Identity is fluid, yet still grounded in time and place, as Mérida Rúa illustrates. Using a “blending of historical and ethnographic research,” the author describes Chicago Puerto Ricans' identity from 1946 to the present (xviii). Trained in American studies, the author presents a truly interdisciplinary text. Rúa draws on the work of Elena Padilla, a Puerto Rican student of anthropology in the late 1940s. The author examines Padilla's master's thesis, field notes, and correspondence to understand how Puerto Ricans saw themselves and also how Chicago viewed Puerto Ricans in the middle of the twentieth century. She also uses government documents from the Migration Division, both English and Spanish mainland and island-based newspapers, magazines, and personal papers to reveal the political, economic, and social context in which Puerto Ricans interacted. The author skillfully incorporates her ethnographic research – such as her observations – to clearly show that the past is inextricably linked to the present, even as space and relationships have changed over the years.

Across six chapters, Rúa traces a progression of Puerto Rican neighborhoods since 1946 and explores questions of identity construction and latinidad. She begins her monograph by describing how women, both graduate students like Padilla and low-paid domestic maids, shaped conversations on Puerto Rican migration and settlement. This was a gendered, racialized, and class-based migration, yet, because of their citizenship, underpaid and overworked domestic servants could organize, walk out of their jobs, and search for work elsewhere. Her second chapter discusses how that ambiguous citizenship which allowed Puerto Ricans to move freely also put them in a precarious position as “nonresidents.” Rúa also details the little-known attempts at Puerto Rican repatriation during the more familiar Operation Wetback in the 1950s. She goes on to discuss how gentrification disrupted long-standing Puerto Rican communities and the social networks they needed for survival. This has been a continual problem from the 1960s to the present and, using ethnographic research, Rúa paints a vivid picture of once culturally rich neighborhoods that have succumbed to multilevel condominiums despite their residents' resistances.

Though the first three chapters are novel and interesting, it is Rúa's fourth chapter that brings the greatest contribution to Puerto Rican studies. She reveals that Puerto Ricans' identity in Chicago was contingent upon place and time, including the relationships they had with other ethnic groups, especially Mexican Americans and African Americans. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans utilized the same resources and shared some social spaces, which allowed them to build relationships. Though earlier scholars have recognized the necessity of latinidad in political activism, Rúa notes that “manifestations of latinidad both official and unofficial … begin with ordinary, tangled exchanges of fellowship and friction” (90). In this same chapter she includes interviews with multiethnic Latinos that build on her earlier work. These insights reveal that “MexiRican” or “PortoMex” identity varies. It is contextual and rests upon the level of engagement and exposure these individuals have with Mexican and Puerto Rican communities.

The author investigates the experiences of a single family, the Bishops, to explore African American and Puerto Rican relationships in Chicago, including the complexities of color and race. Though Gina Bishop was Puerto Rican, she was phenotypically as black as her African American husband Julius Bishop. This caused friction with his upwardly mobile family in the 1940s. Julius Bishop, who would later go by Julio, however, had a strong interest in the African diaspora. He recognized similar struggles among African Americans and Africans in the Caribbean. Rúa finds that Puerto Rican identity in Chicago was strongly connected to circumstances on the island as those on the mainland identified with the island's plight. Building on Lorrin Thomas's work, she cites the island's semi-colonial status as a driving force for activism among Puerto Ricans in Chicago, which included protests against the bombing on the island of Viques in the early 2000s.

With reference to major events affecting Puerto Ricans and other people of color in Chicago, Rúa clearly shows how identity is interconnected with time and place. It would have been useful for the author to unpack what she describes as gentrification rather than simply pointing to it without further elaboration. Though this reviewer would have liked to see more historical connection to twenty-first-century events, this interdisciplinary work makes an important contribution to existing studies on Puerto Rican immigration.