THERE WERE ONLY 500 PUERTO RICANS LIVING IN NEW YORK City in 1910. By 1940 there were 70,000. Puerto Rico, a little island east of Cuba, was an American territory, so its people could move freely within the United States—legally skirting the immigration quotas. When poverty and overpopulation hit there, after 1945 the largest number of immigrants came from Puerto Rico—often coming to join relatives and find a better job. Low-cost airplane service from San Juan to New York City beginning in 1946 contributed to the deluge. By 1960 Puerto Ricans made up 10 percent of New York City’s population. By 1964, 700,000 Puerto Ricans had come to New York, and Spanish had become the city’s second language.
Like the Jews, Irish, and Italians before them, the new immigrants were stereotyped as neighborhood wreckers, criminals, and a burden on the public. Poor when they arrived, most of them were forced to move into old brownstones and tenements that were in a hopeless state of disrepair. When the heroin epidemic struck New York between 1964 and 1968, almost a quarter of the addicts were Puerto Ricans. In 1968 almost half the Puerto Ricans, most of whom lived in Spanish Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Williamsburg, lived below the poverty level.
Puerto Rican children in the public schools faced terrible discrimination. Those entering kindergarten spoke little English. Many were embarrassed to speak it badly, so they chose not to speak it at all. Worse, guidance counselors put the Puerto Rican children in slow classes or assigned them to technical high schools. Like the blacks, many found the school experience frustrating and dropped out.
Victor Robles, who grew up poor in Williamsburg, was one of the large group of Puerto Ricans who should have gone on to college but because of cultural barriers and racial prejudice was directed on a path toward vocational school. Had he not been a good politician, Robles in all probability would have had far more limited economic and social opportunities.
As it turned out, he was a talented social activist in his community, and he was taken under wing first by New York Supreme Court Justice Gilbert Ramirez and then by U.S. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. At Chisholm’s urging, he ran for the New York State Assembly and served for six years from 1978 to 1984. Robles went on to serve on the New York City Council for seventeen years from 1985 to 2001, when term limits forced him to give up his post. Since 2001 Robles has served as the city clerk.
VICTOR ROBLES “I was born in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, in 1945. I migrated to New York City in 1947. My father’s name was Felix Robles, but I knew very little about him, because my mother brought my brother Antonio and me here as a single parent.
“I went to Puerto Rico for the first time at my father’s death, when I was nineteen, and I never could understand how anyone could leave such a beautiful island. But unfortunately, salaries even today are not like you find here. And there were jobs in New York, so New York was the place for Puerto Ricans to come for a better life. Not because they wanted to leave Puerto Rico. And nobody told them they had to confront the winter in New York, which they don’t have in Puerto Rico. And they had to confront discrimination, because we didn’t speak English.
“My mother’s mother—her husband died and she remarried—she came to New York, bought a house in Spanish Harlem in 1947, and she convinced her daughter to bring her two kids and come live with her. In 1950 my grandmother and mother bought a house in East Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and I have lived in Brooklyn ever since, on Seigel Street between Manhattan Avenue and Graham Avenue, which was changed to the Avenue of Puerto Rico.
“When I first came, it was a Jewish community. We were the only Puerto Rican family within twenty blocks. Today there are Dominicans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Hasidim, which we didn’t have many of back then.
“I had never seen anyone with sideburns like that before. We used to refer to the Hasidim as penguins, because they were dressed all in black with fur hats. As I grew up I found that those hats, made of real fur, could cost as much as $12,000. I say that because when we were growing up, kids will be kids. The Hispanic kids didn’t understand the Hasidic religion or their culture, and the Hasidic kids were very meek and religious, and the Hispanic kids used to slap them and take away their hats.
“In those days we had gangs. We had the Ellery Bops and the Quintos, who today are called the Young Lords. Ellery Street is in Bedford-Stuyvesant, out by the Pfizer plant, and those kids lived there. That was the gang of the day, and they were dangerous. They didn’t have a formal education—these kids, unfortunately, dropped out of school. I had friends who ended up running in these gangs. They got addicted to drugs. I was very fortunate, because I was more afraid of my mother and what she would do to me than whether my friends wouldn’t call me.
“I’m not a smoker, and I’ll tell you why. Like everything else with your friends, the temptation was there. One day I took a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. Remember the cowboy, the Marlboro Man? I went into the bathroom to smoke a cigarette. With my grandmother, who we lived with, you could go to the bathroom, but if you were in there longer than she thought the norm, she would start banging. And here I was, smoking. I flushed the cigarette, and I tried to get the smoke out, but when she opened the door, she smelled it.
