#384 Nuyorican: The Great Puerto Rican Migration

On August 4th, 1902, the SS Philadelphia sailed into New York, carrying Isabel Gonzales, a young woman looking for a better life, like the millions who have come through the harbor before her. But her story was a little different. The ship passed by the Statue of Liberty and docked, letting out most of the passengers, like Gonzales was promptly transferred to Ellis Island, entering the processing center, where she was surrounded by thousands of newly arrived immigrants. There were only a handful of people around her who could even speak in her native language. And there was another complicating factor. Isabel Gonzales was pregnant. Her husband had died of tuberculosis and she came to New York to live with family members in Staten Island. But when she was interviewed and examined by inspectors, she was deemed an alien, unlikely to become a public charge. She was then detained for weeks. This was the unfortunate circumstance for many immigrant women. But Isabel Gonzales was not an immigrant. She was Puerto Rican, but at a moment in the island's history when her legal status was vague and undefined. Her story would market turning points in American history and change the fate of Puerto Ricans in New York. The Bowry Boys Episode 384. New York The Great Puerto Rican Migration. Hey, it's the Bowry Boys. Hi there, welcome to the Bowry Boys. This is Greg Young. And today's show looks at the special relationship between New York City and Puerto Rico via the stories of Pioneros, the first migrants from the island to make New York their home. Today there are more Puerto Ricans in New York City than in any other city in the nation, except for San Juan, Puerto Rico, of course. And it has been so for decades. By the late 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans lived in New York City. But in a metropolis of deteriorating infrastructure and financial woes, they often found themselves at the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder in poverty-stricken neighborhoods. It was in this light that Puerto Rican artists began to address this disparity in their work, and celebrate a Puerto Rican New York culture that was quite distinct and thriving against all odds. This artistic revolution was known as the New Yorkian movement. Institutions elevating Puerto Rican culture and supporting the Puerto Rican community emerged at this time. And many are still with us. In 1973, Miguel Algarine founded the Poets Collective to be known as the New Yorkian Poets Cafe, founded in his Lower East Side apartment. Algarine transformed the original condescending, meaning of New Yorkian, which at the time meant an Americanized Puerto Rican, not a true Puerto Rican, transformed it into a bold label of community pride. That same year, in 1973, CUNY Center for Puerto Rican Studies, or Centro, was founded by a coalition of Puerto Rican students, activists, and academics. Now last Thursday, I headed up to East Harlem and the Hunter College home of Centro to meet with the new director, Yarema Bonilla, and Carlos Vargas Ramos, the director of development at Centro, to discuss how the origins of the program fit in with the circumstances surrounding the near-recon movement. Well, I think at the heart of the foundation of Centro was a desire and a need identified by Puerto Ricans living in New York City and across the nation to better understand where they came from, why they were here, the history of Puerto Rico, its place in the United States, and also part of what Centro does is to document the unique history of the Puerto Rican diaspora of the New Yorkian community, its formation, its creation, its cultural institutions, its political institutions as well. And so there was a time when the term New Yorkian could have been a pejorative term to think of someone who's not from Puerto Rico, who is somehow less Puerto Rican or a different kind of Puerto Rican, and I think part of the role of organizations like Centro has been to valorize that tradition, and to see the rich cultural legacy that Puerto Ricans in New York have built and given us, and now that extends beyond New York as we have emerging Puerto Rican communities across the 50 states, really. And I would add that in addition to that, that generation of Puerto Ricans, mostly born and/or raised in the United States from childhood, they were trying to understand, well, why is it that we are a marginalized community, why is it that we are poor, why is it that we are discriminated against? And they found that the curriculum didn't teach it, well, first of all, it wasn't mentioned in the public school curriculum at all, you know, we were anomalies, we were just, you know, not fitting in, and at the college level, it wasn't even mentioned currently or what have you. So there was a need from the students themselves saying, this is not explaining our reality at present. And it was precisely that New Yorkian generation, the generation that said, okay, we are here, but why are we here? What brought us to New York? What brought us to the United States, what, therefore, is their relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States? You'll be hearing from Yarnimar and Carlos throughout the show today, as well as a few other special guests. As I look at this era, that those in the New Yorkian movement were responding to, the generations of Puerto Ricans who had made New York City their home since the late 19th century, the generations that would become New Yorkian. For almost all of the 19th century, the islands of Puerto Rico and Cuba were colonies of Spain. Here in New York at this time, immigrants from these places lived in small Spanish enclaves, often with attachments to the commercial shipping of sugar or coffee. Many actually worked in the cigar-making business. New York had hundreds of factories during the Gilded Age and Eficionados considered Cuban and Puerto Ricans cigars the finest. There