THE POPULARITY OF “Spanish” culture also took hold in New York City. Although the city had a growing population of Cubans and Puerto Ricans, immigrants from Spain lived there as well. Had any of them journeyed to north Manhattan in 1927, they could have seen El Cid, the famed eleventh-century slayer of Moors, sitting astride his steed, with a spear held over his head, his horse prancing on a plinth in front of an imposing Beaux-Arts building in Washington Heights. El Cid’s exploits were memorialized in a twelfth-century poem, and for centuries he had been a symbol of Spain, so he was seen as a fitting figure to welcome visitors to the Hispanic Society of America, which had opened nearly two decades earlier, born from the passion, and deep pockets, of Archer Milton Huntington, the son of a railway tycoon.
Huntington founded the society in 1904 after accompanying his father to Mexico, where they dined at Chapultepec Castle with president Porfirio Díaz. Huntington later recalled that the trip was “a sort of strange awakening … Mexico was a revelation.”1 Although this was his introduction to the larger Hispanic world, Spain, not Mexico, enthralled him for the rest of his life. In 1909, just after the society’s opening, Huntington organized a retrospective of the contemporary Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida. It was a hit with the public and triggered a fashion for Spanish art among the wealthy, who found themselves fighting each other to buy works not only by Sorolla, but also by artists such as El Greco and Goya.2
Huntington continued to acquire books, manuscripts, artwork, and photographs related to Spain, and the society published monographs about Spanish culture. The museum remains a repository of treasures—from medieval icons to paintings from Spain’s golden age to an entire room lined with panels painted by Sorolla. In that salon, each panel depicts crowds of people in traditional dress in the various regions of Spain. Sorolla’s Basques, Catalans, and Galicians have an air of timelessness—it could be a scene from three hundred years ago, or one of twenty-first-century people donning their folk costumes for a fiesta. Sorolla worked on the panels until his death in 1923, and the room was opened to the public in 1926.
New York City at this time had a small but thriving community of Spanish immigrants who, like the Italians and Greeks, had left the poverty and lack of opportunity in Europe for the United States. In Spain, the nineteenth century had been marked by a series of civil wars, and the influx of Spanish immigrants to New York was part of a longer and larger process of people from the Iberian Peninsula resettling in the Americas; from 1880 until 1930 more people from Spain crossed the Atlantic than had done so between 1492 and 1880.3 In New York, this immigration cut across all classes, from Spanish workers seeking a well-paid factory job to educated elites seeking to practice law or medicine. They lived in the city during the peak of the “Spanish craze” that emerged in the eastern United States. As with the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the mission churches of California, this, too, was a time of great interest in anything Spanish, as witnessed by Huntington’s successful Sorolla exhibition.4
A New York Times article in 1924 profiled the Spanish-speaking community in the city, describing it as “like Spain itself, with rivalries of old provinces still lingering. … Here are not Chelsea nor old Peter Stuyvesant’s farm, but Estremadura and Leon.” The piece also went on to note the other, non-peninsular Spanish-speakers in the city, as “Argentina lies next to Castile and Uruguay is near by, with Cuba in the offing.”5 The article claimed there were about thirty thousand such Spanish-speakers, half from Spain, a fifth from Mexico, and the rest from the Caribbean and Central and South America, all “scattered over Manhattan and Brooklyn.”6
The number of Spaniards would be curtailed by the 1924 Immigration Act. Because quotas for visas were now based on the population at the time of the 1890 census, the Spanish were left with a minuscule quota of 131.7 Enough people, however, had already arrived from Spain for there to be a Little Spain neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, on the northwest edge of Greenwich Village, near the docks, with Fourteenth Street acting as a main thoroughfare, and adjacent streets lined with shops selling goods from Spain.8
Many people joined social clubs that represented their regions of origin, which included the Basque country, Catalonia, and Galicia, while others were members of broad-based groups that promoted a type of Hispanic unity. Efforts at forging Hispanidad—the idea that there was a shared culture, heritage, and language between Spain and Latin America—had predated Spain’s loss of its empire, but the effort was renewed in the early twentieth century. Promoters of a “pan-Hispanic” identity thought it could counter the growing global influence of English-speaking U.S. culture.9 For instance, the Unión Ibero-Americana, a body that promoted good relations between Spain and Latin America, was able to use the success of the Columbus Day celebration—with the Admiral already appropriated by Italian-Americans—to lay the groundwork for the Día de la Raza (day of the race), instituted on October 12, 1918, to celebrate Hispanidad.10 The idea was successful enough to survive in the Spanish-speaking world to the present day, although, like Columbus Day in the United States, the Día de la Raza in many Latin American countries has attracted increasing criticism.
In June 1929, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca arrived in New York to study at Columbia University. He was already well-known within Spain, but in the United States he had no reputation, except among the Spanish in the city, whom he came to know the minute he stepped off the ship. Upon his arrival, he found that “a group of Spaniards was there waiting for us.”11 It was not just any group; among the coterie were artists and writers, publishers and politicians, including Federico de Onís, a descendant of the foreign minister who signed the treaty ceding Florida to the United States.12
While his diary reveals many social occasions and parties, his poems speak of a lonely city. In the poem “Dawn” he wrote:
He later explained at a lecture that he thought Wall Street, with its “rivers of gold,” was terrifying and had a “total absence of the spirit.” He found the people who worked there dispiriting because they believed “it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.” Lorca put this down to “a Protestant morality that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.”14 His letters to his family, however, tell of a different New York, a much more cheerful one with a large community of Spaniards and high-profile Hispanophiles. Lorca noted with surprise in one letter that “there are over six hundred students of Spanish language and literature [at Columbia].”15 He returned to Spain in 1930 and six years later he was assassinated by nationalist forces, an early victim during the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 until 1939. By this point, the enthusiasm that fueled the “Spanish craze” had come to an end, dampened by the rise of fascism in Spain and the resulting conflict there. However, some Americans took a great interest in that war, going as far as volunteering to fight on the side of republican Spain. Ernest Hemingway memorialized this in his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Many Spaniards left the peninsula during this violent time, going into exile. However, the Spanish population of New York, limited by the tiny U.S. immigration quota, could not absorb them, and thousands instead went to Latin America.
