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- The book offers what its editors say is the first in-depth, scholarly review of the history and cultural development of Latinos in the Garden State.
- Twenty-two authors contributed to the book, which was published in January by Rutgers University.
Latinos make up nearly one-quarter of New Jersey’s population. In counties like Hudson and Passaic, they account for almost half the community.
But much is still unknown about the group’s history and cultural development in the Garden State due to the lack of scholarly research, says Aldo Lauria Santiago, a professor of Latino and Caribbean studies and history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
“There’s very, very little about Latinos in the state. There’s a book on [New Jersey] Cubans; there’s a few things. New York City has 5,000 scholarly publications on its Latinos of every period and every flavor,” Lauria Santiago said. “It’s just mindboggling as scholars when we look at it.”
He hopes the new book, “Latinas/os in New Jersey: Histories, Communities, and Cultures” (Rutgers University Press; January 2025), will address that void.
The book, edited by Lauria Santiago and his Rutgers colleague Ulla Berg and with a foreword by the university’s Olga Jimenez de Wagenheim, is a compilation of deeply researched writings that explore a wide range of topics about New Jersey’s Latinos and Latinas, including their migration from the cities to the suburbs and the experience of undocumented communities who eventually found acceptance in the state.
The book also covers how Latinos came to the state in significant numbers, including Peruvians, who settled in Paterson from the 1940s to the 1960s, and Cubans, who made their way to Hudson County in the ’60s and ’70s.
The longtime professor said that after five years of work, he was in awe of how much academic talent went into the final product. A total of 22 contributors were involved in putting together the 402-page book.
“I don’t brag because I wrote one chapter and the introduction. I helped hammer this stuff together with [Ulla] Berg, which is a lot of work,” Lauria Santiago said. “The quality of the colleagues’ work is just so amazing.”
The following transcript of the interview with Lauria Santiago was edited for space and clarity.
How long ago did this project start?
The book started five years ago. But the larger project has a multi-tiered history because it’s the product of multi-cited work that our department has been doing. We knew that we needed to engage with New Jersey. Eventually, I decided it was time to do it.
What was the impetus?
[It was] the basic need for research because there was none. New Jersey has not supported research on Latinos and Puerto Ricans, especially, its biggest Latino community. It’s been an upward battle forever and part of the history of our field. It had to be done. It’s a state with 20% of its population Latino or Latina in some way. We want to have a book to use in our courses. We teach about Latinos in New York; we teach about Latinos in California. And yet, we had no good book to use that is research-based and the work of scholarship.
How were the topics chosen?
There’s a public call that gets distributed in different fields — sociology, history, anthropology, whatever — to invite scholars to apply. There’s a targeted process where you know that people might be working or are working on certain things, and you invite them because you know their work is good. These are scholars trained somewhere else — outside New Jersey — and they just happen to do research on New Jersey, and we try to grab it.
What can Latinos and non-Latinos from NJ take from this book?
They will get to know the state better. Most books about New Jersey are about economic history or colonial history. There’s a lot of that, and they fizzle out after the 1960s. Basically, once New Jersey cities go into crisis, New Jersey forgets about its cities. Obviously, that’s the challenge with Camden and Trenton and urban reform and fixing the urban places that industry left behind when industry left. They will learn about how spaces that were left behind were filled slowly by Latinos.
What is important about this work given the challenging times for Latinos?
The bigger challenge is national for Latinos; the bigger challenge is the federal government. Defining anything it doesn’t like as DEI and including threats to the very teaching of racial and ethnic content, which is an absurdity and dictatorial imposition from the federal government. Right now, the people with temporary protections, with DACA protections, who are part of these communities are being deported, incarcerated or being criminalized. The book’s chapters discuss some of this.
Ricardo Kaulessar covers race, immigration, and culture for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email: kaulessar@northjersey.com
Twitter: @ricardokaul