Immigrant Communities
José Martí celebrated along with throngs of New Yorkers the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886. His essay on the event began with a tribute to liberty as a concept, moved to three short paragraphs about the dedication itself, and then recounted the birth of U.S. independence and the nation’s ties to France (11: 99). Although he did not live to see the famous lines by Emma Lazarus inscribed at the statue’s base in 1903, he did witness the arrival of “huddled masses” and “homeless, tempest-tossed” immigrants from Europe and directly experienced their impact on city life. His narratives chronicled the growing ethnic diversity of the United States and the influence of Irish, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Chinese arrivals. As America in her Gilded Age absorbed the tired and the poor from northern and southern Europe and from Asia, class, racial, and religious lines clashed.
Ivan Schulman’s analysis of how immigrants were portrayed in Martí’s pages, as described in chapter 2, makes important points. While Native Americans and African Americans were punished with exclusion and separation from society—a kind of internal exile—the newcomers from Europe and Asia fared relatively better, even as they faced Anglo disdain and endured living conditions that were grim. Schulman notes that Martí called the European immigrant groups alternately races or peoples and wrote about Chinese customs in cultural chronicles that were often imbued with poetic imagination.
In the immense social theater of New York in the 1880s, the Cuban patriot saw firsthand how arrivals fleeing poverty and Old World discrimination found both opportunity and misery in North America. Most of these Europeans coming to the United States entered as hopeful yet culturally disadvantaged arrivals—not all spoke English, and many had religious traditions different from the largely Protestant foundation of the host country. Martí’s own status as an exile—he was neither a migrant who hoped to shuttle back and forth, nor an immigrant who planned to settle in the United States—allowed him to identify with the internal exile experienced by both blacks and Indians. At the same time, his status as a foreigner, who had to learn English and adapt to a new cultural setting, helped him to identify with the foreign-born peoples who were reaching both coasts of the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Jewish arrivals, coming mainly from Eastern Europe and Russia, were referred to by Martí with the words raza and also hebreos (Hebrews). Their status was unique, he said, because they had a distinct cultural identity but were sin patria, without a country to call their own (12: 16). The immigrants Martí observed in the United States were different from immigrants like Martí’s parents, who had come to Cuba regarding it as an extension of their homeland and part of a common cultural patrimony. The United States presented a volatile mix of cultures, races, and traditions that challenged conformity, produced fierce debate, and sparked conflict.
An 1884 series of articles for La América, a monthly review where Martí served as editor, offered some of his initial insights on immigration. The paper’s stated purpose was to promote the export trade of the United States with Spanish-speaking countries, and it targeted audiences in the fields of industry, commerce, and agriculture. Martí expanded the range of topics, however, during his tenure as editor in 1883 and 1884. In his profiles of various ethnic groups from Europe, the editor attached national characteristics to each one.1 In this accounting Germans were industrious, disciplined, and skilled in the trades and chose to remain in cities. Italians, although not intrinsically energetic, accepted work on railroads and other physical tasks or set up fruit stands, unlike the Italians who went to Argentina, ready to work on the land. The Irish, unhappy products of an enslaved nation, took day laborer jobs and work as servants. The French, few in number, brought aptitudes for the arts and refinement. Swedes and Norwegians forsook the cities. Many of these characterizations were borrowed from print sources in the United States rather than resulting from firsthand observations, as Martí readily admitted.
Along with Martí’s descriptions was an insistence that immigrants should come with technical and industrial training or agricultural skills in hand, because such preparation would serve both the immigrants and their new homeland (8: 377–82). The writer added a cautionary note for Spanish American republics that were recruiting immigrants: no country should welcome newcomers who were unable to assimilate (8: 384). Why should any country invite trouble? For all these caveats, however, in his closing statement Marti metaphorically praised the harmonious blending of peoples: “there is nothing more beautiful than to see streams flow into rivers, where the confluents mingle and mix and then head as a serene and magnificent current into the immense waters of the sea” (8: 384).