ALTHOUGH THE NUMBER of arrivals from Spain was dropping, other Spanish-speakers were making their way to the city, Puerto Ricans in particular. In 1920 there were 7,364 Puerto Ricans in New York, 2,572 Mexicans, and 8,722 Cubans and other West Indians.16 Many people from the Hispanic Caribbean found employment at the docks or on construction sites, and in hotels and restaurants, as well as in the uptown cigar-making operations in the city at this time. Others started their own businesses, including bodegas, bars, and cafés, building on the foundation earlier Puerto Rican and Cuban exiles had laid.17 Cubans in New York opened mutual-aid societies similar to those in Tampa. Institutions like El Club Cubano Inter-Americano were cultural as well as social centers, welcoming people from other Spanish-speaking nations. That club’s founding charter declared its intent to “maintain the fraternity that should exist between the Cuban colony and the rest of the Latin-American countries.”18
By 1930, the Puerto Rican population in New York had boomed to 44,908, now constituting around 40 percent of the Spanish-speaking community. While Cubans, Dominicans, and other West Indians had a combined population of 23,000 by 1940, the Puerto Rican community was more than twice as large at 61,500. By 1954, one in every twenty New Yorkers was Puerto Rican. This number continued to rise, soaring to 612,574 by 1960.19 Puerto Rico’s División de Educación a la Comunidad, a government agency on the island, printed pamphlets warning of the risks—as well as describing the rewards—of heading north. Readers of the 1954 leaflet Emigración were told that Puerto Ricans were considered “a problem” in New York and that they should look to other parts of the United States for work. The booklet also urged cultural assimilation, which was the official policy of the Migration Division of Puerto Rico’s offices in New York and Chicago.20 One illustration showed men disembarking from an airplane with the tagline: “Do Puerto Ricans know the country where they are emigrating? New York is not the only city.”21 Behind the scenes, however, Governor Luis Muñoz Marín and officials in Washington were promoting migration to the mainland, seeing it as a way to prevent social unrest, such as strikes, on the island.22
The influx of Puerto Ricans had an enormous impact on the city, as their community spread out beyond East Harlem—often called El Barrio—into Brooklyn and the Bronx.23 The earliest years were a struggle for many, and housing was a particular problem, as immigrants from the Caribbean were pushed into tenement housing, which was often substandard and unhealthy.24 These parts of the city were often seen as no-go areas for outsiders. A report in Civil Rights Digest in the late 1960s described the area starting at East Ninety-Sixth Street, by then also known as “Spanish” Harlem, as being “like an invisible Berlin Wall between affluent Manhattanites and East Harlem puertorriqueños and Harlem blacks.”25 In these parts of New York, apartments were “poorly ventilated … the smell of the sweat and refuse of generations is stifling. Most of the dwellings are privately owned (few by Puerto Ricans themselves), and in the final stages of dilapidation; most of the buildings, which house many times the occupants they were meant to house, were built before the First World War.”26
Not everyone settled in the city; some headed to suburbs or smaller towns, a world that Judith Ortiz Cofer evoked in her novel The Line of the Sun. One character described life in an apartment block called El Building, in Paterson, New Jersey, as a place where “the adults conducted their lives in two worlds in blithe acceptance of cultural schizophrenia.” Describing the residents of El Building, Ortiz Cofer wrote: “Fortified in their illusion that all could be kept the same within the family as it had been on the Island, women decorated their apartments with every artifact that enhanced the fantasy. Religious objects imported from the Island were favorite wall hangings. … Mary could always be found smiling serenely from walls.”27
Immigrants often bear the blame for bringing disease or crime to an area, and it was no different for those from the Hispanic Caribbean. In one case, a World-Telegram article in October 1947 quoted New York’s deputy health commissioner, who claimed Puerto Ricans brought tuberculosis, among other illnesses. Rafael Angel Marín, a doctor and activist, was quick to respond that “the half truths, the errors and misrepresentation … are not only a gratuitous injury to Puerto Ricans … but … an insult to scientific accuracy.” He was angered by the claim that one in ten Puerto Ricans had TB, pointing out that no reliable statistics existed.28
New York offered some respite from the strict Jim Crow laws of the Deep South, though people from the Spanish-speaking islands all eventually became familiar with U.S.-style prejudice, often finding their “race” redefined upon their arrival.29 In a 1934 article in the newspaper Alma Boricua (Puerto Rican Soul, or Soul of Puerto Rico), Bernardo Vega argued that “the principal characteristic that distinguished us from the [Anglo-] Saxon Americans was our racial tolerance,” warning Puerto Ricans that if they were not careful, they would be “on the verge of poisoning ourselves with the filth of the racial hatred of the US.”30
Cubans and Puerto Ricans in New York were joined during this period by people from a third Spanish-speaking island in the Caribbean: the Dominican Republic. It, too, had fallen into the sphere of U.S. influence and interference. At the same time that U.S. troops had been in Mexico hunting down Pancho Villa in 1916, another branch of the military was occupying the Dominican Republic. The United States had earlier taken over the island’s custom house in 1905, claiming it would help to bring the island’s debt under control. A decade later, with entry into the First World War looming, President Woodrow Wilson was fearful of potential German influence in the Dominican Republic, as well as its ongoing political instability. Pressure was put on Dominican president Juan Isidro Jimenes (sometimes spelled Jiménez) to give U.S. officials governmental posts, as well as access to the island’s finances, but he refused. Around the same time, political infighting was weakening Jimenes’s control of the situation, and in May 1916, the first contingent of marines arrived. Martial law was declared, and a military government was established. Troops also began working on infrastructure projects and building up the Dominican Guardia Nacional. The United States thought that bolstering the Dominican national guard would help solve some of the island’s problems. Marines occupied the Dominican Republic until 1924, though control of the custom house did not revert back to the island until 1940.
