Latino Americans

by Ray Suarez

  • • •

  IN 1948, PUERTO Ricans did something they had hoped to do half a century earlier: They elected their own chief executive, a governor. Puerto Rico had governors since 1509, since Ponce de León, of Florida exploration and Fountain of Youth fame. He held the job for most of the next decade.

  For the next four hundred years, most of the governors were generals, military men sent from Madrid or Washington to run the affairs of a colony or possession. Ponce de León’s grandson had the job in the sixteenth century; President Roosevelt’s son Theodore Junior held it in the twentieth century, after his father helped win Puerto Rico by beating Spain. When Americans started to arrive in San Juan to serve as governor, many of them did not even speak Spanish.

  What paved the way for Puerto Ricans to get their own governor was the Elective Governor Act of 1947, approved in Washington. The first elected governor was Luis Muñoz Marín, son of the famed anticolonial leader Luis Muñoz Rivera. In 1950, at the end of Muñoz Marín’s first term in office, the constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico came fully into effect, and the island was running its own affairs in a way unseen since the American invasion. The constitution set out the number and responsibilities of Puerto Rican senators and representatives, and called the “coexistence in Puerto Rico of the two great cultures of the American Hemisphere” one of the “determining factors” of Puerto Rican life and democracy.

  Also arriving with a Puerto Rican governor was a new approach to the Puerto Rican economy and its development, called Operation Bootstrap in Washington, and Manos a la Obra, “Hands to the Job,” in San Juan. The new government borrowed heavily, and built long-needed infrastructure: sewers, roads, electrical distribution systems. In a presentation before a group of prospective investors in New York, the governor dismissed stereotypes about Puerto Ricans that likened them to a lazy man lying on a mattress, asking for a cup of coffee. “That is all changed. The attitude now and for some years has been for the people of Puerto Rico to help themselves to the best of their ability, to face their democratic responsibilities, and to solve their own problems.

  “Today the people of Puerto Rico are not lying on a mattress, but are standing on their feet helping themselves to the best of their ability, yet still in need of a helping hand. . . . I feel that Puerto Rico deserves the understanding and help of all of the citizens of the United States.”

  Earlier in the century, as explained in chapter two, the U.S. Congress had defined products from Puerto Rico, agricultural and manufactured, as imports, as if they were being brought into the United States from a foreign country. Over time, this had the effect of destroying the Puerto Rican–owned agricultural export sector, leaving more and more land to be snapped up by American-based multinational sugar producers.

  The Great Depression and a series of unusually destructive storms applied the final blows: By the late 1930s and early 1940s, Puerto Ricans were underemployed, undernourished, and increasingly desperate. As early as 1933, unemployment reached a staggering 33 percent, significantly higher than that of the mainland United States. In 1937, agricultural economist Esteban Bird calculated that in the 1930s the Puerto Rican rural worker had an income of twelve cents a day for each family member, by Bird’s reckoning only four cents a day more than the cost of feeding a hog in the United States.

  Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans, despite rising levels of aid from the U.S. mainland, still lived in desperate poverty as the island became a commonwealth and elected a Puerto Rican governor. For many, life was little better once they arrived in New York. CREDIT: © BETTMANN/CORBIS

  This was in Puerto Rico as it was on the United States mainland a recipe for conflict and radicalization. There was increasing opposition to American rule and bloody armed clashes between workers and militias. Muñoz Marín’s Popular Democratic Party, the PDP, or populares, grew from this hostility to the U.S.-based sugar interests that had brought so much misery to the common worker during the wild swings in the price of sugar during the Depression.

  The production needs of World War II brought some industrialization to Puerto Rico, with factories on the island producing goods for the war economy as a hedge against a German naval blockade. Factories, military bases, and roads to connect the bases were all built in the war years. When the war was over, tax incentives lured investment in a new, industrialized island.

  Sugar production continued to decline, which meant less and less employment for rural Puerto Ricans. Encouraged by Operation Bootstrap, the island urbanized, and agriculture became a smaller share of the overall economy. This process left many Puerto Ricans between two stools. The world their families knew, of grinding rural poverty and low-wage agricultural work, was disappearing. In the new world of urban and suburban skilled and semiskilled labor, they saw no place for themselves.

  They headed to New York by the thousands. “If not the panacea, migration became a crucial component for solving Puerto Rico’s economic problems. So migration became a cornerstone of the government’s modernization plan,” according to Lorrin Thomas, professor of history at Rutgers University, who specializes in Puerto Rican migration and identity. Muñoz Marín’s projections of a future Puerto Rico after Operation Bootstrap factored in high levels of migration to the U.S. mainland. The Department of Labor’s Migration Division office in San Juan encouraged people to move north.

  Juanita Sanabria had been hearing about Nueva York for years in her hometown of Yabucoa on the island’s far southwest corner. “I was excited by the idea of New York—I imagined myself in this glamorous place with glamorous people. But it was really hard, too. I had never been separated from my family. We were always together. I was in the middle of thirteen kids. No one in my family had gone to New York yet—but many in the town had already left.”

