THREE

Not Foreigners, yet Foreign

From 1951 to 1956 I lived as a priest in Incarnation Parish on the West Side of New York’s Manhattan. Puerto Ricans were then being crowded into the walk-ups between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway. They were displacing many families who had moved a generation earlier straight from Ireland to this area. I became involved in the inevitable conflict between these peoples and also in the controversy about its meaning.

As a newcomer to the United States I was surprised to see how New Yorkers, from druggist to mayor, fell back upon ready stereotypes to guide their policy decisions. Whatever was worth understanding about Puerto Ricans, they apparently felt, could be explained in old categorical terms coined for preceding groups of immigrants. That which had served for the Poles or Italians should fit the Puerto Ricans.

At that time I tried to obtain recognition of the fact that, at least for the Roman Catholic Church, the Puerto Rican immigration represented a phenomenon without precedent. Amazingly, I found an inquisitive listener to my opinion in Cardinal Spellman.

 

 

 

After the introduction of the quota system in 1924, it seemed that the melting process in New York City was finally about to catch up with the number of people tossed into the pot. Then in the late forties, the city was presented with a novel challenge, an invasion of American-born “foreigners,’’ the Puerto Ricans. In Vito Marcantonio’s heyday (1943) there were less than thirty-five thousand Puerto Ricans in New York; at present (1956) there are more than half a million, and indications are that the migration has not yet reached its peak.

These Puerto Ricans are not foreigners, and yet they are more foreign than most of the immigrants who preceded them. About this seeming paradox the well-meaning should be well-informed, since to be received kindly merely because one is a foreigner is a cold kind of condescension: the chances are that the man who thus receives you is determined never really to know you.

If on the one hand a man consistently designates you a foreigner, he usually precludes any possibility of appreciating that which is unique to your group—besides the fact that it is not his own. If on the other hand, misunderstanding St. Paul’s instruction to make himself Jew with the Jews and Greek with the Greeks, he approaches you with an exegesis such as “We are all Americans,” he denies your right, and his, to a heritage, to be human, with roots reaching back in history.

This fallacy is at the bottom of the attitude of many well-meaning people toward the Puerto Rican immigrants: let them do what the Irish or Italians did, or let them attempt what the Jews attempted; let them grow gradually through their own national parishes, territorial ghettos, and political machines to full “Americanization”; let them vociferously assert that they are as good Americans as the man next door. These attitudes are very common in New York, where the arrival of successive migratory waves is taken for granted. It is too often gratuitously assumed that the future novel about the Puerto Rican journey will be fashioned after either The Last Hurrah or Marjorie Morningstar, or will be a combination of both.

The welfare investigator who says to José Rivera, “My parents went through the same experience,” neither lies nor expresses xenophobia—he just misunderstands, like the politician who tries again to use methods which worked when Italian was spoken in Harlem.

When the Irish and the Germans came here a century ago, New York City was faced with a challenge of a kind never experienced before and of a size never to be duplicated. In 1855 one-third of the city’s population (500,000) consisted of immigrants who had arrived in the previous decade; against this proportion the one-fifteenth of the city’s population which in 1955 consisted of recently arrived Puerto Ricans (again 500,000) seems insignificant.

In the days of the heavy influx to America, wave after wave of immigrants arrived, settled, and became accustomed to new patterns of life. The newcomers spoke different languages, worshiped in different churches, came from different climates, wooed in different fashions, ate different dishes, sang different songs. But under these apparent differences they had much in common. They came from the Old Continent and arrived as refugees or settlers to become Americans and to stay for good. They brought their own clergy—rabbi, priest, or minister—and the symbols of past millennia which were their own, Saint Patrick, the Maffia, or Loretto, no less than the Turnverein. They settled in special sections of the city and kept to themselves for years before they ventured to take part in that experience new to all of them: life in a pluralistic society. They fell into a common pattern, and it is no wonder that those who had been here long enough to consider themselves part of a settled stratum fell into the habit of assuming a priori that each new incoming group would be analogous to theirs. This assumption, in fact, proved to be true until after World War II, with the exception of two groups, the Orientals and the Southern Negroes.

Then suddenly the Puerto Ricans arrived en masse. New York had never before known such an invasion, an invasion of Americans who came from an older part of the New World into New York, which by the way had been part of the diocese of San Juan long before Henry Hudson discovered Manhattan. And New York had never had to deal with born American citizens who in their schools had learned English as a foreign language.

These strange Americans were sons of a Catholic country where for centuries slaves had found refuge, where the population of a little over two million is overwhelmingly white but where a difference in the shade of the skin is no impediment, either to success or to marriage. Yet theirs was the first sizable group coming from overseas into New York to be tagged by many as “colored,” much less because of the racial heredity of some than for the vaguely sensed great difference between them and former new arrivals.