In the years after the marine withdrawals, a young member of the national guard, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, rose through the ranks with such speed that he was able to take control of the presidency—and the military—by 1930. He would stay in power for the next thirty-one years, until he was assassinated. Those three decades were a time of terror for many Dominicans, and some people were forced into exile. The novelist Julia Alvarez, who was born in the United States to Dominican parents who fled the regime, reflected this fear in her novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. The father of the main characters is unable to let go of his anxiety: “Now in America he was safe, a success even. … But in his dreams, he went back to those awful days and long nights, and his wife’s screams confirmed his secret fear: they had not gotten away after all; the SIM [Servicio de Inteligencia Militar] had come for them at last.”31
OUT OF THE diverse communities living alongside each other in New York would grow one of the city’s most important contributions to the culture of the United States and the world: music. The islands had musical traditions that had long merged popular Spanish and African forms, among them Cuban son and Puerto Rican bomba. Once these sounds moved north, they came under the influence of other musical forms, including African-American music, first overlapping in early twentieth-century New Orleans, whose rich Spanish, French, and African traditions gave rise to the “Latin Tinge” and would eventually influence the development of jazz in that city and beyond.32
Some music historians trace the modern Latin sound to New York, after the return from the First World War of the African-American “Harlem Hellfighters,” the 369th Infantry Regiment, which included Puerto Rican soldiers who had played in military bands.33 In the decades that followed, performers like Rafael Hernández—who had served in that regiment—and his Trio Borinquen began to appear. Their 1929 “Lamento Borincano” became an unofficial anthem for Puerto Ricans living away from the island, with its lines “Borinquén, the land of Eden / the one that when sung by the great Gautier / he called the Pearl of the Seas / now that you are dying with your sorrows / let me sing to you also.”34
Cuban music also made up part of the city’s—and eventually, the nation’s—soundscape. At this time, tourists were going to Havana in their thousands, and popular culture became enamored of Cuba throughout the decades that followed. Through films with titles like Week-End in Havana and Holiday in Havana, Cuba—or, at least an imagined approximation of it—became accessible to a wider audience, as did its music.35 The first Cuban song to become a hit in the United States was “El Manisero” (“The Peanut Seller”), in 1930.36 Soon the ballrooms of New York were playing their own versions of this song, and before long the country was in the grip of a rumba (sometimes, rhumba) fever, for both the music and the dance steps.
Rumba music has at its structural core the clave, a pattern of five beats usually played on claves, a pair of wooden sticks; at its historical core, rumba was part of Afro-Cuban culture, coming from slaves in sugar plantations and free people of color in the cities, as part of a tradition in which people gathered to sing and dance, and was also connected to Cuba’s vibrant culture of Catholic processions.37 Anglo musicians learned the style and some of them even tried to pass themselves off as Cubans, such as Don Carlos and His Rumba Band, whose earlier incarnation had been Lou Gold and His Orchestra.38
Alongside this, demand increased for actual Cuban musicians and their music. In 1946 the Cuban Desi Arnaz scored a hit with his rendition of “Babalú,” before becoming a household name a few years later in the TV show I Love Lucy. Despite the musical successes, in general race continued to stalk musicians from the Hispanic Caribbean, with lighter-skinned Puerto Ricans and Cubans playing to all-white downtown crowds in New York, many times as the “relief” bands for bigger orchestras at clubs or upscale hotels, while Afro-Caribbean musicians were often limited to playing in Harlem and elsewhere uptown.39
Following on the heels of the rumba came the even more popular mambo, again a style drawing from Cuba’s African roots, with the term possibly being of Congolese origin. Its use of Cuban percussion, such as the conga drum, reflected its history, but its development was also influenced by the proximity of Cuban musicians and composers to popular U.S. big band jazz.40 This mixture of influences was exemplified by Pérez Prado, who moved from Cuba to Mexico, where he recorded “Qué rico el mambo” in 1949, the energy of its full brass horns and drums propelling it into a hit, first in Latin America and soon afterward in the United States, helping to spark a mambo craze across the country.41 Places like New York’s Palladium Ballroom at Broadway and Fifty-Third featured the mambo throughout the early 1950s, hosting the big bands of rising stars like the percussionist and bandleader Ernesto “Tito” Puente.42 The music industry was trying to cash in on this trend anywhere it could, creating what have become known as “latunes”—basically, songs with Latin rhythms but lyrics in English. In the rumba era, among the songs that qualified for the category was Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.”43 By the time of the mambo, however, songwriters were churning out “mamboids”—compositions that more or less just mentioned the mambo rather than copying its musical style, such as “Mambo Italiano,” “Papa Loves Mambo,” and even “Mardi Gras Mambo.”44 As fevered as the mambo was, by the mid-1950s it gave way to the smoother cha-cha (or cha-cha-chá), another Cuban style that found its way north. It was slower than the mambo, and its dance steps were an “one-two-cha-cha-chá.”45
While the various types of Cuban music enjoyed some success, Puerto Rican styles, including the danza, the bomba, and the countryside sounds of música jíbara, did not gain as large a public following as Cuba’s, though they were influential components of the music coming out of the Latin scene in New York. In the later part of the 1960s, another musical form was on the rise: the Latin boogaloo, mixing elements of African-American and Puerto Rican traditions. The song “Bang Bang,” released in 1967 by the Joe Cuba Sextet, was a nationwide hit and introduced the public to this latest musical genre.46 It is around this point that salsa, a sound that blended these influences, also began to gain ground. Salsa would take over Latin American music, becoming popular throughout the world and tying together many of the strains of Latin music in New York.47 When asked about what constituted salsa, bandleader and composer Tito Puente, who played across a wide range of styles, was said to have replied: “I’m a musician, not a cook.”48
ON THE CORNER of Calle de la Cruz and Calle Sol in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is a rose-colored building with white trim that bears a small golden plaque near one of its windows. This elegant building, with its carved wooden balconies on the second floor, was once the headquarters of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico (Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico) and the residence of Pedro Albizu Campos, who led the party. The marker, featuring a black-and-white picture of Albizu holding his fist in the air, says, “During the revolutionary acts of 1950, in defense of our right to independence, this building was shot at for two days by the island police and the National Guard.”
