Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America

In the summer of 2005, while combing through the 1930 census records for Westchester County, New York, to locate southern black migrants for research I was doing on the Great Migration and the Great Depression, I noticed that African Americans and Latinos (Chileans, Puerto Ricans, Iberians, Mexicans, and Argentines) tended to reside in the same lower-income neighborhoods in the villages of North Tarrytown (now Sleepy Hollow) and Tarrytown. Earlier, I had also noticed that WPA records described blacks and Latinos in 1930s eating in the same restaurants, frequenting the same nightclubs and theaters, and intermarrying in Harlem, thirty-five miles to the south of the Tarrytowns. These descriptions struck me as odd when contrasted to contemporary Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, where Latinos now far outnumber African Americans residents and mostly Ecuadorian-, Dominican-, Puerto Rican–, Colombian and Brazilian-owned bodegas, restaurants, and luncheonettes are part of the uptown culinary landscape of both towns. What is even more interesting is the fact that there is not one black-owned soul food restaurant in either town, although there are three black churches. Similar descriptions fit the current situation in the surrounding urban centers in the Hudson Valley that also attracted black southern migrants in the 1920s and 1930s. The changes in urban centers of New York encouraged me to use interviews and written sources to explore the declining influence of soul food and the growing influence of Caribbean cuisines on African American foodways in different times and places.

My findings, though they concentrate only on New York City and Westchester County, nonetheless suggest a tentative framework for explaining where and why the Caribbeanization of soul food has emerged in urban New York. Caribbean influence on black foodways has been the strongest within the ethnic subgroups in which blacks and Caribbean migrants felt the most comfortable. While the nature and location of these subgroups shifted over time, interethnic relationships tended to be strongest between those who shared a common language, passion, or employer, as well as among younger African Americans and Caribbean migrants who shared the same class status and ethnic group identity. This understanding of the conditions that fostered connections among African Americans and Caribbean migrants in New York emerged from my examination of a wave of migrants who came to New York between 1930 and 1970, particularly Cubans, Afro-Panamanians, and African Americans in Harlem and Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s and in the smaller suburban setting of Westchester County, where Tarrytown and North Tarrytown experienced an influx of Puerto Ricans and Cubans.

Because motives for and patterns of immigration influence to a large extent migrants’ subsequent experiences and relationships with other groups, it is difficult to understand the influence of Caribbean cultures on urban identities. Some of the earliest examples of Cuban immigration to New York, for example, were rooted in a long history of colonialism, racism, and classism in the Caribbean basin. Political persecution, poverty, hunger, and lack of opportunity under Spanish colonialism motivated Cubans to start emigrating to the United States beginning in the 1860s. Cuban oligarchs and foreign investors continued to dominate the best land, occupations, and opportunities on the island following Cuba’s independence from Spain in 1898, prompting Cuban immigrants to arrive in the United States in a slow but steady stream. Until the 1930s, Tampa was the center of the Cuban American expatriate community and a thriving cigar industry. After 1930, however, new arrivals of Afro-Cubans, many of them musicians, baseball players, and cigar makers, tended to settle in New York City. Because of restrictive racist housing practices, the majority of black immigrants from the Caribbean who settled in New York in the early twentieth century, whether Puerto Rico, Cuban, or Panamanian, found lodging in existing African American neighborhoods. Most of New York’s early Afro-Cuban immigrants settled in Harlem. Much smaller and whiter Cuban communities developed in Brooklyn (near the Navy Yard), Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The small number of Cuban immigrants in New York City—they account for only a fraction of the eighteen thousand or so Cubans in the United States in 1940—prevented the development of distinctive Cuban communities there before 1950.¹

