Puerto Rican Women and Work: Bridges in Transnational Labor (review)

Puerto Rican Women and Work: Bridges in Transnational Labor. Edited by Altagracia Ortiz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Tables. Notes. Index. xi, 249 pp. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $19.95.

This book is a collection of essays, most of which were previously published or form part of a larger project, which collectively and with the assistance of the editor's adroit introduction propose to construct the history of Puerto Rican working women on the island and in the United States. With this goal in mind, the book is organized as follows: Eileen Boris writes on the needlework industry in Puerto Rico from 1920 to 1945; Altagracia Ortiz on garment workers in New York City from 1920 to 1980; Virginia Sánchez Korrol on substitute auxiliary teachers in New York City in the fifties and sixties; Alice Colón-Warren on female employment in the mid-Atlantic states in the 1970s; Carmen Pérez-Herranz on garment workers in Mayagüez, Rincón, and Añasco in the early eighties; Marya Muñoz-Vázquez on female leadership in the CPNRS (Comité Pro-Rescate de Nuestra Salud), formed in Mayagüez in the late 1980s to demand a safe work environment; Rosa M. Torruellas, Rina Benmayor, and Ana Juarbe on "workfare" mothers who participated in New York's Puerto Rican Studies Center literacy program in the late eighties; and Geraldine J. Casey on clerical workers in the early 1990s at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras. The volume seeks to place Puerto Rican women's labor in the context of colonial capitalism, immigration to the United States, and Latin America's work culture patterns.

The research for this volume in each and every case meets the most rigorous academic standards, as do for the most part authors' expositions of the historiographical debates within which they wish to insert their work. Through Pérez-Herranz interviews with 157 factory women on the western part of the island, for example, we learn that garment workers developed strategies to cope with stress at work and home that were peculiar to their social upbringing and life experience. These included avoiding the company-sponsored union (ILGWU) for conflict solving, forming family networks in the workplace, and recruiting the aid of kin to meet obligations at home. Although unquestionably proletarianized and actively braving the consequences of world capitalism, these women, Pérez-Herranz suggests, continue to rely on traditional support systems to face the day-to-day difficulties.

Similarly, Torruellas, Benmayor, and Juarbe document the empowering effect for 13 welfare mothers in an adult-learner collective of attempting to comply with the Family support Act of 1988. Contrary to Linda Chávez's belief that Puerto Rican women on public assistance lack purpose, the three authors record their subjects' conviction that they have been denied their "cultural citizenship rights" when the culturally valued task of motherhood is not considered work by government agents.

A final example of fine scholarship within an explicit historiographical context is Muñoz-Vásquez's account of the grassroots efforts of the workers in Guanajibo-Castillo Industrial Park to receive compensation for ailments induced by toxic emissions and to secure a safe environment in the future. In promoting their cause in the media and dealing with government agencies and plant supervisors, the female leadership of the ad hoc health committees developed political skills that promoted alternative conceptualizations of social activism.

My only criticism of this book is that it is dated. Even when one takes into account that it was published nearly four years ago, the absence of any kind of reference to "globalization" or "neoliberalism" is suspect. I am not advocating indiscriminately throwing about the current buzzwords for the latest round of unbridled capitalism and classical economics. Rather, I am suggesting that the book would profit from situating Puerto Rico's relationship with the United States in the context...