The research presented in these blog entries represents an advance on various books that I have been working on for the last decade. When I embarked on this project on the history of Puerto Ricans in New York as workers I knew that a traditional labor history approach would not suffice. But I did not understand how the stories and “data points” I encountered would become so rich and complex, requiring many different skills and questions ranging from urban, cultural, social, economic, political and migration history. I also learned how many pieces of the history of our community remained poorly understood even though hundreds of research reports, theses and other pieces of work had accumulated over the years. More...