From the New World: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans
Immigration from the nations and colonies to the south of the United States—Latin America and the Caribbean—has long been dominated by Mexicans, although there have always been substantial numbers of migrants from other places. Until the period of World War II and after, these immigrants amounted to only a very small percentage of all newcomers. In the century of immigration between 1820 and 1930 about 1.3 million persons were recorded as entering from the whole region. More than half—some 750,000 were from Mexico and most of the rest—425,000 came from the West Indies. Central America contributed about 43,000 and the whole continent of South America only 113,000, a little over a thousand a year. Clearly most of these immigrants came from our very close neighbors and a significant but indeterminable number of those were sojourners who returned home. The bulk of Mexican immigration, 720,000 persons, had come in the years after the Mexican Revolution that began in 1909, pushed by the danger and disorder of the conflict and attracted by the booming economies of California and the Southwest. During the 1930s neither of these forces was operating: Mexico had achieved a stable government and the mass unemployment of the Great Depression repelled rather than attracted most immigrants. In addition, the United States government sponsored a repatriation program, supposedly voluntary, under which as many as five hundred thousand Mexican Americans—some of them citizens—were sent south across the border, many of them on special trains chartered by federal and local governments.
But many Mexican Americans were not recent immigrants but descendants of the founding fathers and mothers of European-style civilization in California and much of the Southwest. At the time of the Mexican War (1846–47) there were perhaps eighty thousand Mexicans living in the territory that the United States would annex—sixty thousand of them in New Mexico and twenty thousand in California. Another five thousand or so lived in Texas, which had been added in 1845. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848), which ended the war, gave those living in the territory taken from Mexico the right to stay or go to Mexico: some three thousand chose the latter course. The others could become American citizens or remain Mexican citizens and were to enjoy property rights “as if the [property] belonged to citizens of the United States.” The former were promised “the rights of citizens of the United States according to the principles of the Constitution.” Alas, the principles of the treaty were soon ignored in both New Mexico and California: Many Mexicans and former Mexicans were soon separated from their land and became strangers in what had been their own country, although some Mexican members of the elite in New Mexico retained power—or the trappings of power. New Mexico remained a territory until 1912 even though it satisfied the normal requirements of statehood at the time of annexation. As would be the case in Hawaii, statehood was delayed because the population was not considered “American” enough.1
The Mexican American community is thus both old and new. Since Mexican Americans have usually been counted by the Census Bureau as Caucasians even though most have large amounts of Amerindian ancestry, it is all but impossible to get accurate estimates of their total number. In recent years the census has resorted to a “Spanish surname” estimate, but this includes Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and other groups under a blanket heading that confuses more than it clarifies. The Cubans of Miami, the Puerto Ricans of New York, and the Chicanos of Southern California have little in common beyond the Spanish language that many but not all use in daily life. In 1980 the Census Bureau estimated that there were some 14.6 million persons of “Spanish origin,” about 6.5 percent of the total population. Of these, some 8.6 million persons were presumed to be of Mexican origin. Earlier population estimates are no more precise. The HEAEG essay on Mexicans estimates the number of Mexican Americans in 1900 at somewhere between 381,000 and 562,000, a margin for error of almost 50 percent.2 Comparing the midpoint of this “guesstimate”—471,500—with the census guess for 1980—8.6 million—we get a more than eighteenfold increase over eight decades in which the U.S. population increased a little less than threefold. However one manipulates and adjusts the figures, it is clear that the incidence of the Mexican American ethnic group has increased significantly and that it and other “Hispanics” are the sleeping giants of American society. In the rest of this chapter we shall consider the two most prominent Hispanic minorities, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans. Other Hispanic groups will be treated in the two final chapters.
Twentieth-Century Migration from Mexico
Like the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos who came before them, large numbers of the Mexican immigrants who began to come north after 1909 found agricultural jobs partly in the newly irrigated Imperial Valley of California, in the sugar beet fields of Colorado, and elsewhere in the Southwest and Far West. The pioneer historian of California, Hubert Howe Bancroft, argued that the Mexicans would be ideal laborers for California’s ranchers and growers, because they would go back home after they were no longer needed. Others worked as copper miners in Arizona, coal miners in Colorado, and as track layers for western railroads. In the agricultural sector, in particular, they tended to fill the role that first Chinese and then Japanese agricultural workers had pioneered. In addition, there were some refugees from the Mexican revolution, ranging from those on the right, like General Victoriano Huerta (1854–1916), the man responsible for the murder of the reform president, Francisco Madero (1873–1913), to left wingers such as the syndicalist followers of the Flores Magon brothers, who bulked large among the Far Western victims of the post–World War I “Red Scare.”
Between these extremes were significant numbers of businessmen, mostly small and middling, who established themselves along the once largely unsettled border between Mexico and the United States. Stretching from the cities of Matamoros/Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico to Tijuana/San Diego on the Pacific, it runs for two thousand miles. From the Gulf to El Paso it is marked by the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande: From El Paso to the Pacific it is largely desert. While the border divides, it also unites: Its paired cities are economic units, each dependent on the other, and tens of thousands of people cross the border every day to work, to shop, and to play. The same can be said of our even longer border to the north. But there is one crucial difference. The standard of living on each side of the Canadian American border is roughly the same: Along the Mexican American border there is great disparity, with lower prices for most goods and services on the Mexican side and higher wages and more jobs on the American side. As long as those conditions prevail, the United States will continue to attract Mexicans as either temporary or permanent residents. For a long time, except for the odd customs facility, both governments largely ignored the border: Only in 1924 did the United States establish the Border Patrol.