As a leader and politician, Albizu Campos occupies a complicated place in Puerto Rico’s history, and his party has been described as everything from “patriotic to criminal, self-sacrificing to demented, proto-socialist to fascist.”49 He rose out of poverty to study at the University of Vermont before earning an undergraduate degree in 1916 at Harvard, where he would go on to law school. His studies were interrupted when he volunteered for the U.S. military during the First World War and was assigned to an all-black regiment, owing to the skin color he inherited from his mother. It was a formative experience because he discovered at first hand the prejudices and discriminations of the mainland. After the war, he finished his law degree, returned to Puerto Rico, and was soon active in the island’s politics, joining the nascent Nationalist Party in 1924; by 1930 he was its leader. Part of his motivation in advocating nationhood was the realization, after his time in the United States, that dark-skinned Puerto Ricans had no hope of equality under U.S. rule.50 The party wanted independence, state ownership of utilities, and land reforms limiting private-sector ownership to three hundred acres.51 Albizu Campos’s aims were not merely economic and political. He also had a vision of a Puerto Rican raza, a form of Hispanism that was a cultural rejection of Americanization.52 To Albizu Campos, the Puerto Rican republic was born in 1868, during the revolt in Lares when rebels tried to throw off Spanish rule. In a 1936 speech, he called Puerto Rico an “island property” of the United States, saying, “We stand today, docile and defenseless, because, since 1868, our political and economic power has been systematically stripped away by the United States for its own political and economic gain.” He was angered by the United States’ “imposing its own culture and language” and argued that Puerto Ricans “must be a free nation in order to survive as a people.”53 His vision embraced the Spanish language and also Catholicism, which he considered part of the expression of Puerto Rican nationhood.
During the Great Depression, Puerto Rico had suffered.54 The sugar industry had been hit hard, and cane cutters saw their wages drop or lost their jobs. Puerto Ricans were heading north in droves. Although the United States tried to cobble together some relief measures for the island, sugar workers began striking for better pay. At least eighty-five strikes occurred in the second half of 1933, not only among cane cutters but also among people who worked in tobacco, at the docks, or in the needlework industry.55 The sugar workers returned in 1934 with an even larger strike that disrupted the harvest.
In 1935, President Roosevelt extended a version of the New Deal to the island, establishing the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA). Cement and glass factories were built, and a number of public health measures were attempted, such as slum clearance. In all, some $58 million was spent by 1938.56 The PRRA also sought to put more sugar production back in the hands of Puerto Ricans through the establishment of cooperative mills, and to enforce the provision in the Jones-Shafroth Act that limited corporate landownership to five hundred acres. This move upset large U.S. sugar interests, though it pleased growers on the island. One frustrated Puerto Rican wrote to Charles West, acting secretary of the interior, in 1936 to complain: “I have not yet met one of them [Americans living on the island] who does not defend the monopoly of our profitable agricultural lands by the Sugar Centrals. Not one of them has taken the side of the Puerto Rican.”57
As PRRA policies were being implemented, relations between the authorities and the nationalists took a violent turn. In October 1935, four nationalists were killed after an altercation between demonstrators and police at the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras. A few months later, on February 23, 1936, two Nationalist Party members killed the police commissioner, Elisha Francis Riggs. They were later shot at police headquarters, and many Puerto Ricans believed they had been summarily executed—a belief that sparked public anger. The authorities arrested Albizu Campos and other prominent nationalists in 1936, locking them up in the imposing Princesa prison, built by the Spanish a century before on the Bay of San Juan. The men were charged with sedition and conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government on the island, but their first trial—in which seven of the jurors were Puerto Rican and five American—ended in a hung jury. They were retried, this time with a jury of ten Americans and two Puerto Ricans, and found guilty in a 10 to 2 vote.58 Albizu Campos and six others were moved to a federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
That summer, the island’s governor, Blanton Winship, wrote to Harold L. Ickes, secretary of the interior, about these tumultuous events. Of particular irritation to Winship were the repeated calls for the direct election of a Puerto Rican governor, which he sarcastically described as “only natural” because he did not expect the Puerto Rican political class to “admit that it could not furnish the brains, character and other equipment necessary for carrying on the government of the territory it inhabits.” In addition, the growing nationalist agitation was “particularly evident,” said Winship, since the rise of Albizu Campos. To his mind, the nationalist leader’s purpose was “to break down the American government established here.”59
Later that year, Millard Tydings, chair of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, put forward a bill in support of Puerto Rico’s independence, though it was no victory for the nationalists. The bill offered the island a vote on independence, but if independence was chosen, the United States would offer no transitional assistance, and would impose high tariffs that were to rise over the first four years.60 It also would give individual Puerto Ricans only six months to decide if they wanted to retain their U.S. citizenship, which had the potential to be a serious dilemma for the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans living on the mainland. In addition, the immigration quota would be set at five hundred people a year.61 Its punitive message was clear, the subtext being that Puerto Rico could not survive without the United States. Tydings had made his political point and withdrew the bill.
