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CHOICE Review

Padilla (Northern Illinois University) is not incorrect in observing that ``although Puerto Ricans have lived in this midwest metropolis {{Chicago}} for almost five decades, a systematic study of their way of life is still lacking.'' This book is intended to fill ``this void.'' It examines ``(1) The leading social, economic and political colonial conditions forced upon the Puerto Rican people ...; (2) various barrios {{i.e., neighborhoods}} formed by Puerto Rican migrants in Chicago; (3) the leading factors and conditions which served to influence the accelerated growth of Puerto Rican consciousness in Chicago between 1950-1965; (4) the Division Street riots {{June 1966}}; and (5) factors that generated a relative wide-scale diversity of status and leadership among Puerto Ricans during the 1970s.'' Padilla rejects assimilation for Puerto Ricans because ``the assimilationist approach in America is not only an expression of cultural imperialism but in effect an expression of dehumanization.'' Even the Marxist advocate of independence for Puerto Rico, Manuel Maldonado-Dennis, in his classic The Emigration Dialectic: Puerto Rico and the U.S.A. (CH, Dec '80) rejects such strident and ideological language. Padilla's monograph has value as the only extended (as yet) study of the Chicago Puerto Rican community, but it is hardly a basis for the ideologically charged social policy that Padilla asserts. For ethnic specialists and academic libraries with extensive holdings in urban sociology and ethnic historiography.-F. Cordasco, Montclair State College