by Ray Suarez
The two very different reactions, Manzano burning up the Internet chat rooms and a ho-hum after De La Hoya, may be in part the product of changing technology that allows people to join in pitched verbal battle across the globe in an instant. It may also be a product of the mood of the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The optimism that ended with the September 11 terrorist attacks has carried over into discussions of American culture, nationhood, economics, and our shared future.
Ricardo Jiménez, for one, has never accepted the idea that he is an American. Brought from Puerto Rico as an infant, Jiménez was raised in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. While agitating for a Puerto Rican studies course at his dilapidated and overcrowded neighborhood high school, he started asking tougher questions about the status of Puerto Rico and the circumstances under which the Stars and Stripes flew over the island. He began to dig deeper, and what he unearthed radicalized him.
“I realized that this is what it is to be Puerto Rican; this is the rich and glorious history that we have had and that I don’t know about. I found out that we have a father of our country, and we have authors, that we have painters, that we have poets; I mean, we have all these things that I didn’t know, that I never knew were in existence. I said, ‘Why is this happening?’ On my quest for information I got involved in the Puerto Rican independence movement and realized who I was as a Puerto Rican. I realized the circumstances that were happening here and understood why people would leave Puerto Rico. Then I found out the reasons and the whole colonial status and that became my passion.”
Jiménez said the isolation and segregation of Puerto Rican Chicago made the experience there very different from that in New York. The Puerto Rican population of Chicago was and is much smaller than that of New York. Yet Chicago played an enormous role in Puerto Rican politics on the mainland. It was the place the Young Lords was born before coming to greater prominence in New York. It was the home of many of the men and women who would be arrested and sent to federal jail for violent conspiracy against the U.S. government in their quest to make the United States leave Puerto Rico.
The Chicago members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional—the Armed Forces of National Liberation, or FALN—were highly educated. Many had been born on the mainland, but grew up steeped in Puerto Rican culture. At the time of their arrest in Evanston, Illinois, in 1980, they were in their twenties and thirties. When asked whether he fully understood what he was getting into when he joined the resistance to U.S. rule, Jiménez said, “The reality was that anybody that fights for Puerto Rican independence, you can assure yourselves that you’re going to be . . . there’s going to be repression. You’re going to be sure the FBI at one time or another is going to bother you; you’re going to be watched.
“So it’s when you decide that you’re going to defend our country that you have found that reality, the history of Puerto Rico. You know why it is the way it is, and you decide that you’re going to dedicate your life to the Puerto Rican independence movement; it is without a doubt that you’re going to face repression; you might face prison or death. That’s a reality in the Puerto Rican independence movement, because the United States has made that very, very clear.”
Federal prosecutors linked Jiménez and eleven others to some one hundred bombings or attempted bombings since 1974, none of which was connected to loss of life. He was charged with seditious conspiracy, interference with interstate commerce by violence, interstate transport of firearms with intent to commit a crime, and other felonies. The prosecution never directly linked Jiménez and the others with the actual placement and detonation of the bombs, a much harder case to prove in court. He was sentenced to ninety years in prison. He does not see the decision to confront the United States as a fateful one. “We didn’t decide to confront the United States; it decided to confront us. They’re the ones who invaded our nation. We didn’t invade the United States. So the initial confrontation and the initial persecution come from the United States, not from the Puerto Rican people.”
President Bill Clinton offered clemency to the FALN inmates not directly connected to violent acts and loss of life. The president was accused of making the offer to the Puerto Rican nationalists as a boost to his wife Hillary’s electoral prospects as a candidate for U.S. Senate in New York. The blowback from the president’s decision was so severe that a few weeks after the clemency offer was announced by the president, his wife the Senate candidate denounced it.
In 1999, Jiménez was released from federal penitentiary after serving nineteen and a half years. He publicly denounced the use of violence, and supported utilizing the democratic process to end what he calls Puerto Rico’s colonial status. When asked about the decisions he has made, and the life he led, Jiménez has steadfastly refused to express regret. One exception is the sadness expressed over the loss of his mother during his long prison sentence. “I never got to see my mother again. I was never able to have closure. I was never able to say good-bye. I was never able to give that last kiss. I was never even able to comfort her and help her for all the sacrifice she did.
“Yes, you sacrifice a lot. But it’s a decision that I made that I felt was the correct decision, not only for my family but for the nation of Puerto Rico, for all Puerto Ricans.
“There cannot be any regrets for something that is a just and noble cause for the freedom of our country. You know when people understand what freedom is, when people understand what the nation of Puerto Rico has gone through, they will understand why we have sacrificed our lives in order to see it free.”
Ida Luz Rodriguez was caught in the same dragnet as Jiménez, and spent the same nineteen and a half years in prison. In her few interviews since clemency, one gets from Rodriguez more of a sense of regret, and a more skeptical look at her own youthful passions. When asked shortly after her release about how she looked at her past, she said, “I would say there was an evolution on my part. I saw that in countries that won political independence, there’s so much more they have to do to gain their freedom. There was a lot of pain and injury caused on both sides of the struggle, and when you look at it, you say, ‘I’m sorry that has happened.’ Yes, I have regrets. I think every single human being has done things in their lives that they regret, but if we carry the past, it is much too heavy, and we can’t go forward.”
Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor is a generational peer of Ricardo Jiménez and Ida Luz Rodriguez. Journalist Juan González is just a few years older. Veteran congressman Luis Gutiérrez is a Chicago-born peer who grew up a short drive from Jiménez’s boyhood home, and was active in the Puerto Rican independence movement in college. All understood and were shaped by the Puerto Rican predicament, the economic struggles on the island and the mainland. All made different decisions about how to be a Puerto Rican living in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century.
The poet Tato Laviera tried to define the ambiguity for Puerto Ricans in his poem “commonwealth,” in which he writes that both he and his island are in the same commonwealth stages of their lives. The state of semi-limbo that Laviera describes gave Puerto Ricans what other Latinos would see as a gift: the ability to move to the United States whenever they wanted. From inside the Puerto Rican diaspora, that “gift” looked different. They came from a country without sovereignty, to live in the nation that claimed them, but did not seem to want them.
Born in Puerto Rico, raised in New York, journalist and historian Juan González finds that ambiguity easy to understand, and perhaps harder to explain. “Puerto Ricans can come back and forth and as a result the identity is a lot more fluid and the sense of place becomes a lot more fluid. You can go back and forth because you have citizenship wherever you are. For immigrants from Mexico, or Guatemala, or El Salvador, when they go back to visit family they really are entering a different nation.
“Puerto Ricans don’t feel they are entering a different nati
on, but they are. What you have to deal with is much more complex, psychologically, socially, politically.” Through the Supreme Court rulings that came to be known as the Insular Cases, González said, American law affirmed again and again that Puerto Rico belongs to, but is not part of, the United States. “So no one born in Puerto Rico, including me, could ever be president of the United States.
“Puerto Ricans who are born in Puerto Rico as U.S. citizens have a different set of relationships and a different set of rights from other U.S. citizens. The Supreme Court has also ruled in other decisions that not all of the protections of the Constitution are affordable to Puerto Rico as they are afforded to other parts of the country. It is not part of the United States. It belongs to the United States.”
Back on the island, the two big political parties representing pro- statehood and procommonwealth forces command a stable mid–40 percent support. The proindependence party bumps along at less than 10 percent approval in opinion polls and in repeated plebiscites on future status. Despite this lack of success at the ballot box, it is no exaggeration to say the leaders of the most nationalist tendency are still widely admired as defenders of Puerto Rican identity and culture, as men and women brave enough to push back against the giant United States. One recent example was the successful struggle to get the U.S. armed forces to stop using a small island that is part of Puerto Rican territory, Vieques, as the site of live-ammo target practice.
For Cubans, the push and pull factors of identity and nationality were utterly different. At the same time Jiménez and his young radical friends in Chicago are nursing a deepening anger about U.S. involvement in their island, Cubans are in the midst of their transformation of a booming regional capital. Miami became a bilingual city as Cubans grew in cultural influence and economic clout, but also as Miami became an offshoot of Central and South America. Instability elsewhere in the hemisphere made Miami attractive to the wealthy and mobile in Spanish-speaking countries. Miami was easily accessible by jet, had a Spanish-speaking business community, and had bankers more than happy to deposit the money they were pulling out of their turbulent and inflation-ridden homelands.
Cuban refugees and their U.S.-born descendants were perceived by other south Floridians as largely white and middle-class in values and outlook. While other Floridians did not share the passionate interest in exile politics and the political state of play in Cuba, they did share their Cuban-born neighbors’ interest in housing values, new shopping centers, and foreign investment.
In 1978, Emmy Shafer of Miami Beach went on a frustrating march from one office to another, trying to find a public employee who spoke what she thought was good enough English to help with her problem. Nearly two decades after Cubans fleeing the Communist revolution poured into Miami, it was possible to get along pretty well speaking only Spanish. What bothered Shafer was how difficult she thought it was becoming to speak only English. She had spent part of World War II in a German concentration camp, came to Miami as a teenager, and learned English. Now, she figured, it was the Cubans’ turn.
“How come the Cubans get everything?” Shafer asked. “This group of people gets one hundred percent and everything their way because our local politicians are for sale. It’s a disgrace when you sell your own heritage and your own language for a dollar. They forget that the English people are the ones that vote.” That is a stunning—and very American—statement. A Russian-born Holocaust survivor moves to Miami Beach, becomes an American, and gets to team up with “the English people” in unhappy solidarity over the new guys’ refusal to learn the language.
Shafer led a successful petition drive, gathering more than twenty-six thousand signatures, but the push to turn back legal bilingualism languished until 1980. Then Shafer got an unexpected assist from a surprising place, and an unexpected politician: Havana. And Fidel Castro.
El Jefe’s intention was clear. Castro took an opportunity to give Washington a poke in the eye, while at the same time getting rid of inconvenient Cubans. Mirta Ojito was sixteen when the knock on the door came at her family’s apartment in Havana. “They asked for our names. But then they asked something strange. They asked if we were ready to ‘abandon’ the country. Yes, we were ready to leave. My father never believed in Fidel’s promise of a better society. We wanted freedom. We wanted to go. And a lot of other people did too.”
