by Ray Suarez
The story—native-born spouse marries immigrant spouse, hilarity ensues—was an old one. What was new this time was where the immigrant came from—Latin America—and how he lived. Unlike the Latinos of decades of movies and other television shows, Ricky Ricardo was not a criminal, a cowboy, a peasant, a lounge lizard, or a victim. He was a bon vivant: sophisticated, good-looking, and able to take advantage of the good life in America. While it was never clear why a musician and nightclub owner, possibly one of the most urbane characters on television, would do it, he and Lucy even moved to the suburbs, like millions of other Americans were doing at the time.
While people across the country who had never met a Cuban or heard someone speaking Spanish laughed it up over Ricky’s explosions in his mother tongue when another of Lucy’s harebrained schemes went wrong, musician Bobby Sanabria saw something else entirely. “I think for Latinos in the fifties, he was a great source of pride. That we had somebody. That you could turn on the TV and say, ‘Hey, he’s one of us.’ Every community wants to feel that they’re represented, and he represented us. Here’s a successful bandleader, he has a beautiful wife, and he’s living the American dream.”
The comic plot twists depended heavily on making Ricky more foreign, and heightening the contrasts by making him more American at the same time. Lucy Ricardo never seemed to learn a word of Spanish, or purposely mangled what she did say for comic effect, even though her husband moved easily between the two worlds of English-speaking domesticity and his Latin bandmates. While the women at the club moved with instinctive grace to the rhumbas and cha-chas gaining great popularity in American clubs, Lucy the comedienne could only make a broad pantomime, sometimes “going native” in a black wig.
Cuban-born author Gustavo Pérez Firmat remembers the moments his wife would provoke an outburst of “Latin” temper: “Ricky used to swear in Spanish. He used to get mad at Lucy—esta mujer, carajo . . . ‘I’m gonna kill this woman’ . . . he would never say this in English. But it was assumed that no one in the audience could understand Spanish. It was supposed to sound like gibberish. He said things you weren’t allowed to say in English. Ricky Ricardo lived the dilemma and delights of biculturalism right on that television screen.”
The “fish out of water” plotlines were milked for laughs, but also made it possible for Ricky to stay who he was: a Cuban. Sanabria remembers a recurring song that might have seemed a little silly to American audiences. “When you hear the song, ‘Babalu Aye,’ mainstream America was probably laughing it up, going, ‘Babalu’! Little did they realize they were being exposed to this incredibly deep West African culture we inherited in the Caribbean.”
The song “Babalu Aye” is a reminder that I Love Lucy was a mainstream 1950s situation comedy and not a National Geographic documentary. People who hardly remember a note Ricky Ricardo sang even after decades of reruns, when trying to imitate him, will swing an imaginary conga drum, pound it, and sing, “Babalu”! Even Lucy did.
As Sanabria says, it is a moment of exposure, however accidental, to a deep and complex part of Caribbean culture.
As long as he’s singing in Spanish!
The lyric tells of a man preparing a ceremony that is part of the devotion to Babalu, a West African orisha, or spirit deity, that came to the West Indies with captives headed for enslavement on the plantations. While outwardly converting to Catholicism, the slaves continued to practice their old religion, using Christian saints to represent their African deities.
You may see in a Caribbean grocery store or a shop window a statue or portrait of San Lazaro, Saint Lazarus, from a parable of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. Lazarus is a poor servant, shown in rags, on crutches, with a dog walking alongside him that licks the sores on his legs. A rich man, called Dives, lives it up on earth, but when he dies he is punished in hell, while Lazarus is freed from his sufferings on earth by the comforts of heaven. For deeply faithful Christian believers there are few more powerful ideas than a promised respite in the afterlife from all the sorrows of earth. Lazarus is also, in the Afro-Caribbean mix of West African and European religion, Babalu Aye, the orisha in charge of health.
In the Spanish-language song the candles are readied, to be set in the shape of a cross. The tobacco and brandy that are also part of the wake for Babalu are invoked. The singer needs money, is unlucky in love, and sings his song to Babalu.
