[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] The paperback edition of Milagros Denis-Rosario’s Drops of Inclusivity: Racial Formations and Meanings in Puerto Rican Society, 1898-1965 was published this month (January 2023) by SUNY Press. The hardcover edition was released in July 2022.

Description: Drops of Inclusivity examines race and racism on the island of Puerto Rico by combining a wide-angle historical narrative with the individual stories of Black Puerto Ricans. While some of these Afro-Boricuas, such as Roberto Clemente and Ruth Fernández, are well known, others, such as Cecilia Orta, and Juan Falú Zarzuela, have been largely forgotten, if remembered at all. Individually and collectively, their words and lives speak to the persistent power of racial hierarchies and responses to them across periods, from the Spanish-American War at the turn of the twentieth century to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visit to the island in the early 1960s. Drawing on rich archival research, Milagros Denis-Rosario shows how Afro-Boricuas denounced, navigated, and negotiated racism in the fields of education, law enforcement, literature, music, the military, performance, politics, and more. Each instance of self-determination marks a gain in inclusivity—gota a gota, or drop by drop, as the saying goes in Puerto Rico. This study pays homage to them.

Milagros Denis-Rosario is Associate Professor of History in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Drops of Inclusivity: Racial Formations and Meanings in Puerto Rican Society, 1898-1965, Milagros Denis-Rosario
SUNY Press
240 pages
ISBN 9781438488691 (hc) July 2022
ISBN 9781438488684 (pb) January 2023
https://sunypress.edu/Books/D/Drops-of-Inclusivity

For more about the author, see https://hunter.cuny.edu/people/milagros-denis-rosario