Puerto Rican immigration to New York was similarly fueled by poverty, unemployment, and hunger, but factors specific to the Puerto Rican context meant that Puerto Ricans formed tight-knit, distinctive communities in the city. The mass migration of Puerto Ricans to New York City began during World War I, when wartime restrictions on European migration caused labor shortages in the city and manufacturers and employers in the service industries recruited Puerto Ricans to meet their labor demands.² The first Puerto Rican diaspora in New York City consisted of three hundred individuals who settled on the Lower West Side of Manhattan along Eighth Avenue between Fourteenth and Thirtieth Streets in 1910. The largest influx of Puerto Ricans to Harlem came directly from Puerto Rico after 1917, when the U.S. Congress passed a bill granting citizenship to all native-born Puerto Ricans. Three regiments of Puerto Rican soldiers settled in Harlem between 1918 and 1919, for instance, bringing their families with them.³ The Puerto Rican population of the United States swelled from 1,513 in 1910 to almost 53,000 in 1930. As the number of Puerto Ricans in East Harlem increased, the area gained the popular names “Spanish Harlem” and “El Barrio.” By 1935 the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York, consisting of three communities throughout the city, had swelled to approximately 75,000 people. Some 35,000 of them lived in Spanish Harlem. The others were in South Brooklyn, where 30,000 Puerto Ricans lived, and on the West Side between Broadway and Amsterdam in the vicinity of Columbia University, the home of the most elite immigrants: merchants, restaurant operators, and barbers.⁴ Although the number of African Puerto Ricans who migrated to New York is unknown, one historian argues that “black and brown Puerto Ricans were a significant and conspicuous presence” in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s.⁵

According to one WPA report, African Americans and Latinos frequented the same social clubs, informal hangouts, theaters, and ballrooms during the 1930s. Some of these clubs included orchestras featuring Afro-Cuban artists fresh from the club scene in Havana. Such artists came to the United States because racism in Cuba hampered their careers artistically and financially, but they chose to settle in New York rather than Florida, where the racial climate drove a wedge between black and white Latin musicians.⁶ After Cubop began to catch on in 1947, it became even more common to see Latino and African Americans playing together in traditionally African American venues and afterward enjoying traditional southern and Caribbean food. Latin Americans, West Indians, and African Americans often frequented the same restaurants in Harlem and the Upper West Side.⁷

Caribbean and African American artists developed relationships because they shared common interests: cutting-edge jazz and, to a lesser degree, good, inexpensive food. Language barriers did not prevent blacks and Latinos like the charismatic conga drummer and brilliant composer Afro-Cuban Chano Pozo and South Carolinian trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie from communicating. In the words of Dizzy, they spoke to each other in the universal language of music and the “bebop language.” The hip lingo of jazz artists bridged the customary gap between native English and Spanish speakers and allowed them to communicate with each other. “Most bebop language came about because some guy said something and it stuck. Another guy started using it, then another one, and before you knew it, we had a whole language,” writes Dizzy.⁸ An ethnic subgroup of crossover artists interested in combining the best of Latin and North American jazz emulated each other’s music, language, and food in urban New York. This subgroup was most comfortable at the jazz clubs and multiethnic eateries that were located primarily in Harlem and Spanish Harlem before the 1950s.

A second wave of African American and Hispanic migrants arrived in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. The number of Hispanic migrants, particularly Puerto Ricans, far outweighed the number of African Americans from the South. This was in part because beginning in the late 1950s San Juan, Puerto Rico, served as the “international training ground” of the U.S. government’s Point Four Program, which promoted a U.S. capitalist model of development for the third world as an alternative to Communism. In order for the program to work, the Harry S Truman administration and the Puerto Rican colonial government under Luis Muñoz Marín negotiated the emptying out of the island’s poorest sectors during the late 1940s, encouraging these areas’ inhabitants, “many of them mulattos,” to migrate to urban centers in the United States, including New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The poor received reduced airfare between the island and the mainland. Some six hundred thousand “mostly rural unskilled” Puerto Ricans filled the demand for cheap labor in U.S. manufacturing. The migration of the poorest sector of the island permitted social mobility among those who remained, seemingly proving the government’s capitalist model of third world development superior to the Soviet Union’s socialist model.⁹

