Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement : Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City.

In this pathbreaking history of Puerto Rican activism in New York, Lee (Washington Univ. in St. Louis) contends that the city's Latino civil rights movement emerged in close conversation and collaboration with its African American freedom struggle. Rather than relying on fixed notions of seemingly "natural" black/brown conflict, Lee demonstrates that "Puerto Rican-ness" and "blackness" were, in fact, flexible, shifting, and overlapping categories that were mutually constituted and that remained, above all, political identities. Black and Puerto Rican activists created their respective senses of individual and collective selves in the streets--through protracted community organizing, the negotiating of interethnic coalitions, and fierce resistance to powerful politicians, social scientists, social workers, reformers, educators, and trade union leaders. Most of these antagonists were white, but Lee reveals the internal class and political conflicts among Puerto Ricans and African Americans that also contributed to the defeat of the activists' quest for self-determination and community control. Skillfully weaving together the historiographies of postwar urban space, the war on poverty, and the civil rights and black and brown power movements, Lee convincingly demonstrates that interethnic coalitions not only were possible but, indeed, flourished. For general readers, scholars, researchers, and upper-division undergraduates and above, in all ethnic studies disciplines. --Max Krochmal, Texas Christian University