Welfare is Work: Social Welfare, Migration, and Womenís Activism in Puerto Rican Communities Since 1917.

[摘要] This dissertation tells the history of welfare and social work in Puerto Rico, rethinking the ideologies, politics, and practices of the colonial relationship to the United States through a close examination of the ways that Puerto Ricans negotiated their inclusion into federal public assistance programs. Congress granted nominal citizenship to natives of Puerto Rico in 1917, but the continued territorial status of the island restricted the terms of this citizenship. Puerto Ricans had limited political rights, and as the federal government began to expand in the 1930s, it only partially extended social welfare policies to the territories, inscribing colonial differences in the emerging welfare state. Puerto Ricans responded by organizing and demanding access to social welfare provisions, including child welfare funds, veterans benefits, and old-age assistance. I argue that these debates over the right to welfare, and social practices of public assistance, were fundamentally transnational, because both social workers and clients moved extensively to and from the US mainland, and because advocates and policy makers saw the question of welfare as inseparable from the issue of migration.While the extension of welfare to Puerto Rico has long been recognized as central to the history of U.S. colonial rule on the island, the history of welfare in Puerto Rico and among Puerto Ricans in the U.S. has generally escaped extensive treatment in Puerto Rican and U.S. scholarship.Ideas about Puerto Rican welfare dependency have been wrongly linked to assumptions about the pathology and lack of support for independence of the poor. Arguably, welfare and the class, racial, national, and gender ideologies that it reproduced and reconsolidated are the most important story about the U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico and about the displacement of Puerto Ricans to the mainland United States in the 20th century. My project investigates how social welfare programs, and ideas about social rights, actually came into being and how policy makers, activists, and clients shaped their formation and meaning.It reframes Puerto Rican history around women clients, social workers, and advocatesoffering a new way to understand the evolution of a colonial citizenship.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Humanities

[关键词] This dissertation tells the history of welfare and social work in Puerto Rico.;Humanities;History