Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York by Sonia Song-Ha Lee (review)

By documenting and analyzing the many ways in which African Americans and Puerto Ricans, debated, connected, clashed, confronted, and overcame obstacles on the path toward racial justice in New York City during the 1960s and early 1970s, Sonia Song-Ha Lee has made a significant contribution to the study of ethnic and racial politics in the United States. Her book is meticulously researched and beautifully written

Lee shows how African Americans and Puerto Ricans were at times insular in their approach to socio-political action and at times entangled in ways that were both crippling and propulsive. In some instances, the process of working together brought about transformations in consciousness, so that movements that began anchored in concepts of racial and ethnic self-determination would transform into movements bound by working-class solidarity and/or anti-colonial sentiment. According to Lee, synergistic impulses were nurtured by three basic factors: malleable racial identities, the rich tradition of political radicalism of New York City’s history, and the physical proximity between African Americans and Puerto Ricans in neighborhoods and workplaces.

Lee’s analysis is distinctive because it steers away from approaches that either see “Hispanicity” and “blackness” as irreconcilable or reject the idea of commonality between African Americans and Puerto Ricans because it is considered degrading and stifling. Lee further distinguishes herself by rejecting the notion of political alliances as natural if situated within a context of a similar, “objective,” socio-economic status. She is also clear about the scope of action of her protagonists: they are primarily political activists whose trajectories often intersected with the trajectories of others in the fields of music and culture but who were mostly concerned with labour issues, educational access and attainment, poverty, and civil rights.

Lee builds her case systematically, looking first at the types of racial discourse and structure that provided the ideological context for African American and Puerto Rican socio-economic and political participation in Postwar New York City. From that platform she examines the relationship between African Americans and Puerto Ricans in the labour movement. She then pauses to examine two elements that doubled as context for, and promoters of, action: settlement houses and social reform organizations. These agencies not only brought together African Americans and Puerto Ricans in time and space, but also gave opportunities and encouraged them to discuss and test ideas about how to best engage in political action against poverty and racial discrimination. One aspect of this part of the story that is significant is the role that whites played: bringing together blacks and Puerto Ricans, promoting their agendas and making things happen: racial and minority coalitions ultimately cannot succeed, and in some cases cannot even come off the ground, without support from the ethnoracial majority. She then explores the ways African Americans came together and clashed with Puerto Ricans in their pursuit of War on Poverty resources and quality education through community control. Lastly, the book shows how inter-group collaboration crashed, not just because of external obstacles, but also because of internal tensions and divisions.

In her analysis, Lee simultaneously decries culture of poverty approaches while suggesting that when faced with the possibility of having to publicly criticize the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, African American abstention was a tactical decision whereas Puerto Rican reluctance was due to an alleged “art of dissimulation,” (p. 70). Further, while emphasizing that white backlash is hardly the sole explanation for the end of black-Puerto Rican collaboration, she affirms that the failure of the community control movement was “largely because uft president Al Shanker waged a battle against activists of color” (p. 213). Ultimately, she makes it clear that if Puerto Ricans “dissimulated” it was not because they were culturally inclined to do...