were also many political exiles from Puerto Rico living in New York, uniting with Cubans and other immigrants from Latin America, and furthering the cause of independence back home. In fact, the Puerto Rican flag was actually invented in New York. It was unfurled in 1895 at a meeting of Puerto Rican exiles at Chimney Corner Hall on West 25th Street. But independence did not come for Puerto Rico. On February 15th, 1898, the USS Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana Harbor and the American government intervened, bolstered by jingoistic headlines from the newspapers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hurst. The resulting Spanish-American war was confusing, brutal, and an otherwise swift affair. By the winter of 1898, the war was over and with the Treaty of Paris, the United States now owned Spain's island colonies, Guam, the Philippines, Cuba for a short time, and Puerto Rico. The U.S., which had, of course, taken over many nations and turned them into the American territories on the mainland, did not know quite how to handle its island properties. To quote from Daniel Immerwarr's book, "How to Hide an Empire," quote, "America's western territories were the frontier, the leading edge of the country's growth. But if places like the Philippines and Puerto Rico were territories, they were territories of a different sort. Unlike the West, they weren't obviously slated for statehood nor were they widely understood to be integral parts of the nation." For a time, the legal status of Puerto Ricans was in flux. Carlos Vargas Ramos, from Centro, explains. So the people of Puerto Rico, between 1898 and, say, 1904, they had no real status, but for one, established in 1900 that the people who were not Spaniards, meaning born in Spain, you know, decided to return to Spain or remain as Spanish citizens, those who were born in Puerto Rico, they would be seen as, and they were recognized as citizens of Puerto Rico. There was this citizenship that had never before existed, legally, and that the United States Congress decided to recognize Puerto Ricans and in terms of their relationship with the United States, in 1904, the Court of the U.S. Supreme Court established that Puerto Ricans were U.S. nationals, and therefore they have a relationship with the United States there, U.S. persons. So what happened in 1904, the U.S. Supreme Court case, Gonzalez versus Williams, the case of Isabel Gonzalez. Gonzalez detained at Ellis Island in 1902, as someone who, quote, would likely become a public charge, had come to New York when immigration was being overseen by Commissioner William Williams, who notoriously rejected any immigrant, through his personal conditions he thought to be considered weak or poor, but Gonzalez was not an immigrant, but rather trapped in a vague legal status. Fortunately, her uncle, a man named Domingo Colazo, was a well-connected attorney, and by the following year, her situation became a test case in front of the Supreme Court, determining the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans. And that allowed them to come into the United States without having to be subject to the same immigration restrictions and laws that existed for somebody who was not a native-born citizen of the United States. As the rest of the city prospered, as Times Square became the center of amusement and millionaires moved up Fifth Avenue, opportunities also began opening slowly in New York for Puerto Ricans. In 1916, a tobacco worker named Bernardo Vega left the town of Caillet Puerto Rico for New York, where eventually he found work as a journalist on a Spanish-language newspaper publisher. His memoir paints a vivid picture of the lives of Spanish-speaking New Yorkers in the early 20th century. Here he writes about his arrival into New York upon the SS Cuamo, quote, "When the Fourth Day dawned, even those who had spent their whole trip, cooped up in their cabins, showed up on deck. We saw the lights of New York even before the morning mist rose. As the boat entered the harbor, the sky was clear and clean. The excitement grew the closer we got to the docks. We recognized the Statue of Liberty in the distance. In front of us rose the imposing sight of skyscrapers. The same skyline we had admired so often in postcards. Many of the passengers had only heard talk of New York and stood with their mouths open, spellbound. Beside as we set foot on solid ground, there gaping before us were the jaws of the iron dragon, the immense New York metropolis. In 1917, citizenship rights were finally granted to Puerto Ricans by the U.S. Congress and the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Although even that would need to be upgraded and redefined over the next few decades. By the 1920s, many Puerto Ricans found themselves in direct beneficiaries of opportunities due to major restrictions on immigration, especially restrictions of immigrants from particular areas of Europe. The flow of new immigrants would slow to a trickle. But then that opened up certain job opportunities for southern African Americans, for Puerto Ricans, and even other immigrants from Latin America. The reason why there is a migration of Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico to the United States specifically to New York is because after World War I, after 1921, 1924, there was a restriction in immigration coming from Europe from the rest of the world. Therefore, a lot of the supply of labor needed to come from within the boundaries of the United States. That is why you see the great migration beginning to take place. The migration of African Americans from the south to the north on the one hand, and what is the source of domestic migration, Puerto Ricans, right? You had a migration of Mexicans in the southwest, but that was a special migration they can place there because there were no restrictions of migration coming from the western hemisphere. But in so far as this