Foreign, Dark, Young, Citizen
Puerto Rican Youth and the Forging of an American Identity, 1930–70
In the late 1950s two teenage Puerto Rican boys represented the darkest side of social change in New York City. One, Salvador Agrón, or the “Capeman,” was a real person, a gang leader who was convicted and sentenced to death for the unprovoked murder of two boys in 1959. The other, Bernardo, was fictional, leader of the Puerto Rican street gang the Sharks and brother of the tragic heroine Maria in West Side Story, which opened on Broadway in 1957. Both characters reinforced the era’s archetypal urban delinquent. In photographs, both boys appeared dark-skinned and menacing; less visibly, both embodied the politically incongruous combination of foreign birth and American citizenship.1
At this point in the New York’s twentieth-century journey from immigrant metropolis to a city divided into “minority” and white (a category that by midcentury included the descendants of all those “swarthy” Europeans), Puerto Ricans stood at a crossroads—at least as far as many young migrants and second-generation youth were concerned. A growing cadre of young Puerto Rican leaders in the 1950s and 1960s, in an era of unprecedented prosperity, decided it was time to make good on the guarantees of inclusion and opportunity that their citizenship had promised but not yet delivered. Through their community leadership and political activism, they would try to ensure that the rights conferred by US citizenship were not limited by class status or racial or national identity. In the process, they would help redefine rights of American citizenship for Puerto Ricans in the United States.
Migrants from Puerto Rico had begun settling in New York City in increasingly large numbers between the end of World War I and the mid-1920s, for reasons both connected and unrelated to the impact of excluding most other immigrants from the United States in the same period. Puerto Rico had been taken by the United States as a prize of war in 1898; and after US lawmakers ratified the extension of citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917, migrants began arriving in the United States by the thousands. As the number of European immigrants entering the country dropped dramatically by the early 1920s, and as the prosperity of that decade increased demand for workers, the Puerto Rican migration increased annually. In just over a decade, Puerto Ricans had built a thriving community, and with great expectations they took steps in the climb toward the middle class—with the added benefit of their citizenship to help them gain a foothold.
The Great Depression dashed those hopes. Jobs evaporated, decent housing became both scarcer and more expensive, and migrants faced intensifying prejudice in the labor market and in the streets. The prejudice was generic to a degree—Puerto Ricans were still decidedly “foreign,” and their island’s connection to the United States was mysterious to many. But the specificity of American anti-black racism was also translated, with few intermediate steps, to apply to mixed-race Puerto Ricans. Over time, racial prejudice—with its peculiarly American, binary categorization—came to characterize much of Puerto Ricans’ experience, supplanting traditional anti-immigrant prejudices.
Young Puerto Ricans experienced this shift in the 1930s perhaps even more viscerally than their parents did, through their close connections to the most interventionist of American institutions: schools. Children of immigrants, the “second generation,” had been an object of reformers’ and city officials’ preoccupation dating back to the nineteenth century, but the rapidly growing numbers of Puerto Rican children living in New York by the 1930s inspired a particular mix of liberal reformist concern and racist assumptions about their dangerous influence on American society.2 In these midcentury decades, Puerto Rican youth were at first accused of criminality and low intelligence, and then of delinquency—the targets of familiar, if increasingly racialized, expressions of anti-immigrant bias.
However, as the place of youth in American society changed, and as young Puerto Ricans’ racial self-identification evolved with the nation’s changing political and racial climate, they began to assert a new political consciousness. Accused by some of destructive political militancy in the late 1960s, Puerto Rican youth accomplished far more than simply increasing the visibility of Puerto Ricans and their disadvantages in US society in that era through their radical community organizing. As a result of their demands for more open access to education and their commitment to generating new networks of legal and civil rights activism, they also created a legacy of empowerment that continues to define Puerto Ricans’ engagement as citizens in the United States.
Although there were probably thirty thousand Puerto Ricans in New York City by 1930, their residential concentration in East Harlem and near the Chelsea Piers and the Brooklyn Navy Yard meant that many New Yorkers outside of those neighborhoods were unaware of their presence: they blended with other “Spanish” immigrants, of which there were substantial numbers by the 1920s. Most members of these growing Spanish-speaking communities were Latin American migrants— from Cuba, Colombia, and a handful of other countries—whose entry into the United States from within the Western Hemisphere had not been limited by the passage of restrictive immigration laws that targeted Europeans (most of them from southern and eastern Europe) and Asians.
New York’s Spanish-speaking world may have been invisible to many city residents, but the rapidly growing number of Puerto Ricans in the city began to make some observers nervous by the early years of the Depression. Puerto Ricans protested their poor treatment at Home Relief offices (where aid was distributed to the unemployed and single mothers before the advent of federal New Deal programs); they objected loudly to what they perceived as damaging statements about Puerto Ricans by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt following her goodwill trip to the island in 1934 (where she noted high rates of tuberculosis); and they petitioned the Mayor’s Office for stronger political representation following a major riot in Harlem in 1935 (although the rioting took place in the mostly African American part of Harlem, the riot was sparked by the arrest of a Puerto Rican boy).
Immediately after the riot, a member of the New York City’s Chamber of Commerce wrote to inform Mayor LaGuardia that Puerto Ricans had been “flooding” into Harlem since the mid-1920s and to warn that “this class presents a problem … which nobody knows how to handle.”
We find that a tremendous number of [them] are on “relief” of some kind or other. They do not learn to speak English. Apparently, their morals are undesirable and they seem to be altogether a pretty nearly hopeless group.
