Community Organizers, Civil Rights Activism, and Demands for Care in Puerto Rican Communities in the United States Available to Purchase

This chapter focuses on how Puerto Rican social workers in the 1960s and afterward became activists in the civil rights movement and other social movements advocating for social justice in the United States. It centers on the life history of Afro-Puerto Rican social worker Antonia Pantoja, who used her training as a social worker to become a community organizer, civil rights leader, and educational rights activist in the United States. The chapter emphasizes how many social workers of this generation were from poor and working-class backgrounds, and they believed that social workers’ foci should be on creating social welfare programs that should be accountable to their communities and be community led.