Edgardo Meléndez: “Sponsored Migration” (2017)

On October 18, 2017, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College held an event focused on Edgardo Meléndez’s new book, Sponsored Migration. Teresita Levy moderated, and the discussion panelists were Ismael García and Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones.

Sponsored Migration places Puerto Rico’s migration policy in its historic context, examining the central role the Puerto Rican government played in encouraging and organizing migration during the postwar period. Meléndez sheds an important new light on the many ways in which the government intervened in the movement of its people: attempting to provide labor to U.S.. agriculture, incorporating migrants into places like New York City, seeking to expand the island’s air transportation infrastructure, and even promoting migration in the public school system. One of the first scholars to explore this topic on depth, Meléndez illuminates how migration influenced U.S.. and Puerto Rican relations from 1898 onward.