Alyssa Ribeiro | Allegheny College (original) (raw)

Journal Articles and Book Chapters by Alyssa Ribeiro

Centro: Journal for the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, 2021

From the 1960s into the 1970s, increasing consumer activism swept across the United States, promp... more From the 1960s into the 1970s, increasing consumer activism swept across the United States, prompting a multitude of consumer education and advocacy efforts by government agencies and community organizations. Spanish-speaking populations, though, are largely absent from this history. Consumer issues were both pertinent to Latino populations and a conduit for interethnic alliances. This article uses Philadelphia as a case study to demonstrate how consumer activism,
viewed from street level, played a critical role in Latino rights struggles. Drawing on community organization records and newspapers, I trace how several overlapping consumer advocacy projects involved the city’s small, but increasingly visible, Puerto Rican population while building systemic responses to individual grievances. At the same time, consumer activism strengthened bridges between Puerto Ricans and their African-American neighbors. The success of small-scale advocacy efforts offered a concrete way for Puerto Rican residents to buffer the impact of structural economic change.

Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 2019

This article profiles three black and Puerto Rican neighborhood leaders of Philadelphia. Their ci... more This article profiles three black and Puerto Rican neighborhood leaders of Philadelphia. Their civic efforts reveal a certain style of leadership that they used to navigate their communities through the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. They charted a middle path between identifying with the established power structure and pursuing purely oppositional politics. In addition to expanding our perception of civic leadership, these figures defy binary typologies of leadership style while demonstrating continuity at the local level. With diverse backgrounds and personalities, they created and maintained interethnic and cross-class alliances. Their accomplishments reveal how migrants could quickly become representative figures in their new communities. These leaders effectively mobilized a sense of shared group identity to build legitimacy among neighborhood residents.

Labor History, 2019

This article examines local labor insurgency in Philadelphia between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s.... more This article examines local labor insurgency in Philadelphia between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s. Drawing on alternative press sources, it traces the efforts of Black, Puerto Rican, and female workers to reshape their unions as stable employment opportunities declined. Across industries and job sites, workers pressured both their unions and their employers through public criticism, running slates of candidates in union elections, and taking part in picketing and wildcat strikes. Existing scholarship has privileged rank-and-file activism among White men focused on wages and working conditions. Enlarging our view to include a more representative workforce at the local level while following workers’ resistance forward through time recharacterizes the rank-and-file rebellion to include defiant, multiracial coalitions demanding progressive reform. That broader rebellion, in turn, challenges some long-held assumptions about US labor during the 1970s.

Beyond Civil Rights: African American and Latino/a Activism in the Twentieth Century United States, 2016

Journal of Urban History, Apr 9, 2012

Abstract Though riots themselves have often been studied, scholars know little about their short-... more Abstract Though riots themselves have often been studied, scholars know little about their short-term effects. This article considers the five-year period following Pittsburgh's April 1968 riots, which allows scholars to see a moment of possibility not as evident in the long term. ...

Reference Articles by Alyssa Ribeiro

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies, 2019

Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, 2016

Home Contents Themes Maps Timeline Artifacts Blog Sources Migrants to Philadelphia brought their ... more Home Contents Themes Maps Timeline Artifacts Blog Sources Migrants to Philadelphia brought their culture, including folk music, with them. This group in a Philadelphia home are playing traditional Latin American instruments including a guïro and maracas. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania) Related Reading Collections Places to Visit Comments Explore Click the images to learn more.

Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, 2017

Dissertation by Alyssa Ribeiro

This dissertation is a case study that explores black and Latino relations in North Philadelphia ... more This dissertation is a case study that explores black and Latino relations in North Philadelphia neighborhoods from the 1950s through the 1980s. It draws upon community organization records, local government documents,newspapers, and oral histories. In the fifties and sixties, scarce housing, language barriers, Puerto Ricans’ ambiguous racial identity, and slow adaptation by local institutions contributed to racial tension and social segregation. But from the late sixties through the late seventies, black-Latino relationships markedly improved. During this crucial decade, blacks and Latinos increasingly drew upon their shared circumstances to form strategic alliances. They used grassroots organizing to pressure existing institutions, focusing on basic issues like schools, housing, and police. Coinciding developments like the election of a racially-polarizing mayoral administration and greater federal funding for antipoverty programs boosted these efforts. The Philadelphia case provi...

Book Reviews by Alyssa Ribeiro

Journal of Agricultural History, 2020

The Journal of African American History, 2013

Pacific Historical Review, 2016

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 2016

The English Historical Review, Aug 1, 2020

Journal of Planning History, 2017

Two recent books by Allen Dieterich-Ward and Aaron Cowan reappraise how actors in declining indus... more Two recent books by Allen Dieterich-Ward and Aaron Cowan reappraise how actors in declining industrial cities worked to shape fates that have often been presented as preordained, even inevitable. These accounts reveal the nuanced ways in which local stakeholders negotiated the impact of structural economic shifts that reached far beyond city borders. To be sure, their successes were only partial. But the ways in which resident elites proactively collected financial, legislative, and electoral support while remaking the built environment are instructive. Their efforts remind us how critical policy and planning were in sustaining cities through difficult decades. As structural and demographic shifts became apparent in the midst of the twentieth century, urban elites worked to assure the economic future of their cities by creating new revenue streams. Regardless of exact location, their courses of action bore some similarities. Changes to the urban environment were usually motivated by survival in the relatively near term, even as plans alluded to broader visions for the future. In addition, those modifications nearly always privileged the desires of middle-class residents or visitors while offering few provisions for working-class and poor populations. Lastly, revitalization efforts were supported by creative financing that combined public appropriations, bond issues, dedicated tax revenues, and private support in a multitude of ways. Many of the redevelopment tools in these stories will be familiar: public-private partnerships, convention centers, stadiums, freeways, festival marketplaces, and brownfield redevelopment. Yet the regional and comparative accounts provided by Dieterich-Ward and Cowan enhance our understanding of how those tools were deployed with varying results depending on the particular local actors and geographic setting. These books incorporate insights from several areas of planning history but speak most directly to the literatures on urban renewal and image-making. Contemporary accounts of urban renewal were often laudatory, while historical scholarship has emphasized the destructive, discriminatory nature of such campaigns. Regardless of perspective, the story usually ends in the 1970s. Dieterich-Ward and Cowan aim to provide a more balanced account of renewal impacts, taking seriously how they benefited some local constituencies even as they cost others dearly. Meanwhile, they carry their expositions of urban renewal forward in time toward the end of the twentieth century. This extended time frame reveals more continuities in renewal strategies than is commonly acknowledged. Beyond Rust and A Nice Place to Visit join recent works by scholars such as Neumann, Taft, Highsmith, and Gillette in reframing our conceptualization of twentiethcentury-urban revitalization strategies. 1