concern, you had a migration of African Americans in Puerto Ricans. Where did they settle? African Americans we know then that the settle first in the Harlem area around where Harlem Hospital is, and that was a migration of both African Americans and Caribbean Americans, meaning English, Beijing, West Indians, or what have you, right? And then there was a Puerto Rico migration that settled around that area near Lexington Avenue, 104th Street, 103rd Street, maybe 100th and 2nd Street. East Harlem had become El Barrio by the 1920s. The center for most of New York's Spanish-speaking residents. Over time it would garner another name, Spanish Harlem. But when the very first Puerto Ricans and Cuban migrants first settled here in the 1890s, it was a very different neighborhood. The area we're talking about here is on Manhattan's east side, from 96th Street up to the Harlem River. It had first been the home of Irish and then Eastern European Jewish immigrants. By the start of the 20th century, it had become a vibrant Italian neighborhood, filled with working-class Italian residents who had escaped the overcrowded streets of Lower Manhattan. In 1922, the entire district was represented in Congress by a young, ferello la Guardia. But as the years progressed, the other ethnic groups would move away, and El Barrio would become the predominant Puerto Rican colonia for decades. Meanwhile in Brooklyn, a small number of Puerto Rican migrants had lived near the Navy yard, and also along the waterfront near the neighborhood of Red Hook. When the flow of European immigrants dried up in the early 1920s, many New York companies actually recruited employees from Puerto Rico, chartering steamships to transport workers to the city. That was the case with a business in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, called the American Rope Manufacturing Company, who hired 130 Puerto Rican women and set them up to live in company-owned housing. This single act of employment practically created one of Brooklyn's largest Puerto Rican neighborhoods at the time. According to Virginia Sanchez Coroll, author of the groundbreaking work on this subject from colonial to community, "These workers have the opportunity to thoroughly familiarize themselves with city neighborhoods, transmitting this information and letters to friends and relatives in Puerto Rico." In addition, the settlement originally oriented around work opportunities soon attracted small businesses catering to specific migrant needs. In the late 1920s, Brooklyn had Puerto Rican restaurants, boarding houses, and in 1927, Brooklyn's first documented bodega. Today there are over 13,000 bodegas in the city of New York, and I think it's fair to say that they keep the city running 24 hours a day. The bodega was more than simply a convenience store, especially for those first Puerto Rican migrants. They were a source for news back home, a newsstand which sold Spanish language newspapers, an unofficial post office, and most critically, a place to make phone calls during a period when most homes did not have private phones. Over in Spanish Harlem, there were dozens of Puerto Rican restaurants by the 1930s. Many run eateries, which served Chuchifritos, Edo's Compollo, and other delicacies from back home. And there was, of course, music. By the 1930s, there were Latin music venues like Teatro San Jose and Teatro Campo Amor. Even Harlem's Apollo Theater hosted Latin music nights in the 1920s. In general, Puerto Rican and Cuban musicians found work in the orchestras of Harlem nightclubs and would reach greater prominence as Latin music became popular with mainstream audiences into the 20th century. In 1927, a piano teacher named Victoria Hernandez opened the first Latin music store in New York. At 1735 Madison Avenue, here in East Harlem. One of the first Puerto Rican women to operate a business in New York, Hernandez soon became a music agent and even operated a music label from her shop. She also supported her brother, a man who would become one of the 20th century's most prolific Latin songwriters, Rafael Hernandez. Puerto Rican migrants might find respite in New York's growing body-os, but they faced great hardship and even conflict the moment they stepped beyond those borders. Like other poor and working class neighborhoods in New York, like five points or hell's kitchen, in East Harlem, there were often certain streets you didn't cross because that was the Italian side of the block or there were places even in central Harlem with its rising black population where Puerto Ricans were not welcome. As the years progressed, Puerto Ricans competed for jobs with newly arriving black migrants from the American South, jobs which soon dried up in the 1930s. According to author Ruth Glasser, quote, "While it was relatively easy to get a job before the depression, the typical Puerto Rican worker found low wages, poor working conditions, employer and union discrimination, unstable employment, and jobs which the skills they brought with them were useless and outmoded." During the depression, this situation became more acute as recent Puerto Rican migrants competed with members of other ethnic groups for scarce, un-scaled jobs. But from the start, Puerto Ricans faced a very specific challenge, a general lack of understanding by most New Yorkers of who these people really were. Yarema Bonilla from the Center of Puerto Ricans Studies elaborates. In terms of the challenges that Puerto Ricans faced when migrating here, I think one key problem in that persists to this day is that a lot of people here didn't know what Puerto Rico was, you know, and were these folks, you know, foreigners or not, right? And, of course, also language and distinct kind of cultural traditions that were at times misrepresented, misunderstood, feared. And so, of course, you know, those cultural differences and linguistic differences piled onto racial, you know, assumptions led to, you