I bring this up because I understand that there is no bar to the immigration of these people. I do not think most people realize how many there are in the city and what a burden they are to the community … and in my opinion they are a source of danger from propaganda and from their inability to mix with other elements in the city.3
A few months later, the Chamber of Commerce’s Special Committee on Immigration and Naturalization hired two psychologists to conduct a study on the intelligence of Puerto Rican children in New York City, using the standard tests of that era. According to the psychologists, the students’ poor results proved that Puerto Rican migrations would “deteriorate standards already so seriously impaired by mass immigration of the lowest levels of populations of many nations.”4
The lead investigator, Dr. Clairette Armstrong, was a staff psychologist for the city’s Children’s Court and an expert on juvenile delinquency—and a well-known voice in New York’s anti-immigrant circles. A year before beginning the study, she had written to the editor of the New York Times: “Juvenile delinquency on the whole results from the clash of civilizations. Low-grade, intellectually dull immigrants thrust into our complicated, highly organized civilization are unable to adjust their likewise intellectually dull offspring to the exigencies of such environment.”5 Although Americans’ obsession with eugenics and scientific racism had peaked in the 1920s, Armstrong could still count on the support of many likeminded colleagues (and a receptive white public) in the 1930s. Discourses about the racial basis of intelligence focused, of course, on African Americans and on immigrants, especially those not considered white. Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the western states also were subjected to IQ testing throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with pronouncements about their intellectual deficits and social undesirability nearly identical to Armstrong’s summation of Puerto Ricans’ IQ.6
The study’s results were circulated widely enough that they triggered a reaction from a number of Harlem activists, including members of the Puerto Rican– dominated Spanish Welfare League as well as Leonard Covello, a prominent East Harlem educator who was the principal at the community’s progressive Benjamin Franklin High School.7 Covello, himself an Italian immigrant, pointed out that Italian immigrant children had also been “attacked” in the press after an intelligence study in 1921. “When the Binet tests were given to Italian children they had the same difficulty because of the foreign expressions and idioms. Only after the tests were revised was it possible to use them for American children,” he said.8 This incident—from the commissioning of the study to the contested interpretation of its results—showed the aggressiveness of a growing anti-Puerto Rican lobby in New York in the 1930s, and it punctuated the worst two years to date, in terms of hostile and discriminatory discourse, for the new Puerto Rican community in New York. Using a familiar rhetorical strategy of identifying children as the vector of the contagion, the IQ study presaged the extent to which young Puerto Ricans would stand on the front lines of bitter battles with white New Yorkers.
So it was that the most visible eruption out of the simmering conflicts between Puerto Ricans and Italian Americans in East Harlem in the late 1930s—when Puerto Ricans began to replace Italians as the largest group in the neighborhood—happened among youth. According to reports, there had been ongoing tensions between rival gangs across “the line” that separated the Italian and Puerto Rican sections of East Harlem. The “feud” was exacerbated when some of the Italian boys referred to Congressman Vito Marcantonio as a “spic lover.”9 The physical conflict that ensued took place adjacent to Benjamin Franklin High School, and Covello received at least a dozen furious letters from Italian American parents who resented having to send their sons to one of the city’s few racially integrated schools. One letter, signed only with a crudely drawn skull and crossbones, presented Covello with a “WARNING. No damn lousy Spics are allowed in Franklin … This is your last warning. The next time we will use more drastic measures.” A few of the letters avoided explicitly racial language, but to the same effect, like the one from a father named Ralph De Donato: “I take pride in stating that my son has been reared in strict adherence to the traditions of well bred people, and has been trained to carry to school a pen and pencil, rather than an ice pick or a razor.”10
In his responses, Covello was determined to convince other New Yorkers that the Puerto Rican “newcomers” were “just like other immigrants.” While it was true that European immigrants, like Puerto Ricans, had been reviled in very similar terms for their allegedly weak morals and ill health, Covello’s logic sidestepped the key aspects of Puerto Ricans’ difference from their immigrant predecessors: their mixed-race heritage and their American citizenship. These differences, combined with a generational shift in American society—the emergence of a more independent youth culture, and attendant preoccupation by adults with delinquency— meant that young Puerto Ricans in New York were poised to be targeted as the city’s most dangerous citizens. Indeed, this was what they faced in the decades to come.
“Juvenile gangsters. … in a world apart”
Nascent fears among white New Yorkers of a “Puerto Rican problem” receded briefly during World War II, then exploded as migration from Puerto Rico increased dramatically after the war. As the number of migrants in the city approached 150,000 by 1947 (the “influx” averaged about forty-five thousand migrants annually between 1946 and 1954), other New Yorkers read dozens of newspaper stories about Puerto Ricans living in crowded tenements, unable to speak English and unprepared for life in a cold city. These warnings did sound a lot like the invective applied to European immigrants half a century earlier. But, contrary to what Covello implied about their shared plight, those immigrants had not been so obviously different in racial terms—the most powerful terms of difference in American society—and those immigrants had not had the formal protections of citizenship, which would prove to offer little protection for Puerto Ricans buffeted by both anti-black and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Puerto Rican youth were doubly burdened by this discourse. Throughout the 1950s, Puerto Ricans under age twenty-five constituted New York’s most rapidly expanding demographic group, and they became ready targets of the public’s anxiety about a postwar world in flux. Punctuated by the “zoot suit” riots in Los Angeles in 1943, then a spike in gang activity and youth homicides later in the decade, the postwar years witnessed a national obsession with youth, especially those with dark skin.11 The rate of juvenile court appearances by children ages ten to seventeen continued to rise, nearly doubling between 1948 and 1957. Delinquency rates, measured through juvenile arrest counts, had first peaked in the United States in 1943, declined in the first years after the war, and then began rising precipitously by 1949. By 1957, across the nation, more than twenty-three in one thousand children ages ten to seventeen appeared before juvenile court for alleged delinquency, nearly double the 1948 rate of about twelve per thousand.12 In New York, black and Puerto Rican youth were scapegoated in the media as the most dangerous and irredeemable of these delinquents.
