Latino New Jersey: Histories, Communities and Politics 

Aldo Lauria Santiago Announcement
Location
New Jersey, United States
Subject Fields
American History / Studies, Chicana/o History / Studies, Immigration & Migration History / Studies, Labor History / Studies, Latin American and Caribbean History / Studies

Latino New Jersey: Histories, Communities and Politics 

 

Proposal for a book of essays

 

Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago and Ulla Dalum Berg, editors

 

Since the 1890s, New Jersey has attracted hundreds of thousands of Caribbean and Latin American migrants. The state’s rich economic history has included a massive manufacturing base, the Port of NY/NJ, strong agricultural production, food processing, high income suburbs, commodities warehousing and distribution centers and complex commercial/supply networks have all contributed to attracting Latino immigrants and secondary step migrants from New York City. The state’s strong unions, public sector, and educational institutions have also played a role in attracting, retaining and setting the stage for its Latino population.

 

Cuban cigar workers settled in the state in the 1890s and Peruvians and other South Americans came to work in the Paterson textile mills beginning in the 1920s. Puerto Rican migrant workers found jobs in New Jersey’s farms, railroads, and chemical and food processing industries starting in the 1940s. Exiles from the Cuban revolution joined Puerto Ricans in the factories of Newark and Union City during the 1960s. Since the 1970s growing numbers of Dominicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, and Mexicans have migrated to New Jersey and brought the state’s Latino population to the national levels: 21% of the State’s population (the seventh largest state population in the US) now identifies as Hispanic or Latino.

 

New Jersey’s Latino population is as complex as that of other states, with large numbers of immigrants, including a sizable undocumented population, and a large second-generation population as well.  Between the 1960s and 1980s, New Jersey was home to the second largest concentration of Cubans and Puerto Ricans in the nation. Since then the population has diversified in terms of national origins and generation.  Between 1990 and 2019, the state has seen a dramatic increase in Latino demographics, from 1.2 million to 1.8 million.

 

Concentrated in majority Latino urban enclaves like Perth Amboy, Union City and North Bergen or in townships like New Brunswick and Dover, Latinos also live dispersed in small townships and suburbs like Fairview and Victory Gardens. Latinos form the majority of two counties and form 20-40% of the population of six other counties. Besides the national origin and ethnic distinctions, Latinos also are socioeconomically diverse, forming a large percentage of the state's poorest population as well as a significant part of its upwardly mobile working and middle classes. The state is home to a large class of small and midsize merchants and industrialists serving the large Latino markets of PA to CT region. 

 

Latino politics and policy in the state, however, have a younger history. During the 1960s and 1970s Latino politics were mostly a matter of community organizing and protest against systematic abuse and exclusion. In these years Puerto Rican and Cuban students left their mark with the creation of Puerto Rican and Latin American Studies at Rutgers’ Livingston College.  Since the 1980s, however, Latinos have developed a more complex presence in the state’s politics.  The emergence of Latino-dominant towns and cities and coalition politics facilitated the incorporation of a few Latino mayors, council persons and many social and community leaders, as well as the election of state-wide officers like US Senator Menendez.

 

Yet, despite this longstanding history and dense contemporary presence, the scholarly and popular literature on Latinos in New Jersey is limited and disperse.  While scholarship on Latinos in other regions of the US has grown by leaps and bounds in the last three decades, there is not a single monograph or essay collection that focuses on Latinos in New Jersey. 

 

This collection will bring together innovative scholarship from different disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of study and address topics including the demographic history of Latinos in the state, Latino migration from gateway cities to suburban towns, Latino urban enclaves, Latino economic and social mobility, Latino students and education, New Jersey Dream Act and in-state tuition act organizing, Latinos and criminal justice reform, Latino electoral politics and leadership, and undocumented communities.

 

Submission:

Interested contributors should submit:

 

  • A detailed 2-3-page abstract that provides:
    • Title
    • Argument of the proposed chapter
    • Sources and evidence
    • Methodology and approach
    • Relevance, importance, contextualization of proposed work
    • Organization, sections
    • Relevant core citations and references
  • A 100-word summary of the proposed chapter
  • A CV
  • Materials and inquiries should be sent to alauria@lcs.rutgers.edu.

Structure of the book:

The book will include an introduction by Lauria-Santiago and Berg, 12-15 chapters, bibliography notes, statistical appendix, and index, for a total length of 300 pages. Essays may include illustrations or photographs.

The essays will be pitched for use in college courses and a general college-educated audience.

The chapters will be organized around three broad themes (subject to revision based on accepted submissions):

 

  1. History and Migration
  2. Communities and Social Life
  3. Policy and Institutions

Dates and Deadlines:

  • The call for abstracts (CFP) will go out December 1, 2019
  • Potential authors will submit required chapter proposal documents: 1 February 2020
  • Notification of acceptance/rejection or requested revisions to proposals will go out March 1, 2020
    • Requested revisions to proposals will be due 15 March 2020
  • Proposal to potential publishers based on accepted/revised abstracts will go out 1 April (or earlier)
  • Full draft manuscripts will be due 1 December 2020 for internal review by editors
  • Notification of acceptance and revisions will be sent to authors on 1 February 2021
    • Requested revisions will be due 15 March 2021
  • Final reviewed manuscript will be sent 1 April 2021 to publisher for external review.

The Editors:

Aldo Lauria-Santiago is a Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Department of Latino & Caribbean Studies and Department of History).  His work has focused on the history of Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the US.  He is co-author of Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights (Routledge 2018) and is completing three books on the history of Puerto Ricans in New York City and New Jersey.  Before this he published two monographs and two edited collections on the history of Central America and the Caribbean.

 

Ulla D. Berg is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University and Director of the Rutgers Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS). A socio-cultural and visual anthropologist by training, her research and teaching focuses on transnational migration and (im)mobility in Latin America and among U.S. Latino populations. Berg is the author of Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S. (NYU Press, 2015) and co-editor of Transnational Citizenship Across the Americas (Routledge, 2014). Berg’s current research examines the effects of U.S. immigrant detention and deportation on migrant communities in Ecuador and Peru.

 

Contact Information

Aldo A. Lauria Santiago

Contact Email
alauria@lcs.rutgers.edu