know, the racialized terms that, through which Puerto Ricans became to be known. More ominously, the New York State Chamber of Commerce took aim at Puerto Rican children in 1936, commissioning intelligence tests, then determining that Puerto Rican children were subnormal and would quote "deteriorate standards already so seriously impaired by mass immigration of the lowest levels of populations of many nations." In other cases, Spanish-speaking children were held back and often assigned to classes for slow learners, leading many to drop out entirely. But these actions by the Chamber of Commerce would only enrage the residents of East Harlem who banned together in protest, forming their own educational programs and cultural activities. But this would not be the first time that the Puerto Rican community would step up or the city failed to do so. By 1940, there were a little over 61,000 Puerto Ricans in New York, a little under one percent of the total population. But after World War II, these numbers would rapidly grow. Thanks to a radical new policy in Puerto Rico and to the advances of commercial flight. How New York became a Puerto Rican capital after the commercial break. Today's show is brought to you by the New York Historical Society and their new podcast for the ages. The New York Historical Society produces a must-listened to podcast exploring the rich and complex history of the United States. Most David M. Rubenstein engages the nation's foremost historians and creative thinkers in conversations on a wide range of topics including presidential biography, the nation's founding, and the people who have shaped the American story. Foreign policy expert Richard Haas explains what the Council of Foreign Relations does and what the challenges are throughout the world. You'll learn about cyber security issues and how he thinks the U.S. should deal with the problem. You'll discover what he thinks is the most important relationship this country has and why. In a fascinating conversation, you'll hear about the relations among American Indian peoples and the U.S. with Harvard University professor Philip Deloria. You'll learn how these relationships have impacted indigenous peoples throughout history. Other podcasts have included Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Carroll offering a first-hand perspective on his writing process and Ron Chernow on his biography of Hamilton and his involvement with the musical. That's For the Ages, available on Apple and Spotify, new episodes every week. [Music] After World War II came one of the most significant population shifts in American history. As over one million Puerto Ricans would move to the continental United States in less than two decades, and a majority would make New York their home, transforming the culture of the city forever. The reason for this involves something with the curious name of Operation Bootstrap. I asked Carlos Vargas Ramos from the Center of Puerto Rican Studies to describe this program. Operations Bootstrap was a policy of the Puerto Rican government to modernize Puerto Rican. Puerto Rican was an eminently rural agricultural society and the leadership at the time, both the local Puerto Rican leadership, but also the American political leadership that ruled Puerto Rico, they definitely wanted to modernize Puerto Rico. Modernization meant industrialization, initially light industrialization, which by the way brought in many women into the market, there had been workers in the little work industry, which was a home band, little work industry, but now they were the ones going to work in factories in the textile industry, or what have you. There were also industries in terms of fabricating bottles and shoes and things of this nature, right? American newspapers were filled with full-page advertisements from the governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Monello's Maudein, beckoning companies to consider Puerto Rico in their own industrial expansion. He declares in one ad, quote, "We Puerto Ricans know that it is palpably in our interest to make every new plant a success," the bootstrap offered generous tax incentives and promised a pool of cheap labor. It was a seismic change for the worse." What happens is that agricultural production, you need many hands, do, whether it is sugar cane, whether it is tobacco, whether it is coffee, or what have you, when you mechanized, you don't need as many people. So as you mechanize, as you industrialize, you displace many workers. Of course, when you are disposing of laborers, you have a higher unemployment rate. For many then, the only sustainable option was to leave the island and had somewhere where many had friends and relatives already, New York City. Now, of course, you know, this had been an option for decades. So what was so different about this moment heading into the 1950s? The dawn of commercial flights had arrived, thanks in part to military aircraft refitted for passenger service, and a fleet of war-trained pilots in new jobs for commercial airlines. The port authority of New York City now operated New York Airport, La Guardia, and Idlewild, not yet renamed JFK International, of course, and upgraded them all to service new carriers and bigger planes. It also became cheaper to fly. In 1951, Eastern Airlines debuted its first direct flight from San Juan to New York, opening up competition for the route, which then drove down prices. Over the next 20 years then, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans would take advantage of this airline bounty. Famously called La Guardia in Puerto Rico, the flying bus, you know, and all famously a lot of the immigrants would take the Kiriki flight, which would be the first crack-a-don flight, and there's a lot of lore about what those flights were like, how people were bringing food onto them, and there was a famous movie, La Guardia, Poetry, etc. I think all of that was tied into that promise