“I’m not a pure Puerto Rican?” Racialization, respectability politics, and Puerto Rican intragroup tensions

Abstract

This work underscores the importance of understanding engagement in respectability politics as a response to racialization and structural inequalities. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with Puerto Ricans in a Florida community who hail from the Northeastern United States and the island (N = 30), intragroup tensions can be seen in the areas of language, status, and culture. Groups’ experiences with racialization in their communities of origin prior to arrival, coupled with their interactions with white co-residents in Florida, play a role in the expectations they hold in these arenas, and subsequently, the way they perform respectability. Over time, adherence to respectability ideology becomes habitus, and existing community members expect newcomers to conform or risk threatening the perceived good-earned status of the group, relegating them to threat narratives past. As (im)migration to the U.S. is increasing for many groups, understanding within-group tensions becomes increasingly important, particularly if coalescence is the goal.

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