“She took the entire pack of cigarettes, and she made me smoke them! I will never…After that, whenever I smelled the smoke, I wanted to puke.
“And it was done out of love.
“I only met my father once before he died. He had come to New York from Puerto Rico, a one-day visit. I came home from school, and I sat next to my mother on the sofa, and as my father turned, I saw he had a bald spot on the back of his head, and I said innocently, ‘Look Mom, Pop has a bald spot.’
“I got a slap across my face.
“I said, ‘What did you do that for?’
“She said, ‘That’s your father. Respect him.’ So all I knew about my father was when I met him I got slapped. In those days that was discipline in a good way. Today you get locked up.
“I can’t emphasize enough, now that my grandmother, grandfather, and mother are gone, I really believe I could not be where I am today without three things: my family, the faith, and their always cultivating in me that ‘you were born with God’s gift to be whatever you want to be, and if you fail, it’s because you failed yourself, not because God didn’t give you a brain.’ I gotta tell you, I succeeded because of that upbringing.
“We attended a church called Most Holy Trinity, a German church, which is still there about five blocks from where we lived. [The church dates back to 1841, and the cornerstone of the current building was laid in 1882.] I was an altar boy. My brother, Tony, before he moved to Puerto Rico, worked in the rectory. Whenever he couldn’t make it I would fill in for him.
“The Germans built it, and when we started going there, the Mass was in German. We didn’t have a Spanish Mass until later, after Latinos started moving into the neighborhood. I was there for twenty-five years. Now we also have a Polish Mass, because we have Polish people from Greenpoint moving in. The census in the late 1970s indicated that Puerto Ricans were a majority in the neighborhood. In the last census it was the Dominicans. This census shows more Puerto Ricans. The next census will show a Dominican majority, because the Puerto Ricans are moving down to Orlando, Florida.
“After we moved into the neighborhood, we saw that it was changing, that a lot of whites were moving out. We did not see it that they were fleeing from us. My parents all the time told me about America, about the respect and love for the opportunities that America offered us, so you could not be a radical or be anti-American in their house, because they were very appreciative of America. My brother and I are veterans. He went to Vietnam. At that time President Johnson did not allow two brothers to serve in Vietnam at the same time, so I went to Korea. And so my family is for God and country. You respect God and always appreciate what this country has offered you. So when the whites moved, I saw that this was what America is all about: you work hard, you study, go to school, and that opens up avenues for you to go wherever you want to go. They were leaving for a better life. So I did not see it as they were running away from us.
“Like today, most of the third-generation Puerto Ricans who became professionals don’t live in the city of New York. They live in Long Island, Connecticut, those places the whites moved in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s not black and white, Jews and gentiles, Protestant and Catholic. I look at it that this is America. And America and capitalism say, ‘If you work hard, study, respect and have faith in God, you can make it.’ And when you make it, they don’t expect you to stay poor. It’s like the Jeffersons on TV, moving up to the East Side. That’s America. Even a black man can move up.
“In Williamsburg we always had tensions between Jews and Hispanics, especially after the Hasidim began moving in in large numbers. Today it’s not the Jews displacing us but yippies, dippies, artists, what-have-you.
“Our culture is a very happy one, with hugging and kissing, and the family. The Hasidim seemed strange and different, but after living there awhile I began to see, understand, and know the cultural differences. Because of my family and my faith, and people around me who showed me by example, I did not look at the Hasidic community as a threat. I was close to the Sodder family, husband and wife, son Bobby and daughter Anna. They had a fruit stand, and I used to spend time with them and help them out. On Friday they invited me up to their house for Shabbat. Once you get to know people, you realize we are all God’s children underneath the skin. We all have blood. If I need blood, am I going to ask you if you are Jewish or not?
“Children learn what they see and hear, and that begins in the house. Kindness and understanding must be nourished, and you go to school and you come back home, and I better do my homework before running from the house. I didn’t dare go outside and play without first getting permission from my grandmother.”
After going to PS 41, Robles graduated to Intermediate School 49, an all-boys school in Williamsburg on Graham Avenue. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited I.S. 49 in 1957 to read John Brown’s Body to the students, Victor was chosen from a school of six hundred to escort the former first lady around the school.
