White, Black, Brown: Becoming Puerto Rican in Chicago, Michael Staudenmaier, 2026, University of North Carolina Press
Puerto Ricans who settled in the US during the late 1940s have something to teach Latin Americans in Britain who—on a different continent and generations later—are engaged in a remarkably similar fight for recognition.
The Coalition of Latin Americans in the UK (CLAUK) has been campaigning tirelessly to gain official recognition as a distinct social group, and hence inclusion of the category “Latin American” in the monitoring of ethnicity.
Ask anyone with a Latin American heritage or connection in the country about this—and there are now at least 450,000 Latin Americans residing in the UK—and they will point out with significant frustration that it is long overdue.
CLAUK itself notes that the community remains “invisible, under registered and underrepresented in the policy, strategy, and practice of the country”, and its Latin American Recognition Campaign has been a core platform to advance this cause.
As the organisation says, recognition is a first step of Latin American migrants in the search for better living conditions and access to rights.
While many of these undertake poorly paid roles in conditions of exploitation, their significant economic and cultural contribution to Britain has changed the face of the country.
In the US, when the Puerto Rican diaspora began in earnest in the 1950s, the community faced similar problems—not least how to insert themselves in the existing landscape of identity and its institutional recognition.
Michael Staudenmaier has studied their struggles in Chicago, by no means a city with the largest concentration of people with Puerto Rican heritage in the US, but nonetheless an important one for their history.
His focus in White, Black, Brown: Becoming Puerto Rican in Chicago is how the growth of this community stimulated and conditioned two distinct but related social forces—nationalism and racial identity.
On the one hand, notions of Puerto Rican nationalism repeatedly mobilised migrants to defend their heritage and fight for political rights and freedoms in Chicago and in Puerto Rico itself, while on the other Puerto Ricans also struggled to fit themselves into existing categories in terms that made sense to them.
These struggles threw up as many questions as answers, and the diaspora community found novel solutions despite persistent exploitation, discrimination, and marginalisation.
Staudenmaier examines multiple manifestations of Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago between 1950 and 1999 to explain why and how this community, after flirting first with whiteness and then the Black Freedom Movement, eventually came to understand itself in terms of a broader racial category, “Latinxs”.
What is so novel about this is that this category quite simply did not exist when archipelago-born citizens began migrating to Chicago in large numbers shortly after the second world war.
Indeed, a Eurocentric vision of Puerto Rican national identity and cultural heritage, privileging bourgeois, and often Spanish influences—which eschewed Black and Indigenous contributions—was hitherto something of a default understanding.
Staudenmaier explores a series of “racial projects” within the Puerto Rican diaspora in the US—community struggles organised along racial lines, often against the backdrop of shifting nationalist ideas and trends, which changed how members saw themselves and were seen.
Such initiatives confirm, first and foremost, that race is a sociopolitical construction, but they also demonstrate its role in the creation of national identities. We see similar elements in the UK to those that arose in Chicago in efforts to establish a panethnic front.
The author shows how many early arrivals, aware of the benefits of white privilege in both the Caribbean and the US, crafted racial projects designed to facilitate the incorporation of Puerto Ricans as white citizens, comparable to earlier waves of immigrants.
By the mid-1960s, however, some Puerto Ricans viewed the hard-won victories of the Black Freedom Movement—a term spanning a period of activism from the civil rights struggles to the Black Power assertion—as evidence that they stood to gain more by identifying themselves as Black.
In Chicago, this racial project never got off the ground, and between the 1960s and the 1990s the strategy of developing panethnic alliances with other Latin Americans, particularly Mexicans, shaped the novel category of Latinx identity that has largely endured.
A misinformed assumption is that demographic notions such as Latino/a/x have always existed in the racially divided US, but the truth is these terms are novel, established only during the second half of the twentieth century.
And Staudenmaier suggests that Chicago, because it was home to large populations of both Puerto Ricans and Mexicans during this period—and because both groups suffered similar inequalities—has often been seen as “ground zero” for its emergence.
A key phase of this development was the emergence of the Latin American Defence Organisation (LADO) in the aftermath of the so-called Division Street Riots—civil unrest among Puerto Ricans in Chicago in June 1966 following an altercation with police.
It is the contested and intrinsically unclear nature of what in fact defines the category of Latino that is arguably its strength, with ambiguity enabling those who use it to bend the definition of panethnicity in an instrumental way depending on their needs.
One product of this according to the author has been the fact that the interplay between sophisticated notions of panethnic Latinidad promoted from below by community activists and a version of Latinx identity embraced by governmental entities has flattened differences between Puerto Ricans and Mexicans.
It has also had an impact both on Puerto Rican nationalism itself, as well as for the militancy that characterised the initial emergence of this new Latinx identification.
Staudenmaier suggests that by the 1980s the promotion of an emergent sense of Latinx identity shared across communities had created a tangible electoral constituency, further institutionalising the category in mainstream political discourse.
At the same time, such successes were achieved by deemphasising the past “insurgent militancy” from which had arisen commitments to panethnic Latinidad in the first place.
The author writes: “Instead, Puerto Rican nationalists in Chicago increasingly embraced a form of multicultural antiracism that demanded a progressive version of diversity, while in exchange tacitly accepting the persistence of the racialised political system they had previously aimed to overthrow.”
And local gains in terms of improved rights and lives within the diaspora may have arguably come despite the failures of—or even at the expense of—Puerto Rican nationalism itself.
Referring to what is arguably the greatest triumph of this embrace by Puerto Ricans of Latinidad—the successful campaign to force President Bill Clinton in 1999 to grant clemency to 14 prisoners, many of them veterans of the insurgent tendency—the author is sanguine.
While this victory was real, Staudenmaier writes, “This was no utopia—Puerto Rico remained a colony, Chicago’s Puerto Rican community was still disproportionately poor and marginalised, and racism against US Latinxs persisted …”
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Categories: Caribbean, Puerto Rico, United States