VIRTUAL AUTHOR TALK – Puerto Rican Farmworkers in the Garden State, 1950s-1970s
September 19 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
New Jersey has a rich history of agriculture and is renowned for many types of crops, from peaches, to blueberries, to corn. Those who committed their efforts to the cultivation of those crops tell as rich a history, especially those migrants who came from Latin America and the Caribbean in the Twentieth century. Please join us for Hispanic Heritage Month as Professor Ismael García-Colón discusses the experiences of Puerto Rican farm workers in New Jersey and how those experiences inform us of the larger Hispanic experience in America in the second half of the Twentieth century.
Ismael García-Colón is a Professor of Anthropology at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is a historical and political anthropologist with a focus on immigration and colonial migration, guestworkers, farm labor, U.S. empire, Puerto Rico, and U.S. ethnic and racial histories. García Colón is the author of Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire: Puerto Rican Workers on U.S. Farms (University of California Press, 2020), and winner of the 2020 Frank Bonilla Book Award from the Puerto Rican Studies Association. His research explores the Puerto Rican experience in U.S. farm labor and its relation to U.S. colonialism and immigration policies, and how government policies formed and transformed modern subjectivities in Puerto Rico.
