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 Thursday, May 23, 2013
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Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modern New York City |
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CHARLIE VÁZQUEZ
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 oricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modern New York City (Markus Wiener 2004) puts the politics, poverty and cultural achievements of New York Puerto Ricans (Nuyoricans) under a powerful microscope and zooms in on the last fifty years of the 1900s, mapping a broad, panoramic sweep of our cultural vulnerabilities and triumphs. As a Bronx-born Nuyorican and writer, I was riveted as soon as I purchased it and will continue to refer to it, and its revealing statistics, in the future.
Boricuas
in Gotham: Puerto Ricans and the Making of Modern New York City (Markus
Wiener 2004) Edited by Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Angelo Falcón, and Félix
Matos Rodríquez |
The late Dr. Antonia Pantoja’s opening statement on how the bulk of the Puerto Rican experience in America is only as old as about 1945 reminded me of how new our people are to this country—and how I still feel it every day. Boricuas in Gotham tackles some very prickly issues, such as our poverty, discrimination and unfair media coverage. It starts at the beginning, with our massive migrations to a new land, where our hopes for better lives were challenged by hateful forces and a profit-driven society.
The collapse of the island economy and a post-war boom in industrialized New York City spiked massive migrations starting in the 1940s, and as commonwealth citizens, our forefathers were granted easy entry. But our ancestors instantly encountered a new language, dangerous racism and xenophobia and bitter winters nonexistent on the island. And as we arrived and settled in the great metropolis of Gotham, it began to de-industrialize, leaving many unemployed and marooned. This set a pattern for economic disadvantage, for a people whose only employment options were low-paying blue-collar jobs, as the New York economy began to shift from manufacturing to finance and specialized services.
Boricuas in Gotham also uncovers many of the dark forces that menaced early New York Puerto Ricans—such as the “deficit” reporting of the mainstream press, which championed the “failures” of our community in lieu of our achievements. Clara E. Rodríguez’s contribution, Forging a New, New York: The Puerto Rican Community, Post-1945, details how the mainstream press—and especially The New York Times — has enjoyed a long tradition of depicting New York Puerto Ricans as savage, anti-assimilationist “welfare-freeloaders” living in Third World conditions in the South Bronx. And although there is some truth to this image, what is often ignored by the media is that Puerto Rican households were more commonly governed by women, whose employment options were demanding and low-paying. If you weren’t an eroticized celebrity like J-Lo or Mark Anthony, or a politician like Fernando Ferrer or Herman Badillo, your success story just didn’t exist.
Another fascinating aspect of the book is how it charts Puerto Rico-to-mainland USA migration trends, return migrations to the island, and the dispersal of Puerto Ricans away from New York and to other cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia. In 1940, nearly 88% of all stateside Puerto Ricans lived in New York City, as opposed to just over 23% in 2000. Angelo Falcón’s essay, De’tras Pa’lante: Explorations on the Future History of Puerto Ricans, takes a careful look at this population decline of Puerto Ricans in New York and our growth and decline in the New York suburbs, Florida, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas and Connecticut. An increase in Dominican and Mexican immigration changed the landscape of Latino New York, where the trailblazing achievements spearheaded by Puerto Ricans, forged despite our opposition, made the transition to New York easier for these newer groups.
Boricuas in Gotham also examines how the New York Puerto Rican community was attacked by conservative politicians in the 1990s, a mauling spearheaded by no other than the Giuliani administration, which cut the city’s contribution to City University of New York by 17% and supported tuition increases at the same time, disrupting the ambitions of many New York Puerto Rican (and other minority) students, who were studying to improve their lives. This brand of malice echoed the manner in which we were treated when we first arrived. As this brutally honest volume points out, the considerable Puerto Rican absence at voting polls in the 1900s hurt us tremendously—we must mobilize our families to vote in every election, as our numbers can tip the scale in our favor. Boricuas in Gotham is a realistic slideshow of our colorful history, which when memorialized, can make the future ours.
Our cultural achievements are hardly few: Jennifer López, Mark Anthony, Rosie Pérez, Luís Gúzman, Benicio del Toro and Big Pun are all testaments to the Puerto Rican presence in 1990s (and contemporary) popular culture, and the Museo del Barrio, The Nuyorican Poets Café and Taller Boricua are all cultural landmarks bearing our wounds and rewards. Our influence on early hip-hop goes underreported, as does the formidable network of theaters, performance spaces and community organizations we created through hard work and vision. The New York Puerto Rican cultural movement was the “spark” that thrust New York City into the Latin American sphere of influence, as Cubans did with Miami. And as the late Dr. Antonia Pantoja pleads in the closing statements of the book, “We must also develop effective means of communicating our history, which I insist is a powerful weapon in our struggles to secure change and social justice.” And this is what Boricuas in Gotham brilliantly accomplishes. Bravo.
Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans and the Making of Modern New York City (Markus Wiener 2004) Edited by Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Angelo Falcón, and Félix Matos Rodríquez
CHARLIE VÁZQUEZ can be found at: www.firekingpress.com
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