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U.S. citizenship on all Puerto Ricans. For the next 35 years the island would exist as a colony of the United States and provide cheap labor for the mother country’s industries. In the 1950s, after the island’s status had changed to a neo- colonial commonwealth model permitting some limited political autonomy, migration to the United States rapidly accelerated in fact, this was the largest migration of Latin Americans to the United States the hemisphere had ever wit- nessed. But that was only the beginning of the migrant flood to the north. New legislation in the 1960s would not only increase the numbers of Latin American migrants to the United States, but it would also radically reshape the contours of North American society. On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Immigration Bill, inaugurating a new era of mass migration. The legislation, which phased out the national origins quota system first instituted in 1921, created the foundation of today’s immigration laws. Prior to 1965, 70 percent of all migrant slots were allotted to natives of just three countries—United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany—and most slots went unused. But there were long waiting lists for the small number of visas available to those born in Italy, Greece, Poland, Portugal, and elsewhere in eastern and southern Europe. The Hart-Celler Act eliminated the various nationality-based criteria, supposedly putting people of all nations on an equal footing for migration to the United States. The new legisla- tion put in place a system based primarily on family reunification and needed skills. The long-term result of the Act was to reverse the composition of migrants coming to the United States in the last four decades of the twentieth century. In 1960, 75 percent of all the foreign-born population came from Europe, and only 14 percent came from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. These numbers had been essentially inverted by 2000, when only 15 percent of migrants arrived from Europe, and over 77 percent arrived from Latin America and Asia. This trend only promises to continue in the future. Latin America and the Caribbean also contributed to the massive flow of migrants to the United States during this period. Between 1960 and 2000 the region’s population skyrocketed from 218 million to over 520 million. Political instability in Latin America and the Caribbean, combined with this growing pop- ulation, meant increased needs for out-migration and work thus many turned to the economic opportunities of the United States. On the other hand, for most of the twentieth century, agricultural, industrial, and domestic employers in the United States depended upon cheap migrant labor from Latin America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere to make enough profits to sustain their successes. Though the events surrounding the years 1848, 1898, and 1965 help us to under- stand how and why Latin American and Caribbean populations migrated to the United States, they do not tell us much about what happened once they arrived. Despite their many shared experiences of U.S. military and economic imperialism, Introduction xix