Defending Their Own in the Cold: The Cultural Turns of U.S. Puerto
Ricans explores U.S. Puerto Rican culture in past and recent contexts.
The book presents East Coast, Midwest, and Chicago cultural production
while exploring Puerto Rican musical, film, artistic, and literary
performance. Working within the theoretical frame of cultural,
postcolonial, and diasporic studies, Marc Zimmerman relates the
experience of Puerto Ricans to that of Chicanos and Cuban Americans,
showing how even supposedly mainstream U.S. Puerto Ricans participate in
a performative culture that embodies elements of possible cultural
"Ricanstruction." Defending Their Own in the Cold examines various
dimensions of U.S. Puerto Rican artistic life, including relations with
other ethnic groups and resistance to colonialism and cultural
assimilation. To illustrate how Puerto Ricans have survived and created
new identities and relations out of their colonized and diasporic
circumstances, Zimmerman looks at the cultural examples of Latino
entertainment stars such as Jennifer Lopez and Benicio del Toro, visual
artists Juan Sánchez, Ramón Flores, and Elizam Escobar, as well as
Nuyorican dancer turned Midwest poet Carmen Pursifull. The book includes
a comprehensive chapter on the development of U.S. Puerto Rican
literature and a pioneering essay on Chicago Puerto Rican writing. A
final essay considers Cuban cultural attitudes towards Puerto Ricans in
a testimonial narrative by Miguel Barnet and reaches conclusions about
the past and future of U.S. Puerto Rican culture. Zimmerman offers his
own "semi-outsider" point of reference as a Jewish American Latin
Americanist who grew up near New York City, matured in California, went
on to work with and teach Latinos in the Midwest, and eventually married
a woman from a Puerto Rican family with island and U.S. roots.
