El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  More than two decades later, she returned to those formative revolutionary years, publishing The Wind That Swept Mexico in 1943. It is an unusual history, a work of two halves: one written, one visual. About one hundred pages are devoted to her words and the remaining two hundred pages are a pictorial history. It starts with a portrait of Porfirio Díaz, wearing a jacket bejeweled with military medals, his mustache obscuring his mouth, his eyes calmly looking back at the camera. The photos that follow attempt to document those years—the smug Científicos, the barefoot children, the workers on strike, the dead bodies in the street, Zapata’s glowering visage and Villa’s cheeky grin, Pershing on his horse—with the final image being one of a young man in a white shirt and straw sombrero, his concern about the future palpable, with the caption asking, “And the boys who had grown up with the idea that the revolution would somehow make their future. Would they lose it all …?” For Brenner, the revolution in Mexico was “not a finished story.”172 Neither was the relationship between Mexico and its powerful neighbor, something Brenner lived, summing it up by writing, “Being an American brought up in Mexico gives one an obsession to reconcile two ways of life, two almost opposed points of view, and two sets of emotions and interests.”173

  * Many of the terms related to ranching have their roots in Spanish: vaquero (cowboy), lazo (lasso), and ranchero (rancher), to name but a few contributions, and of course rodeo, from rodear, to surround.

  Chapter 13

  New York, ca. 1920s–’60s

  THE POPULARITY OF “Spanish” culture also took hold in New York City. Although the city had a growing population of Cubans and Puerto Ricans, immigrants from Spain lived there as well. Had any of them journeyed to north Manhattan in 1927, they could have seen El Cid, the famed eleventh-century slayer of Moors, sitting astride his steed, with a spear held over his head, his horse prancing on a plinth in front of an imposing Beaux-Arts building in Washington Heights. El Cid’s exploits were memorialized in a twelfth-century poem, and for centuries he had been a symbol of Spain, so he was seen as a fitting figure to welcome visitors to the Hispanic Society of America, which had opened nearly two decades earlier, born from the passion, and deep pockets, of Archer Milton Huntington, the son of a railway tycoon.

  Huntington founded the society in 1904 after accompanying his father to Mexico, where they dined at Chapultepec Castle with president Porfirio Díaz. Huntington later recalled that the trip was “a sort of strange awakening … Mexico was a revelation.”1 Although this was his introduction to the larger Hispanic world, Spain, not Mexico, enthralled him for the rest of his life. In 1909, just after the society’s opening, Huntington organized a retrospective of the contemporary Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida. It was a hit with the public and triggered a fashion for Spanish art among the wealthy, who found themselves fighting each other to buy works not only by Sorolla, but also by artists such as El Greco and Goya.2

  Huntington continued to acquire books, manuscripts, artwork, and photographs related to Spain, and the society published monographs about Spanish culture. The museum remains a repository of treasures—from medieval icons to paintings from Spain’s golden age to an entire room lined with panels painted by Sorolla. In that salon, each panel depicts crowds of people in traditional dress in the various regions of Spain. Sorolla’s Basques, Catalans, and Galicians have an air of timelessness—it could be a scene from three hundred years ago, or one of twenty-first-century people donning their folk costumes for a fiesta. Sorolla worked on the panels until his death in 1923, and the room was opened to the public in 1926.

  New York City at this time had a small but thriving community of Spanish immigrants who, like the Italians and Greeks, had left the poverty and lack of opportunity in Europe for the United States. In Spain, the nineteenth century had been marked by a series of civil wars, and the influx of Spanish immigrants to New York was part of a longer and larger process of people from the Iberian Peninsula resettling in the Americas; from 1880 until 1930 more people from Spain crossed the Atlantic than had done so between 1492 and 1880.3 In New York, this immigration cut across all classes, from Spanish workers seeking a well-paid factory job to educated elites seeking to practice law or medicine. They lived in the city during the peak of the “Spanish craze” that emerged in the eastern United States. As with the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the mission churches of California, this, too, was a time of great interest in anything Spanish, as witnessed by Huntington’s successful Sorolla exhibition.4

  A New York Times article in 1924 profiled the Spanish-speaking community in the city, describing it as “like Spain itself, with rivalries of old provinces still lingering. … Here are not Chelsea nor old Peter Stuyvesant’s farm, but Estremadura and Leon.” The piece also went on to note the other, non-peninsular Spanish-speakers in the city, as “Argentina lies next to Castile and Uruguay is near by, with Cuba in the offing.”5 The article claimed there were about thirty thousand such Spanish-speakers, half from Spain, a fifth from Mexico, and the rest from the Caribbean and Central and South America, all “scattered over Manhattan and Brooklyn.”6

  The number of Spaniards would be curtailed by the 1924 Immigration Act. Because quotas for visas were now based on the population at the time of the 1890 census, the Spanish were left with a minuscule quota of 131.7 Enough people, however, had already arrived from Spain for there to be a Little Spain neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, on the northwest edge of Greenwich Village, near the docks, with Fourteenth Street acting as a main thoroughfare, and adjacent streets lined with shops selling goods from Spain.8