Among these second-wave Puerto Rican migrants were Eddie Cruz and his family, who joined relatives in the United States and settled in a largely Puerto Rican, Spanish-speaking community. Born in 1941 in Yauco, Puerto Rico, Cruz arrived with his family in New York in 1947, settling in East Harlem around 107th Street. Cruz’s parents were just starting a family, and they wanted their children to have a better quality of life than was available to them in Puerto Rico. They moved to East Harlem because Eddie’s uncle lived there; he helped Eddie’s father find a factory job. The family lived at several different addresses in El Barrio before moving to the projects in Brooklyn in 1956. In the 1950s the “suburbs” of Brooklyn, to use Cruz’s term, were very diverse: “The projects were mixed back then, but I would say mostly Puerto Ricans and blacks.”¹⁰

In the 1950s and 1960s Brooklyn was also a destination (sometimes a transfer station) for working-class African American migrants from the South, working-class Afro-Panamanians (from the Canal Zone region of Panama City), Afro-Cubans from Havana, and middle-class Cubans, most of them white, from provincial cities. “Just like in every other part of Latin America and many parts of the world, the dream was to come to the United States,” remembers Cuban migrant Francisco Corona.¹¹ Corona was born in 1933 in Guayos, Las Villas Province (later renamed Sancti Spíritus), Cuba. During the military dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar (1952–1959), members of about six extended families in Guayos responded to the corruption and repression of Batista’s regime by immigrating to the Borough Hall section of Brooklyn.¹² As life got tougher under the Batista dictatorship, Cuban expatriates from Guayos “began to sponsor friends and families who also wanted to come to New York,” Corona remembers.¹³

“Shortly thereafter,” Corona says, “some of the families from Guayos started to relocate to Tarrytown.” The first Cuban to settle in Tarrytown was Angelo Hernandez, who had arrived in Brooklyn from Guayos around 1953.¹⁴ Hernandez and a Cuban named Aurelio Garcia went to Tarrytown to do a survey for a Puerto Rican–owned radio station in New York City whose management wanted to learn about the taste of the town’s Hispanic residents: what programs they listened to and what products they consumed. Hernandez asked the people he was surveying about job opportunities and learned of an opening at the upscale Tappan Hill Restaurant in Tarrytown. In the 1950s job opportunities, many of them at nurseries and factories, including General Motors (and later Union Carbide), were abundant in the Tarrytowns and the surrounding area. Hernandez took the job at Tappan Hill because it offered free room and board and a uniform, perks that significantly reduced his living expenses. The first Hispanic to work at the Tappan Hill had been the Ecuadorian Miguel Lopez, who was sent there by an employment agency in New York City around 1951. Lopez left Tappan Hill and was replaced by his brother. Then Cubans, following Hernandez, began to fill job openings at the restaurant. Hernandez secured jobs for Ralph Hernandez (no relation), Francisco Corona, and Oliverio Ojito Fardales, all from Guayos.

One of the first Guayos-owned homes in Brooklyn on Harry Street became the receiving station where fresh arrivals got their footing. New migrants to Tarrytown went to Harry Street “to get news about family members back home and to learn about job [opportunities],” among other things. Unlike earlier Afro-Cuban immigrants to New York City, the Guayos Cubans who immigrated to the Tarrytowns tended to be white and economically better off.¹⁵

Panamanian immigrants to Brooklyn in the 1960s offer an interesting contrast to the Tarrytown Cubans. George Priestly, an Afro-Panamanian sociologist who conducted about sixty interviews with Panamanian immigrants to the United States, was born in 1941 and raised in a working-class community in Panama City, Panama. His father was a native-born Afro-Panamanian, and his mother was a second-generation Afro-Panamanian of Caribbean descent who was bilingual but preferred to speak English. Most Afro-Panamanians of Priestly’s generation were raised speaking English with at least one parent in the home while attending a Hispanic public school system. There were also English-language schools in Panama City that many Afro-Panamanian children attended in evenings or over summer vacation. On weekend nights, African American GIs frequented black bars in Panama City, and many Afro-Panamanians were exposed to aspects of American culture through them. “You would see black folks hanging out, some speaking English, some speaking Spanish, some speaking Spanglish,” Priestly recalled. His older brother operated the first black-owned men’s boutique in Panama in the 1950s in the working-class community of Panama City. “Eighty percent of his customers were African American GIs,” Priestly says. This meant that his family, like many other Panamanian immigrants, was “pre-sensitized to African American culture” before migrating to New York.¹⁶

