El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  Cuban music also made up part of the city’s—and eventually, the nation’s—soundscape. At this time, tourists were going to Havana in their thousands, and popular culture became enamored of Cuba throughout the decades that followed. Through films with titles like Week-End in Havana and Holiday in Havana, Cuba—or, at least an imagined approximation of it—became accessible to a wider audience, as did its music.35 The first Cuban song to become a hit in the United States was “El Manisero” (“The Peanut Seller”), in 1930.36 Soon the ballrooms of New York were playing their own versions of this song, and before long the country was in the grip of a rumba (sometimes, rhumba) fever, for both the music and the dance steps.

  Rumba music has at its structural core the clave, a pattern of five beats usually played on claves, a pair of wooden sticks; at its historical core, rumba was part of Afro-Cuban culture, coming from slaves in sugar plantations and free people of color in the cities, as part of a tradition in which people gathered to sing and dance, and was also connected to Cuba’s vibrant culture of Catholic processions.37 Anglo musicians learned the style and some of them even tried to pass themselves off as Cubans, such as Don Carlos and His Rumba Band, whose earlier incarnation had been Lou Gold and His Orchestra.38

  Alongside this, demand increased for actual Cuban musicians and their music. In 1946 the Cuban Desi Arnaz scored a hit with his rendition of “Babalú,” before becoming a household name a few years later in the TV show I Love Lucy. Despite the musical successes, in general race continued to stalk musicians from the Hispanic Caribbean, with lighter-skinned Puerto Ricans and Cubans playing to all-white downtown crowds in New York, many times as the “relief” bands for bigger orchestras at clubs or upscale hotels, while Afro-Caribbean musicians were often limited to playing in Harlem and elsewhere uptown.39

  Following on the heels of the rumba came the even more popular mambo, again a style drawing from Cuba’s African roots, with the term possibly being of Congolese origin. Its use of Cuban percussion, such as the conga drum, reflected its history, but its development was also influenced by the proximity of Cuban musicians and composers to popular U.S. big band jazz.40 This mixture of influences was exemplified by Pérez Prado, who moved from Cuba to Mexico, where he recorded “Qué rico el mambo” in 1949, the energy of its full brass horns and drums propelling it into a hit, first in Latin America and soon afterward in the United States, helping to spark a mambo craze across the country.41 Places like New York’s Palladium Ballroom at Broadway and Fifty-Third featured the mambo throughout the early 1950s, hosting the big bands of rising stars like the percussionist and bandleader Ernesto “Tito” Puente.42 The music industry was trying to cash in on this trend anywhere it could, creating what have become known as “latunes”—basically, songs with Latin rhythms but lyrics in English. In the rumba era, among the songs that qualified for the category was Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.”43 By the time of the mambo, however, songwriters were churning out “mamboids”—compositions that more or less just mentioned the mambo rather than copying its musical style, such as “Mambo Italiano,” “Papa Loves Mambo,” and even “Mardi Gras Mambo.”44 As fevered as the mambo was, by the mid-1950s it gave way to the smoother cha-cha (or cha-cha-chá), another Cuban style that found its way north. It was slower than the mambo, and its dance steps were an “one-two-cha-cha-chá.”45

  While the various types of Cuban music enjoyed some success, Puerto Rican styles, including the danza, the bomba, and the countryside sounds of música jíbara, did not gain as large a public following as Cuba’s, though they were influential components of the music coming out of the Latin scene in New York. In the later part of the 1960s, another musical form was on the rise: the Latin boogaloo, mixing elements of African-American and Puerto Rican traditions. The song “Bang Bang,” released in 1967 by the Joe Cuba Sextet, was a nationwide hit and introduced the public to this latest musical genre.46 It is around this point that salsa, a sound that blended these influences, also began to gain ground. Salsa would take over Latin American music, becoming popular throughout the world and tying together many of the strains of Latin music in New York.47 When asked about what constituted salsa, bandleader and composer Tito Puente, who played across a wide range of styles, was said to have replied: “I’m a musician, not a cook.”48

  ON THE CORNER of Calle de la Cruz and Calle Sol in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is a rose-colored building with white trim that bears a small golden plaque near one of its windows. This elegant building, with its carved wooden balconies on the second floor, was once the headquarters of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico (Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico) and the residence of Pedro Albizu Campos, who led the party. The marker, featuring a black-and-white picture of Albizu holding his fist in the air, says, “During the revolutionary acts of 1950, in defense of our right to independence, this building was shot at for two days by the island police and the National Guard.”

