BOOK PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION "From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies" [Temple University Press, 2001] Author: Dr. Carmen Whalen

DR. CARMEN WHALEN SPEAKS ABOUT HER BOOK

U.S. historians have written so very little about Puerto Ricans in the United States. My goal was to contribute to filling in what seemed a huge historical gap, but I did not want to focus in to narrowly, nor did I want to just skim a very broad surface. My book is an attempt to achieve that balance. I had a number of hopes, as I undertook this project, part was to write the histories or one part of the histories of people whose stories are too often left untold. And my other hope was that, perhaps, in writing this book and trying to fill in part of this history, that I might provide an alternative to much that is still cited in scholarly circles. While many of my concerns are very structural ones, the political economy chief amongst them and other kinds of economic structures, I did not want to lose sight of the fact that, for me, as a social historian, history is ultimately the story of people´s lives. Many of you, and some of you will become my best critics, will let me know what I have achieved here and where I have come up short. Time will tell if I achieved my other hope which was to spark interest in these histories and to encourage others to take up some of these challenges. In other words, even as I celebrate this evening that the book is real, that it exists in print from that project that started in 1987, I still see my book very much as a beginning and not at all as an end.

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