The Near Northwest Side Story

Book excerpt: "An original and significant contribution to Puerto Rican, Latino, and Latin American studies, drawing on the perspective of ordinary men and women. Gina Pérez's fine work is based on intensive research in two distant but interconnected places, conducted by a perceptive and sensitive observer-participant, herself immersed in two languages, cultures, and nations. Clearly written and cogently argued, her book will be of great interest to students of migration, ethnicity, and gender."—Jorge Duany, author of The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States "In this fresh, textured, original, multi-sited ethnography, Pérez traces the changing ways that Puerto Ricans have experienced poverty, displacement, and discrimination, and how they imagine and build deeply rooted but transnational lives through the extended families, dense social networks, and meaningful communities. Pérez exposes the limits of citizenship for racialized minorities; the contradictory, constrained agency in community mobilizations and urban uprisings; and the often-failed promise of transnational migration as a place to build a counter-hegemonic political space."—Brett Williams, Professor of Anthropology, American University "This is a fascinating account of transnational migration as survival strategy, one bound up in kin, region, and economic restructuring."—Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows