“Puerto Rican Needleworkers in Colonial Migrations: Deindustrialization as Pathways Lost”

Journal of Working-Class Studies (December 2019): 40-54.

When Puerto Rican needleworkers become visible in the history of the US textile and garment industry, their colonial migrations complicate deindustrialization, and its linear logic collapses. From the perspective of these colonial women, industrialization of Puerto Rico began at the turn of the twentieth century – the same time factories and mills increased in the South. Thousands of women also migrated to the Northeast metropole, especially from the 1950s to the 1970s, when many white workers were mourning the loss of textile and garment jobs. Puerto Rican women moved to the old factories of the Northeast, which had become outposts for large transnational corporations that did not relocate their manufacturing in a direct geographic path but rather spread their processes over any arrangement that offered the best cost-benefit analysis. For Puerto Rican women, employment in the plants of the Northeast during the 1960s and 1970s offered hope rather than despair, and many took pride in meeting their quotas and providing wages for their families. In the 1980s, when the Reagan administration initiated financial policies that made closing old plants a better return on investment, Puerto Rican women mourned the loss of jobs in an industry many experts had already declared ‘dead.’

Book Review, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s, by Traci Parker

Black Perspectives (October 2019): www.aaihs.org.