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Puerto Rican Studies in the City University Of New York: The First Fifty Years HCC Professor Vanessa Martínez Honored for Inspiring Civic Engagement
Puerto Rican Studies in the City University Of New York: The First Fifty Years
Editors: MARÍA ELIZABETH PÉREZ Y GONZÁLEZ AND VIRGINIA SÁNCHEZ KORROL
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New York, NY | CENTRO Press | January 25, 2021 | 308 pages
Book’s description:
Authored by leading scholars in the field of Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies, this volume is an important milestone in documenting the power of collective consciousness and action to create change in and access to higher education for all peoples. The book features a comprehensive fifty-year trajectory in the field of Puerto Rican Studies (PRS) at the City University of New York in a series of critical essays on scholarship, the social sciences, bilingual education, media, and its counterparts beyond CUNY, in addition to retrospectives from founders of the field, current professors, and alumni. The student founders of PRS, its pioneering faculty and groundbreaking interdisciplinary focus on the intersectionalities of race, culture, gender, power, and class, elucidate a contentious path to forging an anti-racist and decolonial pedagogy. The critical analysis in the scholarship found in this volume assesses the current status of Puerto Rican Studies in continuing to meet its academic mission, challenges and opportunities, and points to future directions in the 21st century.
Table of Contents:
Foreword: 50 years of Puerto Rican Studies at CUNY by Félix V. Matos
Rodríguez, Chancellor Preface Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION: by Virginia Sánchez Korrol and María Elizabeth Pérez y González LEGACY:
• Remaking Puerto Rican Studies at 50 Years by Pedro Cabán • Puerto Rican Studies: A Legacy of Activism, Scholarship, and Collective
Empowerment by Edna Acosta-Belén • Bilingual Education and Puerto Rican Studies: From Vision to Reality by
Antonio Nadal and Milga Morales Nadal • Five Decades of Puerto Rican Studies: Influences on Sociology and Allied
Social Sciences by Christine E. Bose • The Evolution of Puerto Rican Studies at City College by Conor Tomás Reed • How a Few Students Transformed the Ivory
Tower: Puerto Rican Studies and its (R) evolution at Brooklyn College by María E.
Pérez y González
• Puerto Rican Studies: Transitions,
Reconfigurations, and Programs Outside the
CUNY System by Edna Acosta-Belén • So Much Knowledge and We Still Ain’t Free:
Puerto Rican Studies Fifty Years Later by Juan González IN RETROSPECT: Voices from the Field • Past is Prologue: A Look Back at the Evolution of Puerto Rican Studies in the Academy by Jesse M. Vázquez • Puerto Rican Studies at Baruch College by Regina A. Bernard-Carreño • Camuyana en Brooklyn: Reflecting on My Journey Through Puerto Rican and Latino Studies by Gisely Colón López • Reflections on a Return to Lehman College by Andrés Torres
Editor’s bios:
MARÍA ELIZABETH PÉREZ Y GONZÁLEZ is a Puerto Rican born in Brooklyn, New York, and Associate Professor in the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY, where she has served as faculty for 30 years with 17 of those years as Chairperson, including two as Acting Chairperson. Her research includes the Puerto Rican diaspora, Latinxs, women in ministry, and Pentecostals. She is the author of Puerto Ricans in the United States (2000) and scholarly pieces on Latinas in Christian ministry. VIRGINIA SÁNCHEZ KORROL is Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College, CUNY, where she chaired the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies from 1989 to 2004. Her publications include From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York (1983, 1994), and the three-volume Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia (2006). She serves on the boards of the New York Historical Society Center for Women’s History, Arte Público Recovery Project, and the Latino Expert Panel of the National Park Service. She is a 2020 recipient of the prestigious Herbert H. Lehman Prize awarded by the New York Academy of History.
by MIRELSIE VELÁZQUEZ Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press | January 25, 2022 | 224 pages
About This Book
The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children’s classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago’s Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican identities. Education also offered women the only venue to exercise power, and they parlayed their positions to take lead roles in activist and political circles. In time, a politicized Puerto Rican community gave voice to a previously silenced group--and highlighted that colonialism does not end when immigrants live among their colonizers. A perceptive look at big-city community building, Puerto Rican Chicago reveals the links between justice in education and a people’s claim to space in their new home.
About the Author
MIRELSIE VELÁZQUEZ (mirelsie.velazquez@ ou.edu) is an educational historian at the College of Education of the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Velazquez interests’ focus on issues of race/ethnicity, historical research in education, and gender and sexuality. She teaches courses on History of American Education, Critical Race Theory, Latino Education, Oral History, and Historiography of Education. Her research is on History of Latino Education, Puerto Rican history in the diaspora, social movements, and history of Latinas in the U.S. Locally, Dr. Velazquez is working on issues pertaining to community involvement in Latino and African American communities, as well as access to higher education for underrepresented communities of color. (credit - Center for Puerto Rican Studies @ Hunter College)
