Seams of Empire: Race And Radicalism in Puerto Rico and the United States by Carlos Alamo-Pastrana (review)

This is a wonderfully balanced account of points of overlap between African American journalists and Puerto Rican activists from 1940 to 1972. The book brings to light connections that have been neglected on both sides of these two fields of cultural studies. Alamo-Pastrana clearly and with great impact lays out the challenges and convergences of Puerto Ricans and African Americans around ideas of race and empire. Focusing on the imbrications around race, empire, gender, and politics, the book examines overlooked histories that were disruptive of race, colonialism, and cultural practices. It uncovers the synergies of overlapping narratives about race and power among Puerto Ricans, the Black diaspora, and US liberal thinkers.

Expertly researched and accessibly written, the book reinscribes significant historical contexts from before, during, and after the era it explores within “the contradictions and unforeseen identifications between Puerto Rican activists and African American and white American liberal writers in the middle decades of the twentieth century” (12).

Alamo-Pastrana abandons the comparative approach typical in contemporary scholarship about race because, he says, “such comparisons contribute to a distorted historiography of what is, in fact, an intimate relationship between the Puerto Rican and American racial regimes.” He further adds that the production of comparative differences between the two, “ultimately re-centers whiteness and white supremacy in both national contexts” (6). In particular, he argues against the myth of racial democracy, one of the cornerstones of Puerto Rican national culture on both left and right.

The book offers in-depth analyses and provides crucial historical background surrounding the complicated relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico and other parts of Latin America. It does so by delving into many historically significant matters in the United States and Puerto Rico, among them the Plan Chardón in the 1930s concerning land reform and corporate sugar interests, Luis Muñoz Marín’s complicated ascent to power, Myrdal’s 1944 study of the treatment of African Americans in the United States, Truman’s Point Four Program, the 1948 Ley de la Mordaza, and many more.

To present the complexities of the racial construction in those two areas, Alamo-Pastrana sets the stage using Avery Gordon’s concept of “hauntings”: looking at subjects and stories that have been treated as insignificant. “The Puerto Rican Blueprint” (Chapter 1) provides thorough background to the rise of black radicalism and the black press in the United States and examines the writings of African American journalists who visited Puerto Rico during the decades studied. Throughout the book, Alamo-Pastrana finds connections between local conditions and global formations in order to lay bare common struggles for racial justice. In this chapter, and the next, he explores how “the institutionalized and racialized nature of the second-class citizenship imposed upon Puerto Ricans made them valuable points of imbrication for black journalists” (35).

“Dispatches from the Colonial Outpost” (Chapter 2) analyzes the writing of Chicago Defender journalist Denton Brooks and Pittsburgh Courier guest contributor George Little. The detailed groundwork begins with the organization of Puerto Rico’s local government around land reform during the 1940s, a structural point of reference for black journalists who later became disenchanted with the island when its local political leadership shifted away from independence. Brooks offered a thorough analysis of the depredations of the sugar industry on the island. The analysis of widespread poverty in Puerto Rico led him to a conclusion: “If Puerto Ricans have citizenship, why do they agitate, what aren’t they satisfied? It’s because they don’t have full rights, their citizenship resembles in many respects that of the disenfranchised white and colored southern sharecroppers” (49–50). He and other African-American journalists linked Puerto Rico’s economic model with that of the US south, and questioned the assumption that Puerto Rico did well under the management of the United States. As Alamo-Pastrana...