Claims to the city: Puerto Rican latinidad amid labors of identity, community, and belonging in Chicago.

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the complex ethnoracial dimensions of identity and space in order to tease out the multiple meanings of latinidad from a historical and ethnographic perspective. By doing so, I focus on the daily lives of Latinos who are situated and situate themselves in a shifting ethnoracial landscape---that is the City of Chicago. The dissertation elucidates the historically contingent productions of space, as a proxy for social relations and geographic terrain. This is undertaken through an examination of the constructedness of the city and the neighborhood and anchoring expressions of latinidad in time and place. By specifically looking at the case of Puerto Ricans in Chicago from the late 1940s to the present, I examine the labors entailed in the continuous construction, restructuring, and transformation of place through discourses of belonging. While the dissertation underscores everyday social practices of identity in Puerto Rican Chicago, these social practices are situated in the context of interracial experiences between Puerto Ricans, other Latinos, and non-Latinos. Explicitly, Chicago Puerto Ricans have produced a Puerto Ricanness deployed in relation to Mexican (im)migrants and residents of the city. Therefore, I suggest the emergence of a Chicago Puerto Ricanness that surfaces in recognition of a latinidad. Merging bodies of research that have independently investigated the geography of the city and latinidad, this dissertation examines transculturized articulations of Puerto Rican latinidad and the fabric of socio-spatial development in the city of Chicago. The dissertation profiles how Puerto Ricans claim the city, and simultaneously produce historically informed instantaneous renditions of latinidad in everyday battles for housing, neighborhoods, and community, as well as public and personal negotiations of identity.