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On the surface, identity politics appears to promote polarization. To the contrary, political scientist Jose E. Cruz argues that, instead, fragmentation and instability are more likely to occur only when the differences are ignored and nonethnic strategies are employed. Cruz illustrates his claim by focusing on one group of Puerto Ricans and how they mobilized to demand accountability from political leaders in Hartford, Connecticut. The activities of the Puerto Rican Political Action Committee from 1983 to 1991 illustrate the power of ethnic mobilization and strategy in an urban setting. Cruz examines their insistence on their right to be included in the political process in the context of b...
Directory of foreign diplomatic officers in Washington.
Assessing the limits of pluralism, this book examines different types of political inclusion and exclusion and their distinctive dimensions and dynamics. Why are particular social groups excluded from equal participation in political processes? How do these groups become more fully included as equal participants? Often, the critical issue is not whether a group is included but how it is included. Collectively, these essays elucidate a wide range of inclusion or exclusion: voting participation, representation in legislative assemblies, representation of group interests in processes of policy formation and implementation, and participation in discursive processes of policy framing. Covering broad territory—from African Americans to Asian Americans, the transgendered to the disabled, and Latinos to Native Americans—this volume examines in depth the give and take between how policies shape political configuration and how politics shape policy. At a more fundamental level, Ericson and his contributors raise some traditional and some not-so-traditional issues about the nature of democratic politics in settings with a multitude of group identities.
Little attention has been paid to the Latino movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the literature of social movements. This volume is the first significant look at the organizations that emerged in the late 1960s to promote Puerto Rican independence and the radical transformation of U.S. society. The Puerto Rican movement was a response to U.S. colonialism on the island and to the poverty and discrimination faced by most Puerto Ricans on the mainland. This anthology looks at the organizations that emerged to combat these two problems in such places as Boston, Chicago, Hartford, New York, and Philadelphia. Almost all the contributors worked with the organizations they describe. Interviews with such key figures as Elizam Escobar, Piri Thomas, and Luis Fuentes, as well as accounts by people active in the gay/lesbian, African American, and white Left movements, create a vivid picture of why and how people became radicalized and how their ideals intersected with their group's own dynamics.
In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Martín Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approaches to judging others. Identities are historical formations and their political implications are open to interpretation. But identities such as race and gender also have a powerful visual and material aspect that ...
Jos Snchez offers a fresh new way of thinking about Puerto Rican politics. Guided by a dynamic and suggestive concept of political power, the author navigates his way deftly through the thickets of volatile debates and controversy in tracking a century-long history of radical class and ethnic speaking-truth-to-power in the Latino vein. Taking us back to the cigar worker strikes before the 1920s, the story of Boricua Power goes on to probe the political scene in the post-World War II era, and then sheds new light on the Young Lords Party and the exciting political watershed of the Sixties and Seventies in New York City. To sidestep the pitfalls of blame-the-victim pathologizing on the one han...