  As a leader and politician, Albizu Campos occupies a complicated place in Puerto Rico’s history, and his party has been described as everything from “patriotic to criminal, self-sacrificing to demented, proto-socialist to fascist.”49 He rose out of poverty to study at the University of Vermont before earning an undergraduate degree in 1916 at Harvard, where he would go on to law school. His studies were interrupted when he volunteered for the U.S. military during the First World War and was assigned to an all-black regiment, owing to the skin color he inherited from his mother. It was a formative experience because he discovered at first hand the prejudices and discriminations of the mainland. After the war, he finished his law degree, returned to Puerto Rico, and was soon active in the island’s politics, joining the nascent Nationalist Party in 1924; by 1930 he was its leader. Part of his motivation in advocating nationhood was the realization, after his time in the United States, that dark-skinned Puerto Ricans had no hope of equality under U.S. rule.50 The party wanted independence, state ownership of utilities, and land reforms limiting private-sector ownership to three hundred acres.51 Albizu Campos’s aims were not merely economic and political. He also had a vision of a Puerto Rican raza, a form of Hispanism that was a cultural rejection of Americanization.52 To Albizu Campos, the Puerto Rican republic was born in 1868, during the revolt in Lares when rebels tried to throw off Spanish rule. In a 1936 speech, he called Puerto Rico an “island property” of the United States, saying, “We stand today, docile and defenseless, because, since 1868, our political and economic power has been systematically stripped away by the United States for its own political and economic gain.” He was angered by the United States’ “imposing its own culture and language” and argued that Puerto Ricans “must be a free nation in order to survive as a people.”53 His vision embraced the Spanish language and also Catholicism, which he considered part of the expression of Puerto Rican nationhood.

  During the Great Depression, Puerto Rico had suffered.54 The sugar industry had been hit hard, and cane cutters saw their wages drop or lost their jobs. Puerto Ricans were heading north in droves. Although the United States tried to cobble together some relief measures for the island, sugar workers began striking for better pay. At least eighty-five strikes occurred in the second half of 1933, not only among cane cutters but also among people who worked in tobacco, at the docks, or in the needlework industry.55 The sugar workers returned in 1934 with an even larger strike that disrupted the harvest.

  In 1935, President Roosevelt extended a version of the New Deal to the island, establishing the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA). Cement and glass factories were built, and a number of public health measures were attempted, such as slum clearance. In all, some $58 million was spent by 1938.56 The PRRA also sought to put more sugar production back in the hands of Puerto Ricans through the establishment of cooperative mills, and to enforce the provision in the Jones-Shafroth Act that limited corporate landownership to five hundred acres. This move upset large U.S. sugar interests, though it pleased growers on the island. One frustrated Puerto
Rican wrote to Charles West, acting secretary of the interior, in 1936 to complain: “I have not yet met one of them [Americans living on the island] who does not defend the monopoly of our profitable agricultural lands by the Sugar Centrals. Not one of them has taken the side of the Puerto Rican.”57

  As PRRA policies were being implemented, relations between the authorities and the nationalists took a violent turn. In October 1935, four nationalists were killed after an altercation between demonstrators and police at the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras. A few months later, on February 23, 1936, two Nationalist Party members killed the police commissioner, Elisha Francis Riggs. They were later shot at police headquarters, and many Puerto Ricans believed they had been summarily executed—a belief that sparked public anger. The authorities arrested Albizu Campos and other prominent nationalists in 1936, locking them up in the imposing Princesa prison, built by the Spanish a century before on the Bay of San Juan. The men were charged with sedition and conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government on the island, but their first trial—in which seven of the jurors were Puerto Rican and five American—ended in a hung jury. They were retried, this time with a jury of ten Americans and two Puerto Ricans, and found guilty in a 10 to 2 vote.58 Albizu Campos and six others were moved to a federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