  Many people joined social clubs that represented their regions of origin, which included the Basque country, Catalonia, and Galicia, while others were members of broad-based groups that promoted a type of Hispanic unity. Efforts at forging Hispanidad—the idea that there was a shared culture, heritage, and language between Spain and Latin America—had predated Spain’s loss of its empire, but the effort was renewed in the early twentieth century. Promoters of a “pan-Hispanic” identity thought it could counter the growing global influence of English-speaking U.S. culture.9 For instance, the Unión Ibero-Americana, a body that promoted good relations between Spain and Latin America, was able to use the success of the Columbus Day celebration—with the Admiral already appropriated by Italian-Americans—to lay the groundwork for the Día de la Raza (day of the race), instituted on October 12, 1918, to celebrate Hispanidad.10 The idea was successful enough to survive in the Spanish-speaking world to the present day, although, like Columbus Day in the United States, the Día de la Raza in many Latin American countries has attracted increasing criticism.

  In June 1929, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca arrived in New York to study at Columbia University. He was already well-known within Spain, but in the United States he had no reputation, except among the Spanish in the city, whom he came to know the minute he stepped off the ship. Upon his arrival, he found that “a group of Spaniards was there waiting for us.”11 It was not just any group; among the coterie were artists and writers, publishers and politicians, including Federico de Onís, a descendant of the foreign minister who signed the treaty ceding Florida to the United States.12

  While his diary reveals many social occasions and parties, his poems speak of a lonely city. In the poem “Dawn” he wrote:

  Dawn in New York has

  four columns of mire

  and a hurricane of black pigeons

  splashing in the putrid waters.13

  He later explained at a lecture that he thought Wall Street, with its “rivers of gold,” was terrifying and had a “total absence of the spirit.” He found the people who worked there dispiriting because they believed “it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.” Lorca put this down to “a Protestant morality that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.”14 His letters to his family, however, tell of a different New York, a much more cheerful one with a large community of Spaniards a
nd high-profile Hispanophiles. Lorca noted with surprise in one letter that “there are over six hundred students of Spanish language and literature [at Columbia].”15 He returned to Spain in 1930 and six years later he was assassinated by nationalist forces, an early victim during the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 until 1939. By this point, the enthusiasm that fueled the “Spanish craze” had come to an end, dampened by the rise of fascism in Spain and the resulting conflict there. However, some Americans took a great interest in that war, going as far as volunteering to fight on the side of republican Spain. Ernest Hemingway memorialized this in his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Many Spaniards left the peninsula during this violent time, going into exile. However, the Spanish population of New York, limited by the tiny U.S. immigration quota, could not absorb them, and thousands instead went to Latin America.

  ALTHOUGH THE NUMBER of arrivals from Spain was dropping, other Spanish-speakers were making their way to the city, Puerto Ricans in particular. In 1920 there were 7,364 Puerto Ricans in New York, 2,572 Mexicans, and 8,722 Cubans and other West Indians.16 Many people from the Hispanic Caribbean found employment at the docks or on construction sites, and in hotels and restaurants, as well as in the uptown cigar-making operations in the city at this time. Others started their own businesses, including bodegas, bars, and cafés, building on the foundation earlier Puerto Rican and Cuban exiles had laid.17 Cubans in New York opened mutual-aid societies similar to those in Tampa. Institutions like El Club Cubano Inter-Americano were cultural as well as social centers, welcoming people from other Spanish-speaking nations. That club’s founding charter declared its intent to “maintain the fraternity that should exist between the Cuban colony and the rest of the Latin-American countries.”18

  By 1930, the Puerto Rican population in New York had boomed to 44,908, now constituting around 40 percent of the Spanish-speaking community. While Cubans, Dominicans, and other West Indians had a combined population of 23,000 by 1940, the Puerto Rican community was more than twice as large at 61,500. By 1954, one in every twenty New Yorkers was Puerto Rican. This number continued to rise, soaring to 612,574 by 1960.19 Puerto Rico’s División de Educación a la Comunidad, a government agency on the island, printed pamphlets warning of the risks—as well as describing the rewards—of heading north. Readers of the 1954 leaflet Emigración were told that Puerto Ricans were considered “a problem” in New York and that they should look to other parts of the United States for work. The booklet also urged cultural assimilation, which was the official policy of the Migration Division of Puerto Rico’s offices in New York and Chicago.20 One illustration showed men disembarking from an airplane with the tagline: “Do Puerto Ricans know the country where they are emigrating? New York is not the only city.”21 Behind the scenes, however, Governor Luis Muñoz Marín and officials in Washington were promoting migration to the mainland, seeing it as a way to prevent social unrest, such as strikes, on the island.22

  The influx of Puerto Ricans had an enormous impact on the city, as their community spread out beyond East Harlem—often called El Barrio—into Brooklyn and the Bronx.23 The earliest years were a struggle for many, and housing was a particular problem, as immigrants from the Caribbean were pushed into tenement housing, which was often substandard and unhealthy.24 These parts of the city were often seen as no-go areas for outsiders. A report in Civil Rights Digest in the late 1960s described the area starting at East Ninety-Sixth Street, by then also known as “Spanish” Harlem, as being “like an invisible Berlin Wall between affluent Manhattanites and East Harlem puertorriqueños and Harlem blacks.”25 In these parts of New York, apartments were “poorly ventilated … the smell of the sweat and refuse of generations is stifling. Most of the dwellings are privately owned (few by Puerto Ricans themselves), and in the final stages of dilapidation; most of the buildings, which house many times the occupants they were meant to house, were built before the First World War.”26