In articles for newspapers in Latin America, the descriptions of immigrant communities were comprehensive, although Martí wrote more about the Irish, Italians, and Germans than about other Europeans. His accounts quoted immigration statistics and gave reasons for emigration: Germans fled conscription in the emperor’s army; the Irish were escaping from English oppression; Jews flocked to the New World fleeing persecution in Russia; and Italians abandoned a nation that had ill-prepared its farm workers. He highlighted admirable qualities: Scandinavians were hard working and honorable; the Swiss excelled in watch-making; and Belgians were known for their honesty. Comments on the Irish highlighted their willingness to take the most humble of jobs and the fact that Irish women were filling jobs as servants. While the Irish had very little in material resources, Martí commended their financial support for the Irish patriots back home. Such men had rough hands but unblemished spirits, said the Cuban sympathizer: “I shake with pride any calloused hand” (9: 226).
The daily misery endured by many immigrants in the Gilded Age did not escape Martí’s attention. Crowded ghettos, squalid living conditions, poor wages, and sweatshop regimes were all part of Martí’s reporting. He remarked on the resentment that arose when Chinese workers were willing to labor for even less than other groups. He reported on the burden placed on New York City as it received boatloads of European immigrants, who stepped off the ships hungry, broke, without sufficient clothing, and often in poor health (9: 289). And he lamented the plight of immigrant women, who did the same work as a man but earned much less.
In many ways Martí was critical of unskilled immigrants, who jostled for low-paying jobs, rankled each other, and were a source of problems and crime. He reported, for example, on a mob lynching of Italians in New Orleans after the death of Police Chief David Hennessy was attributed to Mafia vengeance. This 1891 case made headlines and brought the word Mafia to the American public’s attention. Anti-Italian sentiments ran high in New Orleans, especially among the Irish, and the Italians, who were mostly from Sicily, were derisively called dagos and accused of being “an organized school of assassins,” according to Martí (12: 494–99).2 In the Cuban’s view, however, governments and those of means bore much of the blame when citizens, immigrants as well as natives, lived in misery. In both his much-studied “Coney Island” chronicle and elsewhere he relates how the summer plague of cholera took the lives of poor children in New York, as surely as “a scythe reaps wheat” (9: 124). Martí called the sunken faces and gasping breaths of the cholera-stricken children a public crime and said that it was the duty of the state to provide a remedy for unnecessary misery (9: 458–59). Martí also saw that immigrants were sullied by vote-buying, even as those in power ignored their needs, and that they were too often victims of scoundrels preying on their naiveté. The case of Father McGlynn, an activist priest in New York, who challenged the Catholic hierarchy on behalf of the poor, let Martí explain how European immigration from Catholic countries had increased Catholic numbers in the United States and also exposed economic rifts (11: 139).
In his portrayal of William Henry Vanderbilt, Martí stated that the magnate was unjustly loathed by those who did not know him, and that Vanderbilt had acts of philanthropy to his credit. At the same time, he acknowledged the understandable exasperation prompted by gross inequality: “when one man sleeps in the muck, by what right does another get to sleep in a bed of gold? Fetid neighborhoods in the cities should be dried up and unhealthy houses torn down. Clean and appealing homes should be built and paid for by idle capital. Then the houses should be given to the poor at low rent or no rent at all if they can’t afford it” (10: 146). He continued these thoughts with the maxim: “To be charitable one must have been unfortunate” (10: 147). To save the immigrant children of the slums, the “mud flowers” as he called them, churches also had an obligation, according to Martí. Rather than sermonize and give alms, the religious community ought to provide shoes, build housing, give away newspapers with agreeable content, and send in people capable of setting a good example to educate and enlighten those growing up in poverty (10: 60).