Afro-Panamanians began immigrating to the Bushwick section of Brooklyn in the early 1960s. Priestly moved there in 1961 at the age of twenty. The Panamanian community at the time was quite small. Most of the earliest arrivals were Afro-Panamanians of West Indian descent. Over time, Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn became the center of New York’s Panamanian community. In part because of Panamanians’ familiarity with English and their exposure to American culture, the members of this community tended to interact with African Americans to a considerable degree. “There were two or three Panamanian families in Bushwick who introduced me to their African American and Puerto Rican friends,” Priestly recalls. “They would take me to clubs in Bed-Stuy [Bedford-Stuyvesant] and Crown Heights. And the clubs that they used to take us to were largely African American clubs.”¹⁷

In the 1960s some of the African Americans in Brooklyn were also newcomers to New York, just having arrived from the South. But there were many fewer black southern migrants to the North in the post–World War II period than in the period following World War I. In the 1950s and 1960s New York City’s and Westchester County’s African American population consisted largely of folks born in the South, as well as the children and grandchildren of southerners. Metropolitan New York’s Latino community included old-timers with very rudimentary English language skills who had arrived before the Second World War and their bilingual children and grandchildren born in the Big Apple and its surrounding suburbs, but it also included a much larger group of more recent migrants from the Caribbean basin who tended to speak only Spanish.

The first Cubans who came to Westchester County in the 1950s were all single men. They tended to keep to themselves or to eat, drink, and dance with Puerto Ricans, going to their bars, clubs, and ballrooms in the Tarrytowns and Manhattan.¹⁸ By 1977, however, there were about three thousand Cubans living in the Tarrytowns, along with “a scattering of Dominicans, Venezuelans, and Puerto Ricans,” in all enough Spanish-speaking migrants to support two cocktail lounges on Cortland Street, La Embajada and La Teresa, and a Venezuelan bar and disco called La Arriba at 11 Beekman Avenue.¹⁹ The Latin cocktail lounges on Cortland Street were a stone’s throw from three African American bar and grills: De Carlo’s, the Upper-Class Men, and the Wonderful Bar. Cubans also founded their own social club in uptown North Tarrytown on Beekman Avenue. As the nature of these institutions makes clear, Latino immigrants and African Americans remained socially segregated in the Tarrytowns. “You would not see Hispanics in these [black-owned] bars back then,” says Alice Conqueran, as “there were not that many of them, and they stuck together” in their own shops and restaurants.²⁰

The exception to this pattern of social segregation in the Tarrytowns occurred among GM workers, who belonged to a comfortable shared subgroup as fellow workers and union members. On the GM assembly line, there was a leveling of the language and ethnic divisions that segregated older Hispanics and African Americans in the villages. The auto union to which all blue-collar workers at the plant belonged created a multiethnic working-class solidarity between African American and Hispanics that made them feel comfortable together.²¹

Just as Hispanics and African Americans tended to enjoy separate entertainment in the Tarrytowns (with the exception of GM workers in certain contexts), they also frequented separate eateries. There were no black-owned- and -operated restaurants or luncheonettes in the Tarrytowns. (In fact, there are none today.) The only African Americans eateries were the bar and grills in town: Club Six, the Upper Class Men, the Wonderful Bar, and De Carlo’s. In addition, for religious African Americans, the black churches in the villages served not only as spiritual filling stations but, to some extent, as eateries.²² In contrast, Latin Americans had their own eateries. In North Tarrytown, there were already Puerto Rican–run Bodegas on Cortland Street, which by the late 1950s had become the center of the Puerto Rican community. Hispanic bodegas were small shops where drinks and food were sold for consumption on or off the premises.²³ In addition to Puerto Rican shops and restaurants, there were also other Latino immigrant–owned establishments. In the 1970s there was the Cuban-owned Corona’s Luncheonette (discussed below) and Renaldo Barrios’s Nite and Day Delicatessen. Both of these Cuban eateries were located on Beekman Avenue in North Tarrytown, not far from the GM plant. The Nite and Day sold inexpensive Latin soul food takeout such as Cuban fritas (Cuban-style hamburgers), Cuban empanadas (a pastry filled with ground beef seasoned with cumin, garlic, green peppers, and raisins), and a traditional Cuban sandwich (a wedge of ham, roast pork, and Swiss cheese dressed with a blend of butter, mayonnaise, and mustard and grilled until the bread is crusty). North Tarrytown had a Dominican restaurant at 109 Beekman Avenue called El Jaravi. Signature Dominican soul food include dishes like mangu (a dish reminiscent of mashed potatoes made from plantains and other ingredients), octopus salad, arroz con pollo (rice and chicken), and arroz con camarones (rice and shrimp characteristically seasoned with cilantro in addition to other herbs and spices).²⁴

