White, Black, Brown: Becoming Puerto Rican in Chicago

Join us for a special author event in honor of Latine Heritage Month! Facing persistent exploitation, discrimination, and marginalization in the second half of the twentieth century, generations of Puerto Rican organizers and activists drew on multiple competing versions of nationalism to challenge the racial order in Chicago, one of America’s most segregated cities. Initially, both supporters and opponents of Puerto Rican independence promoted the assimilation of fellow migrants as white citizens. The three-night-long Division Street Riots marked a fundamental pivot point in 1966, ending the pursuit of whiteness and opening the door to waves of nationalist militancy during the 1970s. By the 1980s and 1990s, Puerto Rican nationalists in Chicago had entered electoral politics, building a broader notion of Latinidad even as they softened its radical edges.

Drawing on an extraordinary array of archival material, much of it previously inaccessible, Michael Staudenmaier highlights cultural and political projects profoundly informed by nationalist sentiments, from beauty pageants and parades to protests and bombings to elections and legal battles. Revealing how nationalism became a key site of racial formation for Puerto Ricans in Chicago, White, Black, Brown: Becoming Puerto Rican In Chicago shows how they understood themselves and demanded to be seen by their neighbors and the world.

Michael is an independent scholar living in Chicago. He received his PhD in history from the University of Illinois and taught for more than a decade at various universities in Illinois and Indiana. Since 2020 he has been an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Puerto Rican Studies Association. He is the author of Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986 (AK Press, 2012) and co-author of We Go Where They Go: The Story of Anti-Racist Action (PM Press, 2023), as well as numerous shorter works published in both academic and popular venues…