In English, the original sense of the song is sadly lost to the lust for the exotic, and an impatience with themes that run to ancient, and definitely non-Christian, rites being celebrated to the beat of drums in the jungle that might not successfully cross over for those whose knowledge of Cubans runs as far as . . . let’s say, Desi Arnaz.
Oh, well.
If Americans had any problem with a show that featured a black-haired Cuban married to a redhead from Jamestown, New York, it was hard to tell from the ratings. When the fictional Lucy Ricardo gave birth to the actual baby Desi Arnaz IV, it became one of the most-watched television programs in history. In 1953, television was still fairly new, but on January 19, forty-four million Americans watched, fully two-thirds of all the sets in America, as I Love Lucy welcomed “Little Ricky.” Lucy and Desi’s real-life child was the cover illustration of the first nationally distributed issue of a new magazine, TV Guide. That is crossover appeal.
Even as Cuban-American “Little Ricky” was becoming America’s favorite baby, in most places in the country Latinos were still strangers. Outside the Southwest, where Spanish speakers had lived for 350 years, Latinos were still rare. The 1950s would become the decade when Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans would begin to arrive and settle in large numbers, mostly in the Northeast and Florida. They would accept, and challenge, cherished American ideas about assimilation and the melting pot. With their homelands a daylong drive from the United States or a few hours away by plane, the interplay between the old country and new was different than it had been for many Americans’ ancestors who boarded steamships thousands of miles away, assuming they would never see their homes again. Modern communication brought Spanish-language radio and television into the home. To some Americans new and growing barrios represented their desire to remain tethered to the countries they left behind instead of fully embracing the task of becoming an American.
• • •
IN 1957, PLAYWRIGHT Arthur Laurents and composer Leonard Bernstein dusted off the old love-across-ethnic-barriers idea for a new Broadway musical. This one would not have a “we’re all human after all” comedic kumbaya at the end, like Abie’s Irish Rose. It was to be a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with warring clans and young death. The original title was East Side Story, with a Jewish Juliet falling for an Italian-American Romeo. The newspapers of the day were full of gang wars, but by the late 1950s increasingly middle-class and suburbanizing New York Jews were a tougher fit for the Montagues or the Capulets reimagined as street toughs.
One gang, the Jets, became a motley collection of working-class whites. The other, the Sharks, was composed of the new kids on the block, Puerto Ricans. Now West Side Story, the show opened on Broadway to wide acclaim, with two of the leading Puerto Rican roles played by Carol Lawrence as Maria and Ken LeRoy as Bernardo. Chita Rivera, the daughter of a Puerto Rican–born musician and a U.S.-born mother, played Bernardo’s sister, Anita.
While West Side Story continued its Broadway run, the low-intensity conflict on the streets of tough New York neighborhoods left the realm of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award–winning ballads and splashed onto the front pages of the New York tabloids.
Though the Irish, Italians, and Jews of earlier generations had all been through it, Puerto Rican gang membership was portrayed as a new and different kind of menace. While white boys of many ethnic backgrounds still joined gangs, it was black and Puerto Rican gang membership that was most widely discussed in the press, studied by commissions, and worried over by the grandchildren of anc
estors who lived in neighborhoods that were rife with gang enterprises and gang violence.
Edwin Torres, jurist, author, and son of Spanish Harlem, watched it all unfold in the late 1940s and early 1950s. “There were gang wars going on. There was a pool hall at 106th and Madison—and I was hanging out there with my pals from the ’hood. My father happened to walk by and saw me. He rapped on the window—to come out. He told me, ‘Go back in there, finish your game—but this is the last time you set foot in there.’ He always said there is only one way out of here: los libros, the books.”
Torres did as he was told. He was the only Puerto Rican student at the elite public Stuyvesant High School, and then attended the City University of New York. After service in the Korean War, Torres went to Brooklyn Law School on the GI Bill, and was a celebrated symbol of “making it” when he became the first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney in New York. The boy whose success at school sent him to college instead of the gangs was assigned to the Capeman case, forever intertwining his life with that of a young killer who illustrated a different side of Puerto Rican life in New York.