This was a new type of immigrant: not a European who had left home for good and strove to become an American, but an American citizen, who could come here for the time between one harvest and another and return home for vacation with a week’s salary spent on an air coach ticket. This was not the fugitive from racial or religious persecution in his own country, but the child of “natives” in a Spanish colony or perhaps the descendant of a Spanish official in the colonial service; not a man accustomed to be led by men of his own stock—priest, politician, rebel, or professor—but for four hundred years a subject in a territory administered by foreigners, first Spanish, then American, only recently come into its own.

The new arrival from Puerto Rico was not the Christian in his own right who received the Faith from the sons of his own neighbors, but the fruit of missionary labor typical of the Spanish Empire. He was a Catholic, born of parents who were also Catholics, yet he received the Sacraments from a foreigner because the government was afraid that to train native priests might be to train political rebels.

Even the physical configuration of the world from which he came was different. He was a man from an island where nature is provident and a friend, where field labor means much more harvesting than planting. When nature rebels every few decades, he is powerless; in the hurricanes he cannot but see the finger of God.

Until recently nobody in Puerto Rico built a house with the idea that it should survive the elements or withstand the climate by air conditioning. What a difference from the Pole and the Sicilian, both of whom built houses to withstand nature, climate, and time, both of whom built houses to separate their lives from that of nature. One might have come from the Russian steppe or the ghetto and the other from an olive grove on the coast, but both knew what winter meant; they knew that a house was there to protect them from the cold, a place within which to make a home. It was easy for the Pole and the Sicilian to settle in tenements and to live confined there. But the new immigrant from the tropics knew no winter, and the home he left was a hut in which you slept but around which you lived with your family. The hut was the center of his day’s activities, not their limit. To come to a tenement, to need heat, to need glass in your windows, to be frowned on for tending to live beyond your doors—this was all contrary to the Puerto Rican’s traditional habits, and as surprising to him as it is for the New Yorker to realize that for any immigrants these basic assumptions of his life should be surprising.

The new Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rico of 1956, is studded with concrete houses and opens a new factory every day. It is a proving ground for the most advanced forms of community organizations, and it has the fastest-declining rate for illiteracy and the fastest-falling mortality in the world. Yet these facts must not make us think that the traditional outlook of its people has changed or will change tomorrow. These material improvements are the outcome of the first decade of Múñoz Marín’s administration, but they do not wipe out the Island’s past nor are they intended to make of San Juan a suburb of New York.

The differences between the Puerto Rican migration and the influx of Europeans are fundamental. Indeed, in the shortness of its history Puerto Rico is more foreign to Europe than to America. These differences account for much of the distinctive behavior characteristics of Puerto Ricans in New York, and the lack of knowledge of these differences accounts for many misunderstandings on the part of old New Yorkers.

Many a Puerto Rican does not leave the Island with a clear plan of settling on the mainland. How can a man who leaves on the spur of the moment, planning to make a fast dollar in New York and be back as soon as he has enough to buy a store, take roots in New York? I remember one woman who was in despair because her husband had disappeared on his way to the cane fields, carrying his machete. She thought, of course, that a rival had grabbed him from her. And then, after a week, she got a money order from Chicago. On the way to the cane field he had run into a hiring gang and decided to try his luck—and that was the reason he neglected to come home for dinner. In a case like this, in which a man “drops in” on New York, with no intentions of staying but of eventually commuting “home,” how can the transient have the same effect on his neighborhood in New York as the old immigrant who came to stay? Yet the statistical curve of emigration from the Island is in exact correlation with the curve of employment on the mainland. If employment is scarce, the reflux increases correspondingly. Many, even after years in New York, feel they got stuck there because of money.

With the arrival of hundreds of thousands from Puerto Rico and the other Central American states (it is estimated that more than one-fourth of New York’s Spanish-American population is not Puerto Rican), not only a new language but a new pattern of living has been added to the city. Instead of the strangers speaking only a foreign tongue who formerly arrived exhausted from the long journey, American citizens, all of whom know some basic English, arrive in airplanes within six hours of leaving their tropical island.

The old immigrants settled in national neighborhoods; the new transatlantic commuter spreads out all over the city; ten years after the beginning of the Puerto Rican mass influx Spanish has already become ubiquitous in New York. Unlike European immigrants, all Puerto Ricans know some English, and this helped, but there is another factor that has contributed to Latin Americans spreading to all quarters of the city. In former times when a neighborhood became a center for the newest immigrant group, it was either a slum or tended to become one. And once a neighborhood had deteriorated it hardly ever was redeemed. The great immigration from Puerto Rico started after World War II, due to such factors as cheap air transportation, acquaintance with the mainland acquired by many during service in the army, rising education under the new political order on the island, and, last but not least, the growing pressure of a population which has more than doubled since the beginning of the century. At that same time the city was embarking on its great slum clearance program and the first blocks to be torn down were almost invariably those where the newest and poorest immigrant had just settled. As a result, the Puerto Ricans began to be resettled all around town in new projects and on a non-discriminatory basis.

