Chicago is the home to the third-largest concentration of Puerto
Ricans in the United States, but scholarship on the city rarely
accounts for Puerto Ricans. This book is part of a revisionary
effort to include Puerto Ricans in the history of Chicago. Rua
explores the multiple meanings of latinidad (a shared sense of
identity among people of Latin American and Caribbean descent) from
a historical and ethnographic perspective by examining daily lives.
She shows that Puerto Ricans in Chicago have continually
constructed, restructured, and transformed place through discourses
and experiences of rejection and belonging, despair and hope. Rua
traces Puerto Ricans' construction of identity in a narrative that
begins in 1945, when a small group of University of Puerto Rico
graduates earned scholarships to attend the University of Chicago
as a private employment agency recruited Puerto Rican domestics and
foundry workers. These people formed the foundation of Chicago's
contemporary Puerto Rican community. In the following six decades,
Chicago witnessed urban renewal, loss of neighborhoods, emergence
of multiracial coalitions, waves of protest movements, and
celebrations of life within which Puerto Ricans negotiated their
identity, as Puerto Ricans, as Latinos, and as U.S. citizens.
Puerto Ricans arriving in the U.S. had come from an island colony,
but they had had the status of U.S. citizens, and most considered
themselves, and were considered to be, "white." And yet, their
brownness was considered "colored," and their citizenship was
second class. They seemed to share few of the rights other
Chicagoans took for granted. Memory and place and loss and identity
seemed interconnected. Were those of Puerto Rican descent
historical anomalies of the vestiges of empire? Or genuine American
citizens? What is the link for Puerto Ricans, other than the
Spanish language, to other Latinos, citizens as well as
undocumented migrants and documented ones? Through a variety of
sources, including oral history interviews, ethnographic
observations, archival research, and textual criticism, A Grounded
Identidad attempts to redress the oversight of traditional
scholarship on Chicago by presenting the example of Puerto Ricans,
their reconstruction from colonial subjects to second-class
citizens, and the implications of this political reality on how
they have been racially imagined and positioned vis-a-vis blacks,
whites, and Mexicans over time.
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