Between Boricua and black

The "Civil Rights Movement" has been remembered primarily as a southern movement, led by church leaders and college students, and fought through student sit-ins and marches. The movement has been limited to a black and white paradigm, but it was much broader geographically and more racially diverse in reality. This dissertation explores the struggle for racial equality in the 1950s through the 1970s by focusing on the interactions between African Americans and Puerto Ricans in New York City. Many Puerto Ricans engaged in the civil rights movement and worked visibly and intensely alongside African Americans. Most were poor migrants who came to New York City in search of wartime jobs. They arrived at the same time as many black migrants from the South. Indeed the two groups had much in common with each other--their non-white racial identity and economic status. In a series of shifting alliances, they competed and cooperated with one another in regard to their political and economical interests. Puerto Ricans, as the second largest minority group in New York, both associated and disassociated from African Americans in the postwar era by identifying themselves as an "ethnic minority." Although Puerto Ricans initially self-identified as "Hispanic immigrants" in the 1950s, their increasing racialization under the literature of the "culture of poverty" and the rise of the black civil rights movement led them to identify themselves as a "minority" group alongside blacks. The War on Poverty catapulted an alliance between blacks and Puerto Ricans as it led both of them to combat poverty and racism by creating community control movements within their schools and neighborhoods. Ironically, the more Puerto Ricans made alliances with black Americans in civil rights battles and adopted common political strategies, the more they identified themselves as distinctly "Puerto Rican," creating an ambiguous relationship with black Americans.