Liberal social scientists tried occasionally to counter such allegations with empirical evidence but got little traction.13 Puerto Rican leaders argued repeatedly that juvenile delinquency was a temporary problem resulting from postwar social changes, one that was not unique to Puerto Ricans. Indeed, Joseph Montserrat, the head of the Migration Division (a social-service office in New York City sponsored by the Puerto Rican government), quipped in 1957 that juvenile delinquency was “just second-generationitis.”14 If what Montserrat meant by “second-generationitis” was a temporary failure on the part of youth to conform to their immigrant parents’ expectations, “second generationitis” certainly did not explain the problem of teenage gang violence in the Puerto Rican and Italian areas of East Harlem (among other neighborhoods) throughout the 1950s. Police increasingly intervened in gang conflicts. In August 1956 in Hell’s Kitchen, for example, a series of confrontations among the multiethnic “Sportsmen,” “Dragons,” and “Enchanters” resulted in several murders of rival gang members, which led to interventions by police, priests, social workers, and other community leaders. A temporary truce was reached, and at least one of the gangs “went social,” meaning it transformed into a social club that collaborated with other community leaders in social events and community organizing.15
Most outcomes were not so positive, however. More often, law enforcement’s approach to gang violence only exacerbated already tense relations between police and youth. Aggressive enforcement of seemingly arbitrary rules, including confining ethnic and racial groups to “their” neighborhoods, as well as the liberal use of racial slurs and frequent recourse to physical abuse of teens on stoops and street corners, were common through the 1950s. Puerto Rican community members organized a protest against police brutality in 1949, triggered when two detectives killed a Puerto Rican youth under questionable circumstances. Protests over incidents like this continued sporadically throughout the 1950s.16
This was the backdrop when West Side Story hit Broadway in September 1957. The play was a story of doomed love between a white boy (of indeterminate ethnicity, probably Italian), Tony, and a Puerto Rican girl, Maria; it followed the plotlines of Romeo and Juliet. While West Side Story offered a sympathetic portrayal of Puerto Ricans—striving immigrants who endured the indignities of their new life but expected the best, just like the European immigrants who came before them—it also powerfully reinforced a hardening stereotype of juvenile delinquency in New York in that era: the image of dark and menacing Puerto Rican gang members who would wield their switchblades without a second thought to defend the honor of one of their own.
Concerns about juvenile violence and gangs reached their apex in New York less than two years later. Six gang-related homicides happened during the summer of 1959; then, during the last week of August, there were four more. The final incident involved the murder of two non-gang (or “straight”) youth, both white, by a group of teenagers from several Puerto Rican gangs.17 The boy charged as the main perpetrator of the murders, who was wearing a black cape during the late-night attack on the victims in a West Side playground, quickly became known as the “Capeman,” or “Drácula” in the Spanish-language press.
The “Capeman” murders confirmed white New Yorkers’ worst fears about Puerto Rican youth, and they presented Puerto Rican leaders with the realization of their worst nightmare of anti-Puerto Rican publicity. El Diario regularly ran stories with headlines like “Victims of Juvenile Gangs Symbolize the Failure of Community” and “‘Gang’ Says: We Want to Be Good, but Nobody Helps Us.”18 About a week after the murders, thousands of individual Puerto Ricans gathered with representatives of more than 160 Puerto Rican organizations in meetings, press conferences, and community forums throughout East Harlem and across New York City. New York’s tabloids and even the Washington Post noted the community’s efforts in editorials that commented on the injustice of putting a Puerto Rican face on youth violence.19
Joseph Montserrat, in testifying a month later before the US Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, pointed to “poverty, insecurity, ignorance, prejudice and discrimination, living in slums, and substandard wages” as the “major causes” of juvenile crime. Montserrat argued that “juvenile delinquency is inextricably linked with broader problems such as nationwide population shifts, housing conditions, opportunities for education and employment, and economic development.”20 Meanwhile, a Brooklyn judge who regularly handled juvenile cases, Samuel Liebowitz, pushed Mayor Wagner to discourage further Puerto Rican migration to the city, arguing this would be the most effective step the city could take to turn back the tide of juvenile crime in the next decade.21 For many New Yorkers, the links Montserrat identified were invisible; they only saw that the Capeman was the embodiment of the stereotypical violent delinquent, the youthful symbol of the city’s ongoing Puerto Rican problem.
