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Puerto Rican studies is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that emerged in response to the exclusion of research, coursework, and archival materials documenting the Puerto Rican migration to and experience within the United States. While initially formed in reaction to student demands for Puerto Rican history courses during the 1960s, the field has evolved to incorporate a wide range of disciplines and perspectives generated by scholars from across the United States and around the world. Scholarship and coursework in Puerto Rican studies draw on numerous methodological approaches that contribute to the analysis of Puerto Rican migration and its antecedents and effects. History, sociology, literature, anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, cultural studies, American studies, education, and urban studies are among the fields represented within Puerto Rican studies. In addition, Puerto Rican studies exists within the broader field of ethnic studies and contributes to the fields of Latin American and Latino studies. Puerto Rican studies also incorporates and informs perspectives from the fields of Africana, African American, and Caribbean studies. This entry reviews the history, key texts, institutions, and the current state of the field.

Historical Background

Puerto Rican migration to the continental United States accelerated during the post–World War II period, especially to New York City, where the growing community of U.S. citizens began to demand access to public institutions during the Civil Rights Era. During this period, Puerto Ricans allied with African Americans and progressive Whites in struggles to desegregate public schools and increase representation of their communities within public institutions. Organizations such as the Puerto Rican Student Union and the Young Lords Party were involved in demonstrations and the takeover of the campuses of Columbia University and City College of New York in 1968 and 1969, respectively. Among their demands was the establishment of ethnic studies programs, the first of which were established within the City University of New York (CUNY).

By 1973, almost 20 ethnic studies programs offering courses in Puerto Rican studies had been established within CUNY, including notable programs at Brooklyn College and the City College of New York. Additional programs and Puerto Rican studies departments were subsequently established within public institutions of higher education throughout the Northeastern and Midwestern United States. Also in 1973, with the support of the Ford Foundation, CUNY established the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños (Center for Puerto Rican Studies), which would play an important role in developing inaugural texts in Puerto Rican studies and in linking scholarship with activism and policy debates under the leadership of its founding director, Frank Bonilla.

Early Scholarship

A unifying theme in early Puerto Rican studies scholarship was counteracting the “culture of poverty” paradigm that was advanced by scholars, policymakers, and the media during the 1960s and 1970s. This paradigm, which was introduced by anthropologist Oscar Lewis, suggested that poor communities socialized their children to embrace attitudes and behaviors that maintained them as impoverished. During the 1970s and 1980s, Puerto Rican scholars began conducting research with findings that argued that poverty was not caused by Puerto Ricans' presumed cultural deficiencies, but rather by economic exploitation and discrimination. Inaugural texts such as Labor Migration Under Capitalism (1979) by the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños History Task Force at City University of New York utilized Marxist frameworks to analyze the conditions for Puerto Rican migration and reception into the U.S. low-wage economy as principal forces explaining Puerto Rican poverty.

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