Silencing Race Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, And...

In Ileana M. Rodrà ­guez-Silva’s book Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico, she reconstructs defining historical moments between the 1870s and 1910s when over-racialized boundaries became politically expedient in the building of a cohesive Puerto Rican national identity. Ileana M. Rodrà ­guez-Silva is an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Washington, Department of History. She earned her B.A. at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has also won an award for writing Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico. In their quest for greater political participation within shifting imperial fields, Puerto Ricans struggled to shape and contain conversations about race. In doing so, they crafted, negotiated, and imposed on others multiple forms of silences while trying to reproduce the idea of a unified, racially mixed, harmonious nation. In this book RodriÃŒ guez primary goal is to reveal how silence and alternate means were used, consciously and unconsciously, to avoid explicit discourse regarding race. Through rigorous research of census records, civil and criminal records, newspaper articles she demonstrates how the narrative of racial fusion and the strategic erasure of indigenous and African narratives have veiled the history of racial struggle in Puerto Rico