Defending their own in the cold: The cultural turns of US Puerto Ricans by Marc Zimmerman
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D e f e n d i n g t h e i r o w n i n t h e co l d : T h e c u l t u r a l turns of US P uerto Ricans Marc Zimmerman University of Illinois Press, Chicago, IL, 2011, 232pp., $55.00, ISBN: 978-0252036460 (hardcover)
Latino Studies (2014) 12, 163–164. doi:10.1057/lst.2014.9
I know I have officially visited Chicago when I take a ride to Paseo Boricua, and can see murals designed by Gamaliel Ramirez or run into Eduardo Arocho walking down the block. No matter how much time passes between visits to Paseo, it is a community that neither forgets its members nor stops supporting them. Reading Defending Their Own in the Cold allows me explore the historical legacy set by earlier generations of Chicago Puerto Ricans, artistic and cultural leaders who have influenced my mentors and colleagues. Marc Zimmerman’s discussion of Chicago and Midwest Puerto Ricans’ significance to the greater diaspora affirms the cultural and political wealth I can always access when going back home. Zimmerman’s text puts the life and legacy of Midwest and Chicago Puerto Ricans’ literary collaborations on the page. Defending Their Own in the Cold collects Zimmerman’s essays that focus on the divergent ways Puerto Ricans in the United States stake a cultural and political claim in literature, material art and other media. Featuring revised articles he had initially published in the 1990s, the collection offers a lens into Puerto Rican contemporary cultural politics. Within the first pages, Zimmerman situates himself as an intellectual and cultural witness, someone politically and personally invested in
Puerto Rican Chicago’s diasporic cultural and literary legacy. No matter how much of his life experience was/is immersed in cultural interactions in the United States and in Puerto Rico, he acknowledges his distance to the material since he is not being Puerto Rican; however, cultural and political collaboration with key literary and artistic figures such as Eduardo Arocho, Gamaliel Ramirez and Pedro Pietri, shaped Zimmerman’s historical solidarity with Puerto Rico’s island- and US-based communities. His lifelong interactions with Puerto Ricans allow him to bear witness to what he has experienced and highlight his appreciation and respect for Puerto Rican resilience. Zimmerman’s ethos is specifically grounded in countering Oscar Lewis’ thesis regarding Puerto Ricans’ innate culture of poverty. Defending Their Own in the Cold contextualizes the significance of Puerto Rican cultural workers’ challenge to Lewis’ thesis by framing their work within Latino and Puerto Rican cultural politics. Before reviewing the works of key Puerto Rican poets and artists, Zimmerman draws on Latino popular culture and performance to situate the other factors that he counters in the essays. Because of historic misrepresentation in popular media, the manner in which Puerto Ricans defend their own gets lost
© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
Vol. 12, 1, 163–164
Book Review
in translation. Puerto Ricans, like Jennifer Lopez,
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