Nosotras Trabajamos en la Costura: Puerto Rican Needleworkers and Colonial Unionizing with the ILGWU

Starting in 1898 with the occupation of Puerto Rico, needleworkers contributed their skilled labor to the expanding US textile and apparel industry as it served as a vital engine for the global ambitions of manufacturers and politicians. The women’s industrial work started in Puerto Rico, where thousands of women organized with the ILGWU in the 1930s. In subsequent decades, more women migrated to the continental United States and found jobs in New York City that paid more than the lower colonial piece rates and insular minimum wage. They participated in linked extensions of ILGWU organizing that continued across the main island, New York City, and Connecticut and included a major regional northeastern strike in 1958. In the 1980s, Puerto Rican needleworkers in New York shared oral histories for a public history project, “Nosotras Trabajamos en la Costura.” These ILGWU women sought to intervene in the popular understanding of “American workers” and to advocate for unionizing as a means to address immediate work conditions, colonial and international trade policies, and the exploitation of textile and apparel workers around the world. When Puerto Rican needleworkers become legible in US women’s labor history, their work and activism challenge the dominant narrative of globalization and broaden historical understanding of different workers’ engagement with unions and goals for their labor activism.