Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Rodriguez's book is a series of related essays dealing primarily with what has been done to the Puerto Rican community (especially in New York City) instead of what the community is doing for itself. Missing are the inner dynamics of a study "from the inside out," which would have been most valuable. Rodriguez does cover in satisfactory fashion the nature and context of the Puerto Rican colonial nexus and its impact on past and present ethnicity. She also offers salient information on such areas of emphasis as the schools and the Puerto Ricans, political and economic data, and housing issues (especially in the South Bronx). The author has certainly delved deep into the relevant records and she provides material that will be useful to persons interested in this aspect of urban ethnicity. However, there is little here that is new to the even relatively well informed observer, or to a careful reader of The New York Times. Rodriguez also devotes precious space to material of dubious value, including a long and highly confused description of racial terminology among Puerto Ricans and an account of the short-lived Menudo singing group. The author's writing style is rather wooden, and the text is complicated by a system of endnotes that contain various subthemes of the narrative flow instead of references. Caveats aside, Rodriguez's book is worth acquisition by most libraries because it presents relatively up-to-date data in an accessible format. N. Lederer Thomas A. Edison State College