of operation bootstrap, of modernity, of progress. And that's part of what did provide some kind of positive seduction with the idea of migration, of boarding, you know, these new modern forms of transportation, just, you know, that goes along with the arrival of modern industry and all of that, and in lots of ways it was seen as a sign of progress and uplift and improvement. The combination of operation bootstrap and the introduction of affordable flights would change Puerto Rico and New York forever. To compare, remember, in 1940, New York City had 61,000 Puerto Ricans. In the decade of the 1950s, alone, almost half a million Puerto Ricans would emigrate to the continental United States, and by the mid-1960s, that number would rise to over 1 million. Puerto Rico even opened a migration office to facilitate this mass number of new arrivals. According to Aldo Lorea Santiago from Centros Online Resources, the office served "as a consulate of sorts that worked both to facilitate and legitimize the United States' citizenship rights of Puerto Rican migrants, as much as to maintain and support the cultural and ethnic coherence of Puerto Ricans as a minority." One service they provided was the issuance of ID cards, which could be used as proof of U.S. citizenship, IDs that were vital for them getting work in New York. As a result of this sudden surge of new residents, neighborhoods changed overnight. El Badoio expanded its boundaries west toward Central Park, even as the Puerto Ricans Italian neighbors began moving out. Other Badoios, which had modest Puerto Rican populations, rapidly grew, especially those places with affordable housing, which often meant as the years progressed here in adequate housing. But it also meant more Spanish language resources and a stronger cultural presence, in other words, a community in places like San Juan Hill, North of Hell's Kitchen, and Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan, Williamsburg and Bushwick in Brooklyn, Richmond, Queens, and in the South Bronx. More on that in a minute. But the most significant surge of new Puerto Rican residents occurred in a neighborhood which already had a very long history of welcoming new arrivals. The Lower East Side. Now these streets had once housed Irish and German immigrants, Russian and Eastern European arrivals, and by the mid-20th century was also home to a rising African-American population. But this neighborhood became one of the primary destinations for newly arriving Puerto Ricans in the 1950s. Within just two decades, Puerto Ricans would become the most prominent ethnic group in the neighborhood. Now, to get a better sense of life in what would eventually be known as Loisida, I hopped on a subway down to the Tenement Museum at 103 Orchard Street, where the story of Puerto Ricans migration is told in a vivid exhibition called Under One Roof, featuring the actual apartment of the Sia's Villa's family. Here at the museum, I sat down in this lovely, recreated living room, wonderfully preserved in the exhibition, and spoke to Cat Lloyd and Pedro Garcia of the Tenement Museum, where we discuss the family's experience. Ramonita Jose and Andy moved here in 1955, and at that point Ramonita is a single mom. She doesn't reunite with the boy's father Andres, although he also comes to the mainland U.S. to New Jersey to work in agriculture. Ramonita and the boys come here to the Lower East Side in 1955. The Tenement Museum presents the recreated spaces of people that would once lived on Orchard Street, a very different kind of period room than one you might find at the Metropolitan Museum. Here you can learn the stories of Irish, German, and Eastern European immigrants. In this exhibition, the Sia's Villa's family is combined with the personal experiences of the Epstein family, Jewish Holocaust refugees, and those of Chinese immigrants, the Wong family. But this also speaks to the larger diversity of the Lower East Side. Jose and Andy always speak of a very diverse community. Puerto Ricans, definitely for sure, Jewish neighbors, Italian neighbors, Nick, who is the child of Italians, told them about the building. His friend Nick, who he met through the Boy Scouts, he's the one that guided him into this building 103. So there was a definitely diverse community, though Jose and Andy always emphasized that Ramonita makes sure that they always kept their culture, that they always spoke Spanish. So Jose and Andy, that's something that was ingrained in them through what Ramonita passed on to them. Now one thread, sorry for the pun, which runs through many of these stories, is the primary source of employment, which governed life here on the Lower East Side for many decades. Oh, so Ramonita is a garment worker, right, and she's here at the time when garment factories are vastly different than when we interpret in the other tenement. If you're taking up to our older tenement, we talk about garment shops in sweatshop conditions. In this period, these are labor unionized factories. And being that she's a citizen, right, she has access to join those unions. So she's a garment worker, making gloves. Her sons of memories of her coming home by around 440, so it seems like she was working on a regular shift, not those long, as the story goes with the passive, those long sweatshop hours, right? It seems like there's more regulation during her time in the garment industry. The Puerto Ricans who arrived in New York mid-century were not exactly witnessing the exact landscape that Eastern Europeans faced here 50 or 60 years before. New York was actually a city taking on some of these housing deficiencies, which then radically transformed these old neighborhoods. However, slowly over the years, it became clear that Puerto Ricans could no longer rely on the city, or even this migrant division, which had been set up, to help with jobs and social services. Fortunately, for Romaniita and her sons, support could come from