by Ray Suarez
Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, was a reliable U.S. ally and seen as a counterweight to growing leftist influence in Latin America. CREDIT: © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS
Trujillo’s tentacles extended into every part of Dominican life. Secret police surveilled and suppressed all potential dissent. The dictator took a personal stake in the country’s economy and made himself and his family fabulously wealthy. There was only one legal political movement in the country. The Dominican Party had as one of its main functions, as set out in its manifesto, “to sustain, propagate, and put into effect the patriotic and political credo of its founder, Dr. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina.” After centuries as Santo Domingo, the capital became Ciudad Trujillo (Trujillo City), and the highest mountain in the little country became Pico Trujillo.
El Jefe, the Chief, made his eleven-year-old son, Ramfis, a colonel in the army, and owned as much as 20 percent of the country’s sugar manufacturing capacity, dairies, factories, and the national arms factory. A 1953 profile celebrated the stability, strides in education, and access to health care that set the Dominican Republic apart from other Caribbean island nations: “In judging the Dominican Republic and the extraordinary man who is its dictator it is vital, first, to pay tribute to the remarkable accomplishments of the regime since Generalissimo Trujillo took over in 1930.” The article also reminded readers of one of the darkest episodes in the country’s long rivalry with Haiti.
What Dominicans came to call “the Cutting” was a massacre ordered by Trujillo in 1937 to rid his country of Haitians who had come to work, and settled on farms and in small towns. The generalissimo was the proponent of a political idea called simply antihaitianismo, anti-Haitianism, that ended up taking the lives of an estimated thirty to fifty thousand Haitians through wholesale murder, later compensated by a payment to a Haitian puppet regime at about thirty dollars per corpse.
A killer and a thief as much as a statesman, Trujillo was a loyal ally of the United States. A statement, perhaps apocryphal, attributed to President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of state Cordell Hull sums up the feelings Americans probably harbored about heads of state up and down the hemisphere: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Trujillo ran a tight ship, balanced his books, was a good customer, and did not tolerate any leftist nonsense. Since the U.S. Marines trained him as a policeman during World War I, Trujillo had been a reliable player. He was even seen as a counterweight to the growing influence of the new Castro government after the fall of Batista.
Starting in 1949 and continuing through the 1950s, the opposition to Trujillo began to rise in and outside the Dominican Republic. Brutal political killings, harsh repression of the press, and the estrangement of the powerful Roman Catholic Church began to drain away American support for El Jefe. Even as the Cold War rivalries around the world heightened, some leaders were so irredeemable even outspoken anticommunism was not going to be enough to keep them in the good graces of the West.
The novelist Julia Alvarez could date her life in America to a summer day in 1960 back in the Dominican Republic. Her father was part of the growing underground resistance to Trujillo. A black car started showing up in their driveway. “That car could only mean one thing: We were under surveillance. In our country this was deep, deep trouble.”
As historian of Latin America and Cornell University professor María Cristina García affirmed, Alvarez’s family’s fears of Trujillo were well-founded. “He was a psychotic, pure and simple. He kidnapped and raped women, jailed, tortured, and killed political prisoners by the thousands. Informers were everywhere. Everyone feared him.”
Young Julia Alvarez (second from left) with her sisters before the family fled the Trujillo regime and headed to the United States. CREDIT: JULIA ALVAREZ
A friend at the U.S. embassy confirmed Alvarez’s father’s suspicions, and helped the family leave the country. In short order, the whole family was on a plane to the United States, a country that had long fueled Alvarez’s girlhood imagination. “All my childhood I had dressed like an American, eaten American foods, and befriended American children. I spent most of the day speaking and reading English. At night, my prayers were full of blond hair and blue eyes and snow. I had dreamed of just such a plane ride as this one. All my childhood I longed for this moment of arrival. Here I was, an American girl, coming home at last.”
She was not the first immigrant, and she would be far from the last, to get a sharp surprise when the country they had dreamed of and prepared for turned out to be very different from what they expected. “My Dominican classroom English, heavily laced with Spanish, did not prepare me for New York City English. I couldn’t tell where one word ended and another began.
“Boys would taunt us, would yell at us: ‘Spic!’ Of course my good mother insisted that the kids were saying: ‘Speak!’ But I knew enough English to understand that she was wrong. If that wasn’t clear enough, sometimes those boys threw stones at us.”
Worse times were coming for the Dominican Republic. The Alvarez family would watch events unfold from a middle-class neighborhood in Queens, New York.
Rafael Trujillo’s bullet-riddled automobile. The dictator’s assassination led to instability in the Dominican Republic that culminated in a lightning invasion by the United States in 1965. CREDIT: © BETTMANN/CORBIS
In May 1961, Trujillo’s car was ambushed and the dictator was assassinated. Several men were killed in an ensuing gun battle, and as Trujillo’s son tried to retain the family’s hold of the country, all of the attackers but one were arrested and executed among a general crackdown. The surviving attacker, Antonio Imbert Barrera, was later declared a national hero, made a general, and given a state pension. Imbert denies the connection, but rumors that the Central Intelligence Agency played a role in the Trujillo assassination have swirled around it for the last half century. CIA-connected or not, the death of Trujillo did not bring an end to his era; the rival factions inside Dominican politics would continue to fight it out for years.
