Ismael García-Colón UConn Anthropology PhD Alumni and Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, has been awarded the 2020 Frank Bonilla Book Award by the Puerto Rican Studies Association. According to the book prize selection committee, García-Colón’s book, Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire: Puerto Rican Workers on U.S. Farms draws upon extensive archival research as well as oral histories and ethnographic interviews with farmworkers to paint a full picture of Puerto Rican migrants’ experiences with the U.S. agricultural labor regime. . . . Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire cogently laid bare the centrality of labor migration to the modern colonial state in Puerto Rico, [showing] how racialized conceptions of citizenship and, by extension, personhood, have played and continue to play a crucial role in colonial labor management.

---