ABSTRACT
As wage labourers, Puerto Rican women became part of a migrant labour force. Puerto Rican migration to the United States, which increased dramatically after the Second World War, placed Puerto Rican women in a new context where gender, skin colour, class, and ethnicity were defined by categories of ‘otherness’ that differed from those on the Island. The chapter explores the contradictory meanings of ‘Estudia por si tu marido te sale un sinverguenza’ and the implications they have for analysing the changes in Puerto Rican women’s roles and identities in Puerto Rico and in the context of migration to the United States. At the end of the nineteenth century, government and ecclesiastical authorities in Puerto Rico proposed education as a way to instil values of modesty and motherhood, which they thought were lacking because of the great number of consensual marriages.