Despite the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union in Europe, and the escalation of involvement in Vietnam, problems in Santo Domingo did not escape Oval Office attention.
Four years after the death of Trujillo, twenty-six thousand U.S. Marines splashed ashore in Santo Domingo. President Lyndon Johnson explained to the nation that the lightning invasion was necessary to keep Communism from making further inroads in the Western Hemisphere: “It becomes a matter calling for hemispheric action only—repeat—only when the object is the establishment of a communistic dictatorship.”
In the great power logic that prevailed through decades of the Cold War, even the slightest implication of Communist influence was all that was needed to justify a military incursion. Politicians from barely center-left all the way to the hardest-core Marxist-Leninists were often spoken of in nearly identical terms. The U.S. invasion blocked a left-leaning social democrat from the Dominican presidency, and cleared the way for Joaquín Balaguer, a member of previous Trujillo governments. LBJ told Americans, “Communist leaders, many of them trained in Cuba, seeing a chance to increase disorder, to gain a foothold, joined the revolution. They took increasing control. And what began as a popular democratic revolution, committed to democracy and social justice, very shortly moved and was taken over and really seized and placed into the hands of a band of Communist conspirators.”
Johnson reassured the country of the American interest in avoiding casualties on the Dominican or U.S. sides, and of the lack of interest in Washington choosing the eventual leader of the Dominican Republic. During the American occupation a conservative, nonmilitary organization was established in Santo Domingo, and the U.S. Marines came home.
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THE POSTWAR IMMIGRATION laws had limited the number of people who could come to the United States from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Since 1924, Congress set immigration quotas based on t
he number of foreign-born residents of each nationality already counted in the country in the 1910 census. In other words, American immigration law for much of the twentieth century was rigged to reproduce the patterns of immigration that prevailed at the beginning of the century. This formula excluded immigrants from much of the world, favoring arrivals from Europe over anywhere else, and northern and western Europeans over southern and eastern immigrants.
No more. With passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, American law would no longer automatically block the Dominicans who wanted out of an unstable and sometimes dangerous country and others trying to leave other non-European countries. Thousands headed for New York. “We didn’t think of any other place to go. To us, New York was the United States. That’s all we knew anyone we knew was in New York,” recalls Eligio Peña, looking back to his teenage years, when he first began thinking about leaving the Dominican Republic. “I was in boarding school in Santo Domingo. You could hear the confrontations almost every night—it was unsafe. As far as a future—it didn’t look good.” Peña finished school, and left the country in 1968.
In his years as a journalist, Juan González has closely covered Dominican politics, and the settling of a major new ethnic group in New York. “The new arrivals were generally better educated than either Puerto Rican migrants or Dominicans back home. They were also more politically aware than the average Puerto Rican or Mexican. But they arrived to occupy the lowest jobs—as immigrants tend to do.”
Eligio Peña headed to the Bronx. “I went to Baruch College at night—and worked in a factory until I got a job at a bodega. I went to the Empire Institute for computer training. I still don’t know computers. But I know bodegas—and I know supermarkets.” Bodegas are the small Latino convenience stores that dot neighborhoods everywhere there are large numbers of Spanish-speakers. They open for long hours, carry Caribbean foods many supermarkets will not, and importantly, offer small amounts of credit to working-class Latino New Yorkers.
Dominicans moved into the South Bronx and Manhattan’s far-northwest neighborhoods, as Puerto Ricans left the center city for New Jersey, Connecticut, and suburban New York counties.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Puerto Ricans set the Latino cultural tempo of New York. If you heard someone speaking Spanish on the street, it was with a Puerto Rican accent. If a Latino was vying for a city council seat in Brooklyn, or a state senate seat in the Bronx, you knew that person almost certainly was Puerto Rican.
On a Sunday in mid-June, Manhattan would suddenly become Boricua Central, as the National Puerto Rican Day Parade brought hundreds of thousands of marchers, bands, beauty queens, and Puerto Rican celebrities from the island and the mainland. Puerto Rican New York was the soil that nurtured Tito Puente and Cuban Pete and Piri Thomas and Rosie Pérez and Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez.
Juan González watched as Dominicans inhabited Puerto Rican spaces, and economic niches as well. “There’s a rivalry between the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans—which has moved from one barrio industry to the other. Virtually every bodega used to be Puerto Rican–owned. Today it is rare to find one not owned by a Dominican. The same is true of the livery cab service.”
Eligio Peña is grateful for the pioneering generations of Puerto Rican migrants. “The Puerto Ricans really laid down the foundation for us. If it had not been for the Puerto Ricans, the Dominicans—we wouldn’t know where to go. Dominicans started to buy up the bodegas—and then we saw that there was a real need for supermarkets—the big chains had left because they didn’t want to be in poor areas.”
When Peña left the Dominican Republic and headed to New York, he left behind an enormous family. One by one, his fourteen siblings took advantage of the progress made by their big brother Eligio, and helped expand a growing family business. “Each year, as they graduated high school, I brought my siblings. All of them came—fifteen of us plus my mother. We all worked in the supermarket business—and we were able to expand to fourteen stores, in Manhattan, Long Island, New Jersey and North Carolina.” Today the name Compare Foods is well known to Spanish-speaking customers up and down the East Coast.
