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by Manuel Cabranes
Manuel Cabranes was, according to The New York Times, “the principal spokesman for the mass of poor Puerto Ricans” who came to New York City during the “Great Puerto Rican Migration.” Although “Nuyoricans” are now a community whose very nickname joins their identities and one now sits on the Supreme Court of the United States, Puerto Ricans were not initially greeted with open arms in New York City as their population grew following the Second World War. Migrants from the island to the City struggled for economic opportunity, social acceptance, and political influence. It was Manuel Cabranes who was “called upon to defend” his fellow Puerto Ricans “from attacks by opponents of the migration” “as the ranking Puerto Rican official in New York City for nearly two decades.”
Cabranes’s service as the first head of the Office of Puerto Rico in New York City and in various appointments in City government made him a critical conduit between the governments of his two homes. He was also cultural ambassador for his people in the City, helping build opportunity and understanding for them as a co-founder of the New York Puerto Rican Scholarship Fund and as leading Roman Catholic layman who was named by the Archdiocese of New York to lead the City’s celebration of Puerto Rico’s patron saint. His contributions as a pioneer in the field of social work and as public intellectual were felt in the City and on the island alike. Cabranes’s life and work would earn him respect from a broad coalition of both New Yorkers and Puerto Ricans—but would make him a target for assassination by extremists.
Drafted shortly before his death in 1984, these fragmentary remembrances shed light on the unique, unfamiliar, and misunderstood experience of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the twentieth century. They have been prepared for publication by Manuel Cabranes’s son, U.S. Circuit Judge José A. Cabranes—the first Puerto Rican appointed to a federal judgeship in the continental United States.
Hardcover: $28.99
6 × 9 in. (15.24 cm x 22.86 cm)
Perfect Bound
262 pages
57 artworks
Imprint: OctoberWorks
ISBN: 978-1-959262-13-8
LCCN: 2026930266
BISAC: BIO026000 [Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs]; SOC044000 [Social Science/Emigration & Immigration]; HIS036140 [History/Caribbean & West Indies/Puerto Rico]; BIO002000 [Biography & Autobiography/Cultural Heritage]; BIO010000 [Biography & Autobiography/Political]
Published in a limited edition by OctoberWorks. Inquiries regarding future editions, rights, and expanded distribution are welcome.
Winnowing: Recent Photographs by John T. Hill presents a selection of photographs made over recent years by photographer, designer, educator, and author John T. Hill. Known for a career spanning photography, design, architecture, and visual education, Hill approaches the camera as a tool for sustained observation rather than spectacle. The book brings together images distilled from decades of looking, revealing unexpected relationships among light, form, texture, landscape, and the built environment.
Rather than functioning as a retrospective, Winnowing offers a focused examination of Hill’s continuing practice and evolving vision. The photographs invite close looking and contemplation, encouraging readers to discover beauty and meaning in ordinary places and fleeting moments.
Created for photographers, artists, designers, students, and general audiences, the book extends Hill’s lifelong exploration of seeing as both a creative act and a way of understanding the world.
The City and Its Workers at New Haven’s Gun Factory
by Joan Cavanagh
From the late 19th century through the early 21st, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was an important employer in New Haven, Connecticut. The legendary guns it produced and their role in American expansionism at home and abroad were celebrated, largely uncritically, in movies, books, and songs. But the stories of those who worked there and of the company’s impact on its host community have received little attention.
The tale includes elements familiar to students of United States economic, social and labor history: workers’ struggles to win collective bargaining rights and to achieve equity in the work place across all job classifications, ages and ethnicities; relentless management efforts to divide them and prevent, then undermine, union representation; a ruthless company’s repeated threats to leave town in order to force union concessions and win economic incentives and tax abatements from city government; and the gentrified aftermath of the loss of working class jobs in an American city.
The story of New Haven’s experience unfolds in Our Community at Winchester through interviews with former workers and their families as well as material from union newsletters, archival records, and city publications.
Case Laminate Hardcover: $38.99
8 x 10 in. (20.32 x 25.4 cm)
170 pages
138 illustrations, photos, ephemera
Imprint: OctoberWorks
ISBN: 978-1-7321801-5-4
BISAC: POL013000 [Political Science/Labor & Industrial Relations]; NHIS054000 [History/Social History]
Published in a limited edition by OctoberWorks. Inquiries regarding future editions, rights, and expanded distribution are welcome.
Herbert Matter: Artist Magician is a 302-page limited-edition monograph published by OctoberWorks documenting the life and work of modernist designer and photographer Herbert Matter. Featuring approximately 390 images, the project combines design history, memoir, archival preservation, and contemporary publication design through the decades-long relationship between Herbert Matter and author John T. Hill, who studied and taught alongside him at Yale University.