the community itself in other ways. By this point, there are starting to be bodegas set up in the lower east side. She's actually where Romaniita meets Francisco, her second husband meets Amitabodeca. In the neighborhood, she goes to St. Teresa's Church, down on Rocker Street, which is a Puerto Ricans parish by this point. You can start to see within the church, within places like bodegas, there's beginning to be an emerging support network for people like Romaniita. Yes, Romaniita was religious. She was Catholic, and you could see it from the decorations that we've done here. The recreation was really channeling her traditions, so when we did the recreation, our curator makes sure to highlight those things, like you see on the wall to my left, the image of Pope Pius, right? Across from the Pope is the last supper, and those were inputs from the family, because they strongly believed Romaniita was religious. Her sons, Jose and Andy, went into the public school system, which, as I mentioned earlier, had once been notoriously hostile to Puerto Rican children. And now here in the 1950s and 60s, the system was not really reacting fast enough to these sudden population changes. So the brothers both go to PS42, which is still a public school, just a few blocks from here. And they go to school at a time when there are no bilingual education programs for students like them who are coming into class, speaking Spanish. And both Jose and Andy told us about those first years being particularly difficult. A lot of the teachers weren't given the training to work with students like Jose and Andy. And although they might be trying, it's not happening at a structural level for support. The Velés family weren't just passing through this building on Orchard Street, mind you. Romaniita was actually very well known in the neighborhood at the local Essex Street market, the fabric store across the street. At our son Jose would play an even larger role in this building's life. Pretty quickly after moving into this building, Jose decides that he wants to become the superintendent of the building. Get Romaniita, his mom, to sign the work papers for him because he wasn't quite old enough to work. And then becomes the caretaker, rents apartments to new tenants, does repairs in the building, and really becomes a mayor and anchor of this building. And we see that that's in a way kind of representative of the way that Puerto Ricans are shaping the lower east side at this time period. And how he as a teenager has already had all these other experiences of working in the neighborhood, you know, turning on the lights at synagogues on Saturday, selling packets of seeds door to door. Jose Velés was actively involved in the recreation of his childhood home here, helping to embody the rooms with the spirit of his mother and the life that he remembered. From the plastic-covered couch, the cream-colored wallpaper, and wooden TV set. You can also visit the Tenement Museum's website for more recollections from Jose about life on the lower east side. There was a guy with cells, and they clinton street, everybody sells records, the Viglo piece. My house, there was always music. My mother, love music. To the last couple of days here, before she passed away, she would be dancing here. And it was the family stayed together, but like I say, with rules and regulations. Yet early, early in the school, and it's, you go to school. On April 13, 1958, New Yorkers witnessed the first-ever Puerto Rican day parade on the Upper East Side, with thousands of marchers and almost 125,000 onlookers. According to the New York Times, quote, "The purpose was to demonstrate Puerto Rican civic and cultural contributions and to emphasize the ties between the island commonwealth and the United States," unquote. To an audience of besasht beauty queens and musicians, Mayor Robert Wagner declared, quote, "I know all of New York is glad to salute our fellow citizens of Puerto Rican descent," unquote. But as the years progressed, Wagner's statements rang hollow. The realities of Operation Bootstrap in Puerto Rico had driven people to New York with the hopes of new opportunity. But we're now talking the era of the new American interstate highway system and the rise of industrial container shipping. These innovations had the effect of industry's leaving big cities like New York. Back up at Centro with Yaremone Carlos, we discussed the challenges that Puerto Ricans faced just as the economic fortunes of the city were plunging. But we know that throughout the 1950s and 60s industry manufacturing left New York City. So many of those jobs that Puerto Ricans initially occupied, they were disappearing as more Puerto Ricans were coming in. So instead of being seen as a source of labor for the industry that existed in New York City, they were seen as just waves of poor people that are just unable to find jobs because, hey, well, the jobs are disappearing. The housing that they inhabited was housing that was already 50 years old, and you know, 75 years old by the time they began to occupy it, and the landlords were not maintaining it in the neighborhood they could go in, because they were still discriminated against in terms of housing, etc. Then because of the industrialization, because of the decay in the urban housing stock, they were subject to urban renewal, what is perhaps the classic example of urban renewal? Well, let us West Thai story have to tell us about it, right? The Broadway musical West Side Story was released as a very popular feature film in 1961, co-starring Puerto Ricans star Rita Moreno, who had been born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York in 1936 when she was just five years old. The movie, which was filmed mostly on a sound stage, also used locations in two areas of Manhattan, the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of East Harlem and San Juan Hill. By the time the film came out, the neighborhood of