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TODAY AMERICA’S LARGEST city speaks Spanish in a stunning array of accents. Roughly one out of three New Yorkers is Latino, a shocking number for los viejitos who remember the hard times, the cracked plaster and cold pipes in East New York, the Lower East Side, and Sunset Park, when Latinos were seen as intruders bringing chaos and criminality. Their grandchildren are not unwelcome intruders. They have spread throughout the Northeast. Many have educations, homes, and a secure perch in the middle class. At the same time, many others still struggle in aging cities, plagued by the same poor housing, schools, and jobs faced by earlier arrivals.
The 2010 census confirmed the continuation of a gradual change in Latino New York. Puerto Ricans are still the largest group, at 738,000, while Dominicans have zoomed in population from those first arrivals in the tumult of coups and invasions in the 1960s to number more than 600,000. Mexicans have come to New York in enormous numbers in just the past few decades. From a little more than 50,000 in 1990, there are now some 350,000 Mexicans in New York . . . an entire Minneapolis . . . an entire Wichita . . . now making their way in the vast city. Countless others work hard to avoid the census enumerators, because they live and work in the United States illegally. Along with middle-class homeowners, college students, politicians, entertainers, and office workers, there are new thousands clinging to the bottom rungs of New York’s opportunity ladder, occupying the worst housing and sending their kids daily to the worst schools.
As Peña noted, it was the Puerto Ricans of the postwar migrations who paved the way. Along with the ballplayers, boxers, actresses, and musicians, community leaders carry their people’s aspirations forward in their new home. Today they are U.S. senators and representatives, mayors and county executives from all Latino groups. For Caribbeans making a political career, their godfather is a Puerto Rican who stepped off a cargo ship a near-penniless twelve-year-old orphan in 1941.
Young Herman Badillo was sent to Haaren High School in Manhattan and put in vocational training. “I was studying aeromechanics; we all were. Well, this aeromechanics thing was a disaster, because there were no engines for us to repair—but that’s just how it was. Because I was Puerto Rican, they had decided I would have no higher aspirations.
“But then I began writing for the school paper. The student in charge of the paper says to me, ‘Why are you taking aeromechanics? That’s for blacks and Puerto Ricans.’ I said, ‘I am Puerto Rican.’ ‘But you’re actually bright,’ he says, ‘even with the accent.’”
Badillo graduated first in his class at the City College of New York and Brooklyn Law School. A very close presidential election loomed in 1960. It was just the opening for an ambitious young lawyer from a community that arrived in the United States already naturalized and able to vote. “JFK was looking for someone to run his campaign in east Harlem. Kennedy wanted to register blacks and Puerto Ricans. So they put me on. Eleanor Roosevelt came; so did JFK. But Jackie [Kennedy] was the hit, because she spoke Spanish.”
Getting Puerto Rican voters to the polls, it turned out, was not just a matter of getting them registered and interested in voting. It was also a matter of pushing past entrenched powers with no interest in having a new constituency to whom they had to answer. So Badillo played a double game. “The Italians were a real obstacle. I was running a voter registration drive. The polling places were open until ten p.m. Some guy, not knowing who I was, thinking I was Italian, said, ‘You know what we’re going to do with those Puerto Ricans? We’re gonna close that polling spot at nine.’ And I said, ‘Wow, great idea.’
Herman Badillo cuts his teeth in politics. Flanked by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Badillo campaigns for John F. Kennedy during the 1960 campaign. CREDIT: HERMAN BADILLO
“They closed that polling place at nine. But
I went there, and I took down everybody’s name who showed up on time to a closed polling location. There were fourteen people. And with that I filed a complaint—which was the first official case of discrimination against Puerto Ricans in New York.”
Badillo won the voters’ rights case.
John F. Kennedy won the election.
Badillo was the first voting member of Congress born in Puerto Rico and a cofounder of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. CREDIT: HERMAN BADILLO
The Puerto Rican lawyer had registered Puerto Rican and Spanish-speaking voters in record numbers, adding almost a quarter million to the rolls. Kennedy carried that population and won the election by one of the slimmest margins in history. Badillo was on his way.
“JFK could not have won without the Puerto Rican vote. The political establishment needed to know that—but Puerto Ricans did too. This was the first time we could feel that we made a difference.”
Badillo was elected Bronx borough president in 1965, the first Puerto Rican elected a county executive on the U.S. mainland. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1970. His unsuccessful run for mayor of New York marked him as the first Puerto Rican to run for mayor of an American city. (It was Maurice Ferre, mayor of Miami from 1973 to 1985, who was the first Puerto Rican to become chief executive of a mainland city.) During his three terms in Congress, Badillo became one of the founders of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Latinos from many countries, and from more and more places in the United States, were making it in America. At the same time the most durable commodity of all, memory, was carried in many heads like a diamond: memory of a town, a home, a culture. Latinos kept theirs alive in the United States, even earning the resentment of other Americans for doing so.