Mérida M. Rúa. A Grounded Identidad: Making New Lives in Chicago's Puerto Rican Neighborhoods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xviii + 234 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-976026-8.
Reviewed by Mauricio Castro (Purdue University)
Published on H-Urban (September, 2014)
Commissioned by Robert C. Chidester (The Mannik & Smith Group, Inc.)
Group Identity and the Scholar’s Responsibility
Late in Mérida M. Rúa’s excellent A Grounded Identidad: Making New Lives in Chicago’s Puerto Rican Neighborhoods, the author quotes her own dissertation, where she identifies herself as “one of ‘those people’ who literally conducted research at ‘home’” (p. 127). Rúa makes it clear that her monograph is not about her personal story, but that of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community and their neighborhoods. In the process of conducting her fieldwork, however, she came to realize that she herself was a historical actor in this narrative. This realization results in a work that probes deeply at the creation of this group’s identity and that openly challenges the long-standing black/white binary that has dominated American urban history for decades.
Rúa describes her project as being “neither a traditional community history nor a conventional neighborhood ethnography,” but instead a work that blends the methods of both disciplines in its approach to its subjects (p. xvii). This approach is an attempt to understand the nature of group identity as ephemeral and shaped by historical circumstances. Rúa describes identidad as complex and fluid, and she states that it “needs to be recognized and explored as ‘grounded,’ as rooted in both time and place, and as manifest in everyday exchanges with people within and beyond one’s own ethnoracial groups” (p. xv). This conception requires the reader to move past established views not only of Chicago but also of most American cities as being defined by the polarization between black and white communities. As one might expect, the text is replete with instances in which the lived experiences of the city’s Puerto Rican residents challenged this perspective on race, but Rúa probes even further by explaining how the interactions between several groups served to shape both group identities and spatial relations in Chicago. Her historical actors are largely Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican descent, but the landscape presented in A Grounded Identidad is also home to Mexican, Cuban, and Japanese Americans who complicate the city’s racial identity. The experiences of the city’s Puerto Ricans in interacting with these other groups “would point to connective histories among communities of color within and beyond a black-and-white only schema” (p. 79).
Through a combination of archival research and extensive fieldwork, Rúa demonstrates that the racial landscape in Chicago is far more complex than it has been traditionally understood. Communities and individuals attempted to forge alliances across ethnic and racial lines. The interactions between Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and African Americans saw these Chicago residents seek to “incorporate its special concerns with broader issues, negotiating participation and working toward collaboration, as allies, often under tentative and fragile circumstances” (p. 101). The Puerto Rican community makes a particularly illustrative example of the confluences and divergences of experience in relation to other groups. While they shared an immigrant experience, a common language, and a degree of common culture with the Mexicans they encountered in Chicago, which Rúa refers to as their latinidad, the Puerto Ricans’ American citizenship and their cultural divergences prevented full identification between them and Chicago’s Mexicans. While there were cultural and racial cleavages between the city’s African Americans and the Puerto Ricans, both groups shared second-class citizenship in the United States.
These differences and similarities ensured that there would be often unexpected cross-cultural connections. There is, for example, the case of a protest against the U.S. Navy’s weapon testing on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques in May of 2001. During the protest, Enrique Obregón, a Mexican-born director of a Latino social service agency on the city’s North Side, joined a human chain of protesters that stretched across Chicago’s city limits from north to south. This protest is noteworthy not only because the protesters included people of many nationalities and ethnoracial groups, but also because when a black bus driver, his passengers, and others angrily confronted the demonstrators for blocking traffic, Obregón cried out “Rosa Parks!” and the bus driver stopped arguing (pp. 96-97). This incident illustrates cross-cultural alliances and how cultural signifiers could be used by one group to illustrate their struggle to members of other groups. As Rúa explains, in the attempt to “enter into meaningful alliances, both individuals and communities recognized and misrecognized themselves and one another” (emphasis in the original, p. 101).
Rúa’s themes all intersect in her most extensively documented and most fascinating example, that of the Bishop family. The marriage of Georgina Rios, a Puerto Rican woman, and Julius Bishop, an African American from the Deep South, and the life and family this couple built is, in many ways, the axis around which A Grounded Identidad spins. Rúa had known the Bishop family since she was a girl, but the family and their business, the Caribe Funeral Home, became central to her research while she was conducting fieldwork. Through the Bishops’ connection to the surrounding community Rúa gained access to the larger Puerto Rican community and their experiences. More important, the themes of race, class, and identity that underlie the book all converge in the experiences of the Bishop family. Julius Bishop’s adoption into the city’s Hispanic communities and the controversies in his family regarding his marriage to Gina convey the fluid nature of race and ethnicity in a complex social environment. Through the Bishops, Rúa is also able to detect a working-class identification by more affluent members of the Puerto Rican community (p. 76). The funerals held at the Caribe Funeral Home proved themselves to be ceremonies where those who knew the deceased could evaluate their life and in doing so reflect “the values and experience of the community itself” (p. 104). As Rúa explains, “a cultural identity and urban identity had been negotiated in death, as it has been in life” (p. 124). The author’s access to this family and their business provided significant amounts of evidence and brought about important theoretical insights.
The relationship between Rúa and the Bishops also drives much of the author’s self-reflection, her questioning of her own identity, and her place as both community member and researcher. By living in an apartment above the funeral home, Rúa not only gained important community access, but also became enmeshed in the lives of the Bishops. During her time as a researcher, Rúa was often called upon to aid the Bishops either by working in the funeral home or providing Gina Bishop with rides. For her, “helping out was a blending of what a neighbor and friend would do and of my own need to reciprocate” (p. 107). After her research, Rúa was called to return to Chicago to eulogize Julius Bishop after his death. In her dissertation’s discussion of her identity, reproduced in the monograph, Rúa ponders the dilemmas she encounters as a “native” researcher for whom the research site was home. “As a result,” she writes, “I do not have the luxury of leaving the site without facing the consequences of what I write. And yet, that very accountability has made this undertaking a worthwhile project” (p. 127). This level of self-reflection will seem foreign, even uncomfortable, to many historians. For the most part, we prefer to keep the connections we develop with our subjects unseen or relegated to the acknowledgements. The importance of a monograph such as A Grounded Identidad is that it challenges long-held disciplinary conceptions and has the potential to move the discipline in new directions.
The book, however, is not without its faults. Rúa’s talent for bringing the Puerto Rican community to life in later chapters is not as evident early in the monograph. It seems as if the earlier sections, based more heavily on archival research, lack the vitality she brings to the events and trends covered later. Rúa’s interest in Puerto Rican anthropologist and activist Elena Padilla seems out of place with the rest of the monograph. It is not that Padilla’s contributions and experiences are not important, but a stronger parallel between her work and actions and Rúa’s own questioning about her role as “native” researcher could have strengthened the early sections of the monograph and enriched the author’s questions about her responsibility to her community.
These flaws do not preclude A Grounded Identidad from being an important contribution to the literature on urban history and race relations in the United States. Rúa joins a growing group of scholars seeking to challenge the primacy of the black/white binary in American historical scholarship. This book would be particularly useful in graduate-level classes. The author’s astute criticism would be instructive for graduate students, but her extended meditation on her role as a scholar, the different approaches to historical subjects, and her process in researching and writing are likely to spark fascinating and fruitful discussions.
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Citation:
Mauricio Castro. Review of Rúa, Mérida M., A Grounded Identidad: Making New Lives in Chicago's Puerto Rican Neighborhoods.
H-Urban, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40923
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