Then, on March 21, 1937—Palm Sunday—the violence worsened. The Nationalist Party had announced that it would hold a parade of its cadet corps in the southern town of Ponce that Sunday and applied for a permit, which was granted the night before, but on the basis that it would not be any sort of military parade. After the request was made, a number of police were sent into Ponce.62 Before the parade was due to start, the mayor of the town revoked the permit on the grounds that it was a religious holiday, while the nationalists argued that their cadets would cause no disruptions.63
While discussions were taking place about how to proceed, spectators began to arrive in the town center, with family members of the cadets gathering to watch the procession. At around three p.m., the eighty or so cadets started to line up, and a band struck up the island anthem “La Borinqueña.” A shot rang out and chaos ensued. A photographer captured the moment, in a picture showing one policeman firing his gun at civilians on the curb, though his face could not be identified. Other accounts claimed a civilian fired first, though the man who was said to have done so was killed in the subsequent volley of bullets. Later, no weapon was found on him.64 In the end, nineteen people died that afternoon, and around 150 were wounded, in what was called the Ponce Massacre.
Whether or not that photo captured the actual first shot or a subsequent one, rumors and accusations flew, and in an attempt to get to the truth for the distressed people of Ponce and across the island, a commission was formed to investigate the shooting. It was led by Arthur Garfield Hays of the American Civil Liberties Union, who was joined by seven Puerto Ricans, though no one from the Nationalist Party took part and there were no representatives of the colonial authorities, who were uncooperative with regard to the entire undertaking.
In his report to the Department of the Interior on March 23, Governor Winship said the parade was not of the cadets but of the “Liberating Army” of the party and that the chief of police had decided it should not go ahead. He reported that at 3:30 p.m., after the anthem was played, they began to march and the police chief told them the parade was prohibited. At this point, “two shots were fired by the Nationalists,” with the bullets striking policemen to the left and right of the chief. In Winship’s account, this was followed by an exchange of fire with “Nationalists firing from the street, and from the roofs and balconies.”65
The director of the U.S. Division of Territories and Island Possessions wrote to Governor Winship to convey the outrage expressed in the letters he was receiving from Puerto Ricans, including claims that the nationalists who were killed had no weapons on them; that the police fired into the crowd, killing innocent women and children; and that had the parade been allowed to go ahead in the first place, there would not have been any bloodshed.66 A classified report from the commander of the “Borinqueneers” Sixty-Fifth Infantry Regiment in Puerto Rico included the “Nationalist Version” of events, in which “they claim that the shooting was initiated ‘on the part of the police exclusively,’ and ‘the police shot down the Nationalists like rats.’”67
The commission’s findings challenged many of Winship’s claims. Its report said, for instance, that “photographs taken at the time show not a single nationalist with any weapon of any kind,” and that the cadets were “hemmed on all sides by heavily armed police.”68 It concluded its findings with the observation that “the people of Ponce have given this tragedy the only possible descriptive title: This was the Ponce Massacre—and the more so because it occurred in a time of peace.”69
Winship continued as governor, though the anger directed at him infused public life. In spite of the heated climate, he decided to hold a military parade on July 25, 1938, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. landing in Puerto Rico. In order to drive home the point about U.S. rule, he opted to hold it in Ponce. The soldiers had scarcely taken a step when the nationalist Ángel Esteban Antongiorgi tried to assassinate Winship but instead killed a national guard colonel who had leaped in front of the governor. Antongiorgi was shot dead on the spot by police.
President Roosevelt decided to replace Winship with Admiral William D. Leahy, whom he named as governor on May 12, 1939.70 The day before the announcement about Leahy, Vito Marcantonio, a New York congressman whose district included East Harlem, had called for Winship to be removed from the post. Marcantonio had many Puerto Rican constituents and over the course of his political career would introduce five bills for independence for the island.
His May 11 speech referred to the ongoing efforts of Winship and others to avoid implementing the 25-cents-an-hour minimum wage stipulated under the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Marcantonio denounced the “slave wages” paid to Puerto Ricans, especially those in the sugar industry, insisting, “Everybody knows it can pay 25 cents per hour to its workers and should.” He blamed wages staying at 12.5 cents an hour on Winship because “the Governor on many, many occasions … advised them [the sugar industry] not to worry about the law.”71
A few months later, after Winship’s departure, Marcantonio made his “Five Years of Tyranny in Puerto Rico” speech to the House of Representatives in Washington, describing Winship’s term as a time when “Citizens were terrorized. … American workers were persecuted and shot down whenever they sought to exercise their right to strike or organize. … The insular police was militarized. … Winship drank cocktails and danced in the Governor’s palace while the police ruthlessly killed and persecuted Puerto Rican citizens.”72
Leahy may have been a change, but he still represented U.S. rule. Many of the same problems remained, and colonial policies were not working.73 At the same time, another political leader was emerging: Luís Muñoz Marín. He was the son of Luis Muñoz Rivera, the island’s former resident commissioner to the U.S. Congress. Muñoz Marín had spent many of his formative years in the United States, studying at Georgetown University before dropping out in 1915. By 1920 he had started to take an interest in politics, moving back and forth between the United States and the island over the next few years, before finally settling back in Puerto Rico in 1931.74 A year later he won a seat in the island’s senate as a member of the Partido Liberal (Liberal Party).
