Ismael García Colón

Professor

Ismael García Colón is a historical and political anthropologist with focus on the Gramscian concept of hegemony, oral history, immigration and colonial migration, race, citizenship, farm labor, U.S. empire, Puerto Rico, and U.S. ethnic and racial histories. His research experiences include documenting Latinxs in the NYC labor movement, and landless workers, migrant farmworkers, processes of colonial state formation and land distribution programs in Puerto Rico. García Colón is the author of Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire: Puerto Rican Workers on U.S. Farms (University of California Press, February 2020), and Land Reform in Puerto Rico: Modernizing the Colonial State, 1941-1969 (University Press of Florida, 2009). His publications have also appeared in Latin American PerspectivesCENTRO JournalAmerican EthnologistLatino Studies, and Dialectical Anthropology. García Colón’s current research explores the Puerto Rican experience in U.S. farm labor and its relation to U.S. colonialism and immigration policies, and how government policies formed and transformed modern subjectivities in Puerto Rico.

Degrees

BA University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras

MA University of Connecticut, Storrs

Ph.D. University of Connecticut, Storrs

Scholarship and Publications

Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire: Puerto Rican Workers on U.S. Farms, University of California Press, 2020.

“The COVID-19 Spring and the Expendability of Guestworkers.” Dialectical Anthropologist, September, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2020, 257-264.

Confronting the Present: Migration in Sidney Mintz’s Journal for The People of Puerto Rico,” American Ethnologist, August, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2017, 403-413.

“We Like Mexican Laborers Better: Colonialism and Citizenship in the Formation of Puerto Rican Farm Labor in the United States,” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Summer, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2017, 134-171

“Enduring Migration: A Profile of Puerto Rican Workers in U.S. Farm Labor,” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, co-authored with Dr. Edwin Melendez, Vol. 25, No. 5, Fall 2013, 96-119.

Land Reform in Puerto Rico: Modernizing the Colonial State, 1941-1969, University Press of Florida, 2009.

“Claiming Equality: Puerto Rican Farmworkers in Western New York,” Latino Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2008, 269-289.

“Playing and Eating Democracy: The Case of Puerto Rico’s Land Distribution Program, 1940s-1960s,” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, Fall 2006, 166-189.

“Buscando Ambiente: Hegemony in Puerto Rico’s Land Reform and Subaltern Tactics of Survival, 1930s-1960s,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 33, No. 1, January 2006, 42-65.

Last Updated: 09.08.2015