Education was not a principal focus of his comments on immigrant groups, but when he addressed the topic, the patriot professor critiqued the type of schooling he saw immigrant children receiving. To his way of thinking, it was too rudimentary, with just basic reading, writing, and numbers, all taught through rote learning. Too often it was delivered by female teachers unhappy with their lot (11: 84–85). Martí believed that teachers, whether male or female, needed to teach with compassion and use examples from nature (11: 288–91). His own experience as a beloved teacher at La Liga, seeking to instruct and inspire Afro-Caribbeans, was doubtless a model for his ideas.
Certainly it pleased Martí that Cubans working in tobacco factories in Florida had lectores (readers) to enlighten them as they sat at long rows of workstations folding and wrapping tobacco leaves. The lector tradition was one that came from Cuba, and the readers were paid by the cigar workers themselves. By the 1890s, when he visited Tampa and Key West, the reader’s role in the factories was an established profession, with reading matter that included newspapers, literature, and political publications. After Martí’s visits to Florida, the readings included his speeches. Martí was keenly aware of the importance of what was read aloud in cigar factories and praised the work of José Dolores Poyo, who was the first cigar factory reader in Tampa (Tinajero 74). In stressing education for all, he declared: “To be well informed is the only way to be free.”3
Immigration and Labor Issues
Europeans brought a tradition of organized labor that quickly influenced their experiences in the United States. There is not space in this book, whose principal focus is on race, to cover such an enormous topic; nonetheless the injustices that immigrants faced and the practices that labor organizations confronted linked their circumstances to those of races whose mistreatment was a constant theme for Martí. Among those seeking redress for labor abuses were Cuban tobacco workers in Key West, whose efforts had Martí’s full support. While living in New York, he attended workers’ parades and in 1885 reported the beginning of the Labor Day tradition in September (10: 309). Martí’s accounts covered clashes between workers and police, and in a series of chronicles, he told of the biggest immigrant and labor story of the decade, the Haymarket Riot in Chicago and its sobering aftermath. The Cuban observer’s perspective changed from initial disapproval of the German anarchists to one of sympathy. As the story unfolded in his articles from September 1886 to November 1887, Martí covered social tensions surrounding the workers, the May 4th assembly in Haymarket Square to protest police brutality, the radical message of the anarchist speakers, the confrontations when police tried to disperse the crowd, the horror when a bomb was thrown, the death of seven policemen, and the saga of a trial in which seven anarchists, who were almost certainly innocent, were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged.
In addition to reporting on the larger social issues, the Martí chronicles also included accounts of clashes between ethnic groups, especially the sizeable Irish and Italian communities. He stated: “The Irish and the Italians don’t get along and neither do the Germans and the Irish” (10: 111). In his 1887 account of a brutal attack by the police, mostly Irish, against a gathering of Socialists, Martí underscored how political ideals combined with national origin could provoke conflict. The Irish, he explained, resented Socialist challenges to societal structures such as the police but were also fueled by ethnic antagonism toward the German, Russian, and Slavic immigrants who marched under a red banner (11: 317–18).
Customs
Immigrants representing a wide array of ethnic groups introduced cultural traditions new to Martí and by extension to many of his readers. While a non-Hispanic European presence was growing in the latter part of the nineteenth century in places like Argentina, which purposefully courted immigration from the Old World, the United States hosted an especially rich and diverse cultural milieu. Chinese opium dens, a Chinese wedding, Chinese theater, Hanukkah (Martí called it Chanucka) celebrations, Saint Patrick’s Day parades with the sons of Ireland sporting proud green sashes, beer festivals by the Germans, and an affinity for the pub by the Irish all appear in the chronicles. Martí included an entire article about a Chinese funeral in New York for readers of La Nación, with many details about Chinese ways. He described typical occupations (merchants, laundrymen, etc.) of the Chinese and used the term yellow man (hombre amarillo) as an ethnic descriptor (12: 78–83).