  As more Puerto Ricans headed to New York, Juanita Sanabria finally made up her mind to go. The girl from Yabucoa became a wife, a mother, and a New Yorker. CREDIT: SANABRIA FAMILY

  As hard as life could be in mainland cities, with each passing year more islanders found it harder to stay home. Even with significant aid from the government in Washington, Puerto Ricans were hungry, and much smaller in stature than their fellow Americans on the mainland. Just as the colony became an Estado Libre Asociado, an Associated Free State with its own constitution, Juanita Sanabria decided it was time to go. “There was never enough food on the table. My father was a farmer—even though his farm had grown to almost a hundred acres, a farmer could not make a living in Puerto Rico. Even for farmers, it seemed like there was much more work in the United States.”

  The tightening relationship with the federal government and the injections of federal aid seemed to make the dream of an independent country even more distant than in the years after the Spanish-American War. It is a strange status, this Estado Libre Asociado, making Puerto Rico not quite part of the United States, but not quite its own country either.

  Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones of Princeton University explains it this way: “This notion of nationhood—or lack thereof—makes a deep impression on the Puerto Rican psyche and identity. It is the first reminder that Puerto Ricans do not have the same say in their destiny as others. It is under the skin—never explicit—but it is more than a romantic notion; it is the lens through which Puerto Ricans view their reality, especially in New York. And it comes out through nostalgia, through music, through poetry—for generations to come.” Whatever the political situation for Puerto Ricans on the island or New York, as numbers grew so did a strong sense of nationhood increasingly unbound by geography. Whether an auto mechanic in Orlando, a garment worker in Manhattan, a public school teacher in Connecticut, or a cop in Chicago, Americans of Puerto Rican descent carried a sense of shared identity, even if they had never lived on or visited the island of Puerto Rico.

  New arrivals like Juanita Sanabria found a well-established community life in New York. By 1955 some seven hundred thousand Puerto Ricans had
moved to the continental United States, and most of them went to New York. More and more New Yorkers who called themselves Puerto Rican had been born there, like Edwin Torres. “My parents had come in the twenties—my father had been in the service and came to New York during the Depression to visit—when East Harlem was still very Jewish. It was a terrible time, but he stayed—it was much worse in Puerto Rico.”

  It would be years before the full extent of the problems were fully realized, but New York was already a city in decline. A desperate people hitched their futures in America to a city on the verge of a thirty-year slide. It was a choice that would end up for many to be calamitous, but at first the newcomers adjusted, and struggled. Juanita Sanabria saw it firsthand. “It turned out to be really hard to find a job, despite what I had been told. Eventually I found a job for a penny a dress—piecework, it was called.”

  Puerto Ricans moved into hotels, into building maintenance, into the Garment District. The specialized manufacturing jobs that had been a New York mainstay, offering union protection and a decent middle-class salary, were becoming scarce, according to Professor Thomas. “The jobs that had always been there for immigrants were starting to move out of the city, to the South, to the Midwest. Those who can, leave with them. But what’s available to the majority are jobs as elevator operators, janitors, doormen—service jobs.”

  Those who can, leave with them. Puerto Ricans did not have the same mobility taken for granted by their neighbors with longer tenures in the United States. Language barriers, poverty, and persistent belief that they would not be welcome elsewhere, especially for those with darker skin, kept many Puerto Ricans concentrated in their long-term homes, even as other Americans moved south and west in search of new opportunities during a time of economic change. Puerto Ricans would stick to New York, and the Northeast, through a generation of terrible decline. A few pioneers who headed to small cities in New Jersey, western Connecticut, and eastern Pennsylvania sometimes found that in the years after they arrived, a new barrio filled in around them.

  • • •

  BACK IN PUERTO Rico, during the first fifteen years of Operation Bootstrap, from 1950 to 1965, more than half a million workers left Puerto Rico, and the unemployment rate declined a little over 1 percent, although it was a still pretty horrifying 11.7 percent. The number of jobs on the island wouldn’t reach its 1951 levels again until 1965.

  The Puerto Rican authorities had based their plans for future prosperity on having fewer people around. But the arrivals’ new home in Nueva York was not so sure it wanted them around either. Or at least it found them an inconvenience. The buildings Puerto Ricans had moved into in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn were already old when they got there. The plaster was shot, the plumbing was worse, and the heat was sporadic. Only the roaches seemed to find the buildings acceptable.

  Postwar New York City was in the full throes of urban renewal. The city built expressways and parks, middle-income housing projects, and a gleaming new center for the performing arts, in part by knocking down the places Puerto Ricans lived. This was the real West Side story, says Professor Thomas. “The real drama was unfolding as urban renewal became the order of the day. Entire neighborhoods were vanishing to make way for office buildings and expressways. Thousands of tenement buildings were bulldozed, displacing thousands of families, mostly Puerto Rican and black.”

  The creation of Lincoln Center “displaced thousands of families” and demolished an area known as San Juan Hill. The Sharks and Jets of the movie version of West Side Story danced, sang, and rumbled in a set of blocks emptied of people just before the wrecking ball and bulldozer went to work. Moving powerless people created an authentic urban set for shooting a movie about powerless people.

