In the past two decades, many scholars have explored crucial instances of conflict and coalition between Latina/o groups and other racial minorities in political and community activism. Andrés Torres's Between Melting Pot and Mosaic: African Americans and Puerto Ricans in the New York Political Economy (1995) examines the systemic patterns of inequality and injustice, both politically and economically, that affected the two largest minority groups in New York in the decades following World War II; Michael Jones-Correa's edited collection Governing American Cities: Inter-ethnic Coalitions, Competition, and Conflict (2001) retains the urban focus but broadens it to numerous US cities and their unique interethnic alliances; and Frederick Douglass Opie's social history of Black-Latina/o coalitions Upsetting the Apple Cart: Black–Latino Coalitions in New York City from Protest to Public Office (2014) mirrors Sonia Song-Ha Lee's focus in many ways but with an analytical eye on the agency of unknown community organizers and the role of food in social movements that brought together or divided African Americans and Latina/os in New York during the civil rights movement and its aftermath. Lee's study of Puerto Rican and African American interactions in protest campaigns and community organizing after World War II offers a vital addition to the existing, developing scholarship on the influence and role of Latina/o groups in the civil rights movement and its local actors and agencies across communities in New York.

In putting Puerto Ricans in context with African Americans, the two largest minorities who have historically shared various neighbourhoods in New York – including East Harlem, South Bronx, Williamsburg, and the Lower East Side – Lee demonstrates the reasons for initial problems in building coalitions up to the 1950s, the civil rights movement's force to encourage coalitions between the groups in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the struggles from the mid-1960s to the 1970s to maintain these coalitions as internal class issues divided African Americans and Puerto Ricans, whose middle-class leaders actively constructed a Hispanic-only narrative that included non-Puerto Ricans with Spanish colonial or Latin American backgrounds.

As many scholars examining the histories of marginalized groups know, traditional archival research will not get one very far, especially in the case of microhistorical events and the activities of community organizations. Lee's methodology builds significantly on oral histories, occasionally too much, to develop cohesive narratives for her chapters, making her study an excellent example of the importance of using oral reminiscences (or similar nontraditional sources such as personal archives) to reconstruct lost histories and place them in their larger contexts – in this case the civil rights movement.

The first chapter contextualizes Puerto Ricans’ need to engage in activism and community organizing in a time of major shifts for urban centres in the US such as deindustrialization, the War on Poverty programs, New York's financial crisis, and gentrification. While Lee largely explores visible coalitions between the two groups, her second chapter details the invisible coalition in a case study of the International Ladies Garment Workers's Union (ILGWU), the racism and discrimination of which was challenged openly by African Americans in the 1950s while Puerto Ricans did not join their cause. Lee's excellent penetration of private records shows that Puerto Ricans did, in fact, experience discrimination, but remained silent as the garment industry employed almost ten times as many Puerto Ricans as African Americans. Chapter 3 focusses on Puerto Ricans's realization of their racialized and marginialized status and the advantages and disadvantages of building an alliance with African Americans. Chapter 4 discusses the War on Poverty policies and how Puerto Ricans and African Americans worked together to distribute the resources down to their communities in the South Bronx and in East Harlem, the areas with the most Puerto Ricans at the time. Chapter 5 continues this examination of antipoverty programs with a focus on education reform and, in the case of Puerto Ricans, bilingual education specifically. The last chapter moves away from the phase of significant coalitions that lasted for just about a decade, and Lee shows that internal conflicts between Puerto Rican middle-class political leaders and the Puerto Rican working class ended a decade of alliances in political offices and neighbourhoods.

Despite the fact that the coalition phase was very brief compared to the overall shared history of African Americans and Puerto Ricans living side by side in neighbourhoods in New York, Lee forcefully shows that Puerto Ricans played a key role in exploring opportunities for both groups to come together and build bridges to empower and help one another as nonwhite groups who have been dealing with similar racist policies for decades. Lee's study adds a crucial perspective on the expanding discourse on racial and ethnic coalitions and conflicts in US urban centres – and Eileen J. Suárez Findlay's We Are Left without a Father Here: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico (2014) has already started dissecting these coalitions in rural areas as well.