Muñoz Marín later broke away from the Partido Liberal, and in 1938 he and his supporters set up the Partido Popular Democrático (Popular Democratic Party), which was initially still in favor of independence.75 In the November 1940 election, the party took enough seats to make him president of the senate. Later that month, Muñoz Marín wrote to congratulate President Roosevelt on his own recent reelection and to discuss in emollient tones “a real opportunity for establishing a relationship of true understanding.” In the letter, he explained to the president that his primary issue was not independent status but rather to see that “economically and administratively our purposes are parallel to those of the New Deal.” Muñoz Marín signed off the letter pledging his “full cooperation to the end that, with your help, the endeavor and the results should be in harmony with that reality.”76 This was illustrative of Muñoz Marín’s shift toward greater autonomy in lieu of independence, a move informed in part by the island’s growing economic dependence on the United States.77 Other theories attribute his change of heart to the U.S. intelligence on him detailing opium usage, leaving him little option but to be compliant.78 His party continued to make gains in elections, pledging changes to land use and the economy and winning support among the rural and often impoverished jíbaro communities throughout the island.
The U.S. officials remained wary of nationalists well into the next decade. Leahy wrote in 1940 that there were on the island “a considerable number of disaffected individuals who would undoubtedly, in the case of war, engage in actual subversive activities and would form a very troublesome 5th column.” According to Leahy, these people were even receiving funds “through the Republic of Santo Domingo and probably Natzi [sic] sources,” which is why military intelligence and the FBI were keeping watch on them.79 The FBI also monitored Puerto Ricans in the United States, with one report noting that there was a “close relationship between the [Nationalist] party and the American Communist organization, particularly in New York.”80
Leahy was not in the post long, and in 1941 Rexford Tugwell—one of the members of the “Brain Trust,” advisers to FDR—was appointed governor. More sympathetic to Puerto Rico’s plight, he expressed his deep dismay at the state of the island, despite the efforts of the New Deal, later writing in his book The Stricken Land, “This is what colonialism was and did: it distorted all ordinary processes of the mind, made beggars of honest men, sycophants of cynics, American-haters of those who ought to have been working beside us for world-betterment.” However, the relief effort angered him most. He pointed a finger at Congress, blaming it for making the island “beg for [help], hard, and in the most revolting ways.” To Tugwell, this was “the real crime of America in the Caribbean, making of Puerto Ricans something less than the men they were born to be.”81 Congress continued to debate the Puerto Rico question. In 1945, Senator Tydings introduced another bill calling for a plebiscite on the status issue, this time with different economic guarantees, but it was later vetoed.82
In the meantime, Albizu Campos had grown ill in prison in Atlanta. There had been many calls for his release, from activists in the United States and abroad. Even Tugwell supported it. In 1943, he wrote to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that he “hoped he [Albizu Campos] will be pardoned and come back to Puerto Rico.” Tugwell believed it was important to demonstrate that Americans were “a people who do not often deprive anyone of the freedom to speak; and especially that we do not fear the advocacy of independence for Puerto Rico.” He also believed that Albizu Campos would now “find that many of his Independista friends here are ready to acknowledge the wisdom of our gradual and rational approach.”83 In the end, Albizu Campos was transferred to a hospital in New York City for treatment and stayed there until 1947. The FBI file on him, however, expressed doubts about his illness. A letter in 1943 from the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to the White House adviser Harry L. Hopkins remarked that “thus far the doctors at that institution have been unable to find any significant physical disabilities.”84 A few months later, another letter from Hoover to Hopkins noted that Albizu Campos “is reported to be using his private room in the Columbus Hospital as the headquarters of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico in New York City and it has been said that he receives many notable visitors and holds meetings in this room, which, according to reliable sources, is paid for by the Communist Party, U.S.A.”85 Albizu Campos would never be free from the scrutiny of the security service, but in 1947 he was released from the hospital, his imprisonment over—for the time being.
After the end of the Second World War, there had been a shift in focus on the island toward advocating the stimulation of private investment from the United States, especially for industrialization. Legislation was passed to allow tax breaks on some manufactured goods, ushering in an era known as Operación Manos a la Obra or Operation Bootstrap, with the emphasis now being on economic output.86 Manufacturers started to take advantage of available subsidies; other industries, like tourism, also began to attract investment from the United States, and hotels began to go up along the glistening seafront. Wages from manufacturing were good at first, more than doubling between 1953 and 1963, from $18 a week for men to $44, and from $12 to $37 for women.87 It was a promising start, but it soon faltered. While Operation Bootstrap allowed workers on the island to move away from sugar, the overall gains made by industrialization did not outstrip the losses from abandoning agriculture, not least because industrialization made the island even more dependent on U.S. markets.88 The economic boom in the postwar United States meant that it was still often more profitable to work on the mainland, and many Puerto Ricans continued emigrating north.
