This is a wonderfully balanced account of points of overlap between African American journalists and Puerto Rican activists from 1940 to 1972. The book brings to light connections that have been neglected on both sides of these two fields of cultural studies. Alamo-Pastrana clearly and with great impact lays out the challenges and convergences of Puerto Ricans and African Americans around ideas of race and empire. Focusing on the imbrications around race, empire, gender, and politics, the book examines overlooked histories that were disruptive of race, colonialism, and cultural practices. It uncovers the synergies of overlapping narratives about race and power among Puerto Ricans, the Black diaspora, and US liberal thinkers.
Expertly researched and accessibly written, the book reinscribes significant historical contexts from before, during, and after the era it explores within “the contradictions and unforeseen identifications between Puerto Rican activists and African American and white American liberal writers in the middle decades of the twentieth century” (12).
Alamo-Pastrana abandons the comparative approach typical in contemporary scholarship about race because, he says, “such comparisons contribute to a distorted historiography of what is, in fact, an intimate relationship between the Puerto Rican and American racial regimes.” He further adds that the production of comparative differences between the two, “ultimately re-centers whiteness and white supremacy in both national contexts” (6). In particular, he argues against the myth of racial democracy, one of the cornerstones of Puerto Rican national culture on both left and right.
The book offers in-depth analyses and provides crucial historical background surrounding the complicated relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico and other parts of Latin America. It does so by delving into many historically significant matters in the United States and Puerto Rico, among them the Plan Chardón in the 1930s concerning land reform and corporate sugar interests, Luis Muñoz Marín's complicated ascent to power, Myrdal's 1944 study of the treatment of African Americans in the United States, Truman's Point Four Program, the 1948 Ley de la Mordaza, and many more.
To present the complexities of the racial construction in those two areas, Alamo-Pastrana sets the stage using Avery Gordon's concept of “hauntings”: looking at subjects and stories that have been treated as insignificant. “The Puerto Rican Blueprint” (Chapter 1) provides thorough background to the rise of black radicalism and the black press in the United States and examines the writings of African American journalists who visited Puerto Rico during the decades studied. Throughout the book, Alamo-Pastrana finds connections between local conditions and global formations in order to lay bare common struggles for racial justice. In this chapter, and the next, he explores how “the institutionalized and racialized nature of the second-class citizenship imposed upon Puerto Ricans made them valuable points of imbrication for black journalists” (35).
“Dispatches from the Colonial Outpost” (Chapter 2) analyzes the writing of Chicago Defender journalist Denton Brooks and Pittsburgh Courier guest contributor George Little. The detailed groundwork begins with the organization of Puerto Rico's local government around land reform during the 1940s, a structural point of reference for black journalists who later became disenchanted with the island when its local political leadership shifted away from independence. Brooks offered a thorough analysis of the depredations of the sugar industry on the island. The analysis of widespread poverty in Puerto Rico led him to a conclusion: “If Puerto Ricans have citizenship, why do they agitate, what aren't they satisfied? It's because they don't have full rights, their citizenship resembles in many respects that of the disenfranchised white and colored southern sharecroppers” (49–50). He and other African-American journalists linked Puerto Rico's economic model with that of the US south, and questioned the assumption that Puerto Rico did well under the management of the United States. As Alamo-Pastrana demonstrates, Little's writing illuminated connections between militarism, US imperialism, and race.
Chapters 3 and 4 tell the stories of little-known liberal white writers who analyzed the material conditions of black labor and poverty in the United States and Puerto Rico. For instance, in the third chapter, “The Living Negro in Latin America,” Alamo-Pastrana begins by highlighting how Tomás Blanco's “paternalistic argument” against the existence of racial prejudice in Puerto Rico was in large part symptomatic of his desire for independence, a political and intellectual dream. Blanco and other intellectuals were invested in discourses of racial liberalism that homogenized Puerto Rican national identity. Analyzing the work of southern journalist Harold Preece, the chapter explores “the racial imbrication evident in the uneven merging of U.S. Southern and Puerto Rican liberalism” (63–64). Preece's writing shows how problematic the understanding of race in Latin America was, even among African American journalists.
“The Republic of the Penniless” (Chapter 4) looks at how Puerto Rico became a locus for analyses that overlooked racial difference. Set in El Fanguito, Edward Rosskam's 1964 novel The Alien is typical of the pitfalls of false class equivalencies that ignore how racial capitalism reinscribed racial difference, particularly in the Puerto Rican diaspora. Of particular interest are investigations countering prevailing nationalist narratives of racial unity. The chapter also contrasts Antonio Pedreira's concepts of marginality in his “Insularismo” with that of sociologist Edward B. Rueter's Race and Culture Contacts Rosskam's portrayal of the criminalization of the Puerto Rican diaspora between 1950 and 1965 should be of particular interest for Puerto Rican scholars of the period.
The final chapter, “You Are Here To Listen,” broadly considers how the Puerto Rican left, particularly as represented by Juan Mari Brás, “were not immune to complicated and often contradictory understandings of race” (116). The chapter focuses on the work of the independentista Ana Livia Cordero, who was connected in myriad ways to African American intellectualism and whose anticolonial project, Proyecto Piloto, centered on Puerto Rican blackness. Alamo-Pastrana finds that despite some instances of essentialist reductionism, her project (which predates José Luis González's canonical scholarship on race) came to constitute “one of the few radical groups on the island to analyze the relationships among race, colonialism, and capitalism” (118). Cordero's inclusive project, which was ultimately undermined by oppressive forces against independentismo ascendant in the 1950s and 1960s, shared with González's an incisive analysis of how Puerto Ricans had historically privileged whiteness. Alamo-Pastrana includes fascinating discussions of the Proyecto's use of short comic books and performances to motivate community action.
In his conclusion, the author looks at recent Puerto Rican migration trends toward the southern United States to demonstrate that it is now vital for scholars to shift their attention to the larger social and political history of the American South. We can do no better than to begin with Seams of Empire.
