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Publisher: Duke University Press Books (December
26, 2014)
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About the Author
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Eileen J. Suárez Findlay is Associate Professor of Latin
American and Caribbean History at American University. She is the author of Imposing
Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920, also
published by Duke University Pres
Review
"In this fascinating study,
Eileen J. Suárez Findlay reinterprets Puerto Rican history in the mid-twentieth
century by placing labor migration, populist politics, and gender at the heart
of her narrative. Thousands of Puerto Rican migrant workers, seeking modernity
and an escape from the harsh colonialism on their home island, journeyed to sugar beet fields
in Michigan. There they
found exploitation harsher than they had known. Findlay eloquently explores
their travels and travails and shows how they reshaped both U.S. colonialism and
Puerto Rican populism."
(Julie Greene, author of The
Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal 2014-03-12)
"Eileen J. Suárez Findlay's new
work illuminates a forgotten chapter of Puerto Rican history—the 1950
'Operation Farmlift,' which ended in protests by migrant workers in Michigan's
sugar beet fields. Findlay's analysis is meticulously documented, imaginative,
and insightful. It is also sensitive to the multiple intersections among gender, race, and
class in postwar
Puerto Rican economic development, colonial reforms, and mass migration. I
learned much from reading this admirable book."
(Jorge Duany, author of Blurred
Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United
States 2014-03-17)
“A most excellent gendered
history of Puerto Rican political and labor history, this book will be required
reading for Latin Americanists and labor historians. Essential. All
levels/libraries.”
(B. A. Lucero Choice)
We Are Left without a Father Here is a
transnational history of working people's struggles and a gendered analysis of
populism and colonialism in mid-twentieth-century Puerto Rico. At its core are
the thousands of agricultural workers who,
at the behest of the Puerto Rican government, migrated to Michigan in 1950 to
work in the state's sugar beet fields.
The men expected to earn enough income to finally become successful
breadwinners and fathers. To their dismay, the men encountered abysmal working
conditions and pay.
The migrant workers in Michigan and their wives in Puerto
Rico soon exploded in protest. Chronicling the protests, the surprising
alliances that they created, and the Puerto Rican government's response, Eileen
J. Suárez Findlay explains that notions of fatherhood and domesticity were central to Puerto Rican
populist politics. Patriarchal ideals
shaped citizens' understandings of themselves, their relationship to Puerto
Rican leaders and the state, as well as the meanings they ascribed to U.S.
colonialism.
Findlay argues that the motivations and strategies for
transnational labor migrations, colonial policies, and worker solidarities are
all deeply gendered.