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...human rights, and expanded education opportunities. The full stories of these episodes, especially stories about the key roles labor and community activists played have yet to be written. As Victor M. Munoz concluded, "Annals of Mexican-American empowerment do not deal at length with the significance of organized labor, let alone organized labor in the Southwest as a factor in empowerment" (1991, 99). This also holds for Puerto Ricans, who were active as leaders and nonelite participants in community and labor movements in New York City, and other places, during the decades before and after the Second World War.
Political: Puerto Ricans began arriving in Northeastern cities, especially New York City, very early in the twentieth century and played a prominent role in community and labor politics, if not the electoral arena. Even though the Puerto Rican House of Delegates formally rejected U.S. citizenship in 1917, the U.S. Congress imposed citizenship on Puerto Ricans that same year with the Jones Act in order to maintain a supply of cheap and mobile labor for industries in the Northeast and plantations in the South. For many decades, Puerto Rican residents, although citizens, were treated by white leaders as merely cheap laborers who had no rights that true Americans needed to respect.
Religion: IN PUERTO RICO THESE DAYS, religion is on the rise. Just when the populace seems fed up with partisan politics and turned off by the endless stream of scandals coming from indicted public officials, the churches and church leaders seem to have found the right formula for inspiring Puerto Ricans. This is not just a case of more people going to church. Public respect for religious spokespersons has increased; they speak both for more people and to larger numbers of Puerto Ricans. Increased attention to religious leaders seems to have come at the expense of the politicians...
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