Civic poverty: An empire for liberty through community action (Puerto Rico)

With the Great Depression still palpable and the faultlines of the Cold War remapping the globe, the conception of poverty and how it might be remedied were constitutive questions for the making of U.S. global hegemony during the thirty years following World War II. These questions were further galvanized by the twilight of European colonial rule, as former colonies forcefully linked the issue of self-determination to the problem of poverty. At the intersection of questions of sovereignty and poverty U.S. policymakers, social scientists, and community organizers seized upon the value of local community and indigenous participation.; Civic Poverty examines community-based endeavors aimed at mobilizing participation of the poor in the planning and administration of programs on their behalf. I focus on the protracted tension between "self-help" and "self-determination" that animated competing agendas for participation. The initiatives I study include the Division de Education de la Comunidad in Puerto Rico, Peace Corps community development field training in New Mexico, Mobilization for Youth and the Puerto Rican Community Development Project in New York City, the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity, and the 1968 Poor People's Campaign. The implementation of these programs associated U.S. foreign and domestic policy in ways that demonstrate the far-reaching political utilities of anti-poverty initiatives with implications for current debates over "social capital" and globalization.; My inquiry is guided by the following questions. Of what significance are the continuities between how U.S. domestic and foreign policy constructed the problem of poverty during the thirty years following World War II? How were conditions of international "underdevelopment" both conflated with and differentiated from poverty in the United States? What factors contributed to the prominence of local initiative and community participation in policymaking and social science concerned with poverty during this period and what were the consequences of this emphasis? In what manner did a focus on poverty integrate or obscure claims pertaining to social, economic, and racial equality galvanized during the mobilization against fascism, the accelerated collapse of the colonial system, and the movement for civil and human rights?...