PUBLICATIONS

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Emma Amador, “Caring for Labor History,” Forum: Starting from Home: Four New Spirits Engage Labor History, LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History (17:4, December 2020): 65-69.

Emma Amador, “Linked Histories of Welfare, Labor, and Puerto Rican Migration,” Forum: Puerto Rico and the United States at Critical Junctures, Modern American History (2: Fall 2019): 165-168.​

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Emma Amador, “Women Ask Relief for Puerto Ricans:” Social Workers, the Social Security Act and Puerto Rican Communities, 1933-1943,” LABOR: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas (12:3, December 2016): 105-129.​
 

• Abstract: In the 1930s, social workers employed by New Deal agencies in Puerto Rico played central roles in advocating for the coverage of Puerto Rico under new federal social welfare provisions. These social workers fought for the island to be included under the Social Security Act of 1935 by building political coalitions to petition the US Congress for inclusion. Territorial law allowed the US Congress to determine on a case-by-case basis how to administer federal policies, including social welfare provisions, which they restricted based on popular colonial discourses that cast Puerto Ricans as racially inferior and that justified US imperialism. This essay explores how social workers organized and were successful in achieving the partial coverage of Puerto Rico under amendments made to the Social Security Act in 1939. However, these changes were slow, and while further coverage was expanded over the proceeding half century, the island still remains only partially included under federal policies that are still determined by the US Congress.

 

Article available here from Duke University Press. 

 

Emma Amador, "Organizing Puerto Rican Domestics: Resistance and Household Labor Reform in the Puerto Rican Diaspora after 1930," ILWCH: International Labor and Working-Class History (No. 88 Fall 2015), pp 67-86. 

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Article available here from Cambridge University Press. 

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