Before that happened, World War I, which cut off the flow of European workers, eventually created unfillable job opportunities in northern American cities. Many of these opportunities were filled by southern blacks who began the “great migration” to places like Chicago at that time; others were filled by Mexican immigrants, who came not only to the Southwest and West in greater numbers but reached such places as Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. This flow continued during the 1920s, when some five hundred thousand Mexicans were counted as immigrating to the United States, there being no quota for Western Hemisphere immigrants. Between 1910 and 1930 the number of foreign-born Mexican Americans recorded by the census tripled from more than two hundred thousand to more than six hundred thousand, which suggests that there were a million or more Mexican Americans by the latter date. About 85 percent of the recorded 1930 Mexican-born population lived in the Southwest, most of them in just two states, Texas (40 percent) and California (30 percent). These immigration flows, as we have seen, were temporarily reversed during the Great Depression, both by government action and by market forces. A strict interpretation of the LPC clause, the literacy test, and the general lack of jobs, plus competition with American migrants, like Steinbeck’s Joads, for the few existing jobs cut the number of incoming Mexicans on immigrant visas to just over thirty thousand for the entire decade of the 1930s, while the previously noted repatriation program sent up to half a million persons the other way.
Acute labor shortages during World War II, shortages that, in California, were exacerbated by the incarceration of the Japanese Americans, caused the United States government to negotiate the bracero program with Mexico. Under this program the United States guaranteed that Mexican workers would receive specified minimum wages and certain living and working conditions, although many complaints were filed against employers who did not meet those relatively modest standards. Conditions were particularly bad in Texas—so bad that for a time the Mexican government refused to allow any braceros to be sent there. The World War II program had as many as two hundred thousand braceros in the United States, about half in California, the rest in twenty other states. There was no program between 1947 and 1951 when a new program was created to meet Korean War labor shortages. It lasted until 1964. Its peak year was 1959, when four hundred fifty thousand braceros entered. The 1960 census reported that braceros accounted for just over a quarter of the nation’s seasonal agricultural workers.
In the meantime, legal immigration, that is, those Mexicans who entered as resident aliens with permanent status, began to rise from its depression lows. Nearly 60,000 came in the 1940s, almost 275,000 in the 1950s, more than 440,000 in the 1960s, and almost 640,000 in the 1970s. The 1980 census reported that there were 2.2 million persons born in Mexico living in the United States. They were more than 15 percent of all foreign-born. Nearly three-fìfths of these Mexican Americans (57.8 percent) told the census taker that they had come to the United States since 1970. The Census Bureau believes that about half of the foreign-born Mexicans it counted were illegal immigrants. And, for a final statistic, in its 1987 current population survey estimate the Census Bureau estimated that nearly twelve million of the nineteen million Hispanics in the United States were of Mexican birth or ancestry.
The whole question of illegal immigrants or, as some euphemistically prefer to describe them, undocumented persons, is a vexed one. Just how many there are in the country at any one time is a matter of great dispute. It is, as noted, a problem of counting the uncountable. Prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant, since no permission was necessary to enter the country. As more and more restrictions have been added, the reasons for entering the United States illegally have risen. Perhaps 50 to 60 percent of contemporary illegal immigrants are Mexicans, although in 1986 alone the INS apprehended alleged illegal immigrants from 93 different countries. In contrast to the popular image of the illegal immigrant as the border crosser, the wetback, the mojado, perhaps more than half of all illegals are not border crossers but visa abusers. That is, persons who have entered the United States legally on some kind of temporary visa and simply stayed on. As long as they have little or no contact with officialdom, such persons are not likely to get caught. Some have been found out, ironically, by being the victims of serious crime.