The Chinese in Cuba and in the United States
Chinese presence in Cuba was essentially an afterthought for Martí, despite their heroic role in the island’s independence struggle. Chinese living in Cuba joined the independence forces of the Ten Years’ War, and as the famous quote from Gonzalo de Quesada y Aróstegui, Martí’s disciple, confirms: “Not a single Chinese was a traitor; not a single Chinese was a deserter.”4 This tribute has been painted on walls in Havana’s Chinatown and is inscribed on a monument at the intersection of Línea and L streets in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana.5 Chinese workers had been brought to Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century to work in sugar cane production, when plantation owners faced shortages of slaves from Africa, and some eventually made their way to cities like Havana. Ironically, however, the Chinese who truly laid the foundations for Havana’s Barrio Chino were from the United States: “Between 1860 and 1875 … 5,000 Chinese fled to Cuba from the United States to escape new anti-Chinese laws and general sinophobia.”6 Notwithstanding a Chinese presence in the Cuban capital during Martí’s boyhood, this presence did not register in his writing, and although Chinese prisoners were among Martí’s fellow sufferers in the San Lázaro quarries, he did not make note of them.
In the United States, on the other hand, the Chinese became protagonists in the exiled patriot’s vision of equitable treatment for those of all races and assumed a role in his North American narratives. As noted earlier in this chapter, the essays about life in the United States included abundant references to Chinese traditions and an appreciation for their distinctive culture. Beginning with his early U.S. chronicles, Martí wrote that submissive Chinese immigrants, willing to work hard for minimal compensation, had lowered the bar for other laborers. He also reported on growing ill will toward arrivals from China and efforts to deny them entry (9: 281), and he was witness to the first major law to restrict immigration to the United States, the Chinese Exclusion Act of May 1882. Martí’s succinct description of the Chinese worker in 1885 was framed by frugality: “the Chinaman does not have a wife, lives on trifles, dresses cheaply, works hard, and is faithful to his customs” (10: 306). Such patterns meant that the Chinese would work for less, consume less, and complain less than other workers. Next came the recounting of a tragic chapter in labor history, the Rock Springs, Wyoming, massacre of Chinese mine workers by white miners, supported by the Knights of Labor. The conflict arose because the Chinese were willing to work for low wages and undercut efforts to strike for higher pay. Martí shared with the readers of La Nación how embittered white miners—armed with rifles, revolvers, hatchets, and knives—descended upon the unarmed Chinese and killed the inhabitants and burned the settlement. One hundred fifty Chinese died, and a powerful image of the attack appeared in Harper’s Weekly. As Martí explained in a subsequent chronicle, persecutions of the Chinese continued, with assassinations and expropriations in California.
FIGURE 8. Massacre of the Chinese at Rock Springs, Wyoming. From Harper’s Weekly, September 28, 1885. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-96518).
Giving immigrants ample space in his pages broadened José Martí’s range of ethnic and racial topical considerations. In these descriptions, national origin, cultural identification, and religion all played roles. The clash of rich and poor in a great metropolis at the dawn of a modern age and the demands of workers who organized in labor unions helped to define the immigrant story. In this sense the immigrant experiences formed part of Martí’s wider narrative: a visceral concern for and connection with all who suffered. Most of those who came ashore, in New York, San Francisco, or elsewhere, brought with them tales of injustice, and most arrived in abject poverty. Once in the United States, they struggled to escape new abuses. These experiences created a natural connection to race-based struggles that Martí recorded about African Americans and Native Americans: exploitation was the common bond. In the United States the planner of a new and free Cuba also saw plenty of evidence that divided loyalties, resistance to assimilation, and entrenched prejudices could fracture a society and poison calls for cohesion. He was witness to a continental divide in U.S. immigration policy: acceptance for Europeans, with the Statue of Liberty symbolizing the welcome, and rejection of workers from Asia, especially in the Chinese Exclusion Act. What he envisioned for his own native land was different.
When Martí made it clear that Spanish immigrants to Cuba could be full partners along with white native-born Cubans and people of color, in a society where Cubanidad trumped all, he described a model that called for inclusiveness on the part of the state and acceptance and adaptation on the part of citizens. It was clearly the obverse side of the immigration coin he witnessed in the United States.
