Ismael García-Colón

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 Perspectives, CENTRO Journal, American Ethnologist, Latino 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.

Selected Publications

Books:

• Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire: Puerto Rican Workers on U.S. Farms (University of California Press, February 2020)
• Land Reform in Puerto Rico: Modernizing the Colonial State, 1941-1969 (University Press of Florida, 2009)

Articles

• 2020 “The COVID-19 Spring and the Expendability of Guestworkers.” Dialectical Anthropologist, September, Vol. 44, No. 3, 257-264.
• 2017 “Confronting the Present: Migration in Sidney Mintz’s Journal for The People of Puerto Rico,” American Ethnologist, August, Vol. 44, No. 3, 403-413.
• 2017 “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, 134-171.
• 2013 “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, Fall, Vol. 25, No. 5, 96-119. (principal author Ismael García Colón).
• 2008 “Claiming Equality: Puerto Rican Farmworkers in Western New York,” Latino Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3, 269-289.
• 2006 “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, 166-189.
• 2006 “Buscando Ambiente: Hegemony in Puerto Rico’s Land Reform and Subaltern Tactics of Survival, 1930s-1960s,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 33, No. 1, January, 42-65