“A positive image to counter ‘pathology and fear’”
While readers of New York’s tabloids followed this melodrama, a rising cadre of young Puerto Rican leaders was quietly constructing an entirely different image of youth in their communities. Puerto Rican college students had formed a group called the Hispanic Association Pro-Higher Education (HAPHE) earlier in 1959 to support Puerto Ricans attending or aspiring to attend college. When HAPHE hosted its second Puerto Rican Youth Conference in 1960, organizers addressed the Puerto Rican community’s trauma following the Capeman incident. The goal of the conference, they said, was “to set a positive image to counter ‘pathology and fear’ to show the Puerto Rican as ambitious, with a desire and increasing ability to climb upwards, as have all past newcomers to the city. … The bad publicity of the summer of 1959 still affects [the Puerto Rican].”22
In terms of their focus on educational achievement, with its promise of middle-class status, young Puerto Ricans were indeed much like “all past newcomers to the city.” The 1950s had been an important decade for the expansion of opportunities for them. Just as city officials half a century earlier had worried over the schooling—and “Americanization”—of impoverished children of European immigrants who did not speak English, so were officials in the 1950s preoccupied with meeting the educational needs of the tens of thousands of young Puerto Ricans arriving each year. A 1951 report on Puerto Rican school children compiled by the new Mayor’s Committee on Puerto Rican Affairs (MCPRA) had insisted, “The need for teachers who can speak Spanish is urgent.”23 That year, the school district employed only ten bilingual teachers; given the student population, the report asserted, the school district needed to hire approximately one thousand more.24
The Board of Education did not hire a thousand bilingual teachers—not even close—though it did begin recruiting trained teachers on the island for jobs in New York. In terms of educational advancement, the leadership energy of young Puerto Ricans themselves in the 1950s was far more important than the inconsistently executed strategies of city officials. In 1951 a young migrant named Antonia Pantoja, who had arrived in New York to take a job in a factory during the war and was finishing her bachelor’s degree at Hunter College, helped found the first formally organized, youth-led Puerto Rican organization in New York, the Hispanic Young Adult Association (HYAA). Pantoja and her cohort wanted to inspire creative and hopeful energy in the community’s young leaders. “We described this approach as one of community development instead of ‘firefighting,’” recalled Pantoja.25
“Firefighting” was still necessary, however, as Puerto Rican children faced even more frequent prejudice and exclusion in their neighborhoods and at school than they had in the 1930s. The same year HYAA was founded, a group of Puerto Rican students from Benjamin Franklin High School wrote to the editors of the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario, asking that the paper publicize the intimidation and beatings they were experiencing at school, perpetrated by gang members from the adjacent Italian community. “We believe that we have the right to study without being harassed by anyone,” the students wrote, “since we are American citizens and our parents pay taxes just like [the Italians] do.”26
Firefighting and community development went hand in hand. Within a few years, Pantoja and a few of her colleagues created a new organization, the Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA), led by young Puerto Rican professionals and activists, although it was not officially organized to serve youth.27 Shortly after the creation of PRACA, Pantoja, who by then had earned a master’s degree in social work from New York University, helped found yet another leadership organization, the Puerto Rican Forum, designed to support both general institution building in the Puerto Rican community and the fostering of young leaders who would initiate Puerto Rican-run programs.28 Many of the participants of these groups described them as modeled after “uplift” and “community defense” groups like the NAACP, but with a focus on the younger generation.29 Pantoja described her goal for the Forum as “influencing policy using the language and values of democratic society”: young citizens would create a new path using familiar tools.
Although this movement of youth activists was well underway before the Capeman murder in 1959, that incident, and the renewed flood of anti-Puerto Rican vitriol that followed, sparked a new wave of organizing by young leaders. Two years after the founding of the Hispanic Association Pro-Higher Education by Puerto Rican college students, members of the Puerto Rican Forum’s board of directors created a youth organization that would become more influential (and long lasting) than they could have imagined. They named the organization Aspira, “to aspire.” With its commitment to the teaching of Puerto Rican history and culture and to a youth-run leadership structure, Aspira stood out as a challenger of the status quo within New York’s social service and education networks.30 Though sometimes accused by more radical Puerto Rican activists of promoting an assimilationist agenda, Aspira served as an early model of cultural pride and community autonomy and an incubator of youth activism, all of which proved central to Puerto Rican community organizing in the 1960s and beyond.31
“Political mobilization of the discontented”
Building leadership was an essential starting point for community development, and access to basic educational opportunities had to be part of the equation. The struggle for an adequate education by Puerto Rican parents and children gained powerful momentum in the 1960s, when concerns over equality in education brought Puerto Ricans and African Americans together in civil rights collaborations that would define the experience of young Puerto Ricans in that decade. The most well-documented collaboration in this period emerged from a shared resentment among parents and community leaders about the board of education’s failure to take adequate steps toward integration—nearly ten years after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that “separate but equal” schools were unconstitutional. In 1963 Gilberto Gerena Valentín, an activist in labor and civil rights groups since the 1950s and head of the recently founded National Association of Puerto Rican Civil Rights (NAPRCR), worked with African American civil rights leaders Rev. Milton Galamison and Bayard Rustin to plan a citywide school boycott. Their goal was to force the New York City Board of Education to take seriously the problems of resource inequality and segregation of schools in black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods.
