Puerto Rican Soldiers And Second-class Citizenship

Puerto Rican soldiers have been consistently whitewashed out of the grander narrative of American history, despite playing parts in all American wars since World War I. This book examines the online self-representation of Puerto Rican soldiers who served during the War on Terror. Focusing on social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace, user-generated content such as videos on YouTube, and web memorials for deceased soldiers, Aviles-Santiago looks at how text, photographs, and video articulate a digital image of the soldiers.

He explores how they portray their racial and colonial selves in the face of the continental United States' media indifference. Review: Responding to the fact that the experiences of Puerto Rican soldiers have been almost entirely absent from mainstream media for decades, Manuel Aviles-Santiago's groundbreaking study explores how they self-represent themselves and their role in the War on Terror via social media.

This much-needed investigation is thoroughly engaging, important, and enlightening. - Charles Ramirez Berg, Joe M. Dealey, Sr. Professor, Media Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, USA Manuel Aviles-Santiago's research has evolved from his keen observations as a youngster of the robust military contributions of his own family, to discovering a curious absence of a Puerto Rican presence in dominant representations of U.S. wars, to finally finding the Puerto Rican serviceman self-representations on social media networks, with particular attention to their racial and colonial subjectivity.

Aviles-Santiago succeeds in carefully deconstructing and analyzing the self-created representations, and comparing them with what (few) representations have been made by the dominant media. Puerto Rican Soldiers and Second-Class Citizenship provides a window into the s the younger generations' self-expression - and opens up major areas still ripe for further study.

This work is an insightful and carefully constructed project, a culmination of a lifetime of observations and probing - begun when he was a mere child. - Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, Director, Voces Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin, USA