  Not everyone settled in the city; some headed to suburbs or smaller towns, a world that Judith Ortiz Cofer evoked in her novel The Line of the Sun. One character described life in an apartment block called El Building, in Paterson, New Jersey, as a place where “the adults conducted their lives in two worlds in blithe acceptance of cultural schizophrenia.” Describing the residents of El Building, Ortiz Cofer wrote: “Fortified in their illusion that all could be kept the same within the family as it had been on the Island, women decorated their apartments with every artifact that enhanced the fantasy. Religious objects imported from the Island were favorite wall hangings. … Mary could always be found smiling serenely from walls.”27

  Immigrants often bear the blame for bringing disease or crime to an area, and it was no different for those from the Hispanic Caribbean. In one case, a World-Telegram article in October 1947 quoted New York’s deputy health commissioner, who claimed Puerto Ricans brought tuberculosis, among other illnesses. Rafael Angel Marín, a doctor and activist, was quick to respond that “the half truths, the errors and misrepresentation … are not only a gratuitous injury to Puerto Ricans … but … an insult to scientific accuracy.” He was angered by the claim that one in ten Puerto Ricans had TB, pointing out that no reliable statistics existed.28

  New York offered some respite from the strict Jim Crow laws of the Deep South, though people from the Spanish-speaking islands all eventually became familiar with U.S.-style prejudice, often finding their “race” redefined upon their arrival.29 In a 1934 article in the newspaper Alma Boricua (Puerto Rican Soul, or Soul of Puerto Rico), Bernardo Vega argued that “the principal characteristic that distinguished us from the [Anglo-] Saxon Americans was our racial tolerance,” warning Puerto Ricans that if they were not careful, they would be “on the verge of poisoning ourselves with the filth of the racial hatred of the US.”30

  Cubans and Puerto Ricans in New York were joined during this period by people from a third Spanish-speaking island in the Caribbean: the Dominican Republic. It, too, had fallen into the sphere of U.S. influence and interference. At the same time that U.S. troops had been in Mexico hunting down Pancho Villa in 1916, another branch of the military was occupying the Dominican Republic. The United States had earlier taken over the island’s custom house in 1905, claiming it would help to bring the island’s debt under control. A decade later, with entry into the First World War looming, President Woodrow Wilson was fearful of potential German influence in the Dominican Republic, as well as its ongoing political instability. Pressure was put on Dominican president Juan Isidro Jimenes (sometimes spelled Jiménez) to give U.S. officials governmental posts, as well as access to the island’s finances, but he refused. Around the same time, political infighting was weakening Jimenes’s control of the situation, and in May 1916, the first contingent of marines arrived. Martial law was declared, and a military government was established. Troops also began working on infrastructure projects and building up the Dominican Guardia Nacional. The United States thought that bolstering the Dominican national guard would help solve some of the island’s problems. Marines occupied the Dominican Republic until 1924, though control of the custom house did not revert back to the island until 1940.

  In the years after the marine withdrawals, a young member of the national guard, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, rose through the ranks with such speed that he was able to take control of the presidency—and the military—by 1930. He would stay in power for the next thirty-one years, until he was assassinated. Those three decades were a time of terror for many Dominicans, and some people were forced into exile. The novelist Julia Alvarez, who was born in the United States to Dominican parents who fled the regime, reflected this fear in her novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. The father of the main characters is unable to let go of his anxiety: “Now in America he was safe, a success even. … But in his dreams, he went back to those awful days and long nights, and his wife’s screams confirmed his secret fear: they had not gotten away after all; the SIM [Servicio de Inteligencia Militar] had co
me for them at last.”31

  OUT OF THE diverse communities living alongside each other in New York would grow one of the city’s most important contributions to the culture of the United States and the world: music. The islands had musical traditions that had long merged popular Spanish and African forms, among them Cuban son and Puerto Rican bomba. Once these sounds moved north, they came under the influence of other musical forms, including African-American music, first overlapping in early twentieth-century New Orleans, whose rich Spanish, French, and African traditions gave rise to the “Latin Tinge” and would eventually influence the development of jazz in that city and beyond.32

  Some music historians trace the modern Latin sound to New York, after the return from the First World War of the African-American “Harlem Hellfighters,” the 369th Infantry Regiment, which included Puerto Rican soldiers who had played in military bands.33 In the decades that followed, performers like Rafael Hernández—who had served in that regiment—and his Trio Borinquen began to appear. Their 1929 “Lamento Borincano” became an unofficial anthem for Puerto Ricans living away from the island, with its lines “Borinquén, the land of Eden / the one that when sung by the great Gautier / he called the Pearl of the Seas / now that you are dying with your sorrows / let me sing to you also.”34