Puerto Rican and African American communities across the city embraced the plan. Migration Division officials organized meetings to encourage parents and other community members to support the boycott, and Gerena Valentín and Galamison mobilized their fellow New York activists. The boycott commanded national press coverage and was by all measures a success: 45 percent of students and 8 percent of teachers stayed out of school, and twenty-six hundred picketers marched in front of three hundred of the city’s 860 schools in spite of twenty-degree temperatures. Counting the number of total participants—those who marched and those who stayed home—Rustin called it the largest civil rights protest in the nation’s history.32 Gerena Valentín staged a follow-up event a month later, a two-thousand-person silent march from City Hall in Manhattan to the board of education office in Brooklyn to demand improvement of facilities for Puerto Rican schoolchildren. At the rally that followed, Galamison joined Gerena Valentín in addressing the crowd, along with a dozen other speakers, including leaders of Jewish and labor organizations and Migration Division head Joseph Montserrat. According to the New York Times in its front-page coverage, some of the Puerto Rican speakers “shouted that the Puerto Rican civil rights movement had come of age.”33
While parents, children, and other residents of black and Puerto Rican neigh-borhoods did see the 1964 school boycott as a success in terms of the publicity they generated for the issue of inequality in schools, that event was clearly just another battle in the ongoing struggle for civil rights in education. The de facto segregation in northern urban schools was intransigent and produced many layers of disadvantage for black and Puerto Rican students. In 1966 half the students in New York’s schools were African American (30 percent) or Puerto Rican (20 percent), but both groups comprised only a tiny proportion (3.6 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively) of those graduating from academic high schools. The vast majority attended schools where there were a quarter the number of licensed teachers as at “top” (white) schools, and where teachers earned substantially lower salaries.34 Such statistics showed, said protesters, the impact of inequality: black and Puerto Rican students were being inadequately supported by the school system.
With these frustrations motivating them, activists redoubled their organizing efforts, asserting that what black and Puerto Rican children really needed was not integration but rather the radical restructuring of the city’s schools. The push by community activists for greater participation in the leadership, decision making, and everyday operation of their communities’ schools intensified in 1966. That fall, parents and activists protested the outcome of a newly created intermediate school (I.S. 201) in East Harlem, which the board of education had promised would attract an integrated student body. Many of the picketers pointed out that the school was only “integrated” if integration was taken to mean both black and Puerto Rican students; with the school sited in the heart of East Harlem, no white parents had applied to enroll their children.35
As with the 1964 school boycott, leaders of national organizations offered their visible support to this new chapter in the push for equality in the schools: Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee joined the demonstrators, as did members of the Black Panthers, along with representatives of community organizations like MEND (Massive Economic Neighborhood Development) and the East Harlem Tenants Council, founded by a Puerto Rican man in his mid-twenties. The activists’ goals could only be accomplished, they said, through “community control”—a rallying cry that activists borrowed from a phrase popularized by Stokely Carmichael around the same time: “what we need … is community control of institutions.” By December 1966, a group of activists expressed its frustration by staging a two-day takeover of a board of education building, calling for the “People’s Board of Education.”36
This action marked the beginning of a highly politicized movement to establish the community control of several school districts in New York City. Shortly before the board of education takeover in late 1966, Evelina Antonetty, a Puerto Rican parent and active participant in the demonstrations, founded United Bronx Parents (UBP) to organize and empower parents of schoolchildren and their families in the Puerto Rican South Bronx; UBP quickly became active in issues and communities well beyond its base.37 Although the community control “experiment” would only last for three years before breaking down in the face of violent pushback from the powerful New York City teachers’ union, those who took part in the movement had forged a model for participatory community empowerment.38 In summarizing the early work of UBP a few years later, Evelina Antonetty stressed the importance of the “political mobilization of the discontented”—the participation by black and Puerto Rican youth and their parents—in driving forward this era of tremendous change in the city.39
Young Puerto Rican activists by the mid-1960s were no longer simply focused on “countering pathology and fear,” as HAPHE leaders had exhorted their audience just a few years before. They were now making bigger claims for equality and were mobilizing across age groups and cultural divisions within their communities. Puerto Rican youth still carried the burden of presumptions that they were prone to delinquency and other dangerous behaviors. At least one thing had changed by the mid-1960s, though, as they stepped onto a new national stage alongside other youth, of all races, to engage in mass movements for social change: young Puerto Ricans for the first time were no longer cast as foreign. They had become, instead, a “national minority,” not so much because the contrast with new waves of immigrants after 1965 (the social impact of that shift would not become obvious for at least a few years) but because young Puerto Ricans, making the most of their citizenship, became very visible as American political actors struggling for civil rights, often alongside African Americans, during the 1960s.
As the phenomenon of the mass social movement continued to gather strength by the mid-1960s, with ongoing civil rights campaigns plus Black Power demonstrations and early antiwar protests, so did expressions of discontent within New York’s Puerto Rican communities—and in many other marginalized communities, with a majority of black and Latino residents, in other cities across the nation. In July 1967, El Barrio in East Harlem, still the city’s largest Puerto Rican neighborhood, exploded in a massive riot. A young Puerto Rican man had been shot to death by an off-duty police officer who claimed the youth had been wielding a knife. Street protests developed into a full-blown riot that shook the Puerto Rican community for three days. Hundreds of community leaders organized dozens of community meetings to try to halt the violence. There were no fatalities during the riot, but there were scores of arrests and substantial property damage.