DOMINICAN MANGU

(for six servings)

3 large green plantains

1½ oz. salt

1 cup reserved plantain boiling liquid

6 oz. sliced onion (white)

6 oz sliced Cuban or Anaheim peppers

2 oz. olive oil

Wash the plantains then boil for about twenty minutes, depending on their size and age. Be sure they are fully cooked. Let cool, remove pulp from skins, and place in a bowl with the salt. Mash with the indicated amount of boiling liquid. Sauté onions and peppers in the olive oil. Put the mash in a serving dish and top with the sautéed onions and peppers, including the oil. Typically served with bacon and cheese.

In Tarrytown, Guayos Cubans Jorge Pozas and Juan González ran bodegas on Main Street, while Pozas and Orestes Suarez operated the Lucky Seven Grocery at 31 Main Street. In addition to their bodegas, both Pozas and González operated restaurants. González ran the La Via, a bar and restaurant on Orchard Street, and Pozas (and later Orestes Suarez) ran the Lucky Seven, a luncheonette next door to his bodega.²⁵ Cuban men milled around the Lucky Seven smoking, sipping café pico (a traditional Cuban coffee), eating plantain soup, yellow rice, black beans, and ropa vieja (shredded beef), and “discussing in Spanish the burning issues of the day.” Orestes Suarez explains, “This is the way of life in the old country. . . . When work is done it is the custom to gather around and talk.”²⁶

As in the bars and social clubs, the language barrier in most of the area eateries inhibited the formation of friendships between Spanish-speaking immigrants and English-speaking African Americans. But African Americans did acquire a taste for Latin soul food and become regular takeout customers. The exception to this rule was Corona’s Luncheonette on Beekman Avenue, one block from the GM plant in North Tarrytown. Corona’s became an important space where five or more days a week blacks and Hispanics socialized over a good Cuban lunch. The owner, Francisco Corona, worked at GM for a brief period before opening his luncheonette. Corona’s became a designated restaurant for GM plant workers and the only eatery in the two villages where African American and Hispanic coworkers mingled. But, again, the customers at Corona’s shared a multiethnic class identity as unionized auto workers at the local GM plant. “I had customers from all parts of the world, Cubans, Venezuelans, all kinds of Hispanics” and “a lot of African Americans,” Corona recalls. He estimates that he had more African American customers than Hispanics because perhaps twice as many of them worked at the plant in the 1960s. The African American workers, recalls Francisco Corona, “really like our kind of food.”²⁷

A fascinating contrast to the situation in the Tarrytowns is the relationships that developed between African Americans and Afro-Panamanians at informal eateries in Brooklyn. In the 1960s family dinners were a “big deal” in Brooklyn, recalls George Priestly. But there were also African American and Afro-Panamanian women who would cook out of their own homes, throwing “paid parties” to earn rent money. Priestly says that, as newcomers to New York, Afro-Panamanian emigrants loved paid parties because they “enlarged [their] contact with other folk” who showed them the ropes. The concept of going from one house to another eating and partying was “something we learned from African Americans,” Priestly remembers. He used to attend paid parties with an Afro-Panamanian friend nicknamed Charlie Boogaloo, who knew all the best spots and all the people that ran them. “When you went with Charlie, you could go in and eat or drink and then split,” Priestly says. “He would know about seven different places and we would just go from house to house paying a couple of dollars, eating, and then go back to our party or stay there.”²⁸ Different house parties had different kinds of food. African American homes usually served up southern food. At an Afro-Panamanian home, there would be West Indian meat patties and rice and peas, chicken, fried plantains, potato salad, and Central American tamales.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s in Brooklyn, Panamanians started opening small formal eateries in and around Franklin Avenue. “In these restaurants,” says Priestly, “you would find a range of food—those with origins in the English-speaking Caribbean, those with origins strictly in Panama, and those adopted from African Americans here.” The “so-called Panamanian restaurants” sold soul food, “food [with a cornmeal base] that you would think is completely South American,” and West Indian food, “rice and peas and all that stuff. . . referred to as Afro-Panamanian food.”²⁹ These small Brooklyn restaurants drew crowds of working-class West Indian, Latin American, and African American customers. The diverse menu at such restaurants made their multiethnic working-class customers feel as though they were staying within their own culinary environment.

