Puerto Rican Soldiers and Second-Class Citizenship (PDF)

Manúel Avilés-Santiago is Assistant Professor of Communication and Culture at Arizona State University, USA.

"Responding to the fact that the experiences of Puerto Rican soldiers have been almost entirely absent from mainstream media for decades, Manuel Avilés-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 Ramírez Berg, Joe M. Dealey, Sr. Professor, Media Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

"Manuel Avilés-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. Avilés-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