Celebrating Five Years Since the Launch of Our Latinx Histories Series: Q&A With Michael Staudenmaier
This spring, the Latinx Histories series is celebrating its 5-year anniversary! It serves as a great point to reflect, acknowledge the series accomplishments thus far, and preview the exciting work to come. Below read a reflection from the series editors and enjoy a Q&A with author Michael Staudenmaier.
Our first three books in the series have all garnered praise and recognition. Cecilia Marquez’s Making the Latino South received honorable mentions in 2024 from the Theodore Saloutos Book Prize (sponsored by the Immigration & Ethnic History Society) and the Dolores Huerta Best Cultural & Community Themed-Book Award (sponsored by the International Latino Book Awards). It was also a finalist for the ILBA’s “Best Academic-Themed Book at the College Level.” Mónica Jimenez’s Making Never-Never Land won the 2025 Gordon K. & Sybil Lewis Award from the Caribbean Studies Association. Lori Flores’ Awaiting Their Feast won the 2024 Book of the Year Award from the International Labor History Association and received an Honorable Mention from the 2026 Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History (sponsored by the Latin American Studies Association). We are on a roll and have no doubt that the newest book in the series, Michael Staudenmaier’s White, Black, Brown: Becoming Puerto Rican in Chicago will draw similar attention.
Exciting work to come in our young but prolific series represents a variety of places, questions, scales, time periods, and paradigms in Latinx history. Juan Ignacio Mora’s Latinx Encounters: How Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans Made the Modern Midwest will publish this September and there are many more to come. Learn more about our forthcoming titles on our series webpage.
The incredible number, diversity, and quality of books in our pipeline are testament to the need for a series such as this, and the hard work our editorial collective has done to recruit and support our authors. A key member of our initial collective, former UNC Press editor Debbie Gershenowitz, is greatly missed since her departure from UNC Press. We wanted to acknowledge her labor and enthusiasm for this series, and her continued support of it from afar. Michael Innis-Jiménez (University of Alabama) and Lori Flores (Columbia University) remain faculty co-editors of the series, and our new UNC editor at the helm, Andreina Fernandez, already collaborated on the series well before taking on its leadership.
A New Editor Joins the Series
Andreina Fernandez is now the UNC Press sponsoring editor for the Latinx Histories series. In collaboration with Lori Flores and Mike Innis-Jiménez, Andreina will support the continued growth of the series and the acquisition of groundbreaking work of Latinx history. Joining UNC Press in 2020, Andreina has been privy to the development of the series since its inception and is a long-time supporter of its mission. She looks forward to working on rigorous and innovative historical book projects and is eager to receive proposals for projects in Latinx studies that overlap with her other acquisitions interests. In addition to her work on the series, Andreina acquires books in American studies, Latin American studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, and gender and sexualities studies.
Author Q&A
One of our goals going forward is to interview more of our authors to spotlight their work. The following Q&A with Michael Staudenmaier about his brand new book White, Black, Brown: Becoming Puerto Rican in Chicago was conducted by Columbia graduate student Laura Jaramillo, and we look forward to celebrating and previewing our future books in this way.
*This interview was edited for length and clarity.
L: You started as an accountant before pivoting to get a PhD in History. What was it about Chicago’s Puerto Rican community that made you want to dedicate your academic career to writing about it?
M: When I was a college junior, instead of studying abroad, I did a semester of an urban studies program that brought me to Chicago. Everybody was assigned an internship; I was assigned to Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School. I was completely clueless about Puerto Rican culture, identity, history, all of it. And I got really the education of a lifetime…the school was connected to all of this amazing social movement activism. You were immersed completely in a sort of nationalist sense of pride and community that was dynamic and in motion. I just fell in love immediately….I moved away from accounting and pursued a PhD in history, with my research focus being this community that had totally transformed who I was as a young adult.
In fact, my book’s cover photo was one I took when I was in my twenties. Every year I loved going to the Puerto Rican parade and I’d bring my little pocket camera. The fact that my book cover is a photograph I took 29 years ago, I think that’s a good marker that I’m invested in this community and its history.
L: While you were working on this project, do you think it shifted significantly from what you originally envisioned? Do you have anything that surprised you along the way, or was there a moment while you were researching that fundamentally changed how you understood the story that you were telling?
M: I really thought that there would be more or less an even amount of material, about Puerto Rican claims to whiteness, Puerto Rican claims to blackness, and then the kind of birth or emergence of Latinx identity. And that just ended up not being the case. There is certainly, especially if you look at places like New York, plenty of Afro-Puerto Rican content [in the archives]. There’s just not nearly as much of that in Chicago for reasons I try to explain in the book.
If we [as scholars] are solely led by our political commitments or impulses, then we’re going to produce propaganda and it’s not going to be worth very much. But if we allow our perspective on our subject to have this kind of interaction over time with the source material that we’re encountering, it’s going to make everything much more complicated, because some of that source material [about people’s divergent views on Puerto Rican nationalism] is not going to fit neatly into the kind of preconceived notions that I had walking into the project. So the research really does necessarily change your perspective over time, and it changes the kind of story that you’re trying to tell.
L: One of my favorite characters in the book was Clementina Souchet. I found her absolutely fascinating. She’s placed in a very uncomfortable position in your book as a Puerto Rican woman who collaborated with the FBI. Can you tell us more about her?
M: I encountered Clementina as a character in her own book. She wrote an autobiography that she self-published in the mid-1980s. . . . She had a set of hard experiences, being a young single woman trying to make her way in a new environment, you know, language barriers, discrimination. And then to make this decision that must have been incredibly difficult for her to basically go to the FBI and say, I want you to arrest my husband, Luis Medina, and all of the people that he’s working with [members of the Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico (PNPR), the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party].
She went on to live a very interesting life . . . [and became a] fairly prominent figure in Republican politics in Illinois in the 1980s . . . . I was getting ready to finalize the manuscript, when a person from UNC Press said, “You know, you should really try and see if you can find her.” And I don’t have a good explanation for why that hadn’t occurred to me when I was in grad school, but I ended up finding her and we met.…She loaned me the original portrait that appears on the page before Chapter One. I’m really excited that I was able to make contact with this person who plays such a prominent role in the very first section of my book.
L: What do you think historians get wrong about the social movements and how they succeed or fail? What does your Chicago study illuminate us about social movements as a whole?
M: Social movements come in a really wide variety of forms, right? And we often tend to want to put them in little boxes…a social movement that’s oriented towards labor, might be in the form of a union . . . . [or one with a] religious component to it is structured through a denomination or a congregation. And then over here, we have one that’s about race and another one that’s about gender or class or sexuality.
Social movements that are dynamic and successful aren’t limited to one of those boxes. They tend to draw on a number of things. Scattered throughout my book are experiences of people who are driven not only by a sense of Puerto Rican nationalism but also by other commitments. I was interested in… this kind of overlap, I guess, between intellectual history and political history. Where are these ideas manifesting and what happens in a political terrain, broadly considered, not just in elections, but broadly political terrain? What happens when ideas about nationalism help generate mass movements?
L: Finally, what do you most hope your book’s readers walk away thinking or feeling?
M: The single biggest hope is that Puerto Rican Chicagoans read this book and . . . see themselves reflected in it in some way. For other audiences . . . . I’m hopeful that I’ve explored further the notion of race as a social construction . . . . We often think of race as this thing that is solely imposed from the outside or top down, and that’s obviously real, but for a variety of reasons, I chose to focus my research on the ways in which Puerto Ricans themselves attempted—and often were quite successful— at framing their own racial identities in ways that got buy-in from their neighbors in one way or another.
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