  That summer, the island’s governor, Blanton Winship, wrote to Harold L. Ickes, secretary of the interior, about these tumultuous events. Of particular irritation to Winship were the repeated calls for the direct election of a Puerto Rican governor, which he sarcastically described as “only natural” because he did not expect the Puerto Rican political class to “admit that it could not furnish the brains, character and other equipment necessary for carrying on the government of the territory it inhabits.” In addition, the growing nationalist agitation was “particularly evident,” said Winship, since the rise of Albizu Campos. To his mind, the nationalist leader’s purpose was “to break down the American government established here.”59

  Later that year, Millard Tydings, chair of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, put forward a bill in support of Puerto Rico’s independence, though it was no victory for the nationalists. The bill offered the island a vote on independence, but if independence was chosen, the United States would offer no transitional assistance, and would impose high tariffs that were to rise over the first four years.60 It also would give individual Puerto Ricans only six months to decide if they wanted to retain their U.S. citizenship, which had the potential to be a serious dilemma for the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans living on the mainland. In addition, the immigration quota would be set at five hundred people a year.61 Its punitive message was clear, the subtext being that Puerto Rico could not survive without the United States. Tydings had made his political point and withdrew the bill.

  Then, on March 21, 1937—Palm Sunday—the violence worsened. The Nationalist Party had announced that it would hold a parade of its cadet corps in the southern town of Ponce that Sunday and applied for a permit, which was granted the night before, but on the basis that it would not be any sort of military parade. After the request was made, a number of police were sent into Ponce.62 Before the parade was due to start, the mayor of the town revoked the permit on the grounds that it was a religious holiday, while the nationalists argued that their cadets would cause no disruptions.63

  While discussions were taking place about how to proceed, spectators began to arrive in the town center, with family members of the cadets gathering to watch the procession. At around three p.m., the eighty or so cadets started to line up, and a band struck up the island anthem “La Borinqueña.” A shot rang out and chaos ensued. A photographer captured the moment, in a picture showing one policeman firing his gun at civilians on the curb, though his face could not be identified. Other accounts claimed a civilian fired first, though the man who was said to have done so was killed in the subsequent volley of bullets. Later, no weapon was found on him.64 In the end, nineteen people died that afternoon, and around 150 were wounded, in what was called the Ponce Massacre.

  Whether or not that photo captured the actual first shot or a subsequent one, rumors and accusations flew, and in an attempt to get to the truth for the distressed people of Ponce and across the island, a commission was formed to investigate the shooting. It was led by Arthur Garfield Hays of the American Civil Liberties Union, who was joined by seven Puerto Ricans, though no one from the Nationalist Party took part and there were no representatives of the colonial authorities, who were uncooperative with regard to the entire undertaking.

  In his report to the Department of the Interior on March 23, Governor Winship said the parade was not of the cadets but of the “Liberating Army” of the party and that the chief of police had decided it should not go ahead. He reported that at 3:30 p.m., after the anthem was played, they began to march and the police chief told them the parade was prohibited. At this point, “two shots were fired by the Nationalists,” with the bullets striking policemen to the left and right of the chief. In Winship’s account, this was followed by an exchange of fire with “Nationalists firing from the street, and from the roofs and balconies.”65

  The director of the U.S. Division of Territories and Island Possessions wrote to Governor Winship to convey the outrage expressed in the letters he was receiving from Puerto Ricans, including claims that the nationalists who were killed had no weapons on them; that the police fired into the crowd, killing innocent women and children; and that had the parade been allowed to go ahead in the first place, there would not have been any bloodshed.66 A classified report from the commander of the “Borinqueneers” Sixty-Fifth Infantry Regiment in Puerto Rico included the “Nationalist Version” of events, in which “they claim that the shooting was initiated ‘on the part of the police exclusively,’ and ‘the police shot down the Nationalists like rats.’”67