  • • •

  MEANWHILE, JUST A few hundred miles to the west, Cuba had overthrown an old-style Latin American strongman only to find itself in a new predicament. Fulgencio Batista had been in and out of power since 1933. Like large numbers of Cubans, the soldier, coup leader, and onetime president spent years in the United States, though he did it in greater comfort than most of his countrymen. After his American sojourn, Batista went back to Havana in 1952, finished third in presidential elections, and led another coup, backed by the army. The U.S. government recognized the new Batista government a short time later.

  Americans sent on fact-finding missions came back with dreary reports of political and economic conditions in Cuba. In Africa, Asia, and elsewhere in Latin America, armed groups were making war on the established order. With the Cold War under way, many of these wars fell into the East-West tug-of-war between Moscow and Washington.

  As the Castro brothers—Fidel and Raúl—gathered support from more people across the political spectrum, the Cuban president cracked down on dissent, and tried to snuff out the resistance. (Like dictators around the world who come to believe they can save themselves from being overthrown by doubling down, Batista expanded the secret police, and jailed and executed his opponents. Fidel Castro led an anti-Batista coalition known simply as “the Movement.” He downplayed his own leftist ideology and avoided alliance with the communist Partido Socialista Popular to maintain the wider alliance.)

  The armed revolt that began shortly after Batista’s 1952 coup gathered energy and outside support. The Cuban dictator had made enough enemies in the previous decades that money began to pour into Castro’s coffers from exile communities in Mexico and the United States. Even a New York Times interview with Castro conducted in the hills in 1957 brought more money from outside Cuba. Support for the anti-Batista revolution widened, and began to include the middle class. By New Year’s Day, 1959, Fulgencio Batista was on his way into exile with all the loot he could carry.

  Bookshelves across the world groan under the weight of histories of the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath. Trying to distill the highly conflicted perspectives of history while the Castro brothers remain in power will be done by others, and likely for decades to come; for the purposes of our story, we will move away from the presidential palaces and ministries to the barbershops and fields and streets of provincial towns.

  Individual Cubans had to make decisions in the heat of rapid social change. They asked themselves very basic questions: “How will I fare in the new Cuba?” “What future is there for my children in this country?”

  Cubans had been coming to the United States for more than a century. There were already sizable, well-established Cuban communities in Florida and New York. Vicente Martinez-Ybor moved his cigar-making operations to Tampa from an increasingly unstable Cuba in the 1860s, and many Cubans joined him there. The 1910 U.S. census counted fifteen thousand Cubans in the country, a number that grew to more than 125,000 on the eve of the revolution’s victory.

  In the 1950s a family here, a single guy there, came to Manhattan, Chicago, Miami, and looked for people like themselves. The revolution changed everything. As in any convulsive change in politics there were winners and losers, and Cuba was no exception: People locked out of access to schooling and influence in society suddenly found they had it. Small businesspeople, educated professionals, and land and factory owners gradually found their home was going to be a harder place to live, and with the almost complete elimination of private property and political freedom, it was going to be harder for good.

  In the beginning, it was unclear whether the Cuban revolutionary government would survive; it was also less clear for ordinary Cubans what to do about it. Some families sent their children out, while they stayed in Cuba to see what happened next. Other families began to believe there was no future for them all, at least for now. Fears were stoked of rumored Communist plans to seize and indoctrinate children on the island. Beginning in 1960, an enormous ad hoc airlift of children out of Cuba was conducted. Over the course of two years, fourteen thousand unaccompanied children were sent to the United States in a program called Operation Peter Pan. The idea was that the children, from little more than to
ddlers to adolescents, would make the trip and wait for their parents in the United States.

  In the summer of 1961, six-year-old María de Los Angeles Torres was prepared for her trip. “They dressed me in the aqua-blue-and-white checkered dress my grandmother had made me. On it they pinned a piece of paper bearing my name.”

  When you are six, and becoming an unwitting cast member in a gathering geopolitical drama, the details are not always clear. “All I knew was that we stopped collecting the trading cards with the heroes of the revolution on them. But my parents had other things on their mind. Fidel had promised elections, but he didn’t hold them. He jailed or executed people who opposed him. Then the regime took over private schools. That’s when my parents decided to go into exile.”

  María, called Nena, “baby girl,” by her family, took her doll Isabelita, and a suitcase packed with clothes, towels, handkerchiefs. “I remember the airport, my mother hugging me, her last words: “Take a bath every day; Americans do not have that habit.” Then, as we took off, I heard some of the other kids starting to cry.”

  Many of the Peter Pans already had family living in the United States. Others were placed with sponsoring families located through the Catholic Church, one of the spearhead organizations for the program. Others headed to group homes set up as a temporary way station to live in America with family. Nena Torres went to live with her aunt, Nenita. “She gave me a box of chocolates. I decided to save it for my parents, and hid it under my bed. Eventually the ants got it. . . . I learned to blow bubble gum and practiced English words. At night I would cry softly, so no one would hear me.”