| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies. By Carmen Teresa Whalen. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. xvi, 309 pp. Cloth, $74.50, ISBN 1-56639-835-5. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 1-56639-836-3.)

Carmen Teresa Whalen's From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia represents the best of several writings I have seen in English on the social and cultural history of Puerto Ricans in the United States. Whalen's magnificent prose tells the story of several generations of Puerto Rican families from the municipalities of Salinas and San Lorenzo who have chosen the path of migration to Philadelphia. Her detailed descriptions and rich analyses are the result of research in firsthand archival records and documents on Puerto Rico's planned migration and show how that policy formed one of the many pillars of the country's economic development strategy early in the 1940s. Whalen's description does not yield to needless sociological abstraction about system, development, and change, however. Instead, Whalen privileges the story of families and their kin-based mobility through locality and time. She speaks of changes in the culture-based modes of everyday life, brought about by the end of Puerto Rico's corporate sugar absentee period. They affected economic survival, poverty, marriage, and separation. At the same time she addresses significant macropolitical and economic variables in relation to the development strategies, political changes taking place in Puerto Rico, and population flows to such places as New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

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