Extract

This book introduces readers to the ghastly plight of Puerto Rican landless workers and the populist state land reforms of the 1940s to the 1960s that were intended to help them. With a methodology that combines social history with social anthropology, Ismael García-Colón relies heavily on published accounts of the socioeconomic history of twentieth-century Puerto Rico, adding some colorful, and often personal, anecdotes from ethnographic research in Parcelas Gándara, a small neighborhood in Cidra, a town in the mountainous interior of the island. The author documents the evolution of this community from an emic perspective, sharing multiple emotional links with the community. Parcelas Gándara was his home, his community, and it still is the home of his childhood memories and where his family and many friends currently live. Thus in this account García presents his personal “testimony of the transformation that occurred in Puerto Rico and in [his] community” (p. 11–12).

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