The question of how many illegal immigrants there are in the country at any one time is repeatedly raised by restrictionists. Nobody really knows. In two reports just two years apart (1972 and 1974) the INS told Congress that (a) there were about one million such persons, and (b) the range was between four to twelve million persons. The then INS commissioner said his personal belief—as opposed to that of his staff—was that there were between six and eight million. A private consulting firm using the “Delphi method”—you ask a bunch of experts what they think and average the replies—came up with a figure of 8 million in 1975. The Census Bureau study, which reviewed all existing studies—really another example of the Delphi method though it was not called that—concluded that as of 1978 there were between 3.5 and 6 million illegal aliens in the country. Local politicians also came up with inflated estimates: Los Angeles County officials in the early 1980s claimed that there were at least two million illegals in their county alone (and wanted federal dollars to care for them), and New York’s former mayor Ed Koch argued that there were at least a million in his city. And finally, two variant, sober, educated guesses for 1980: A Census Bureau researcher has argued that at least 2.057 million illegal immigrants were actually enumerated in the 1980 census, while the National Research Council has argued that the range is 1.5 to 3.5 million. The council’s report added, at a time when there was national hysteria about immigration reform (to be discussed in the final chapters):
There is no empirical basis at present for the widespread belief that the illegal alien population has increased sharply in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
What is a reasonable person to make of all these numbers, claims, and counterclaims? It is clear that at least since the 1950s there have been substantial numbers of border crossers and other illegal entrants from Mexico and elsewhere and that they have ventured far beyond the traditional border areas where such behavior has gone on since the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The INS staged what it called “Operation Wetback” in the early 1950s and reported that it had deported or expelled 3.8 million Mexicans. From the 1970s to the mid-1980s the INS reported a rising number of apprehensions and expulsions of immigrants, from a little over 300,000 in 1970 to 1.8 million in 1986. These “body counts” should not be taken literally. Many individuals are caught more than once in the same day and duly added to the count: Others are casual border crossers who would not have stayed anyway, and many others are migrant workers, who, at the end of the growing season and far from home, arrange to be caught by la migra, as they call the INS. This is a good arrangement for each. The INS adds to its body count, and the migrants, who are willing to sign a voluntary deportation order, get a free plane ride to the border. (No one wants to put such persons in jail: It can cost up to thirty thousand dollars annually to house a single federal prisoner—more than it costs to send a student to Yale or Harvard.) I once spoke to a Mexican migrant worker in Michigan who told me that he had arranged to be deported every fall for some thirty years. He and others cross the border in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas in late winter or early spring and work their way north harvesting crops—often working for the same employers year after year—ending with cherry picking in Michigan. Other workers, following other crops, have different migration routes. These seasoned agricultural workers work in the United States from seven to ten months a year, but they live in Mexico where their families enjoy a higher-than-average standard of living. Like the Italian golondrinas to the Argentine, they have filled an economic niche that is satisfactory to them and their employers. Others, of course, come and try to stay, and clearly many succeed. The arguments about the effects of this pattern of migration will be considered in the final chapter. Here we are primarily concerned with noting and evaluating its existence and its effect on the Mexican American community.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE MEXICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY
Like most other American ethnic groups, Mexican Americans have had a varied history. Their experiences in Texas, in New Mexico, in California, and in the industrial heartland of the United States have been distinct. They have even referred to themselves in various ways. Although some intellectuals and activists now insist on using the term Chicano to describe the entire group over its long history, the term is, in fact, of relatively recent coinage and not accepted by all. In Texas, the original term was Tejano, while in the twentieth century the most important Mexican American civil rights organization was called the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and an important post–World War II veterans’ organization there eschewed an ethnic title and called itself the American G.I. Forum. In California, the pre-1848 settlers called themselves Californios, and by the twentieth century most would call themselves Mexican Americans or Mexicans. In New Mexico, where Mexican American influence was the strongest, the term Spanish American prevailed.
Whatever they were called and wherever they lived in the Southwest and Far West, Mexican Americans were dispossessed of much of their land and subject to discriminatory treatment in every aspect of their lives: in employment, in housing, and in education. Overt discrimination is probably worst in Texas, where the state law enforcement agency known as the Texas Rangers has long had a well-deserved reputation for brutality toward Mexican Americans; it is least pervasive in New Mexico, our only bilingual state, where Spanish has a presumed equality with English. The examples of discrimination that follow all come from California, where a majority of the nation’s Mexican Americans live.
After 1848 most of the few Californios who were sizable landowners—about two hundred families controlled fourteen million acres—were soon separated from their land by what the American reformer Henry George called a “history of greed, of perjury, of spoilage and highhanded robbery.” The California gold rush of 1849 attracted miners from Mexico, Chile, and other parts of Latin America, as well as tens of thousands of migrants from the rest of the United States, and immigrants from Europe, China, and Australia. The new Euro-American California majority soon decided that it did not want Chinese or “greasers”—a term used for native Californians of Mexican heritage and recent immigrants from Latin America alike—to share in the bonanza and by both discriminatory legislation and mob violence sought to drive them out. The philosopher Josiah Royce (1855–1916) described ironically the treatment meted out to the Californios who were also attracted to the mining regions:
We did not massacre them wholesale, as Turks might have massacred them: that treatment we reserved for the Digger Indians. . . . Nay, the foreign miners, being civilized men, generally received “fair trials” . . . whenever they were accused. It was, however, considered safe by an average lynching jury in those days to convict a “greaser” on very moderate evidence if none better could be had. . . . It served him right, of course. He had no business, as an alien, to come to the land that God had given us. And if he was a native Californian, or “greaser,” then so much the worse for him. He was so much the more our born foe; we hated his whole degenerate, thieving, landowning lazy and discontented race.
But unlike so many of California’s Indian tribelets, the Californios were not exterminated. They were, instead, swamped by the massive nineteenth-century migration—much of it immigration—to California. The slow but steady growth of Mexican American population after 1909, and even the massive repatriations of the early 1930s, created little overt friction between the Mexican Americans and the so-called Anglo population. Only after the removal and incarceration in 1942 of the minority that most white Californians found most threatening, the Japanese Americans, was more than casual attention paid to what was California’s largest minority group. Two events in Los Angeles during World War II, the Sleepy Lagoon murder and the Zoot Suit riots, can symbolize both the increase of overt discrimination and the beginnings of more aggressive resistance by the local Mexican American community.