In the absence of a language barrier, then—and perhaps also in part because of the small size of the Afro-Panamanian community in New York City—African Americans and Afro-Latinos in the city shared food and attended parties together in 1950s and 1960s Brooklyn. In Westchester County, as I discuss in the next section, schools, eateries, and community centers were important meeting places where African American and bilingual Latino youth developed long-lasting friendships. Older Hispanic immigrants with elementary English skills, by contrast, spent the majority of their time in Spanish-speaking barbershops, bars, bodegas, churches, and clubs maintaining friendships with other Hispanic immigrants. Except for GM workers, moreover, most Tarrytown Cubans worked on jobs and in departments with Latino personnel. As a result, Latin American immigrants with very little English fluency largely remained separated from African Americans in the Tarrytowns, cloistered in pockets of Hispanic public spaces.

Young people, in particular, tend to travel outside their ethnic safety zones. As studies of rapping and deejaying in New York have shown, youth culture is one of the sites where cultural interaction and hybridization between African Americans and Caribbeans has been most intense. In the words of one study, this is because the lives of youth of different ethnicities “are structured by similar conditions and result in similar understandings of themselves and the world.”³⁰ The mambo, Motown, and salsa mania that influenced youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s did a great deal to erase the invisible line that sometimes separated African Americans and Hispanics in metropolitan New York and suburban Westchester County. Mambo mania coincided with the diminishing cultural and language barriers to African American and Latino relations in New York. Like food, music drew bilingual Hispanic youth to spaces that also attracted African American youth. Latino youth growing up in New York developed a multiethnic consciousness that acknowledged their African heritage rather than denying it, as many of their parents’ generation did.³¹ By the time Motown mania hit the city in the 1960s, the divide between African American and Puerto Rican youth had virtually vanished. For example, born in 1940, bilingual Sonya Cruz remembers growing up in El Barrio in the 1960s. There was a local luncheonette/soda fountain frequented by Puerto Rican and African American youth. The proprietor of the store had a jukebox that played both “Latin American hits and popular Motown artists.”³² Similar cultural sharing was happening in the Bronx.

In 1940 the Bronx had a black and Puerto Rican population of about 83,500. Historian Evelyn Gonzalez argues that “after War II, the most important change in the Bronx was the coming of thousands of Southern blacks and Spanish speaking Puerto Ricans” like Harold Jones and Sonya Sanchez.³³ The number of African Americans and Puerto Ricans in the Bronx had increased from 160,000 in 1950 to more than 350,000 in 1960, with the majority residing in the South Bronx.³⁴ Bubba Dukes’s father took a job in a furniture factory and relocated his family to the newly opened Patterson House. “And when the projects open up, I guess it’s a big thing for people to move into the projects and move away from the tenement, the tenement housing.”³⁵In the 1950s Patterson House had a mixture of residents from South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Barbados, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. African American Victoria Archibald-Good also grew up in the Patterson House. She recalled growing up with Puerto Ricans neighbors on all sides of her family’s apartment: “The Perez family lived right across the hall from us on the fourth floor. There were the Bonitas too, on the fourth floor, but on the other side.”³⁶ The halls of the Paterson House smelt like an international food court at a mall.