San Juan Hill had been demolished, one of the many urban renewal projects during this period. Projects had almost always targeted black and Latino neighborhoods, displacing most of its residents to new districts that were in even more severe states of squalor and decay. San Juan Hill, of course, was replaced by Lincoln Center. For more information on that, see our show from December 2021 on the making of Lincoln Center. Now, the movie not only became a classic, for many, many years, it was probably the only image of Puerto Ricans that most Americans had even experienced. Yarni Mon and Carlos broke down with the reaction of the time might have been, both here in New York and back in Puerto Rico. I think there were some mixed feelings, although we also have to put ourselves in that moment. And so there was an excitement about seeing something Puerto Rican, or something that was supposedly Puerto Rican on the big stream, and in the mainstream cultural production. In hindsight, of course, we can judge the brown face, we can judge all these things in a way that in that moment, it didn't seem so at dissonance with other cultural products. So I think even though a lot of folks who saw it didn't feel fully represented in it, there was still one of the first mainstream recognitions of the existence of Puerto Ricans in the United States, and particularly in New York. Interestingly, something that a few people have discussed is how that film impacted the way folks back in Puerto Rico imagined New York because when there's this big migration of Puerto Ricans to New York folks back in Puerto Rico, they didn't keep up that much with what was happening in the diaspora. There's still to this day a lot of ignorance about the history of the diaspora in Puerto Rico about its struggles, its cultural institutions, its political movements, et cetera. And I think there are still a lot of people who developed a kind of stereotypical image of Puerto Ricans in New York as dominated by street fighting, gangs, et cetera, because of representations like that. But at the same time for folks who grew up with those, there's still a kind of nostalgia around the film. Finally, I wanted to visit the Bronx here. Today, the county with the largest number of Puerto Ricans in the entire United States. Almost one in five residents of the Bronx are of Puerto Ricans descent. For decades, Puerto Ricans made up the largest Hispanic population in the borough, although in recent years they have been overtaken by those of Dominican descent, which will save for another podcast. Bronx historian and friend of the show, Angel Hernandez, president of the historic Huntington Free Library and Reading Room in the Bronx's Westchester Square also happens to be the co-host of the Webby Award-winning Bronx History Podcast called Go Bronx with Olga Luce Tirado. A few days ago, I sat down with Angel at the library, the amazing place, by the way, and I asked how he developed his love of Bronx history. And it started, interestingly enough, when he was a boy living in San Diego. It was over there in California that I learned about Latino history, Mexican history. I've learned about the conquest, Mexico, New Spain. This was more of the curricula at school rather than here where we learned more about the American Revolution or industrialization, right? So when I learned about Mexican culture, Mexican history in California, I thought, hey, what about me? What about my people as Latino? What was the Puerto Rican contribution to American history? So that's when it started. I started asking questions, I started asking my mom questions, mom, what is Puerto Rico? It's an island. Where is it? You know, what part of Puerto Rico? And she appreciated very much, because she always missed her hometown. She never wanted to leave, but when she got to America, when she got to the Bronx, New York, she loved it. She assimilated very quickly, but she took much pride in talking to me about her history. And that's what brought me to learn about me, to learn about Puerto Rican history, and perhaps teach it to others. The story of Angel's mother is both incredibly special, and in another sense, their experiences that were shared by thousands of other children who first arrived in New York during this wave that would be called the Great Puerto Rican migration. So my mom was, her name is Carmen Hernandez, she's no longer with us. She was born in 1949. She was born in this small rural town, which is now a huge metropolis called Umakau, Puerto Rico. My grandfather couldn't hold a job at the time, because this was the 1940s and 50s, when Puerto Rico was still going through the throws of failed economic policies like the bootstrap, right? So my family was affected by that, and they saw a reason like every other Puerto Rican at the time to say there's no opportunities for us. So my mom with the rest of her family, her siblings, they arrived to the Bronx in 1958. The Bronx that Angel's mother grew up in was a Bronx of transition. I loved my mom used to talk about New York, the way she remembered it. She doesn't remember abandoned buildings. She remembers, well, first of all, buildings, standing. She also remembers being one of the few Puerto Ricans to live on the block. There were Puerto Ricans. This was prospect that I have in New South Bronx. You know, you had your clubs already. You had the Trump account. You had all the others, right? She remembers that it was the first time she interacted with people that were not Puerto Rican. She had Jewish friends. She had black friends. She had Irish friends. She told me that she would play hooky. She went to Jane Adams High School. She learned English by listening to Motown music. Smokey Robinson was her favorite, and that's how she learned English. She was the historian because she taught me the train system. She taught me about some Bronx history. I remember coming from my grandmother's house when we lived on Crest, when she