The Sleepy Lagoon case, a romantic title fabricated by the local press to describe an abandoned gravel pit, involved the murder of a young Mexican American, José Diaz, apparently slain in a struggle between gangs on the night of August 1–2, 1942. After the killing had been sensationalized by the press as part of an alleged Mexican crime wave, the police followed with a mass roundup of suspects, arrested twenty-four young men for murder, and actually indicted seventeen of them. Beaten by police, forced to appear disheveled in court, all were eventually convicted, nine for second-degree murder and eight on lesser charges, despite what the appellate court described as the lack of any tangible evidence against them. They were, in Royce’s word, greasers, and that was enough for the original judge and jury. However, all the convictions were reversed on appeal, and the young men were freed. This was not only a victory of justice; it was also a nodal point in the development of group consciousness and the first victory of the community over the Anglo establishment.
The blatant hostility of Los Angeles law enforcement officers to Mexican Americans, while not as notorious as that of the Texas Rangers, was pervasive. The following excerpts are from evidence presented to the Los Angeles County Grand Jury in 1943 by the sheriffs department expert on Mexican Americans, Captain E. Durand Ayres. He reported accurately enough on the discrimination that the group faced.
Mexicans are restricted in the main to only the lowest kinds of labor . . . the lowest paid . . . [T]hey are discriminated against and have been heretofore practically barred from learning trades . . . [including in our defense plants] in spite of President Roosevelt’s instructions to the contrary. . . . Discrimination and segregation . . . in certain restaurants, public swimming plunges, public parks, theaters, and even schools, cause resentment among the Mexican people. . . . There are certain plunges where they are not allowed to swim, or else only on one day of the week [and that invariably just prior to cleaning] . . . signs [read] Tuesdays reserved for Negroes or Mexicans.’
Ayres followed this accurate account with an all-too-typical view of the causes of Mexican American crime and delinquency.
The Caucasian [and] especially the Anglo-Saxon, when engaged in fighting . . . resort[s] to fisticuffs . . . but this Mexican element considers [good sportsmanship] to be a sign of weakness, and all he knows is a desire to use a knife or some other lethal weapon. In other words, his desire is to kill, or at least let blood. . . . [It is] difficult for the Indian or the Latin to understand the psychology of the Anglo-Saxon or those from northern Europe. When there is added to this inborn characteristic that has come down through the ages, the use of liquor, then we certainly have crimes of violence.
This attitude of a so-called law enforcement expert helps explain the Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles during the spring of 1943. The Zoot Suit was a fairly expensive costume worn by some Mexican American and black young men consisting of a jacket that tapered to the knees from exaggerated padded shoulders; pegged, high-waisted, narrow-cuffed trousers; watch chains almost long enough to touch the ground and porkpie hats with a feather. Although the press and some of the few popular historians who have noted the riots speak of attacks by Mexican Americans on sailors or of mutual clashes, it is clear that almost all the aggression was on the side of the servicemen and that they were aided by both civilian and military police.
As Carey McWilliams has described it, after certain clashes (almost certainly over young women and “turf”) between sailors on pass or leave (not generally the most decorous group in the population) and Mexican American teenagers and youths, the sailors, with the tacit approval of the naval authorities and the police, made organized assaults not only on the bizarrely attired zoot-suiters but on any Mexican American they could catch. After receiving accolades from the press (“Sailor Task Force Hits L.A. Zooters”), for several nights informal “posses” of servicemen proceeded to beat, strip, and otherwise humiliate every Mexican American young man (and some blacks) they could find. When they could not find them on the streets, bars and movies were invaded in search of victims, all with the same kind of impunity once given to San Francisco’s vigilantes. The reign of terror ended only when the local naval authorities, acting on orders from Washington, declared Los Angeles off limits to sailors. Most of the latter were neither veterans of Pacific combat nor Californians, but rather newly inducted trainees drawn from all over the nation.3
Although the more egalitarian climate of opinion in the post–World War II years has erased or mitigated much of the most blatant forms of discrimination, a socioeconomic profile of the Mexican American community clearly demonstrates its generally disadvantaged status. Political dreamers from Gunnar Myrdal to Jesse Jackson have envisaged a united front of what the Swedish reformer called “the American underclasses” and what Jackson calls the “rainbow coalition” in which blacks, “Hispanics,” Asian Americans, and poor whites would gain political power or at least more influence in how the country is run. Those dreams have proved largely chimerical. Although black American voters have shown great cohesion and solidarity, other groups in the putative coalition, including Mexican Americans, have not. While Mexican Americans in California have elected local officials—mayors and city councilpersons—and a handful of congressmen, their political participation remains relatively low. In addition, many members of the community, including some of the most successful acculturators, have sought to distance themselves from blacks, a common phenomenon among immigrant groups.4
Part of the pattern of Mexican American life can be seen in the relatively low naturalization rates. Less than a quarter of the foreign-born Mexicans counted by the 1980 census—520,000 of 2.2 million—were naturalized. If one subtracts the number of those who told the census taker that they had arrived in the period 1975–80 and thus were not yet eligible for naturalization, 65 percent of the pre-1975 arrivals from Mexico were still not citizens (950,000 of 1.47 million), while only 34 percent of such Asians were unnaturalized (460,000 of 1.34 million).
