Puerto Rican Studies in the City University of New York: The First 50 Years

Authored by leading scholars in the field of Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies, this volume is an important milestone in documenting the power of collective consciousness and action to create change in and access to higher education for all peoples. The book features a comprehensive fifty-year trajectory in the field of Puerto Rican Studies (PRS) at the City University of New York in a series of critical essays on scholarship, the social sciences, bilingual education, media, and its counterparts beyond CUNY, in addition to retrospectives from founders of the field, current professors, and alumni. The student founders of PRS, its pioneering faculty and groundbreaking interdisciplinary focus on the intersectionalities of race, culture, gender, power, and class, elucidate a contentious path to forging an anti-racist and decolonial pedagogy. The critical analysis in the scholarship found in this volume assesses the current status of Puerto Rican Studies in continuing to meet its academic mission, challenges and opportunities, and points to future directions in the 21st century.