E3W Literature | University of Texas

Gina Pérez
The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families
University of California Press, 2004
276 Pages
$21.95

Reviewed by Kritika Agarwal

In The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families, Gina Pérez uses the backdrop of Chicago, Illinois and San Sebastian, Puerto Rico to explore the transnational lives of Puerto Ricans and how movement between two cities that have “a long transnational history of circulating people, capital, information and ideologies” affects their identity, sense of belonging, and economic status. Using ethnographies and historical research, Pérez reveals how immigration by Puerto Ricans and migration in general is “about power relations—between countries, economies, and individuals—and it raises important questions about the nature and scope of power hierarchies, including those of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation.” Pérez is specifically interested in gendered power relations and how they affect issues of migration, labor, and access to resources such as education, housing, and kin networks.

The Near Northwest Side Story describes the lives of people who lead highly mobile and transnational lives. Pérez is open about her methodological techniques and keenly aware of her insider/outsider status as a researcher. She follows the tracks of her subject, first as a GED instructor to a mixed-age group of students at a cultural center in Chicago’s Near Northwest Side, and second as a worker in her aunt’s neighborhood store in San Sebastian where she had the opportunity to observe, conduct interviews, and converse with the local populace. By the end of the book, it is apparent that Pérez has formed long lasting relationships with her subjects and deeply cares about them and the Puerto Rican community in general. In fact, one could read in The Near Northwest Side Story an argument for urgent alteration in policies that hurt Puerto Ricans in Chicago: her clear prose, written both for an academic and a popular audience, lends her work the aura of activist scholarship even though Pérez never actively lobbies for policy change in this book.

Pérez makes several interventions in key theoretical debates concerning Puerto Ricans and migration by considering how they are effected by state policies on immigration and industrialization. She criticizes the outlook that “uncritically celebrate[s] transmigrants’ nomadism, hybridity, and resistance to the global economy,” and challenges underclass theorists who blame immigrants’ poverty on their supposed lack of organization and inability to assimilate. Pérez also disrupts some of the usual theories about why people migrate. In Puerto Rico’s case, she shows us how migration was initially encouraged actively by both the sending and the receiving states and how this policy caused Puerto Ricans to catch a “fever” of migration that still has not subsided. She also shows how women’s migration was especially encouraged by the Puerto Rican government under presumptions that this would reduce the population growth rate on the island. Pérez contends, against popular belief, that most Puerto Ricans live a highly localized life and, thus, cannot be labeled as circular migrants. In fact, according to Pérez, transnational lives are not always necessarily mobile. In this, her findings reinforce Arjun Appadurai’s contention that people’s lives are shaped by the imaginings of possibilities rather than actual migration.

One of the most striking aspects of Pérez’s book is that it shows how entering the US with legal citizenship status does not prevent Puerto Ricans from sinking into poverty and from becoming the underclass of Chicago. Pérez shows how Puerto Ricans are consistently racially marginalized and denied economic and housing opportunities because of their image as a crime-ridden community. This is one area where Pérez’s discussions of citizenship and the politics of statehood in Puerto Rico leave much to be desired. While one often thinks that illegal immigrants are exploited because of their lack of legal status, it is curious that even though Puerto Ricans are American citizens and have all the fabled rights that come with that citizenship, they are unable to leverage this fact to their advantage or to avoid harassment by the city or the police and remain at the lowest rung of society. After finishing reading Pérez’s book, one is forced to question the value of citizenship for non-white peoples living in poverty within the United States.

The Near Northwest Side Story is a valuable read for those students of diaspora studies and transnationalism who are looking for an example of a multi-sited ethnography that maintains throughout a significant focus on women and on how gender has affected the history of migration, particularly in Puerto Rico. Pérez’s work creates a space for Puerto Rican women’s voices to be heard and shows how they daily negotiate gender roles and create kinship networks that benefit the Puerto Rican community at large. Ultimately, The Near Northwest Side Story is an eloquent account of what strategies migrants, especially women, use to sustain themselves in an increasingly globalized, yet economically disparate world.