VICTOR ROBLES “I mean to know I was walking the first lady of the country—that was it. Here I am, a Puerto Rican, and I’m walking the first lady of the land! In Puerto Rico, let me tell you, they love Franklin Roosevelt. You talk to my grandmother and grandfather about Franklin Roosevelt, forget about it! It was the greatest thing for them and for my mother that I was chosen to escort her.”
At I.S. 49 Robles was so trusted by the administration that he was given the key to the school. One night the parents attending a Parents Association meeting couldn’t get in because the custodian forgot to open the school. The parents called the principal, and the principal told them, “Where’s Victor? Tell Victor to open up. He has a key.” That’s how much he was trusted.
Nevertheless, at school Victor felt the sting of racism. The teacher who treated him most harshly at I.S. 49, he says, was black.
VICTOR ROBLES “God is good. Don’t get mad. Get even. I had a black teacher who was the biggest racist I could have. Every time she caught me speaking Spanish in class, she deducted five points in my English class. At the end of the term she gave me a 40, and I walked around for almost an hour, crying, wondering how I was going to face my mother and explain it.
“After I came home and explained it to my mother, she said, ‘I’m going to school tomorrow, and if you’re lying to me, I’m going to slap you in front of your class.’ She came in, and the teacher showed her I had a 96, but I got a 40 because I constantly spoke Spanish in class. ‘Well,’ my mother said to her, ‘let me tell you something. I carried him for nine months, not you, and I don’t care what you want or how you feel. We are Americans, and we have given our lives for this country. I want you to know that my son will be somebody because I demand it. If he listens to you, he’ll be on welfare the rest of his life.’
“The principal ended up apologizing, and I got my 96. My mother would not take no for an answer. And when I became a state assemblyman, this teacher, who had become the principal of a Bedford-Stuyvesant school in my district, invited me to be the commencement speaker.
“So when you ask what motivated me, I could have ended up as one of those Young Lords or a Black Panther, but I was taught by my mother that God gave me a brain, and you use your brain and your talent. And when you beat them at their own game, they will always respect you.
“Yes, every Puerto Rican faced prejudice. Everybody knows that for a fact. They won’t say it, but that’s a fact. When you have people telling you to your face, ‘Spic, go home,’ what does that mean?
“But I also want to be fair. I really believe that was said to me because they did not understand me, my culture, and where I came from. Again, my faith taught me something. I learned that evil triumphs when good men and women do nothing. So while I paint a rosy picture, I did not let racism or prejudice stop me from getting where I am. And at the same time I refused to give in to racism. On the south side of Williamsburg there were three public housing developments which were 90 percent Hasidim, and then a change in the law called for Hispanic residents. I would say, ‘The Hasidim have the same right for housing that we have. Show me where they violate the law or if they have received favoritism, and I will stand up with you. But you cannot get me to say I will not support a Hasid to get into public housing if that Hasid is poor.’ I used to be crucified in the Spanish media.
“Brooklyn is known as the borough of churches. That is not a cliché. It’s a fact. There is no other place where you have more churches than Brooklyn. But it was my house that taught me what Christianity is all about. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. That was not taught in the schools. That was taught in my house. Because my house also went to church. My poor grandmother read the Bible. She didn’t sit on street corners and wave the Bible. My grandmother and mother were very religious people.
“Every Saturday at four o’clock I was in the church confessing, because my mother said, ‘You cannot receive communion unless you go to confession.’ Every Sunday at nine was a children’s Mass. I was in Mass. Today my nephew—my sister’s oldest son—lives with me, and he knows that on Sunday, wherever we are, we go for one hour to give thanks to almighty God. Even if we’re on vacation.
“And every Thanksgiving and Christmas, I will be at the senior center. For Thanksgiving, I arrive at five in the morning. I’m in the kitchen cutting turkey. I’ve been doing it for thirty years, and that’s my way of thanking almighty God for my blessings and thanking the people who elected me for thirty years. I go back to that foundation, which was in the house. Today parents will always find excuses why their kids will not succeed: it’s the teachers. And I’m not saying the system is perfect. In my day my mother went to the Parents Association meetings. She went to the school board meetings. Today parents have their excuses.
“I went to Eli Whitney Vocational High School [now known as Harry Van Arsdale High School] and majored in carpentry, cabinet-making. I never used it. In those times it was rare when you graduated from high school. As long as I graduated, my mother was satisfied. In those days the Puerto Rican girls didn’t even graduate from junior high school. They had to drop out of school to be in the house, cooking and cleaning. In those days if your son or daughter reached high school, that was like getting a college diploma.”