In addition to economic expansion during the 1940s, the United States enlarged its military presence on the island. At the start of the Second World War, the U.S. government expropriated two-thirds of the land on Vieques, an islet off the east coast, on which to build a naval base. Prior to this, Vieques had been used for growing sugar, and much of the land was already in the hands of corporations or wealthy individuals. The landless workers switched over to construction and, with the world war raging, the island became part of larger regional efforts to secure the Caribbean against any German influence or invasion.89 In the end, plans for the base were scaled back as the United States turned to the Pacific, and by 1943 Vieques was put on maintenance status, halting the economic boost it had provided.90 By 1947 the plan for the base had changed: it would be used for training and as a fuel depot. Despite this, the navy wanted more land, and the issue of what to do with the families living on Vieques became a heated political question. The United States relented over plans for evictions, and instead the island government would build housing on the small part of Vieques that remained habitable while the base was developed into a site for bomb testing and ammunition storage.91
Albizu Campos returned to Puerto Rico in December 1947. In celebration, some university students raised the Puerto Rican flag on the day of his arrival; they were expelled.92 Much had happened since he had been away. In 1946, the United States appointed the island’s first Puerto Rican governor, Jesús Piñero. Alongside this, legislation passed that paved the way for Puerto Ricans to vote for their own governor. This effort was led by Muñoz Marín, convincing both his party of the need to change direction and the United States of the legitimacy of such plans—something the government approved in part because the United States, after the Second World War, wanted to be seen to promote democratic values.93
In June 1948, after the return of Albizu Campos, the Puerto Rican legislature—under the control of Muñoz Marín and his party—passed the Gag Law (known as la mordaza), which made it illegal to show support for independence—legislation directed at the nationalists.94 A few months later, in November, the island voted in Muñoz Marín as its first elected governor, as his party took 61.2 percent of the vote. His heavy brow and tidy mustache would be the face of Puerto Rican politics for decades to come.
The question of status continued to be unresolved, and Muñoz Marín was now in favor of a plan to give the island its own constitution.95 The 1950 Public Law 600—which would allow the island to draw up such a document, as states in the United States had done—was signed into law by President Harry S. Truman in 1950 but needed to be approved by a referendum. For the nationalists, the constitution was no substitute for independence.96 As debates about the legislation began, high-profile arrests of some leading nationalists again led to bloodshed, and on October 30, 1950, some party activists launched an armed insurrection.97 It started in the southern town of Peñuelas, spreading to at least seven more cities on the island.98 The objective was to cause a political crisis, embarrass the United States, and derail the referendum vote.99 Police stations were attacked, as was the governor’s mansion in San Juan, with Muñoz Marín the intended target. Albizu Campos remained in his home, also the party’s headquarters, which came under siege by police, who fired at the building while others who were in there with Albizu Campos retaliated. Elsewhere on the island, the nationalists were outnumbered and the revolts were quickly put down.100
The attacks had not quite finished, however. On November 1, 1950, the nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo had an even larger target in their sights: President Harry S. Truman. The two men had traveled to Washington from New York and tried to shoot their way into Blair House, where Truman was staying during a White House renovation. The plan, as described by the New York Times, “was framed in such ignorance as to suggest insanity.”101 Police shot and killed Torresola, and Collazo was sentenced to death, though Truman commuted this to life in prison. By November 2, the island’s newspapers, which had been full of grisly pictures of the corpses of those who were killed, now had pictures of Albizu Campos being led away by island authorities. He had surrendered after sustained attacks by the police and national guard. In the aftermath of the uprising, one thousand people were apprehended.102
In the end, the referendum took place in June 1951, and Public Law 600 passed with 76.5 percent in favor, though around 35 percent of registered voters did not turn out.103 A constitution was drafted and another vote in March 1952 approved it, with 374,649 in favor and 82,923 against. From there it went to the U.S. Senate for confirmation. The Estado Libre Asociado (Associated Free State), or Commonwealth, was proclaimed on July 25, 1952—fifty-four years to the day after U.S. troops landed on the island.104
Albizu Campos had been sent to jail after the 1950 attempted assassination of Truman, but Governor Muñoz Marín gave him a conditional pardon in 1953. He would not stay free for long. On the afternoon of March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists brought guns into the U.S. House of Representatives and opened fire, shouting “¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!” No one was killed, but five representatives were wounded. According to one account, the shooters “shouted for the freedom of their homeland as they fired murderously although at random from a spectators’ gallery.”105 Three assailants—Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, and Andrés Figueroa Cordero—were caught by police, with Lebrón “still clutching the Puerto Rican flag.”106 Police later discovered a letter in her purse, explaining, “My life I give for the freedom of my country. This is a cry for victory in our struggle for independence.”107 The fourth member of the group, Irving Flores Rodríguez, fled the scene but was later found along with the gun he used.
The photos of the three with police outside the Capitol show a defiant Lebrón, her hair styled away from her face, her gaze determined, and her appearance as polished as a movie star’s. She glared into the camera while two officers each took an arm to restrain her. In the image, as Lebrón’s granddaughter Irene Vilar, would later observe, “the very details of her outfit can be seen: starched shirt and jacket, silver earrings, black patent-leather high-heeled shoes. All this given a glaring majesty by the language of the press.”108
Dolores “Lolita” Lebrón was born in Lares, the town where the first independence struggle began. Like many Puerto Ricans, she left the island—in her case, in 1941—to work in New York, which she did for a while as a seamstress.109 She returned in 1948 but, as Vilar wrote, “she came back a militant. New York had transformed her.”110 Lebrón remained steadfast during her trial, explaining to prosecutors, “I didn’t come here to kill but to die.”111 She was given a fifty-six-year sentence, serving it at a women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia.
