left unexplored. This kind of history does not have much to say about how Puerto Rican women and men contend with, negotiate, or repudiate the ideology of imperialist domination in their everyday lives.

This is precisely one of the main strengths of Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas’s ethnography. Her book, National Performances, substantiates the strong resistance of Puerto Rican migrants in Chicago to assimilation into mainstream U.S. culture. Instead, “most of the Puerto Ricans with whom [the author] talked had a positive view of nationalism as a loosely scripted and staged mode of identity production, activist rhetoric, and cultural performance in Chicago” (p. ix). Ramos-Zayas’s monograph shows that community leaders and ordinary migrants deploy Puerto Rican nationalism to advance their ideological and material interests, such as those grounded in class, race, and gender.

National Performances is primarily based on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago between April 1994 and September 1995. The author taped 60 life histories of Puerto Rican residents of the Humboldt Park area, where many of the island’s working-class migrants have settled, as well as grassroots activists and middle-class professionals who tend to live in the suburbs of Chicago. In addition, she conducted 50 semi-structured interviews with other informants, mostly students, neighbors, and activists. She also participated actively in the daily routines of her Humboldt Park neighbors and attended many of their parades, festivals, marches, religious services, and museum exhibits. Moreover, she analyzed local publications, personal correspondence, and institutional archives. Finally, she volunteered as a teacher in four community organizations, including an alternative educational project, the Pedro Albizu Campos High School. These methods yielded a wealth of qualitative material on the history, development, and contemporary situation of Puerto Rican Chicago.

According to Ramos-Zayas, nationalism has brought together many activists and residents of the Puerto Rican barrio in Humboldt Park. Her well-supported thesis is that Puerto Rican immigrants and their descendants in Chicago have reelaborated the core symbols of Puerto Rican nationalism (notably, the mythical figure of Albizu Campos) as proofs of cultural authenticity. These icons have been widely disseminated through community institutions, including schools such as Roberto Clemente and Pedro Albizu Campos, and cultural centers such as Juan Antonio Corretjer and Segundo Ruiz Belvis. In contrast to the island, Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago combines an anticolonial ideology with cultural practices that do not rely exclusively on the Spanish language or Hispanic culture. Rather, it seeks to counter the public representations of a criminalized and marginalized community, through the reaffirmation of its hybrid identity, for example, by the use of rap music and “Spanglish,” that is, code switching between Spanish and English. In short, “Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago [has] conflated anti-colonial politics and porous transnational identities” (p. 8).

One unproven assumption in Ramos-Zayas’s argument is that rank-and-file Puerto Ricans in Chicago are predominantly proindependence, nationalist, or radical. Despite its reputation as a hotbed of anti-U.S. terrorism, Chicago’s Puerto Rican population is largely composed of immigrant workers who probably do not sympathize with the island’s independence or other leftist movements. Compared with other diasporic communities, however, they seem to be better organized to resist ethnic prejudice, racial discrimination, and residential displacement. Ramos-Zayas’s excellent book documents the high degree of community mobilization around the nationalist discourse of some of its leading members. I remain intrigued by the question of why that discourse gained more popular support in Chicago than in other Puerto Rican settlements in the mainland and even on the island.

In sum, the books under consideration help to elucidate how the U.S. empire was reproduced in Puerto Rico, as well as how the Puerto Rican nation is performed in the U.S. mainland. Taken together, Briggs’s and Ramos-Zayas’s research illuminates the tensions between colonialism and nationalism and the extension of these symbolic struggles to a transnational context. Each book deals, in its own way, with the ominous consequences of the racialization of Puerto Ricans as “nonwhite” citizens of the United States. Whereas Briggs emphasizes the sexual and gender overtones of U.S. colonial discourse on Puerto Rico, Ramos-Zayas privileges the anticolonial and subversive gestures of Puerto Rican grassroots politics in the United States. Although using different perspectives, locations, and methods, the two authors have greatly advanced the scholarship on Puerto Ricans on and off the island.