Puerto Ricans maintain a vibrant identity that bridges two very different places - the island of Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. Whether they live on the island, in the States, or divide time between the two, most imagine Puerto Rico as a separate nation and view themselves primarily as Puerto Rican. At the same time, Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, and Puerto Rico has been a U.S. commonwealth since 1952. Jorge Duany uses previously untapped primary sources to bring new insights to questions of Puerto Rican identity, nationalism, and migration. Drawing a distinction between political and cultural nationalism, Duany argues that the Puerto Rican "nation" must be understood as a new kind of translocal entity with deep cultural continuities. He documents a strong sharing of culture between island and mainland, with diasporic communities tightly linked to island life by a steady circular migration. Duany explores the Puerto Rican sense of nationhood by looking at cultural representations produced by Puerto Ricans and considering how others - American anthropologists, photographers, and museum curators, for example - have represented the nation.
His sources of information include ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interviews, surveys, censuses, newspaper articles, personal documents, and literary texts.
- ISBN10 0807861472
- ISBN13 9780807861479
- Publish Date 15 October 2003 (first published 9 September 2002)
- Publish Status Unknown
- Out of Print 23 April 2014
- Publish Country US
- Imprint The University of North Carolina Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 368
- Language English