After the shooting in Congress, Albizu’s pardon was revoked and he returned to prison in the spring of 1954. He spent most of the rest of his life incarcerated, suffering a stroke and claiming for years that he was the victim of radiation experiments that burned his skin.112 He was pardoned again in 1964 because of his poor health and died the following year, his dream of an independent Puerto Rico unrealized.
With Muñoz Marín in power until 1964, the island settled into its commonwealth status, though another plebiscite was held in 1967 on the issue. Around 60 percent opted for the commonwealth model; 39 percent for statehood; and 1 percent for independence, though nationalists had boycotted the referendum.113 More people from the mainland began to visit the island, and its tourism industry grew. The journalist Hunter S. Thompson moved to Puerto Rico early in his career, in 1960, and stayed a few months working on English-language publications. His novel The Rum Diary exhibits little admiration for what the United States wrought on the island:
There was a strange and unreal air about the whole world I’d come into. It was amusing and vaguely depressing at the same time. Here I was, living in a luxury hotel, racing around a half-Latin city in a toy car that looked like a cockroach and sounded like a jet fighter, sneaking down alleys and humping on the beach, scavenging for food in shark-infested waters, hounded by mobs yelling in a foreign tongue—and the whole thing was taking place in quaint old Spanish Puerto Rico, where everybody spent American dollars and drove American cars and sat around roulette wheels pretending they were in Casablanca. One part of the city looked like Tampa and the other part looked like a medieval asylum.114
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter pardoned Lebrón, Cancel Miranda, and Flores Rodríguez,, as well as Collazo, who had been involved in the 1950 attack on Blair House. The sentence of the fourth member of the group that attacked Congress, Figueroa Cordero, had been commuted in 1977 because of his failing health. It later emerged that Lebrón had turned down earlier offers of parole because she would have been required to promise not to engage in “subversive activities.” The release of Lebrón and the others was not universally popular, and the island’s governor at the time, Carlos Romero Barceló, objected to it. One angry resident, Frederick Kidder, who had lived on the island for thirty-five years, wrote against their release, arguing that they had not paid their debt to society because “they do not recognize either society or the debt.”115 The government, however, believed that the “world around them has changed substantially,” that it was a matter of “humanitarian judgment” because they were serving much longer terms than called for by the guidelines of the time, and that they “would pose no substantial risk of … becoming the rallying point for terrorist groups.”116
As Lebrón left the prison, she called out to some of the inmates, “I’ll never forget you, fight oppression and break the prisons,” before facing the reporters waiting outside the gates.117 From there, she was reunited with the others in New York City. All four received a warm welcome as some four hundred people—many shouting, “¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!”—greeted them at the airport.118 They went on to the United Nations and spoke at a press conference. Holding a dozen red roses that she said were from “the Puerto Rican people,” Lebrón took questions from journalists, including one about recent bombings by an underground group, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation, FALN), which had been demanding the release of her and the others. She told the press: “I am a revolutionary. … I cannot disavow people who stand for liberation, and if they use bombs, what can we do, we are going forward. I hate bombs but we might have to use them.”119 The four left for San Juan, where around five thousand people gathered to greet their arrival, with the crowds chanting, “Lolita Lebrón—an example of courage.”120
Members of FALN would go on to claim responsibility for some seventy bombings in U.S. cities from 1974 to 1983, killing five, injuring dozens, and causing millions of dollars worth of property damage. One of their most notorious attacks was the 1975 bombing at Fraunces Tavern in New York City which left four people dead. In connection with these events, Oscar López Rivera was arrested, but the charge was for “seditious conspiracy,” or attempting to overthrow the U.S. government. López Rivera was born in Puerto Rico and moved to Chicago at fourteen. He was later drafted and served in the Vietnam War, earning a Bronze Star. Upon his return, he became involved in Puerto Rican activism in Chicago, eventually joining FALN.
In 1981, he began his seventy-year sentence, but he was not alone in his imprisonment—other members of FALN had also been arrested, with eleven later being freed from prison in exchange for renouncing violence, in a 1999 clemency deal under President Bill Clinton. López Rivera, however, turned down an offer at this time, in part because the negotiations included only some of the group’s imprisoned members. He would have to wait until 2017, when his sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama—controversially, because while some people consider López Rivera a freedom fighter, others call him a terrorist.
López Rivera told the Guardian in an interview before his release that in its heyday FALN focused on structural targets, not people. “We called it ‘armed propaganda’—using targets to draw attention to our struggle.” He defended the group as “adhering to international law that says that colonialism is a crime against humanity and that colonial people have a right to achieve self-determination by any means, including force,” but said the days of attacks were long over. “I don’t think I could be a threat,” he said. “We have transcended violence.”121
However, FALN was not the only clandestine group on the island. Throughout the 1980s the Boricua Popular Army, or Los Macheteros (the machete wielders, or cane cutters), was also dedicated to the island’s independence struggle. Founded in 1976, the group claimed responsibility for a number of bombings on the island, including some at military installations. The Macheteros drew wider public attention with their 1983 heist, in which $7.2 million was taken from a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford, Connecticut. In connection with this, one of the group’s leaders, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos—who had also been involved with FALN—was arrested but managed to jump bail ahead of his trial in 1990. He lived as a fugitive until 2005, when FBI agents tracked him down at his home in Hormigueros, in the west of Puerto Rico, where he died after a standoff and shoot-out. His death took place on September 23, the same day as the Grito de Lares independence uprising in 1868, prompting angry demonstrations by supporters who considered him a hero and those upset by the FBI’s tactics and timing.122 The Macheteros are thought to still be active, and to be operating cells in the United States.