Womanhood and Race in Interwar Puerto Rico: Labile Bodies, Colonial Disparities

This book examines ’womanhood’ and ’race’ not only as disputed, converging, and constantly changing categories and lived experiences, but also as interrelated and unequal subjectivities and social realties that shaped all early-twentieth century Puerto Ricans. It empirically documents just how significantly ’womanhood’ and ’race’ were inextricably intertwined in Puerto Rico between 1914 and 1945, a decisive period in U.S. expansionism and in the transformation of this island. Through a comparative analysis and description of specific subjects in early-twentieth century Puerto Rico--mostly Puerto Ricans from different races and social classes, but also some North Americans as well--the book demonstrates the extent to which ’womanhood’ and ’race’ are a more thorny, volatile, and unstable than is commonly acknowledged within Women’s History and Caribbean Studies. This is the first book that examines the relationships between women in Puerto Rico from divergent social classes and racialized positions by mostly focusing on the socioeconomic and racial inequalities among colonized women in Puerto Rico. This is in marked contrast with most Women’s History globally which mainly concentrates either on the lives of elite women or, at best, on the unequal relationships between colonizer- and/or European-descended women vis-à-vis colonized- and/or non-white women. In this book ’womanhood’ and ’race’ are not seen as separate, nor as already given, historically and culturally immutable ’things.’ Those are some of the lacunae this book transcends, primarily in the case of white-Creole women relative to non-white Island women and the images socially constructed of them in Puerto Rico, as well as for racially located Puerto Ricans more broadly. Within this context, the book enables a different reading of already known documents while demonstrating the importance of examining unused or forgotten bibliographical sources, some of them previously untranslated.

Gladys M. Jiménez-Muñoz is an Associate Professor at the Sociology Department at Binghamton University-SUNY.