120 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2006 VOL. 14(1) medicine scholars will appreciate the case studies of sexually transmitted diseases and efforts to heal the pains of war. For applied anthropologists, who routinely put scientific knowledge to practical use, Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories will confirm les- sons learned about familiar fictions as obstacles to sound description and analysis. Finally, development researchers and practitioners accustomed or eager to work in Africa will find the volume a highly useful compendium of background information about directed socioeconomic change that will better equip them to work for Africa. National Performances: The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago. Ana Y. Ramos- Zayas. Chicago, IL, and London, UK: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. xiv + 289 pp. (Paper US$21.00) CARLOS ULISES DECENA National Development and Research Institutes, Inc. (New York, NY) What does it mean to engage in nationalist organizing outside the geographical boundaries of “the nation”? What does it mean to stake out Puerto Rican nationalist claims in a context where actors as well as ethnogra- phers must consider the colonial ties that subject Puerto Rico and the island’s diasporic populations to U.S. imperial designs? Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas’s ethno- graphic study illustrates in rich detail how practices, symbols, and discourses associated with Puerto Rican diasporic nationalism serve “multiple ideological and material agendas” (p. 2). Her sensitively written account explores the varied ways that gender, race, class, and migration histories shape individual and collective stakes in what she calls “the performance of Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago” (p. 20). Ramos-Zayas works against the grain of theorizing that takes the main ideological objective of nationalist projects to be erasure of the nation’s internal fractures for the sake of a hegemonic vision that benefits national elites. She assumes that Puerto Rican nationalism in the diaspora is a site of struggle, and explores it ethno- graphically through her informants’ perspectives, expe- riences, and projects. The points of view she brings together include those of community activists, middle- class and working-class Puerto Ricans, other Latinos, adults and youth, island-born and mainland-born people. The various actors wrestling with the meanings of Puerto Rican nationalism do so, Ramos-Zayas argues, to articulate specific visions of belonging, jus- tify claims to control over space, and develop a critical consciousness regarding everyday manifestations of their condition as “colonial subjects” within U.S. society. A central goal of Ramos-Zayas’s analysis is to demonstrate that the “performance of nationalism”—or “performative nationalism,” as she sometimes calls it— transcends the problems that emerge when an “inher- ently official” political nationalism is pitted against an “inherently popular” cultural nationalism (p. 20). The falseness of this opposition between “political” and “cultural” nationalisms becomes especially clear in her ethnographic case studies, which show that many Chicago residents had been militants in Puerto Rico’s independence struggles, their initiatives guided “by the barrio’s ‘encyclopedic myth-makers’through grassroots educational projects” (p. 21). Thus, the concept of “national performances” illustrates that “the cultural” and “the political” are inextricably related, and Ramos- Zayas’s study situates nationalist ideologies within the contradictory features of the daily lives and aspirations of barrio residents. Ramos-Zayas weaves this concept throughout her discussions of the political economy of Puerto Rican migration and settlement in three Chicago neighbor- hoods: Logan Square, Humbolt Park, and West Town. Her case studies describe neighborhood tensions around the participation and influence of radical pro- independence activists in popular education programs; public tributes to the figure of Pedro Albizu Campos, a leader of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement in the 1950s; and the (mis)reading of popular education programs by the mainstream media and by middle-class Latinos. These tensions, Ramos-Zayas suggests, reveal that “nationalist performances” mark internal commu- nity boundaries. However, she also maintains that nationalist discourses open up possibilities for Puerto Ricans in Chicago to do things that the majority of Puerto Ricans on the island cannot, such as change their material conditions and build viable community organizations. “Performance” is a useful concept insofar as it allows Ramos-Zayas to analyze public activism through which community members take critical stances against colonialist, racist, and classist differentiations that emerge within discourses of the “American dream” of upward mobility and meritocracy. “Performance” also facilitates her attempt to account for processes whereby Puerto Ricans construct political projects with contra- dictory objectives—projects always to some degree “on display” to multiple audiences. These contradictions are especially poignant in Ramos-Zayas’s analysis of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, which is most successful when it develops the critical consciousness of youth who become better players in the game of upward mobility in the USA. 16.TRAN.14_102-126.qxd 25/02/2006 12:32 Page 120