After the second day of rioting, Mayor Lindsay assembled a group of forty Puerto Rican leaders for a conference at Gracie Mansion, hoping to develop a strategy to stem the violence, both in the moment and for the future. Pressed for “answers,” there was no singular cause to which the community leaders could attribute the riot. Among the most essential insights came from a twenty-four-year-old community organizer, Arnold Segarra, who emphasized the need for “more meaningful dialogue” between East Harlem youth and both police and antipoverty workers. “Tell a kid you’re putting $1 million [into the community], and he says, ‘That’s got nothing to do with me.’” A similar perspective was expressed in a less conciliatory way by Aníbal Solivan, also twenty-four, who worked for an antipoverty organization in East Harlem. He had been invited by the Mayor to a smaller meeting of Puerto Rican community workers the day before but was not part of the Gracie Mansion conference. Solivan criticized leaders who seemed removed from the struggles of the young people rioting in El Barrio: “That’s the established power structure of the community. None of those cats was there during the weekend. They’re not in the streets when they’re needed. They don’t relate.”40
Throughout the following year, tensions remained high all over the city; rioting had resurfaced, though on a smaller scale, in Puerto Rican communities during the summer of 1968. (And not just in New York: riots shook Puerto Rican communities in a handful of smaller cities in New Jersey and Connecticut as well.) The New York police deployed a specialized riot unit, the Tactical Patrol Force, which caused growing resentment in the neighborhoods they descended upon at the first sign of unrest. In one leaflet distributed in the Lower East Side in July 1968, community activists proclaimed: “We are not animals … We do not need the Tactical Police Force in our neighborhoods to show our human dignity.” A year later, the consecutive years of summer riots were a major topic of concern during New York’s contentious mayoral primary race. In a meandering essay he wrote for the New York Times to broadcast his candidacy (alongside eight other contenders), writer Norman Mailer picked apart the city’s growing sense of social breakdown, concluding that “our fix is to put the blame on the blacks and Puerto Ricans. But everybody knows that nobody can really know where the blame resides.”41
Young African Americans and Puerto Ricans in New York and other cities rocked by riots took the measure of this “breakdown” long before white media commentators began wringing their hands about it. They confronted daily the ways that police, city officials, and other disgruntled whites blamed young blacks and Puerto Ricans for intensifying—if not causing—the era’s urban social crises. In New York, young activists fought back, assembling in storefronts and back rooms and tenement apartments all around East Harlem and the Lower East Side. Organizations formed by young Puerto Ricans in the late 1960s tackled in radical ways the inequalities they perceived in housing, healthcare, and educational access.
These young activists took seriously the idea of “maximum feasible participation of the poor,” as the new Community Action Programs described their collaborations with community members. Young Puerto Rican activists also worked toward the maximum feasible participation of the young. A radical social-work organization in the Lower East Side called the “Real Great Society” had gained prominence in 1967 when it started a program called the “University of the Streets.” One admiring journalist noted that this program had managed to bring together “young Puerto Ricans and hippies from the Lower East Side.” Within six months of its founding, Real Great Society’s University of the Streets had won a large grant from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), opened branches in several locations in the Lower East Side and two in East Harlem, and served thirty-six hundred people for classes ranging from karate to photography to Puerto Rican and African American history. Within a couple of years, the Young Lords Organization emerged, engaging in similar projects of radical community building—including, famously, the occupation of an East Harlem church that the Young Lords converted into the “People’s Church,” as well a variety of community public-health campaigns and political protests.
Another dimension of this burgeoning Puerto Rican movement grew out of the activism on college campuses beginning in the mid-1960s. Following several years of meetings and small protests by groups at various campuses in New York, Puerto Rican and African American students at the City College of New York in 1969 organized a takeover to publicize their demands for more equal access of students of color to higher education. One of the key demands of the protesters was the creation of degree-granting programs in Black studies and Puerto Rican studies. Puerto Rican activists wanted to see greater acknowledgement of Puerto Rican issues on their campuses, more support for admissions of Puerto Rican and other poor students to CUNY colleges, and a commitment to teaching Puerto Rican history and culture at the university level. Protesters gained momentum in achieving these goals from a growing national trend: throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, students on diverse campuses around the country made successful demands for programs in Black studies, Chicano studies, and Third World studies.42
In New York City, guided by savvy and determined student protesters and supportive faculty and community allies, CUNY administrators authorized the creation of Black studies and Puerto Rican studies programs or departments at seventeen of the nineteen senior college and community college campuses between 1969 and 1973 and founded several new community colleges in poor and underserved areas of the city. Hostos Community College, founded in 1970 in the Bronx, was the first of these schools geared primarily toward Puerto Ricans. The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, the nation’s first research center dedicated to scholarship on Puerto Ricans, was founded at another CUNY school, Hunter College, in 1973.
The creation of these programs did not just change the opportunities for Puerto Rican students to “study themselves,” as one critic complained during the takeover in 1969. Creating Puerto Rican studies programs involved the very political act of demanding that Puerto Rican history and culture (and, likewise, Black and Chicano histories and cultures) be acknowledged both within and beyond the academy. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recounted in her memoir, My Beloved World, how she had solicited the help of history professor Peter Winn to design an independent study course on Puerto Rican history for a group of under-graduates at Princeton in the early 1970s, since none then existed. This was “taking ownership of Puerto Rican history,” as one of the founders of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies later put it, a process by which activists challenged the historical silence about their people and also made this history accessible to people outside the academy, both within and beyond Puerto Rican communities.43 In so doing, these young activists proclaimed themselves full citizens with the right to a visible history.