The reasons for the relatively low naturalization rates of foreign-born Mexicans are many. Large numbers expect to return home, and many do. Relatively low rates of political participation, especially among women, are another symptom of the same phenomenon, arising from the economic class structure of Mexican American society and a longstanding reluctance on the part of many to participate in what they perceive as Anglo politics—a politics that, many of them feel, stole their country and has abused their people for a century and a half.
Mexican Americans, like many immigrant groups before them, have been slow to participate in education to the degree that many other ethnic groups have. This is in part due to the discrimination in the form of education deprivation that they have met in most American school systems in the Southwest and West, discrimination that has ranged from consistent underfunding of schools in which Mexican Americans predominate to punishing students for speaking Spanish, even at recess. The fact that many Mexican American students have been made to feel that they, their language, and their culture are not welcome in schools has only served to reinforce the cultural patterns that have led so many Mexican Americans not to complete high school, much less go on to college. Census Bureau data show that in 1987 only 45 percent of Mexican Americans twenty-five years of age and older had a high school diploma.
The strong relationship between education and income that exists in American society clearly applies to the Mexican Americans as well. A Census Bureau study for 1987 claimed that the median annual Hispanic family income was $20,310 and that the median Mexican American family income was slightly below that, at $19,970, while the median income of all white families was $32,270, almost 62 percent higher. (Had the bureau calculated the incomes of whites other than Hispanics the disparity would have been even greater.)
Although they were once largely rural and involved chiefly in agricultural labor, Mexican Americans today are overwhelmingly urban. By the 1970s some 85 percent of Mexican Americans lived in cities. Nevertheless Mexican American men are more than three times more likely to be farm laborers than are American male workers generally, and Mexican American women are even more heavily overrepresented in the agricultural labor force. At the other end of the spectrum, Mexican American men and women are underrepresented in the more prestigious and well-paying professional and technical occupations.
The persistence and continued use of the Spanish language among even native-born Mexican Americans has been pronounced and, as we shall see in the concluding chapter, has helped to trigger a nativist “English only” movement in the 1980s. There are a number of reasons for this, including proximity to the border, a continuing migration from Mexico, and a population highly concentrated into urban enclaves called barrios. The Spanish-language media in the United States—newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations—are a multi-million-dollar industry and growing rapidly. Perhaps the most prosperous are stations KMEX and KMEX-TV in Los Angeles.
However, the perception of many outsiders that large numbers of native-born Mexican Americans cannot speak English is false. Many of them prefer to speak Spanish in some situations, and large numbers of native-born children have been and are raised in homes in which Spanish is spoken. But unlike earlier groups such as nineteenth-century German Americans, Mexican Americans have not created their own schools and few of them attend other than public schools.
Although the overwhelming proponderance of Mexican Americans is Roman Catholic, their relationship with the American church has been difficult and conflict ridden. There have been very few Mexican Americans among the religious of the American church and even fewer in the hierarchy—which, until recently, was often hostile. Well into the 1970s, for example, in the Los Angeles archdiocese with the largest number of Mexican American communicants, priests were discouraged if not forbidden to use Spanish in sermons, something most of them could not have done anyway. In addition, as was true for many devout Euro-American Catholics earlier, the formalism of the largely Irish American church turned off many Mexican Americans used to a religion that was imbued with both Spanish and Amerindian elements. Thus church attendance among Mexican Americans has been relatively low, and they are still served by proportionally few priests, churches, and other religious institutions. And, at times in the past if not in the present, church-run social institutions have made invidious distinctions between Mexican American Catholics and other Catholics. In Los Angeles in the 1930s, for example, Catholic charities routinely allocated fewer dollars per capita to needy Mexican American families than to others because it felt that Mexicans did not need as high a standard of living to get along.
Yet the piety of the bulk of the Mexican American population cannot be doubted. The most spectacular demonstration of this in recent years has been the crusadelike fervor that has accompanied the activities of the United Farm Workers in what many Mexican Americans call simply la causa, the cause. Led by César Chavez (1927–1993), the Farm Workers movement has combined orthodox trade union methods—organizing, strikes, and boycotts—with symbolic fasting, outdoor masses, and processions featuring the Virgin of Guadalupe, the most prominent religious symbol of Mexico. The effect of this movement in raising the consciousness of Mexican Americans, or Chicanos as many in the movement prefer to call themselves, is hard to overestimate. An anecdote will illustrate this combination of religion and politics in Southern California.