Considering this dispersal and the tendency to commute to the Island, it is no wonder that there are hardly any Puerto Rican national neighborhoods in the traditional sense in New York. One result is that it is difficult for Puerto Ricans to develop local grass-roots leadership within their own group; either their concentration per city block is too thin, or the intention to stick to the neighborhood is absent, or the necessity to organize in association with their own is weak because all are citizens who at least understand some English and have official “protection” from the Commonwealth government labor office—the first instance of something like a “Consulate for American Nationals,” And there is no doubt that another factor contributing to the relative lack of leadership is caused by hundreds of years of colonial administration.

Thus Puerto Ricans in New York find it more difficult than groups which came before them to form their own in-group leadership, if they do not find it completely impossible. This fact gives them a very real advantage over former migrations in one sense, because it almost forces them into an active participation in the established community. On the other hand, the sudden challenge of having to participate in a settled New York community proves too arduous for many who might have been able to become leaders in their own cliques.

A lack of consideration on the part of New York civic leaders for the distinctive character of this new Puerto Rican migration, as compared to previous immigrant experiences, can do real damage to the community by either retarding or injuring the new pattern of assimilation which will have to form. If this lack of understanding should be present in the leaders of the Catholic Church, it can seriously damage souls.

One-third of the baptized Catholics in Manhattan and the lower Bronx are Spanish-Americans at this moment. The Puerto Ricans are the first group of Catholics with a distinctly non-European tradition of Catholicism to come to the East Coast The lack of native priests, due to the colonial and imperialistic atmosphere of more than four hundred years of the Island’s history, and also the special approaches due to missionary conditions, have profoundly molded the behavior of Puerto Ricans as Catholics.

Notwithstanding the very recent trend toward rapid urbanization, the majority of Puerto Ricans are dispersed over the steep hills of the interior, living in huts in the midst of small clearings among bananas and flamboyants, with magnificient views, but too far from church to attend Mass every Sunday. Traditionally, they take the Sacraments on those rare occasions when the priest comes to visit them in the chapel in their barrio—but for generations they have had to baptize their own children because the priest came so seldom. Under such circumstances regular attendance at Sunday Mass is not a confirmed element of Catholic practice. Living habits of the tropics, feudal-colonial social organization, and the confluence of Indian, African, and European cultures played their part. The Church’s law declaring a marriage between two Catholics valid even when not entered into before a priest, if a priest could not be available in less than a month, made people forget the need for a priest. It had an adverse effect on the frequency of marriages in church, and still has today.

“Bad habits” like these are not a sign of lack of Catholic spirit, but rather the effects of a peculiar ecclesiastical history. Many United States Catholics are used to a wide variety of national customs in national parishes and a great difference in practices among various ethnic groups; when faced with the lack of “practice” of their faith by Puerto Ricans, they might be tempted to identify them with some other foreign group in whom the effects of a different background show up in similar behavior, or might even deny altogether that Puerto Ricans are Catholic. But for anybody who has ever breathed the atmosphere of the Island there is no doubt that theirs is a Catholic folk-culture: children who might never make their First Communion will regularly ask their parents’ blessing before leaving the house; people who might never have been taught the catechism will devotedly invoke the names of Our Lord or the Virgin and plaster their homes with holy pictures and sign themselves with the Cross before leaving home. Even the fact that a man refuses to get married in church sometimes testifies for rather than against his Catholicity; he does not want to bind himself forever by a Church marriage.

In Puerto Rico God’s house extends from the church into the plaza. Not only do the processions or posedas require the out-of-doors as a continuation of the church, but also the church is often too small, and throngs attend Mass by looking through doors and windows. Unless his neighbor on the mainland understands the different meaning “family,” “church,” or “home” has for a man from the tropics, he will not understand why José plays the guitar on his doorstep, or why María walks from statue to statue during Mass for a little chat with the saints or perhaps enters church only after service, because she is repelled by the formality of the ushers.

All of this points toward the need the Puerto Ricans have to win some respect for their background. What they need is not more help but less categorization according to previous schemes, and more understanding. Only thus will they be able to make the unique cultural, political, and economic contribution for which they seem destined: Spanish-Christian tradition, a Catholicism in which is taken for granted an eminently Christian attitude toward the mixing of races, a freshness and simplicity of outlook proper to the tropics, a new pattern of political freedom in association with the United States, a bridge between the hemispheres politically and culturally no less than economically—these are only a few of the assets that the mass migration of Puerto Ricans to the mainland can contribute to New York and the United States.