Liberalism and Identity Politics: Puerto Rican Community Organizations and Collective Action in New York City

This book is a recollection and analysis of ethnic identity in Puerto Rican politics in New York City between 1960 and 1990. The book argues that Puerto Rican politics at the community level was a politics of identity rooted in liberal democratic values. Puerto Ricans provided an example, from the ground up, that transcended the alleged incompatibility between liberalism and identity politics. This relationship was not free of problems but it was workable, contrary to what other scholars have claimed. The book deploys its evidence in the form of a historical collage to suggest that through strategic and demand-protest activities Puerto Ricans articulated and promoted a liberal form of identity politics in which ethnic identity and the idea of group rights provided a platform for the production of both individual and collective goods. The book illustrates how Puerto Ricans in New York City sought participation, recognition, redress of grievances, and inclusion along liberal democratic lines. In other words, their community politics blended liberalism and group rights, in-group identity and out-group commonality, not naturally but empirically, emphasizing the affirmation of difference and a commitment to legitimate institutional norms and values. Thus, the Puerto Rican record of community organization and collective action is a kernel of identity politics cum cultural citizenship within the shell of liberal democratic politics. In this account, the Puerto Rican addition of an identity component to social liberalism stands as a reminder of the ways in which identity politics can be a sustaining force for liberal democratic values.

About the author

José E. Cruz is Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of Liberalism and Identity Politics: Puerto Rican Community Organization and Collective Action in New York City (Centro Press, 2019); Identity and Power: Puerto Rican Politics and the Challenge of Ethnicity (Temple University Press, 1998); Puerto Rican Identity, Political Development, and Democracy in New York, 1960-1990 (Lexington Books, 2017); editor of Latino Immigration Policy: Context, Issues, Alternatives (NYLARNet, 2008); and co-editor of Adiós Borinquen Querida: The Puerto Rican Diaspora, Its History and Contributions (CELAC, 2000).

Reviews

For more than a century New York City has been home to the largest concentration of Puerto Ricans outside of Puerto Rico. In this deeply detailed empirical study, José E. Cruz documents three decades in the history of this community to answer the abstract theoretical question from which the book’s title is derived: “Is identity politics therefore intrinsically illiberal?” (p. 28) … His answer, a resounding no, is built around an analysis of the work of more than two dozen Puerto Rican groups in New York between 1960 and 1990. ~Michael Staudenmaier, The Journal of American History

Puerto Rican activism, according to Cruz, has a fundamental liberal character that when joined with the ethnic politics of the 1960s fueled much of the activism that emerged in boroughs across the city. Puerto Rican politics was not about destroying the system but instead about making it “deliver on its promises.” And for Puerto Ricans, like other Latinos, identity and identity-based movements were at the heart of politics in the postwar politics. ~Felipe Hinojosa, Journal of Urban History

[Contains] a rich historical tapestry of several often taken‐for‐granted Puerto Rican social activists, political strategists, and community organizations engaged in collective action in New York City during the last third of the twentieth century.… I think Liberalism and Identity Politics is worth reading…for its inclusion of many important episodes in Puerto Rican organizational and activist politics in New York City... ~Carlos Figueroa, Political Science Quarterly