In The Near Northwest Side Story, Gina M. Perez offers an intimate and unvarnished portrait of Puerto Rican life in Chicago and San Sebastian, Puerto Rico--two places connected by a long history of circulating people, ideas, goods, and information. Perez's masterful blend of history and ethnography explores the multiple and gendered reasons for migration, why people maintain transnational connections with distant communities, and how poor and working-class Puerto Ricans work to build meaningful communities.

Perez traces the changing ways that Puerto Ricans have experienced...