Salvador Agron was a teenager from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, a city on the island’s west coast. His mother brought Salvador and his sister from Puerto Rico to New York in the early 1950s. On August 29, 1959, his gang, the Vampires, was set to meet an Irish gang on Manhattan’s West Side for a fight. When the other group failed to show, Agron and his boys just fought who they found, killing two teenagers. Agron wore a black cape with red lining, and came to be known by the cops looking for him, and eventually by the newspapers, then the world, as the Capeman.
The Capeman murders riveted New Yorkers with lurid details, the frightening lack of regret demonstrated by Agron when he was detained, and his seeming willingness to die for the crime: “I don’t care if they burn me. My mother can watch.”
At Agron’s arraignment, magistrate David Malbin sounded like he had already heard the evidence and judged the case. He said it was getting “very monotonous when you see these young punks coming before us.”
Though juvenile defendants, Agron and his accomplice, Antonio Hernandez, were allowed to talk to reporters during a break in the proceedings, the kind of encounter that would never happen today. A reporter asked, “How do you feel about killing those boys?” With a shrug Agron replied, “Like I always feel, like this.” Another reporter asked, “Was it worth killing a kid to be here today talking on a mike?” Agron answered, “I feel like killing you. That’s what I feel like.”
Professor Lorrin Thomas of Rutgers University maintains that the reason the Capeman trial got the kind of attention it did when violent street gangs had been a feature of New York life for more than a century was in part the postwar narrative of a society in decline. Agron himself was also a factor. “He showed no remorse. That’s what got to people. They saw the Capeman as a symbol of evil—a symbol of a society falling apart. He infuriated people. He confirmed white New Yorkers’ worst fears about Puerto Rican youth and exposed the ethnic and class tensions that had been building in New York since the previous decade.”
Agron also divided Puerto Ricans. When Edwin Torres looks back, he says, “I almost had a fistfight with the guy in the courtroom—as we walked past each other, he called me alcahuete . . . I almost punched him.” Alcahuete, a pimp. The implication was that as a prosecutor Torres had taken the government’s side against his own people.
“Killed Because ‘I Felt Like It.’” New York’s tabloids reinforced the already rampant stereotype of an amoral, violent Puerto Rican underclass. Salvador Agron, “the Capeman” or “Dracula,” was sentenced to death for killing two teenagers with an accomplice, Antonio Hernandez, “the Umbrella Man.” Agron was sentenced to death, and the sentence was later commuted. CREDIT: NY DAILY NEWS VIA GETTY IMAGES
After the guilty verdicts were handed down for Agron, Hernandez, and the five Vampires who were their codefendants, the New York Times ran a set of profiles of the seven. It is depressing reading, briefly detailing lives of poverty, instability, and failure. Touching, and perhaps unintentionally revealing, is the sketch for Rafael Colon, who pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter. “Oldest of the seven at 27 . . . Immature mentally and physically . . . Emaciated . . . Said he has always been hungry. Stands five feet five inches, weighs barely 100 pounds . . . Arrived here alone from Puerto Rico four years ago . . . Has no home, slept at homes of fellow gang members, in halls, on roofs . . . Worked for short time as dishwasher in Newark restaurant. Was discharged for habitual lateness . . . At ease only with boys many years his junior . . . When told of penalty he faced, he replied, ‘What difference does it make? I haven’t lived anyway.’”
Agron was sentenced to death for the murders, becoming the youngest person sent to death row in New York history. After time on death row, and time as a cause célèbre, Agron had his sentence reduced, and his accomplice, Hernandez, though older at the time of the murders, was also spared the electric chair.
The Capeman’s story was not read as that of a perhaps sociopathic boy, but as representative of a community of violent, immoral people whom no one wanted in New York in the first place. While white actors like Carol Lawrence and Ken LeRoy did modern dance and acted like Puerto Ricans on a Broadway stage, real Puerto Ricans acted like vicious animals, or so you would assume from the newspapers.