In the spring of 1968, during the heated Democratic presidential primary campaign in California, I was taken to a meeting of Chicano activists (all male, as were many such meetings). In discussion afterwards I discovered overwhelming support for Robert F. Kennedy and absolutely none for his rival, Eugene McCarthy. (Those who didn’t support Kennedy advocated nonparticipation in an Anglo election.) When I inquired what they had against McCarthy, I was told that, after all, he was an Irish Roman Catholic “like the cardinal” (James Francis Cardinal McIntyre, then archbishop of Los Angeles). When I remonstrated that Robert Kennedy was also an Irish Roman Catholic—it seemed to me a self-evident proposition—I was informed that Robert Kennedy had “taken mass with César Chavez” and that “no Irish Roman Catholic would do that.” To them “Irish Roman Catholic” described not an ethnoreligious combination but a cultural style, and they perceived, quite accurately, that Robert Kennedy did not participate in that style. It is also significant that although few if any of the young men I met that afternoon attended church regularly, they saw participation by an outsider in a community religious event as something of great significance.
Puerto Rico and the Federal Government
Since Puerto Rico was annexed by the United States in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898, Puerto Ricans are not, strictly speaking, immigrants. They were American nationals and, after 1917, American citizens by birth, and their comings and goings were not affected by immigration legislation. Between annexation and the end of World War II, few Puerto Ricans migrated to the United States despite extreme poverty on the island, and no legal restraints existed to keep them out. There were no cheap means of transportation between the territory and the mainland. In 1940 there were fewer than seventy thousand Puerto Ricans or persons of Puerto Rican ancestry on the American mainland; almost 90 percent of these lived in New York City. The Census Bureau estimated in 1987 that 12 percent of the Hispanic population was Puerto Rican, about 2.25 million persons, and that more than half of them lived in New York City. The postwar development of relatively cheap air fares between San Juan and New York City—in the 1940s the fare was about fifty dollars, two weeks’ wages—had enabled tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans to come annually.5
In Puerto Rico itself population growth since annexation has also been rapid. A census taken in 1899 found nearly a million people on the island, which has 3,435 square miles, a little over one-third the size of Vermont. By 1980, despite the massive migration to the mainland, the population had grown to more than three million. Thus, there are over five million Puerto Ricans and, given the continuing migration, there may soon be more persons of Puerto Rican birth on the mainland than in the Caribbean commonwealth. There are already more Puerto Ricans in New York City than in San Juan, the island’s capital and largest city.
A few Puerto Ricans had immigrated to the United States in the decades before the Spanish-American War. Most of them were political exiles who hoped to create an independent nation from a base in New York City. These included Francisco Gonzalo Marín (1863–97), who published his newspaper, El Postillón, there after it had been suppressed on the island, and Santiago Iglesias (1872–1939), founder of Puerto Rico’s Socialist Party and one of the leaders who never stopped struggling for independence. American annexation aborted the main thrust of the independence movement, although it has never died. The legal relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, dictated by the American Congress—in which Puerto Ricans are not represented—has evolved over the years.
For a brief period after the almost bloodless conquest of 1898 there was a military government. In 1900 the Foraker Act gave the island a modicum of local government: Under it Puerto Ricans were nationals, not citizens, like contemporary Filipinos. The Jones Act of 1917 declared all Puerto Ricans citizens unless they formally rejected that status. Until Rexford Guy Tugwell (1891–1979) was appointed governor late in Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, most governors had been nonentities. Tugwell, the New Deal reformer whose book The Stricken Land is still a good description of the socioeconomic realities of the island, helped pave the way for some political reform. His successor, in 1946, was the first Puerto Rican appointed governor, and in the following year Congress passed the Elective Governors Act. In 1948 Luis Muñoz Marín, (1898–1980), whose father had been one of the nineteenth-century political exiles in New York, was the first governor elected by the people of Puerto Rico. Two years later the Puerto Rican Federal Relations law was enacted by Congress. It enabled Puerto Ricans to draft a constitution as they saw fit, except that the options of either independence and statehood could not be exercised. Such a constitution was drawn up, approved by Congress, accepted by Puerto Ricans in a referendum in 1951 and put into effect in 1952. Under its provisions Puerto Rico is an estado libre asociado, literally, “associated free state” but translated as commonwealth. Under its provisions Puerto Rico remains a U.S. possession subject to most federal laws, including the draft. Puerto Ricans may not vote in presidential elections and have no senators or representatives, although they do elect a resident commissioner who sits with Congress but has no vote. Puerto Ricans tax themselves and they, and businesses in Puerto Rico, pay no federal income taxes.
The status of Puerto Rico has been discussed by the United Nations more than once and will undoubtedly be discussed again. In 1953 the UN General Assembly refused to categorize the island as “non-self-governing,” because of the 1952 constitution. In 1977 without significant effect, all three major Puerto Rican political groups came before the UN Trusteeship Council to protest the island’s status. The ruling Popular Democratic Party complained because it did not have statehood; the Popular party, because autonomy had not been extended; and the several parties that supported independence, because that had not been granted. One wing of the relatively small independence movement has resorted to violence, most spectacularly in an attempt to assassinate President Harry S. Truman in 1950.
The most compelling reason that independence does not enjoy majority support is an economic one. Without the infusion of federal dollars, Puerto Rico would be even poorer than it now is. In 1984, for example, the U.S. Treasury recorded transfer payments to individuals and governments in Puerto Rico of $3.4 billion dollars, amounting to almost a quarter of the island’s gross domestic product.
