Why read The Sovereign Colony?

Book cover of The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico

Book description

Ceded to the United States under the terms of the Treaty of Paris after the Spanish-American War of 1898, Puerto Rico has since remained a colonial territory. Despite this subordinated colonial experience, however, Puerto Ricans managed to secure national Olympic representation in the 1930s and in so doing nurtured powerful…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Sovereign Colony as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Gregg Bocketti

Author

Put simply, in The Sovereign Colony Antonio Sotomayor uses a fascinating exception to prove an important general rule. That is, he explains clearly just how powerful modern sports can be in defining national identity by showing that Puerto Ricans have used sports to claim a sense of nationhood despite the fact that theirs is a nation but not a nation-state. He shows that whenever the Puerto Rican flag flies at an international sporting event islanders express their national identity and negotiate the character of US colonialism, and he carefully demonstrates how politicians and sports figures worked to make sports a…

From Gregg's list on sports in Latin America and the Caribbean.