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From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City

University of California Press

In the early decades of this century, a significant number of Puerto Ricans from the countryside and urban centers of the island began to migrate to the northern metropolises of the United States. Although small groups of political exiles had emigrated throughout the last third of the nineteenth century, it was not until after the North American occupation of the island in 1898 that critical social, political, and economic transformations in Puerto Rico triggered an increase in the numbers of people leaving for continental shores. Through the creation of infant enclaves on the mainland, Puerto Rican migrants set about establishing communities which reflected in many ways those they left behind. As early as 1910, over one thousand Puerto Ricans resided in the United States. American citizenship granted via the Jones Act of 1917 stimulated the freedom of movement between the island and the United States. By 1920, forty-five states reported the presence of Puerto Ricanborn individuals, with all forty-eight doing so in succeeding censuses. In short, the decades before the onset of World War II witnessed a progressive increase in the numbers of Puerto Ricans living in the United States, a migration slowed only by the Depression, which would peak in the decades of the fifties and sixties.

In New York City and the surrounding metropolitan areas, the Puerto Rican presence became most noticeable just after the Second World War. About that time, the first systematic surveys

depicting the plight of the Puerto Ricans in the city began to appear in print. In 1947, for example, a pictorial essay in Life magazine chronicled the migration to the United States as the first airborne diaspora in history. Such news stories coincided with investigative reports of various social service agencies highlighting the health, housing, and employment problems of the city's newest migrants. Within a decade, monographs like the Columbia University Study, the Welfare Study, and the New York City Board of Education surveys focused attention on Puerto Ricans in an effort to inform the dominant non-Hispanic society about this group.1

While literature on Puerto Ricans during the fifties centered on the economic, social, or racial assimilation or adjustment problems of the post-World War II migration, relatively few studies emphasized the community structure of the Puerto Rican New York settlements throughout the decades before the war. Social scientists like Daniel P. Moynihan and Nathan Glazer blatantly denied the existence of an early Puerto Rican community and failed to perceive the relationship between early support systems or coping institutions and the later migration.2 Indeed, these particular authors based their ideas on the notion that the process of community building never existed on the island proper and therefore could not be translated to the New York settlements. Thus the experience and resettlement patterns of the larger migration at mid-century were frequently viewed and analyzed in a vacuum without reference to earlier community development or to the forces which motivated the original displacement. The experiences of the pioneer migrants in New York settlements who laid the groundwork for the "great migration" of the later decades had clearly been overlooked.

This study proposes to fill the gap. It explores the development of the Puerto Rican settlements, or colonias, in New York City during the first four decades of the century and demonstrates the existence of an identifiable migrant community during that period. Originating soon after the turn of the century, pioneer colonias charged with the responsibility of translating the Puerto Rican way of life to unfamiliar territory generated a visual and intrinsic presence which would greatly influence future settlement patterns between the island and the mainland. It was to those colonias, vividly Puerto Rican with their bodegas (grocery stores), Hispanic

boarding houses, or restaurants, formal and informal support networks and organizations, that migrants came.

Focusing on the community's organizational networks, structured and unstructured coping institutions, settlement patterns and migrants' occupations, the study revises heretofore accepted interpretations of the Puerto Rican experience away from the island and builds on pioneer works, such as those of Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, Lawrence R. Chenault, and C. Wright Mills. Moreover, I intend to expand on current scholarship, particularly the research of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, CEREP (Centro del estudio de la realidad Puertorriqueña), and the Puerto Rican Migration Research Consortium.3

Several issues integral to the migratory process will be dissected. How and why, for instance, did Puerto Ricans come to New York City during the first decades of the present century? What kinds of communities did they establish and what institutions or practices emerged to meet migrant needs? How did the settlements in different New York boroughs relate to one another, to issues concerning Puerto Ricans on the island, and to the dominant non-Hispanic or host society? Above all, who were the early migrants and how did they carve a definable community in the city?

Research for this book was divided into two phases. The first consisted of an investigation of United States government documents and publications, census materials, archival collections, newspapers, periodicals, and journals to determine the size and scope of the early colonia . Most of this research was executed while I served as a member of the History Task Force of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In conjunction with this group, an official but untabulated census, The New York State Manuscript Census of 1925, was coded and computed for 7,322 Spanish-surnamed individuals living in Manhattan's Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Assembly Districts. Yielding variables including the sex, age, race, and occupation, length of residence in New York City, country of origin, place in and composition of Hispanic households, the census formed the basis for an analysis of the mid-1920s Spanish-speaking community.

Moreover, while participating with the History Task Force, I was

introduced to an autobiographical manuscript detailing Puerto Rican life in the United States, especially in New York City, dating from the final decades of the nineteenth century up to and including the 1950s. This material, Memorias de Bernardo Vega, edited by the Puerto Rican writer César Andreu Iglesias, was subsequently published by Ediciones Huracan.4 The most comprehensive study on the subject to date, Memorias provided the leads to many Puerto Rican associations in operation throughout the early decades, newspapers and journals in existence, community issues, and leadership. Once the information became confirmed and corroborated, an investigation of the organizational charters on file in the New York City County Clerk's Office, Supreme Court Building became possible. Archival collections such as the Vito Marcantonio Papers and the Arturo Schomberg collection in the New York Public Library also yielded valuable insights on this theme.

While archival materials,...