Nathan Dukes recalls growing up to the smell of chitlins, rice and beans, turkey, and ham being prepared. “You had a lot of vegetables, collard greens, turnips; spinach was one of the main courses that a lot of the moms would prepare. . . . All up and down the hallways” you would smell the different ethnic dishes being prepared, especially on holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter.³⁷ Some of Victoria Archibald-Good’s fondest childhood memories were of the food of Puerto Rican neighbors. “I remember Mr. Bonita used to make donuts for everybody. And he had this big pot of oil and we would just like to sit on the stoop, because we could smell them from the stoop. And he would call us up and everybody would have a freshly made donut. It was a lot of fun.”³⁸ Puerto Ricans in the Patterson House were “our buddies” and “very good” friends, says Dukes. Many of these friendships would later develop into multiethnic marriages.³⁹ As a result of New York City residential patterns in buildings like the Patterson House, familiar friendships developed between the African American and Caribbean children. Starting in the 1960s, if not much earlier, as this chapter argues, African Americans in New York developed a more diasporic conceptualization of soul food than the exclusionary down-home Southern one that the black power partisans of the soul ideology championed. For African American and Caribbean residents in urban New York, soul food was far more inclusive, encompassing the African-influenced cuisines of South Carolinians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Panamanians, West Indians, and Dominicans that proliferated in multiethnic communities of color in New York in the 1960s through 1980s.

In addition to public housing projects, other important spaces for black encounters with Caribbean cultures in New York included rent parties, house parties, and clubs. In these spaces, it was quite common for black and Latino youth to become bilingual in their choice of music, language, and food. Afro-Cuban GM worker Freddy Pino married an African American from North Tarrytown named Barbara Ann Cardwell. The two met in 1965 at a cocktail lounge called the White Birch Inn across the Hudson River in nearby Spring Valley, New York. Neither of Barbara’s parents objected to her having an Afro-Cuban suitor; her entire family accepted him from the beginning. Pino taught his African American wife of over forty years about Cuban traditions, such as “little Christmas.” She also learned how to cook rice and beans, Cuban-style pork, and turkey Cuban style. Her husband died in 2006, but to this day she continues the traditions to which he introduced.⁴⁰

Describing the culinary influence of Caribbeans on African Americans in New York City and Westchester County from the 1930s through the 1960s requires understanding the complexity of the factors that influenced their interaction, from the initial social and economic conditions that acted as an impetus for various groups’ migrations and shaped their settlement patterns to the constraining and catalyzing roles played by employment, racism, music, entertainment, language, food, and love. Latin American and African Americans musicians in the 1930s shared bandstands, restaurants, hotels, and boardinghouse rooms as they traveled the famed chitlin circuit.

When a second wave of immigrants came to New York in the 1950s and 1960s, some of them traveling north to Westchester County, language barriers and cultural differences kept African American and Latinos over twenty segregated from each other. As a result, Caribbean influence on African American culinary taste happened at a far slower speed there than in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. The exception to this rule were African Americans and Latino GM workers in the Tarrytowns who belonged to the same unions: they frequented the same eatery during their lunch hour, and thus black GM workers (who lived in various parts of metropolitan New York) were far more influenced by Caribbean cultures than were nonemployees. In contrast, black and Latino youth shared a common ethnic subculture: mambo and Motown music. As a consequence, they broke bread far more often in each others homes and at Caribbean-run restaurants in the Tarrytowns. Luncheonettes with mambo- and Motown-playing jukeboxes played an important role in shaping the urban ethnic identity of black and Latino youth.

Tentatively, then, one can conclude that Caribbeans influenced black culinary taste more often within ethnic subgroups in which they felt the most comfortable. In the 1930s and 1940s it was the jazz subculture of black and Hispanic Harlem. For Tarrytown adults of the 1950s, it was the male-dominated subculture of GM’s multiethnic auto workers’ union. And among immigrant and migrant youth, the mambo subculture of the 1950s and the Motown and Latin jazz culture of Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx were particularly significant in fostering shared cultural identities across the racial divide. In the absence of further study, of course, these conclusions remain only tentative, but they offer a useful starting point for organizing and explaining the declining influence of southern culture in northern urban centers.