Inside the academy these programs provided a remedy for many years of academic misinformation and distortion of Puerto Ricans’ lived experience in the United States. All through the 1950s and 1960s, respected academics, many of them liberals sympathetic to the plight of “minorities,” had published observations about Puerto Ricans that focused almost exclusively on their deficits. Even the more nuanced work tended to be based on thin data, causing many well-meaning liberal scholars to misrepresent their subjects. Historian Oscar Handlin, for example, explored Puerto Ricans’ socioeconomic stagnation in his 1959 book The Newcomers, which cited Puerto Ricans’ political apathy, their lack of “associational life,” and the “tragically rare” instances of Puerto Ricans who were “willing and able to exercise creative leadership.”44
Just over a decade later, as the movement of Puerto Rican youth was still exploding in 1970, sociologist Nathan Glazer and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a new introduction to their 1963 book Beyond the Melting Pot, in which they pilloried young Puerto Ricans for their “militant” actions at CUNY the year before—and at the same time wrote the students off as insignificant historical actors, incapable of developing their own political analysis. “The radical white college youth, who are now so influential in the mass media, will try to convince [Puerto Rican youth] that they are ‘colonized.’” In fact, the political education of the nation’s youth was often happening in the opposite direction: young Puerto Rican activists shared their persuasive critiques about American colonialism with leaders of Students for a Democratic Society and other mostly white campus organizations in countless forums and publications throughout this era.45
This moment marked the full flourishing of a Puerto Rican civil rights movement, and it was born out of the experience of the community’s youth—many of whom grew up with stories of parents and grandparents who, as students and young adults themselves, had pushed back against marginalization in their own time. Young Puerto Ricans who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s inaugurated a new era of civil rights activism, built on a foundation of both radical and main-stream political dreams. Whether staging the takeover of an ailing Bronx hospital to demand better service for its largely Puerto Rican patients, as the Young Lords did in 1970, or working to fight for bilingual education and voting rights in state and federal courts, as the lawyers of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund began to do a couple of years later, young Puerto Ricans continually reinforced the decades-old lesson that they must serve as their own advocates. For those who could not count on fair and equal treatment, claiming their rights as US citizens and members of the American nation was part of the process of coming of age.
1. I use “foreign” here in a cultural rather than a legal sense. Puerto Rico is widely considered a country separate from the United States in that it possesses a distinct culture and history, yet it is at the same time part of the US—an “unincorporated territory” from 1898 to 1952, and thereafter a self-governing commonwealth.
2. The vast majority of Puerto Rican migrants settled in New York City until about 1950, when the diaspora began to spread rapidly to other cities and regions.
3. Charles S. Brown Jr. to William Jay Schieffelin, Esq., March 21, 1935, LaGuardia Papers, reel 76, New York City Municipal Reference and Research Center.
4. Vito Marcantonio, “Puerto Rican Children in New York Schools,” Congressional Record vol. 80, part 10 (74th Congress, 2nd session) June 19, 1936, 10310; Pedro A. Cebollero, Assistant Commissioner of Education, San Juan, “Reactions of Puerto Rican Children in New York City to Psychological Tests” (San Juan: Bureau of Supplies, Printing, and Transportation, 1936).
5. Henry W. Thurston, The Education of Youth as Citizens: Progressive Changes in our Aims and Methods (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1946), 37–38.
6. See Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Great Britain and the United States between the World Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); David K. Yoo, “Testing Assumptions: IQ, Japanese Americans, and the Model Minority Myth in the 1920s and 1930s” in Sucheng Chan, ed. Remapping Asian American History (Lanham, Md.: Altamira, 2003), and George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican America: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 259.
7. See Gerald Meyer, Vito Marcantonio, Radical Politician 1902–1954 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 11–13.
8. Minutes of the Racial Committee Conference, February 7, 1936, Covello Papers, series VI, box 51, folder 15, Balch Institute, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; “Results Based on the Henmon-Nelson Tests of Mental Ability,” February 1936, Covello papers, series VI, box 48, folder 30; “A Report of the Special Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York …,” December 31, 1935, Covello papers, series VIII, box 74, folder 3.
9. “New York’s Sorest Spot,” New York Tribune, November 21, 1938.
10. Rita Mellone to Leonard Covello, October 1, 1945; Ralph De Donato to Leonard Covello, October 1, 1945, series VI, box 54, folder 12; Leonard Covello, “We Hold These Truths,” unpublished manuscript, n.d. [1938], box 5, folder 13; Leonard Covello to BFHS students, regarding reaction to “clashes,” October 26, 1938, box 51, folder 13; Covello, “An Experiment in Building Concepts of Racial Democracy,” 1941, box 56, folder 10, all Covello Papers.
11. See Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), and Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 55–77.
12. Richard Perlman, Delinquency Prevention: The Size of the Problem (Washington, DC: GPO, 1960), 3. Children’s Bureau of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, The Children’s Bureau and Juvenile Delinquency (Washington, DC: GPO, 1960), 32.
13. Erwin Schepses, “Puerto Rican Delinquent Boys in New York City,” Social Science Review 23 (March 1949): 51–61.
14. Board of Education of New York City, “The Puerto Rican Study, 1953–57” (1958), 120–21, New York City Municipal Reference and Research Center. Clarence Senior, “The Newcomer Speaks Out,” National Conference on Social Welfare, June 1960, series X, box 103, folder 2, Covello Papers. “Puerto Rican Unit Reports Lag Here,” February 7, 1954, New York Times; Spanish-American Youth Bureau Conference Program, “Topic: Youth of Hispanic Origin and Delinquency,” February 26, 1955, and Spanish-American Youth Bureau Conference Program, “Topic: Community Efforts in Combating the Development of Juvenile Delinquency among Puerto Rican and Hispanic Youth,” February 25, 1956, box 102, folder 13, Covello Papers. Presentation by Joseph Montserrat at Institute of the Welfare Council, Chicago, October 17, 1957, series X, box 109, folder 20, Covello Papers; “Muñoz Niega Juventud Boricua Sea Culpable de Crímenes y Violencia,” October 8, 1957, El Diario, 2.