All of this raises the question of just how poor Puerto Rico is. On a Latin American/Caribbean scale, not so poor. Puerto Rico has one of the highest, if not the highest, per capita incomes of any place in the region. But by American standards it is quite low, much lower than that in the poorest American state. And it must not be imagined that all the effects of the relations with the United States have been beneficial: Some of Puerto Rico’s problems are caused by, not eased by, that relationship. Not surprisingly migration and remigration between the island and the mainland is constant. A segment of that remigration consists of school-age children raised in the United States whose Spanish is so poor that they cannot function effectively in the island’s schools and need remedial attention. Many of these children, in fact, cannot perform well in either language.
PUERTO RICANS IN THE UNITED STATES
Most Puerto Ricans who have come to or been born in the United States face two related problems: poverty and race prejudice. Puerto Ricans are a racially mixed group. The indigenous Amerindian population of the island was largely killed by the Spanish conquerors and the diseases they brought with them. The Spanish introduced African slavery to Puerto Rico in 1511—it lasted until 1873—and there is a large admixture of white and black ancestry in the island’s population. Although Puerto Rico is not without color prejudice, it is less pervasive and total than that existing on the mainland, and for many newcomers the experience of American-style race prejudice in which one is either black or white is a shock and a major social problem. In the view of social theorists such as Myrdal, blacks and Puerto Ricans in New York City and elsewhere ought to be political allies but in fact are more often rivals.
They are also rivals in another sense: They “compete” for places at the lower end of the poverty spectrum. This is complicated by the fact that the Census Bureau puts many Puerto Ricans in two categories: They are both black and Puerto Rican. Among Hispanic groups, Puerto Ricans are at the bottom or near the bottom according to most of the criteria by which the disadvantaged are measured. In median family income, for example, 1987 census data, which divided the American population into two groups, “Hispanic” and “not Hispanic,” found the latter with twice the income of the former: $31,610 to $20,310. A different dichotomy, white and black, gave slightly more disparate figures; $32,270 and $18,100. Specifically Puerto Rican data gave the group the lowest figure, $15,190 in median family income for 1987. Mexicans had a figure of $19,970, while other Hispanic groups tended to be higher, topped by Cuban Americans at $27,290. A corollary figure, that of percentage of households headed by women, showed the Puerto Rican profile much more similar to that of blacks than to other Hispanics. Blacks and Puerto Ricans in the United States have rates that are statistically all but identical: 42 percent for blacks, 43 percent for Puerto Ricans in 1987. Mexicans and Cubans, on the other hand, have only 19 percent and 18 percent of all families headed by women. In education, 54 percent of Puerto Ricans over twenty-five were high school graduates in 1987, as opposed to 45 percent of Mexicans and 62 percent of Cubans. Many data demonstrate that second- and third-generation Puerto Ricans, like the second and third generations of most immigrant groups, have tended to improve their economic and educational standing and, as was also true for most immigrant groups, that those who moved away from the established center of immigration—for Puerto Ricans, New York City—tended to have higher incomes and so on. This was true of modest-size Puerto Rican communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Lorain, Ohio. The latter community, attracted there by industry including steel mills and a Ford plant, has shown high social mobility: In the 1970s more than half the families owned their own homes, and women headed only 7 percent of Puerto Rican families there. But it is New York City—and to a lesser degree its environs—which is crucial to the Puerto Rican experience (see Table 12.1).
Although the data indicate the steady dispersal from a center or centers that is one of the characteristic patterns of ethnic distribution in the United States, that distribution is even more restricted than these tables suggest. In 1980, for example, of those first two generations of Puerto Ricans recorded as being outside New York City, the majority were in the adjoining states of Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and in upstate New York.
Some data suggest that the Puerto Rican community is evolving in ways that are more similar to those of earlier European migrants than to those of contemporary Mexican Americans. These include patterns of education and of exogamous marriage. Joseph P. Fitzgerald, noting that more than a third of second-generation married Puerto Ricans in the United States were married to non-Hispanic whites, and that this marriage pattern correlated strongly with increased education—more education means more outmarriage—predicted that “intermarriage will increase as the educational level rises, presumably reducing ethnic identification as a result.”