When West Side Story moved to the silver screen, Carol Lawrence’s voice moved to Hollywood, but her face didn’t: Natalie Wood, the daughter of Russian immigrants, became Maria in brownface, lip-synching to Lawrence’s beautiful voice. George Chakiris, son of Greek immigrants, became her brother, Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks. In the footsteps of Chita Rivera, a Latina was cast as Anita, this time Puerto Rican–born Hollywood veteran Rita Moreno. “I understood this girl, Anita, very, very well,” Moreno recalls. “I understood prejudice very well. New York was not a friendly place for Puerto Ricans. I found out early on that it was not good to be from another country.”
Teenage Rita Moreno. She came to New York at five and by her teen years was already working as an actress on Broadway. She moved on to Hollywood, where, in her own words, she played “a lot of Señorita, Conchita, Lolita spitfire roles.” CREDIT: COURTESY OF RITA MORENO
Moreno, the only Puerto Rican lead player, remembered the transformation of the actors into gangsters, girlfriends, and seamstresses. “All the actors playing Puerto Rican characters wore an identical shade of brown makeup. Boy, oh, boy, did I hate that; I kept trying to tell them that Puerto Ricans were all colors, from pitch-black to beige. But Jerome Robbins kept saying, ‘I want more contrast.’ I was so offended by that.
“I was very torn. There was always that niggling, terrible feeling that you weren’t representing your people. But Anita was a wonderful role, with this astonishing music.”
Moreno came from Puerto Rico to New York in 1936, a time of terrible economic suffering in the big city. Back on the island, it was even worse. Early on, she became a performer to help support herself and her mother. At the tender age of thirteen, she got her first role on Broadway, left school, and began to build a career. She became one of Hollywood’s go-to exotics, appearing in such movies as The Fabulous Senorita, Latin Lovers, and The Yellow Tomahawk. She played American Indians, Asians, and Mexicans.
“I played a lot of señorita, conchita, Lolita spitfire roles. Everything but an American girl,” Moreno recalled in her eighties. “I was always the utilitarian ethnic. I hated it.”
Rita Moreno with her Oscar. CREDIT: © BETTMANN/CORBIS
The movie made an even bigger splash than the Broadway play, winning ten Academy Awards, including Oscars for Chakiris and Moreno, for Best Musical Score, and for Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise for Best Director.
Moreno was the first Puerto Rican actress to win an Oscar, the first Puerto Rican since José Ferrer for Cyrano de Bergerac in 1950, and the first woman born on the island to win. In the followi
ng years she would make show business history by adding an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony Award.
The writer Stanley Crouch once observed that West Side Story was the result of three gay Jews imagining what it was like to be Puerto Rican, but the musical has undeniable strengths: the score that has contributed such standards to the American Songbook as “Maria,” “Somewhere,” “Tonight,” and “I Feel Pretty”; the doomed lovers; the groundbreaking modern dance. While it is no fault of the stage musical or the movie that followed, it became all many Americans knew about Puerto Ricans for decades.
“It’s an image that’s had enormous staying power,” insists Juan González, who more than a decade after the Broadway run and the movie was working on a small newspaper in eastern Pennsylvania. “Virtually everyone I met for the first time would say to me, ‘Oh, you’re Puerto Rican. Do you carry a knife?’ It was instantaneous. They must have seen West Side Story and that’s how ingrained the stereotypes were. They were disseminated through the heartland of America. It was such a well-done musical. The songs stay with you for life. And the images stay with you for life.
“There are millions of Americans who have never met a Puerto Rican in their lives, and the image they carry of Puerto Ricans is the image they saw in West Side Story.”
One memorable set of lyrics comes from “America,” when the Puerto Ricans are hanging out and playfully arguing about whether it had been a good idea to leave the island in the first place, and whether New York really is a promised land for them. First, Rosalia sings a tribute to her homeland, the lovely island. Anita’s reply speaks not of tropical fruits and flowers but of bugs, crime and intemperate weather, not like her beloved Manhattan. The tempo picks up; the music swells. The young men and women sing of the joys and deprivations of both Puerto Rico and New York, the only America most of them have ever seen. On Broadway, Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics hit the nail on the head. The immigrant has brought Puerto Rico with her to America! Rosalia, dreaming of the day she returns home, sings, “Everyone there will give big cheer!” and gets Anita’s deadpan response: “Everyone there will have moved here.”