15. Christopher Rand, The Puerto Ricans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 90–91.
16. “NAACP Meeting to Protest Increasing ‘Police Brutality,’” Amsterdam News, August 5, 1950.
17. “1,400 City Police Shifted to Fight on Youth Crimes,” New York Times, September 1, 1959.
18. “Víctimas De Pandillas Juveniles Simbolizan Fracaso De Comunidad,” August 30, 1959, 3; “Juventud Sigue Bañando En Lágrimas Los Rostros y Corazones De Madres,” and “Panilleros Juveniles Viven En Un Mundo Aparte Y Hasta Tienen Su Propio Lenguaje,” September 1, 1959, 9; “‘Ganga’ dice: Queremos Ser Buenos, Pero Nadie Nos Ayuda y Todos Nos Persiguen,” September 2, 1959, 5.
19. “Puerto Rican Community Takes Initiative to Combat Juvenile Delinquency in New York,” press release, Council of Puerto Rican and Spanish-American Organizations of Greater New York, September 8, 1959, series X, box 106, folder 4, Covello Papers; “Civic Contribution by Puerto Ricans,” New York Herald-Tribune, September 8, 1959; “Responsible Action,” New York World-Telegram and Sun, September 11, 1959; and “Ethnology and Crime,” Washington Post and Times Herald, September 11, 1959, series X, box 106, folder 4, Covello Papers. Senior, “The Newcomer Speaks Out,” National Conference on Social Welfare, June 1960, p.14, series X, box 103, 2, Covello Papers.
20. The Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency was established in 1953. Joseph Montserrat, “Statement for the record of the US Senate Subcommittee to investigate Juvenile Delinquency,” Septembr 25, 1959, series X, box 106, folder 4, Covello Papers.
21. “Liebowitz Sued on Jury’s Inquiry,” New York Times, November 6, 1959.
22. Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs, Second Puerto Rican Youth Conference, “We the New Yorkers Contribute,” 1960, series X, box 102, folder 10, Covello Papers.
23. MCPRA, “The Puerto Rican Pupils in the Public Schools of New York City,” 18, and Committee of the Association of Assistant Superintendents, “A Program of Education for Puerto Ricans in New York City,” 1947, 103, both reprinted in Francesco Cordasco, ed., Bilingual Education in New York City: A Compendium of Reports (New York: Arno, 1978).
24. Cordasco, Bilingual Education.
25. Antonia Pantoja, Memoir of a Visionary, (Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 2002), 74, 98; José Morales, interview with the author, December 13, 2007.
26. “Pandillas italianas atropellan y roban a estudiantes hispanos,” November 2, 1951, El Diario, 1; “5 Puerto Rican Students Attacked by Members of the Italian ‘Red Wings’” El Diario, January 17 1952, 2.
27. Pantoja, Memoir of a Visionary, 76–77.
28. Ibid., 76–77. See also Virginia Sánchez-Korrol, “Building the New York Puerto Rican Community, 1945–65: A Historical Interpretation,” 11–12, in Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Angelo Falcón, and Felix V. Matos Rodriguez, eds., Boricuas in Gotham (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2005).
29. History Task Force, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Labor Migration under Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 152; José Morales interview, December 13, 2007.
30. Pantoja, Memoir of a Visionary, 103.
31. Ibid., 99; History Task Force, Labor Migration under Capitalism, 52.
32. “Boycott Cripples City Schools; Absences 360,000 Above Normal; Negroes and Puerto Ricans Unite,” New York Times, February 4, 1964.
33. “1,800 Join March for Better Schools for Puerto Ricans,” New York Times, March 2, 1964.
34. Hector Vázquez, “Puerto Rican Americans,” Journal of Negro Education 38 (Summer 1969): 247–56.
35. “Harlem Factions United on School,” New York Times, September 23, 1966.
36. Anthony De Jesus and Madeline Pérez, “From Community Control to Consent Decree: Puerto Ricans Organizing for Education and Language Rights in 1960s and ’70s New York City,” Centro Journal 21 (2009): 17–31.
37. In 1970, Evelina López Antonetty was a Delegate of the White House Conference on Children and Youth.
38. “The Setting of United Bronx Parents’ Work: Summary Description of the South Bronx,” box 2, folder 14, United Bronx Parents papers, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños.
39. Ibid., 323.
40. Peter Kihss, “Puerto Rican Story: A Sensitive People Erupt,” New York Times, July 26, 1967, and Pete Hamell, “Coming of Age in Nueva York,” New York (November 1969): 33–47.
41. “Why Are We in New York?” New York Times, May 18, 1969.
42. Lillian Jiménez, “Puerto Ricans and Educational Civil Rights: A History of the 1969 City College Takeover,” Centro Journal 21 (Fall 2009): 159–75; “Black Studies Programs,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 26, 1969.
43. Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World (New York: Knopf, 2013), 149–51; Nélida Pérez, “Two Reading Rooms and the Librarian’s Office: The Evolution of the Centro Library and Archives,” Centro Journal 21 (Fall 2009): 199–220.
44. Oscar Handlin, The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 111.
45. See Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth Century New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 225–27.