  The commission’s findings challenged many of Winship’s claims. Its report said, for instance, that “photographs taken at the time show not a single nationalist with any weapon of any kind,” and that the cadets were “hemmed on all sides by heavily armed police.”68 It concluded its findings with the observation that “the people of Ponce have given this tragedy the only possible descriptive title: This was the Ponce Massacre—and the more so because it occurred in a time of peace.”69

  Winship continued as governor, though the anger directed at him infused public life. In spite of the heated climate, he decided to hold a military parade on July 25, 1938, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. landing in Puerto Rico. In order to drive home the point about U.S. rule, he opted to hold it in Ponce. The soldiers had scarcely taken a step when the nationalist Ángel Esteban Antongiorgi tried to assassinate Winship but instead killed a national guard colonel who had leaped in front of the governor. Antongiorgi was shot dead on the spot by police.

  President Roosevelt decided to replace Winship with Admiral William D. Leahy, whom he named as governor on May 12, 1939.70 The day before the announcement about Leahy, Vito Marcantonio, a New York congressman whose district included East Harlem, had called for Winship to be removed from the post. Marcantonio had many Puerto Rican constituents and over the course of his political career would introduce five bills for independence for the island.

  His May 11 speech referred to the ongoing efforts of Winship and others to avoid implementing the 25-cents-an-hour minimum wage stipulated under the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Marcantonio denounced the “slave wages” paid to Puerto Ricans, especially those in the sugar industry, insisting, “Everybody knows it can pay 25 cents per hour to its workers and should.” He blamed wages staying at 12.5 cents an hour on Winship because “the Governor on many, many occasions … advised them [the sugar industry] not to worry about the law.”71

  A few months later, after Winship’s departure, Marcantonio made his “Five Years of Tyranny in Puerto Rico” speech to the House of Representatives in Washington, describing Winship’s term as a t
ime when “Citizens were terrorized. … American workers were persecuted and shot down whenever they sought to exercise their right to strike or organize. … The insular police was militarized. … Winship drank cocktails and danced in the Governor’s palace while the police ruthlessly killed and persecuted Puerto Rican citizens.”72

  Leahy may have been a change, but he still represented U.S. rule. Many of the same problems remained, and colonial policies were not working.73 At the same time, another political leader was emerging: Luís Muñoz Marín. He was the son of Luis Muñoz Rivera, the island’s former resident commissioner to the U.S. Congress. Muñoz Marín had spent many of his formative years in the United States, studying at Georgetown University before dropping out in 1915. By 1920 he had started to take an interest in politics, moving back and forth between the United States and the island over the next few years, before finally settling back in Puerto Rico in 1931.74 A year later he won a seat in the island’s senate as a member of the Partido Liberal (Liberal Party).

  Muñoz Marín later broke away from the Partido Liberal, and in 1938 he and his supporters set up the Partido Popular Democrático (Popular Democratic Party), which was initially still in favor of independence.75 In the November 1940 election, the party took enough seats to make him president of the senate. Later that month, Muñoz Marín wrote to congratulate President Roosevelt on his own recent reelection and to discuss in emollient tones “a real opportunity for establishing a relationship of true understanding.” In the letter, he explained to the president that his primary issue was not independent status but rather to see that “economically and administratively our purposes are parallel to those of the New Deal.” Muñoz Marín signed off the letter pledging his “full cooperation to the end that, with your help, the endeavor and the results should be in harmony with that reality.”76 This was illustrative of Muñoz Marín’s shift toward greater autonomy in lieu of independence, a move informed in part by the island’s growing economic dependence on the United States.77 Other theories attribute his change of heart to the U.S. intelligence on him detailing opium usage, leaving him little option but to be compliant.78 His party continued to make gains in elections, pledging changes to land use and the economy and winning support among the rural and often impoverished jíbaro communities throughout the island.