Table 12.1
Puerto Ricans in New York City and the United States, 1950–1980
FIRST GENERATION (BORN IN PUERTO RICO)
YEAR |
NEW YORK CITY |
REST OF UNITED STATES |
TOTAL |
PERCENTAGE IN NYC |
1950 |
187,420 |
38,690 |
226,110 |
82.9 |
1960 |
429,710 |
185,674 |
615,384 |
69.8 |
1970 |
473,300 |
336,787 |
810,087 |
58.4 |
1980 |
— |
— |
— |
— |
SECOND GENERATION (BORN IN THE UNITED STATES)
YEAR |
NEW YORK CITY |
REST OF UNITED STATES |
TOTAL |
PERCENTAGE IN NYC |
1950 |
58,460 |
16,805 |
75,265 |
77.7 |
1960 |
182,964 |
89,314 |
272,278 |
67.2 |
1970 |
344,412 |
236,964 |
581,376 |
59.2 |
1980 |
— |
— |
— |
— |
TOTAL FIRST AND SECOND GENERATIONS
YEAR |
NEW YORK CITY |
REST OF UNITED STATES |
TOTAL |
PERCENTAGE IN NYC |
1950 |
245,880 |
55,495 |
301,375 |
81.6 |
1960 |
612,574 |
275,088 |
887,662 |
69.0 |
1970 |
817,712 |
573,751 |
1,391,463 |
58.8 |
1980 |
852,833 |
1,161,112 |
2,013,945 |
42.3 |
Like so many ethnic Catholics who have come to the United States, Puerto Ricans have felt alienated from the American church. Unlike so many other groups, Puerto Ricans do not have significant numbers of priests migrating with them, and even on the island only about one-third of the Catholic clergy are ethnic Puerto Ricans. The American hierarchy has been more than reluctant, in recent decades, to establish ethnic parishes as it once did. The United States Catholic Conference, as well as a number of dioceses in the East and Southwest, has established bureaucratic organizations to try to meet the needs of its Spanish-speaking communicants, but for the Puerto Ricans these have not been particularly effective. Beginning in 1976 there have been national meetings of Spanish-speaking laity, but these, like so many national organizations of the Spanish speaking, have been dominated by Mexican Americans. Of the first six bishops of Hispanic origin, only one was in New York, the center of Puerto Rican population: He was a native of Spain. And although as many as half of the Catholics in Manhattan and Brooklyn are Spanish speaking—and Puerto Ricans are the largest segment of those—the hierarchy is, from top to bottom, dominated by European ethnics, especially Irish Americans.
As is true for many Catholics of Latin American ancestry, large amounts of what is usually called folk religion have become intertwined with more traditional Christian practices. A walk through a Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York reveals a large number of botánicas, places where the artifacts of folk religious practices are sold. These include incense, herbs, potions, and charms. Puerto Rican folk religious practices, often characterized by outsiders as spiritualism, center on the belief that one can communicate with the dead and that spirits from the beyond can be invoked to solve problems of daily life, console the bereaved, and so on. The followers of these practices often attribute bad things that happen to Puerto Ricans, for example, mental illness, to the influence of evil spirits.
As the data for economic status suggest, relatively few Puerto Ricans have thus far enjoyed the upward social mobility that has been the unifying theme of the American immigrant experience. Puerto Ricans who have become prominent on the mainland seem concentrated in two fields, the arts and politics, although for a while the most prominent Puerto Rican on the mainland was the baseball superstar, Roberto Clemente (1934–73). Those with entrepreneurial skills, training, and capital are more likely to remain in Puerto Rico where there are, of course, upper and middle classes of considerable size. In the arts there is an obvious and natural tendency for artists and would-be artists to come to a metropolis such as New York or Los Angeles for training and performance, just as those from, say, South Carolina would do. Among the performing artists who have been particularly successful are actors Jose Ferrer and Raul Julia and opera singers Martina Arroyo and Justino Diaz. In mainland politics, Puerto Ricans have achieved prominence in a number of state and local positions in and around New York City and in the House of Representatives; none has yet been elected a state governor or a United States senator.
This brief account of two of the earliest Spanish-speaking minorities in the United States shows how artificial the census aggregate “Hispanic” is. Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans share, in addition to language, a common religion and a common poverty. But they share little else. They live in different regions, have different traditions, and, in the color-conscious United States, are regarded as being of different races: Most Puerto Ricans are regarded as being black and most Mexican Americans as being white, although each group is more accurately described as being of mixed racial origin.
The regions in which most of them live are vastly different, with different traditions of dealing with minority groups. And these regional traditions as well as their premigratory history help explain some of the differences in their adaptations to life in America. One way of explaining the vast difference in the school dropout rate, for example, is to note that in Puerto Rico, American-style school systems and attendance patterns have been established for almost a century and that the school system in New York City has long been conditioned to the notion of integrating a kaleidoscopic procession of ethnic groups. The California pattern was, for decades, to segregate or exclude Mexican Americans. The economic differences are at least in part explainable by the fact that most Mexican Americans live in what is now styled the Sun Belt, which has been, in recent years, the most economically dynamic part of the United States. Puerto Ricans, to the contrary, are centered in an area of slower growth and where there is little work for the relatively unskilled. We thus have the anomaly, by American standards, of better-educated Puerto Ricans—one might put that, “less poorly educated”—earning less money than less-well-educated Mexican Americans.
Both groups suffer from a common phenomenon, a phenomenon quite different from the situation that had been faced by earlier immigrant groups. Most of the latter also arrived relatively poor and uneducated, but they came to an America in which a person—particularly young adult males—could earn a modest competence without markedly improving his skills. In addition, most of his competitors in the labor force were similarly situated and he could expect more “greenhorns” to come who would be even less acculturated than he. Those conditions no longer apply. Outside of the shrinking and poorly paid agricultural sector such jobs no longer exist. And the second and third generations of Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans (along with the native black poor) find that most of the growing number of immigrants in post–World War II America arrive with significantly more skills, education, and acculturation to postindustrial capitalism than they themselves possess.