lived on Crest and Avenue. We were walking by the agral and pocotage, and it was my mom that said, "You know who lives there?" And she started telling me about this guy, and I'm like, "Really?" She's like, "He's one of the best writers in American literature." I didn't really take appreciation until later on when I started working for the Historical Society, and I eventually started giving tours at the pocotage. So I thought, and I remembered mom, I'm like, "Here's this woman that born in Puerto Rico." Poor had no idea of Bronx history, and then as soon as she came, she took it all in, and this became her home. So I like to say that I'm a continuation of her historic side, you know, because she was always talking about that, and especially her own personal background. In Ed Morales' great and blistering book, Fantasy Island, Colonialism, Exploitation, and the betrayal of Puerto Rico, he writes of the troubled relationship between the island and the federal government, from Operation Bootstrap to Hurricane Maria in 2017. Of the plight that many Puerto Rican New Yorkers found themselves in in the 1970s, he writes, "It wasn't only Puerto Ricans who were facing a crisis in New York, New York itself was in crisis." By 1973, some pundits were forecasting eventual bankruptcy, but the ascendance of Mayor Abraham Beam would mark a period of renewed and more desperate borrowing, analogous to the early 2010s in Puerto Rico, "The city was ill-equipped, in fact unwilling to balance the scales even a little bit. Puerto Ricans and New York's larger Spanish-speaking populations, along with African-Americans in blighted neighborhoods were seen as the problem, not the victim of the deteriorating city. Partial salvation would come from activists and organizations, and sometimes from those very gangs, so demonized by Hollywood movies. In 1964, a Lower East Side Youth Collective, known as the Real Great Society, was created by former gang members to "fight poverty" rather than each other, addressing educational needs and protesting plans of displacement. And then later on, the young Lord successfully fought for better sanitation services and increased access to health services in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. All of this bolstered by the general spirit of activism in New York City in the late 1960s. At the Lower East Side, community activists Bimbo Rivas declared, "How could there be decay and there could be growth in the same place? It's because creativity is taking place here." That creativity took the form of Puerto Rican activists who became poets, writers, and artists. Creators who would retake this pejorative, "New Yorker" and would turn it into an artistic movement. Rivas, in fact, would give the Puerto Rican Lower East Side a new name in his 1974 poem, Joey Sida. But the woman whose story would ignite a spirit of activism would not be there to stand by the side of those in the New Yorkian movement. In the spring of 1971, Isabelle Gonzales passed away in her home in New Jersey, age 89. Gonzales had started a family in New York, where she lived until 1930, where she then moved to New Jersey and lived her entire life. After being the subject of the first major US Supreme Court case, regarding the rights of Puerto Ricans, Gonzales continued her activism and was regularly published in the New York Times, becoming a tireless advocate for Puerto Rico. I want to thank everyone who joined me on today's show to tell this very epic story. I needed a chorus of voices. I wanted to thank Yarema Bonilla and Carlos Vargas Ramos from CUNY's Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Cat Lloyd and Pedro Garcia of the Tenement Museum and Angel Hernandez of the Huntington Free Library and Reading Room. Now for more information on the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, look them up on social media. And if you are a history buff, as I know most of you are, they also have virtual library lunch hours, with the staff and conversation with scholars talking about their collection. And by the way, their library is open to everyone in the city and the nation. Anyone who wants to do research there, from screenwriters like Tony Kushner, to high school students who are interested in Puerto Rico history. You can find more details on their website, centropr.hunter.cUNY.edu. The Tenement Museum is open again for both building tours and walking tours. In addition to the exhibition "Under One Roof," which features the home of the Sais Valais family, you can also take tours of other recreated experiences of life here on the Lower East Side. And a new exhibition coming soon called Reclaiming Black Spaces. And you must check out Angel Hernandez on his podcast, Go Bronx, where he and Olga talk all aspects of Bronx history. Everything from Jonas Bronck, the man who lent his name to the Bronx, to the history of Bronx' amusement parks in beer, maybe even together, I assuming. You can find his show at the same podcast platforms that you found hours. Become a supporter of the Barry Boyz podcast on patreon.com and you'll get bonus audio and interviews from this week's show and you'll also get news of future Barry Boyz special projects before everybody else. For instance, our patrons actually were just involved with helping us choose a few new topics for some upcoming shows, which you will hear very soon. Head on over to patreon.com/Barryboys. And at our spin-off podcast, The Guilded Gentleman, you can experience the real story behind Guilded Age New York that's upstairs and downstairs and actually on the stairs wearing a corseted gown. Oh, and there's more because there's a brand new Downton Abbey movie coming out for those fans of that period. And Carl's got some special surprises tied in for his podcast there as well. So join in on the fun at The Guilded Gentleman Podcast. So thank you very much for listening. Have a great New York week, whether you live here or not. [BLANK_AUDIO]