The “Puerto Rican Problem” in Postwar New York City
Review By Kenneth M. Donovan
Perhaps most significantly, the book sheds light on how ideas about Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rico itself were constructed and incorporated into public policy and popular culture. According to Meléndez, those ideas have had staying power. As the island of Puerto Rico faces ongoing challenges in the present, from crippling debt to the privatization of its electric power, it seems that, to quote Melendez, “the ‘Puerto Rican Problem’ has not disappeared. It has simply changed shape.”
Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York
Review by Elizabeth M. Marcello and Gail Radford
The New York City metropolitan area boasts an impressive infrastructural network that moves people, trains, motor vehicles, freight, ships, and airplanes. At the center of this network is the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the subject of Philip Mark Plotch and Jen Nelles’s Mobilizing the Metropolis, which they offer as a “reflective history” of this particular agency, but also as a series of “lessons” for other agencies around the country built on the public authority model.
Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism
Review By Edgardo Meléndez
For Power, Puerto Rico’s colonial status greatly undermines the honesty of America’s “Good Neighbor” policy towards Latin American countries in the 1930s. She recounts the PRNP’s continued efforts to obtain support for its cause into the 1940s and argues that it was crucial in getting important sectors in several Latin American countries to challenge US policy towards the region.
Streets in Play: The Playstreets Photography of Katrina Thomas
By Rebekah Burgess and Mariana Mogilevich
Photographs of recreation programs like this one were commissioned to offer visual proof that, after four summers of nation-wide protest and violence, starting in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1964, the city was compensating for a long-term lack of investment in low-income, racially segregated neighborhoods…. A few of Thomas’ images were utilized for official purposes, reproduced in pamphlets to attract or to thank program sponsors, but her exceptional eye transcended the municipal task. Her lens recorded the city's sponsored activities as well as the more candid action at the edge of the frame. These captivating, impromptu images provide a rare perspective on a distressed urban landscape, privileging a child’s-eye view of the possibilities for play and delight.
Boy with the Bullhorn: A Memoir and History of ACT UP New York
Review by Rachel Pitkin
In six parts, Ron Goldberg’s Boy with the Bullhorn: A Memoir and History of ACT UP guides readers through what can often seem like a dizzying terrain of AIDS-related political networks, medical jargon, and direct-action campaigns. The tour is intimate and strikingly honest. Goldberg, a self-described unsuspecting activist, charts his growth from an aspiring theater actor to core ACT UP member and finally—with the publication of The Boy with the Bullhorn—to a “witness.”
Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics
Review by Michael Woodsworth
Chisholm entered Congress as a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, a staunch defender of the Great Society, an advocate of expanded welfare benefits, and an unapologetic feminist. Despite her reputation as a “fiery idealist,” Curwood argues, she was also “ruthlessly pragmatic.” Chisholm was a coalition builder: she helped to found the Congressional Black Caucus as well as the National Women’s Political Caucus…. The 1972 presidential primary run remains Chisholm’s signature moment.… Chisholm may have been a transformational figure, but, as Curwood shows, she was also a product of her times. Her rise, accomplishments, and setbacks match, almost too perfectly, the arc of 20th-century American liberalism.
The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City
Review by Erika Kitzmiller
Despite its global reputation as a proudly diverse and progressive city, New York City public schools remain deeply segregated and inequitable. Bonastia covers two periods in which officials considered and local residents pushed for integration: from Brown v. Board (1954) to the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s and then from the early 2010s to the present. He asserts that he chose these two periods because they were the only times in recent history when there was any hope of enacting and implementing policies and programs to advance integration and equity.
Making Book on the Rez: A Hundred Years of Watershed Inquietude
Review by Gerard Koeppel
Lucy Sante’s Nineteen Reservoirs is an odd little book. “I would like simply to give an account of the human costs,” she concludes the Introduction, “an overview of the trade-offs, a summary of unintended consequences.”…Readers uninitiated in the history of New York’s water supply and watershed-dweller psychosis will find a useful if derivative primer.
A Seat at the Table: LGBTQ Representation in New York Politics, Exhibit at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives
Reviewed by Danica Stompor
The beating heart of Gourjon-Bieltvedt and Petrus’s exhibit is turning these testimonies into a fervent call to young people for optimism and for action…It has been far from a linear path, but for many people my age and younger, the past decades have featured an enormous increase in visibility and significant legal wins for queer people, particularly in New York. A Seat at the Table inserts us into the lives and tactics of the city’s elected officials who made these gains possible while resisting the attitude that progress is inevitable…A Seat at the Table is attuned to the small moments that transform residents into leaders.
Placemaker and Displacer: How Transit Shaped New York
By Polly Desjarlais
Before 1950, a vibrant multi-ethnic, residential neighborhood known as Little Syria existed at the very bottom of Manhattan. A concentration of immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine (countries collectively known then as Greater Syria) settled on Lower Washington Street beginning in the 1880s… As in the case of Chinatown, the transit connections between Little Syria and Brooklyn became instrumental in the community’s transplantation and survival… nearly the whole neighborhood was razed in the 1940s to make way for the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (Hugh L. Carey Tunnel). . . In the case of Little Syria, the city’s transportation demands both displaced people and provided a means of resettlement in other parts of the city.
