DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Melissa Coss Aquino

Citizen, Radical, Rebel and Voice

100 Years of Jesús Colón, A Puerto Rican in New York

 

Mar. 2, 2:00pm, Library Law Classroom (NL-314)

On March 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones-Shafroth Act, under which Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory and Puerto Ricans were granted statutory citizenship.  It is vital to note that the 100th anniversary of U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans--March 2, 2017--comes during one of the greatest economic crisis in Puerto Rican history. There is no better place to begin than with Jesús Colón who arrived in 1918 as a 17 year old manual laborer. This presentation will examine Jesús Colón’s published book of vignettes, A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Stories in the context of autobiography studies. In particular it will examine the pressure his writing was under as he set himself the task of setting the record straight about the “reality” of Puerto Ricans in contrast to how they were being portrayed in the mainstream media upon their arrival in New York City. It will include a look at the archives of some of the newspapers and magazine he mentions to compare their depictions with what he attempts to depict in his own work. It will also examine the ways in which his work in the press, and the posthumously collected writings in The Way it Was, were significantly more radical, and how that may have been the result of the pressures in his first published work to represent a respectable communal “I” to counteract the media portrayal of the “Puerto Rican problem.”

 

Melissa Coss Aquino is an assistant professor of English at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. Her article “Jesús y Concha Colón: A Puerto Rican Story of Love, Tradition, Migration and Modernity in Early 20th Century New York” is set to be published in Centro, The Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in 2017.  Her book, "Citizen, Radical, Rebel and Voice: 100 years of Jesús Colón, A Puerto Rican in New York," is under contract and set to be published in 2018.

 

moderator: John Ziegler

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.