It started when a bus carrying half a dozen people rushed through the gates of the Peruvian embassy, followed by people just running off the streets onto the embassy grounds and asking for asylum. The idea spread to the Venezuelan embassy, with cars simply crashing the gates to get into the compound. Thousands of people crammed onto the embassy grounds, a humiliation for the Castro regime. Pictures were beamed around the world that showed dense crowds standing inside the gates. Fidel got an idea. He could turn this around, end the diplomatic standoff, and end up with far fewer mouths to feed all at once.
When Castro announced that Cubans who wished to leave the island were free to do so, that was all the encouragement many needed. Hundreds of boats streamed toward Florida, loaded with everyone they could carry. Ojito would have help. “My uncle was an exile in Miami. He always promised to help my father get out. So my uncle left his family and his job, and without knowing how to swim, knowing nothing about boats, he chartered this boat and came to get us out of Cuba.”
Between April and October of 1980, about 125,000 Cubans reached south Florida. This refugee flow came to be known as the Marielitos, after the main point of departure, the port of Mariel. Cuban community groups frantically began to place the new arrivals, but even their considerable organizational heft was overwhelmed. Marielitos ended up in armories and recreation centers, churches and even the Orange Bowl. Some were airlifted to military facilities in Arkansas, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
For Fidel Castro, Ojito said, the opportunity to cause mischief was too delicious to pass up. “Imagine you’re the leader of a country, and a hundred and twenty-five thousand people want out. Fidel wanted to turn it around, to punish the U.S. So he tainted the process. He ordered Cuban police to take patients from hospitals and inmates from jails, then forced them to board boats.”
Only a small fraction of the Cubans streaming into Florida, 4 percent, were mentally infirm, but twenty-five thousand had criminal records. After twenty years as Latino America’s “model minority,” Cubans were getting an unwelcome makeover. In the 1983 movie Scarface, Marielito coke smuggler Tony Montana, however dodgy his Spanish accent may have been, put a new face on south Florida Cubans. Beginning in 1984, the television hit Miami Vice gave Latino actors work by parading a weekly perp walk of prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, and money launderers across the small screen.
Election Day, 1980, followed the end of the boatlift by just a few days. Shafer’s proposal banned the use of county funds for messages in any other language but English and blocked expenditures to promote “any culture other than that of the United States.” Shafer’s plea to return Miami “to the way it used to be” found a receptive audience among English-speaking Dade County residents, though black Miamians wondered aloud what United States culture might be.
Latino leaders carefully pointed out that Miami had changed in a way that permanently altered it, meaning it could never be “the way it used to be” again. Silvia Unzueta of the Federation of Hispanic Employees of Metropolitan Dade County told the New York Times, “We are aware that a lot of people would like to erase Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Hondurans. But with or without the ordinance we’re not going away. To go back to the 1950s would be an impossibility. The county has changed and, I argue, for the better.”
Shafer’s proposal to “de-bilingualize” Miami got nearly 60 percent of the vote. A majority of the English speakers who voted for the ordinance said they would be pleased if passage of the proposal made Miami less attractive to Spanish speakers. It didn’t. The Latino community of south Florida continued to grow in numbers, and in p
olitical and commercial clout. In 1993, a now Latino-majority Dade County Commission threw out the 1980 ordnance, and returned county government to supplying services and information in Spanish and other languages.
In his eye-opening book The Nine Nations of North America (1981), journalist Joel Garreau broke the continent into regions that crossed state and national borders, and grouped people by who they were and how they lived rather than the jurisdiction listed on their driver’s license. Garreau argued that farmers in central Illinois had more in common with their peers in Missouri and Iowa (“the Breadbasket”) than they did with their fellow Illinoisans up in Chicago, who in turn shared a “nation” (“the Foundry”), with Ohioans, Michiganders, and the people of industrial southern Ontario.
MexAmerica was a nation that joined both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border, running from south Texas west through New Mexico, southern Colorado, Arizona, and Southern California. Its “capital” was Los Angeles. A multinational “nation” identified by Garreau was called simply “the Islands.” It joined together Central America, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, the English-speaking island nations of the West Indies, and south Florida. The capital of Garreau’s island nation? Miami. It may be securely attached to North America, but it is where the continent dips its toe into the warm waters of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
An economic study of Miami in 1980 found Cubans owned eighteen thousand businesses, including sixty car dealerships, five hundred supermarkets, and two hundred and fifty drugstores. After Mariel, those paled next to Al Pacino’s M16 military rifle and the challenge, “Say hello to my little friend!”
A backlash was under way. So was a demographic revolution.
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THE 2010 CENSUS counted almost forty million residents of the United States having been born in another country, more than twenty-one million of them from Latin America and the Caribbean. Forty million people represents a near tripling of the share of foreign-born since 1970, and a doubling since 1980. That means one of every eight Americans started life somewhere else on the planet. It is a share of the national whole we have not seen in a century, and has launched a debate with wide-ranging consequences that demands answers to so-far unanswered questions: