Old Voices, New Voices: Mainland Puerto Rican Perspectives and Experiences

New York State Curriculum

The sources of information on the everyday struggles and triumphs of these early pioneros are limited, but the texts written by two politically active Puerto Ricans of that era, Jesús Colón and Bernard Vega, have provided us with much insight into the early Puerto Rican community that took root in New York.  In the foreword to A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches, by Jesús Colón, Juan Flores writes: 

[These texts] are in fact unique documents of their kind, offering the only sustained glimpses we have of the New York Puerto Rican community during the decades prior to 1950.  Here we get a sense of what motivated Puerto Ricans to set out en masse in the first place, who those pioneering families were, and what it was like for them upon landing and seeking out a new life in this bulging metropolis.  We witness first-hand the fantasy-world New York, known to them from illustrated magazines and picture postcards, dashing against the somber reality of the crowded tenements where they came to live, while their prospects for stable employment dwindled the longer they stayed.  We also learn how, after the initial fits and starts, the community began forming organizations to provide for the needed cultural cohesion and a political voice in these unfamiliar and often hostile surroundings.  And, finally, these documents tell of the Puerto Ricans’ initial relations with their newfound neighbors, the multitude of other immigrant nationalities in the touted “melting pot” who, like themselves, had come from foreign shores in search of a brighter future. 

Another valuable source of information on the experiences and perspectives of the Puerto Rican migrants is to be found in collected interviews of migrants, gathered by a new mainland-born or raised generation of Puerto Rican scholars intent upon documenting the untold stories of the Puerto Rican migration.  These scholars have captured the diversity of the population and its experiences through their interviews of the working class men and women who made up the backbone of the community, as well as through interviews of more well-known Puerto Ricans who left behind a more easily documented record of their struggles and achievements. 

Such resources add to a growing body of literature written by Puerto Ricans who draw heavily upon their own personal experiences in constructing their literary works.  Taken together, this range of accounts points to similarities in the (in)migrant (immigrant or in-migrant, the latter term applies to Puerto Ricans) experience across ethnic groups and historical eras.  These similarities include the struggle to settle and establish themselves in a new land, the painful process of adjusting to a new cultural and linguistic setting, and the intergenerational conflicts that inevitably occur in such contexts.  And if read with accounts of other Latino groups in the United States, the common bonds that link Latinos in the U.S., in important respects differentiating them from earlier European immigrant groups, also emerge.  But this wealth of resources, carefully read, also vividly illustrates unique aspects of the Puerto Rican experience: coming as citizens, continuing to be involved in a circular migration between island and mainland, entering into a society much more racially divided than that of Puerto Rico, settling in urban areas in large numbers at a time when the changing economic structure has made upward mobility for the community as a whole more difficult.  Taken together, these sources provide us with invaluable accounts of the voices of a people who have contributed so much to the diversity and strengths of the United States of America and its people.  This activity introduces the student to a range of primary source materials that bring to life the history, perspectives, and experiences of Puerto Ricans on the mainland. 

What were the strengths of the Puerto Rican community on the island and on the mainland? 

How do the women remember Puerto Rico?  Have you ever felt nostalgic about an earlier period in your life? 

How did the women respond to the difficult conditions they faced? What choices did they have? 

What similarities are there between the experiences of the first-generation Puerto Rican women and the experiences of their daughters?  What conflicts might exist between the generations? Why?  Have you ever experienced similar generational conflicts? 

Have students in your school whose parents were born outside of the mainland USA had similar experiences or feelings? 

Minerva Torres Ríos, 87 years old, came to the United States from Puerto Rico in 1929.  For many years she lived in New York City’s East Harlem section, one of the oldest Puerto Rican settlements in New York.  The people of East Harlem call it simply El Barrio, or “the neighborhood.”

Ms. Ríos was a member of a popular education and literacy program in El Barrio, organized with the help of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños.  She reflects in this essay on her childhood in Puerto Rico and subsequent experiences as a laundry worker in New York City . 

To remember is to live.  And how well I remember my childhood in the town of Guayanilla, where I was born June 5, 1905. Guayanilla is in the south of Puerto Rico.  It’s near Ponce, the second largest city in the country.  Other towns nearby are Yauco, famous for its caracolillo coffee, and Peñuelas, known for its navel oranges and finger bananas.  Peñuelas also has the famous Banana Tree Mountain, one of the five highest mountains in Puerto Rico.

One of my most pleasant memories is of my baptism at age seven.  I felt so happy, especially when my godparents pinned a five-peso note to my dress.  I knew it was money but I had no idea of its value.  At that tender age, just like other Puerto Rican children at the time, I thought two or three cents was more than one dollar and that five centavos was a lot! 

Life there was poor, but it was a happy life.  You didn’t have the violence you have today.  We young girls used to go with the boys down to the river and go swimming together with our old clothes on. 

The best times of my childhood were the holidays—the patron saints’ days, Three Kings’ Day and Carnival.  For the patron saints’ days we got to celebrate for nine days, winding up with a big party in the town square.  We’d have games of chance, children’s games and most of all, music.  Three Kings’ Day, January 6, was a holiday for children, something like the tradition of Santa Claus here in the United States.  On that day we would go all around the neighborhood, showing off the presents that the Three Kings had left under our beds.  The night before, we would have put a bit of grass under the bed for the kings’ camels, who we knew would be tired and would eat the grass hungrily.  That’s what all Puerto Rican children believed, and I continued to believe in the Three Kings until I was twelve. 

Carnival was another time of tremendous enjoyment, especially for children.  I remember how we poor people celebrated carnival with water.  We’d form groups and throw buckets of water on each other, and we’d put on masks and costumes and dance.  We’d parade through the town chanting the famous carnival chant: Vejigante a la bolla, pan y cebolla! 

In 1914 the First World War broke out.  I was nine.  That’s when my suffering began, because my father had to go to war.  How I cried to see my father leave me, my brothers and two sisters.  Thank goodness, though, my father did not have to serve much time in the military since he was a school teacher and was soon called back to teach. 

In 1918, when I was thirteen, I was in school one morning when the whole building began to shake.  I had never felt anything like it, and ran screaming for home.  I couldn’t even stay standing up, I didn’t know what to do; everyone was crying, “My God, it’s an earthquake!”

The island was left in ruins by that quake.  Every town suffered severe damage.  There were deaths, and many people were left homeless: my humble house was damaged.  They had to use the schools as temporary hospitals.  That was the historic earthquake that destroyed much of Puerto Rico. 

In school, we used a textbook called Rudimentos de América, because in those days everything in Puerto Rico used to come from here, from the United States.  The governor of the island was American, and the laws were made here. 

I know the story of Abraham Lincoln, that they taught me in Puerto Rico; the story of George Washington; Benjamin Franklin with a kite . . . They taught some things about Puerto Rico, but there was no textbook on Puerto Rican history.  They just taught it orally.  They didn’t teach us anything about the people of South America.  I knew nothing about all that. 

I graduated from the eighth grade, which is when you get your first diploma in Puerto Rico.  Those who can, go on to study for another four years.  But I couldn’t continue in school, because there was no high school in my town and I would have had to go to another town and pay.  My father and mother had separated by then, and I couldn’t afford it. 

My mother had to go work in people’s houses as a maid, and I worked in a shop embroidering blouses and dresses.  The pay was very little.  In Puerto Rico at that time poverty was widespread, it was very hard to survive.  I decided to come to New York to work in order to help out my mother and siblings.  In 1929 I arrived in New York, where the rest of my story takes place. 

I left Puerto Rico on a ship called the Coamo.  There was at that time no other form of transportation between Puerto Rico and the United States.  The crossing lasted five days.  I spent most of the time up on the deck, in the fresh air to keep from getting seasick.  It was quite a pleasant trip and the boat reminded me of a big hotel. 

When we reached New York harbor, it was winter and the pier was hidden in fog.  We had to wait for two more days outside the port for the weather to clear.  Finally the ship sailed into the harbor, and we crossed in front of the Statue of Liberty and you can imagine what an impression that made on me.  As the ship passed slowly in front of the statue, I wondered to myself why it was there in the water instead of in a park, where everyone could admire it. 

The Statue of Liberty was the first marvel I experienced in the City of Skyscrapers.  When we disembarked on the Brooklyn pier it was very cold, and I saw another wonder for the first time: snow.  I knew what it was, of course, from studying the history of the United States, but I had never seen it personally and to see the ground all covered in white astonished me. 

I moved in with my cousin.  His wife soon got me a job in a factory where I worked for about six months.  In 1930, a friend of mine got me a job working with her in a laundry on East 94th Street.  I started out ironing collars and cuffs in the men’s shirt department, using huge machines.  We worked Monday through Saturday, from 8 a.m. to 7 at night.  My salary was $12 per week. The workers in the laundries weren’t unionized and so the bosses could do whatever they liked. 

On Mondays and Tuesdays we worked until 8 p.m.  On holidays we had to work half-days.  The summer was when I really suffered, between the work and the heat.  When the temperature outside was 90 degrees, it was more than 100 inside the laundry.  I sweated miserably between those two ironing machines but what could I do? Nothing but keep on working in order to keep my job.  The Depression was gripping the country and there were no jobs; anyone lucky enough to have one wanted to keep it, no matter how small the salary. 

Working in a laundry has always been relatively secure employment, although it’s one of the hardest jobs.  In the days before the struggle to unionize the laundries, the U.S. president passed the National Recovery Act, prohibiting employers from paying less than $14 per week.  I’ll always remember that great president, Roosevelt. 

We began struggling for a union.  It took tremendous effort before the bosses would agree to it.  They threatened to take away our jobs, but we workers kept on fighting until we won. 

We became unionized in 1936 and things began to go better.  But it still wasn’t easy because the employers didn’t want to give us paid vacations.  But after a number of years everything improved.  We no longer had to work on holidays or Saturdays, and if we did work those days, we received double pay. 

I continued working hard from 1930 until 1970, when I retired.  By that time, I earned more than $200 a week with a month of paid vacation. 

Abridged from: Minerva Torres Ríos, “Remembranzas,” in Nuestras Vidas: Recordando, Luchando y Transformando, produced by the El Barrio Popular Education Program, June 1987.  Also includes material from an interview with Minerva Torres Ríos by Rina Benmayor of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College.  Translated by C. Sunshine.
 

The late 1940s began the period of mass migration from Puerto Rico to the United States under “Operation Bootstrap.”  Many women who came found work as sewing machine operators in garment factories in New York City, where pay and working conditions were often poor.  The women played an important role in the effort to unionize the factories and win better conditions for workers. 

Manufacturers, however, soon found it more profitable to move their factories overseas, where they could take advantage of even cheaper, non-union labor.  After 20 or 30 years of work, many Puerto Rican women lost their jobs when factories “ran away.”

A group of women, some of them the daughters and granddaughters of garment workers, decided to find out more about this part of their community’s history.  Working with the Oral History Task Force of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriquños, they interviewed former garment workers.  From these interviews they produced a radio documentary, “Nosotras Trabajamos en la Costura.”  They explain: 

This program is about our mothers and grandmothers, the thousands of Puerto Rican women who spent their working lives as seamstresses in the garment factories of New York City.  These are some of their stories, that we at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College have been collecting.  This is an effort to document and explain our history, to ourselves, to our own communities, and to those who may want to share our lives. 

My mother is an embroiderer.  She does such beautiful, intricate work.  She’s been doing that for 20 years now, ever since she came to this country.  She raised me and my three sisters all by herself.  And she doesn’t speak English, to this day. 

My grandmother learned to sew in Puerto Rico when she was a little girl, sewing and embroidering fancy lingerie for an American company.  Then she came to New York in the twenties, and she was a pionera, and she spent all her life in a garment factory. 

We came to New York in 1948.  My father drove a cab, and my mother worked in a garment factory for 30 years.  Just last Christmas she was laid off permanently.  And now she has to find a job, at the minimum wage.  That’s a hard life, and it’s happening to a lot of our parents. 

When Puerto Rico became a colony of the United States in 1898, American clothing manufacturers didn’t waste much time.  By 1915, they had set up a whole needlework industry on the island.  There they could escape from the unions and make bigger profits by using the labor of women and children. 

Lucila Padrón is now in her seventies. She clearly remembers what her childhood was like. 

It was awful.  I was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico.  That’s where I was raised and went to school.  I started doing needlework when I was a little girl, in order to help my parents, because we were poor.  After the housework and school, instead of playing, we had to sew.  It was a sacrifice. 

Lucila and her sisters started working at home.  Local contractors would distribute bundles of fabric already cut and ready to be sewn to women all across the island.  The women would return the finished products beautifully sewn and embroidered, all by hand.  Then the work was shipped to New York and sold in exclusive department stores like Wanamaker’s or B. Altman’s. 

Our work was really something to see.  It was all done by hand—no machines.  Tracing, embroidering, assembling, all of it by hand.  And do you know what they paid us? For all that intricate work?  Later on, when I came to New York, I saw the clothes we made selling in Wanamaker’s on 14th Street.  Here, those robes or dresses sold for $100 or more.  There, they used to pay us for one of those dresses, with all that embroidery—three dollars.  So, to earn ten or twelve dollars a week, we had to work day and night. 

Lucila was a teenager when she came to New York in 1927. She wanted to continue her education, but instead she had to support herself and then her own family. 

When I came to New York, I had a hard time at first, because I couldn’t find a sewing job.  I used to walk back and forth, across Manhattan, from shop to shop, from one end of the island to the other, until I finally found a job as a seamstress . . . I worked in garment factories for 30 years, working so I could get where I am now and give my children an education.  And I’m very proud of that. 

Like Lucila, many of our grandparents migrated to New York during these early years looking for work.  Some had been driven off the land by American sugar monopolies.  Cigarmakers, carpenters and other skilled workers came too. 

By 1930 there were over 50,000 Puerto Ricans in the United States.  Men, women and entire families came.  The journey took five days by boat and most people settled in East Harlem, or along the Brooklyn waterfront. 

Luisa López came as a child in 1923 on the steamship Coamo. 

My mother and father came to get us at the boat, and when I came into the apartment I found my brother at a machine, sewing.  What was he doing?

Coffee bags.  Everybody used to help my mother; that machine was going on all day long.  I was sewing, my sister was sewing, my brother was sewing, everybody to help out. 

Sewing meant economic survival for many Puerto Rican families.  During the Depression, Luisa and her sister went to work in garment factories.  Puerto Rican women were the newcomers, competing for jobs with Italian and Jewish women. 

I was working in a shop called Elfran’s Dress Company, in El Barrio, on 104th Street.  The Italian girls, they wanted to sit down, and the rest of the girls refused to work, because they didn’t want to work with Puerto Ricans.  When I saw that, I went to the union, and I spoke to the manager, and I told him what had happened.  This manager over here was Italian, he was an old-time socialist, the most wonderful person you ever came to know.  His name was Joe Piscatello.  He called everybody to the union.  And I explained to him, “You know, I’m more an American citizen than some of these people are, that don’t even know how to speak English.”  He gave them hell!  He gave them hell!  So we all went back to work. 

By 1937, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union had more than 2,000 Puerto Rican members.  Ironically, just a few years later in the early forties, Luisa lost her union job, in a way that forecast what would happen to thousands of garment workers in the seventies and eighties. 

His name was Mr. Cohen.  And he opened up five shops in Puerto Rico, that’s how come I lost my job.  We belonged to the union over here, he had to pay us higher wages.  While in Puerto Rico at that time, he could pay fifteen and twenty cents an hour. 

After World War Two, U.S. manufacturers were offered big tax breaks to set up factories in Puerto Rico.  This was part of Operation Bootstrap, the plan to industrialize the island.  But these new factories, many of them garment and light industry, never provided enough jobs.  So although industry was busy relocating to the island, by the end of the sixties close to a million Puerto Ricans had migrated to New York. 

This was our mothers’ generation.  Our parents settled with family or friends, in furnished rooms or tenement apartments, in East Harlem, the Lower East Side, or the South Bronx . . .

In the 1950s, the garment industry in New York was booming. Puerto Rican women were hired by the thousands as sewing machine operators, one of the lowest paying jobs in the trade.  Although many of our mothers were already experienced needleworkers, by this time the garment industry no longer needed such fine skills.  Clothing production was changing.  Seamstresses used to make whole garments, but now, women were sewing only sections, in assembly-line fashion. 

Section work is sewing zippers, or collars.  When I first came to this country, I was sewing the whole garment.  But later, I found section work.  Because working sections, you can make a lot more money.  And I was fast. 

Section work allowed New York garment manufacturers to increase production.  And this new, cheap labor pool meant they could also increase their profits.  Thousands of Puerto Rican and black women became low-paid, unskilled section workers—easily exploited, and easily replaced.  Because wages were so low, women like María Rodríguez often brought home extra work, even though home work was illegal. 

The boss let me take bundles home, and I used to do it at night.  I’d work two hours, three hours to make a little more money.  And some times weekends I used to take it, and Victor used to help me.  I’d teach my husband how to do it, so he used to help me to do the bundles also.  So then, I’d make about $35, sometimes $38. 

Many women, like Dolores Juarbe, found themselves working in sweatshops—small, nonunion operations in firetrap buildings which violated minimum wage laws, paid no overtime, sick leave, or vacation. 

There was not any union there.  In that shop you had to sew, as fast as you could.  And everyone smoked.  The shop was in a basement.  Once in a while the fire department would pay a little visit.  The boss told us to stop smoking, that the fire department was on the way.  The alerter heard that they were coming, you know, she used to pay them off.  So then, they could knock real loud on the door: bam bam bam!  And all the cigarettes would disappear. 

Not only were our mothers subjected to these poor working conditions, some even had to fight off the boss. 

I did not like the boss.  The boss could not keep his hands of the girls.  He was always walking in and touching them and squeezing them.  So one day, he came to me, and like he tried to feel me up, and I told him, “Listen,” I said.  “I don’t like you. I don’t like this job, I don’t like the way you treat the girls.  So you can keep it!” I got ready to leave. “Oh, don’t go, don’t go.”  “Oh, no,” I said. “You are a pig!”

Many Puerto Rican women looked for union shops where they expected to get protection, benefits and higher wages.  During the fifties, labor unions were stepping up their organizing, and many of our mothers and grandmothers led that effort.  Some became union chairladies and organizers, and sometimes the chairlady had the power to stop the shop. 

Eva Monge remembers how she shut down her housecoat factory to support a dressmakers’ strike. 

The dresses were going on strike.  The boss right away stopped the housecoats and gave us dresses.  The first day, I said, “All right, but . . .”   I noticed that the strike kept on.  So, on the second day I said, “Mrs. Corey, every girl on this shop is going to finish the bundle that they’re doing.  They’re not going to make no more dresses.”  You know, that boss went to the dressing room and she cried!  But it was from anger.  She knew that she was wrong—she was breaking the strike. 

By the 1960s Puerto Rican women made up over 25 percent of New York sewing machine operators.  The rank and file of the garment unions was now overwhelmingly Puerto Rican and Black.  But despite their numbers and their histories of activism, few Black or Puerto Rican women find themselves in positions of power.  For decades, the top union leaders have been conservative white men. 

Gloria Maldonado is a business agent for ILGWU Local 22-89-1.  But she is an exception.

I’m the only woman here.  The only woman officer, and the only Hispanic business agent.  The manager is Puerto Rican, but I’m the only woman.  So I’m Puerto Rican, I’m a woman and I’m Black I’ve got three affirmative action points (laughs). 

. . . During the fifties and sixties, our mothers’ work gave our families some economic stability.  But then, things began to change.  Over the last 30 years, well over 200,000 garment jobs have left New York City alone.  And so operators have dwindled to a bare minimum in factories like Juanita Erazo’s, where older, higherpaid workers are the first to go. 

My friend María, she’s been working for him for 29 years, just like me.  She was the first one he laid off.  That’s how he discriminates!  He gets rid of the one who earns more money, and those are the older and more experienced operators.  The boss just spent three weeks in Taiwan, and he came back loaded down.  The factory is four stories high, and practically all the floors are filled with that imported work.  What he wants to do is turn the factory into a shipping department, and get rid of the operators altogether.  Because the work comes already finished, and ready to sell.

Today, garments are cut in New York, sewn in Taiwan, Korea or Mexico, finished in Puerto Rico, and sent back to New York for distribution.  An operator in Haiti is paid 21 cents an hour, for what in New York costs over $3.00. 

As they learned with the Puerto Rican model in the thirties and again in the fifties, clothing manufacturers find it even more profitable today to set up shops in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.  Gloria Maldonado describes just how massive this relocation is. 

Some of these countries, they do a lot of needlework.  And capital people, they saw the advantage of making good money, at the expense of other people’s misery.  And at the expense of our people working here.  Big firms started going out, and little by little they started expanding, expanding, until before we knew it . . . It used to be maybe two, three garments out of ten that were imported.  Now it’s five or six out of ten.  The shops are not the ones that are running away, it’s the manufacturers.  For instance, our Joe Namath, you know, big shot Joe Namath, has a line of men’s clothes.  Where is he getting it done? China.  The thing is, that even though they’re made there for less money, it’s not sold here for less money like years back.

. . . While manufacturers take their capital abroad, our mothers face widespread layoffs, which often deprives them of their pensions.  After years at the machines, many of our mothers suffer back and leg pains, or they are crippled by arthritis. 

At the same time, thousands of poor women are migrating to the United States, hoping to escape poverty and often, political repression in their countries.  They become cheap labor in factories and sweatshops.  Many are undocumented and live in fear of deportation.  Juanita Erazo was horrified by a recent immigration raid on her factory in Brooklyn. 

In the factory there are Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Colombians and Haitians.  The last time Immigration raided, they took everyone away.  They took Puerto Ricans away too.  They handcuffed them, they filled two buses up with people.  Then, after they left, the boss went looking around, and there were people hiding in boxes! 

As a union official, Gloria Maldonado has seen how all of this has affected our mothers’ generation. 

People are just not making it.  The small shops are closing up, and that’s where it affects our people, our generation, of Puerto Rican women who are not old enough to retire, but have put in 20, 30 years.  They stay with this one little shop because it was like a family.  All of a sudden, the man has to close because there is no work. . . .

These are the women who raised us. The were not only our mothers and grandmothers, but our cousins, aunts, neighbors, friends.  They went to the factories early in the morning and sat in front of those machines day after day.  They confronted the difficulties of migration, poverty, low pay, discrimination, and unstable jobs.  In spite of that, they raised us and kept our families together.  They fought for our education, organized in the communities and on the job, and they gave us a legacy of struggle. 

My mother’s work set the tone in the family, set the tone for hard work and struggle.  She never missed a day of work, which used to amaze us.  She was there at 8:00 in the morning, she came home at 5, 5:30, by the time she came in from Brooklyn.  And what she always said to us was, ‘You have to study.  You have to study so that you could be a teacher, you could be a nurse.’  And we knew what it meant to us, so that we did study.  We got somewhere because she worked so hard.  Now I know that that’s not true for a lot of Puerto Ricans, I know that for the majority of Puerto Ricans, working hard hasn’t led to success. 

All these stories are a chapter in our history, which for the most part has yet to be told.  Our mothers and grandmothers shared their lives with us, so that we could understand more clearly where we are today. 

Abridged from Radio documentary: "Nosotras Trabajamos en la Costura/Puerto Rican Women in the Garment Industry," produced by Rina Benmayor, Ana Juarbe, Kimberly Safford and Blanca Vasquez Erazo Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos, Hunter College, 1985).  Program funded in part by National Endowment for the Humanities.  Bilingual cassette available.

In the following selection, Celia Alvarez, a daughter of Puerto Rican migrants who moved to the mainland in the 1950s, and one of the researchers who collected the women’s stories, reflects on her own experiences growing up in New York City.  As you read the passage, think about the similarities and differences between her life and the lives of those who came before her.

My mother migrated to New York in the early 1950s during the period of rapid urbanization and industrialization concomitant with Operation Bootstrap on the Island.  She was also a seamstress.  She married soon after her arrival and subsequently had the three of us, one right after the other. 

Raised in the projects of downtown Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Navy Yard I often wondered: What were we doing here? How did we get here?  And why?  Nobody said too much, however; no one wanted to talk about the poverty and pain, the family truces and secrets which clouded the tremendous upheaval from Ponce to San Juan to New York. 

I grew up speaking Spanish, dancing la pachanga, merengue, and mambo, eating arroz con habichuelas and drinking malta y café.  I was smart, and learned to play the chords of the bureaucratic machinery of housing, education, and welfare very well at a very young age.  I translated for everyone—my mother, her friends, our neighbors, as well as my teachers.  My parents kept us close to home and it was my responsibility to keep my brother and sister in tow. 

It was hard to understand it all, to try to make sense of who I was as a Puerto Rican in New York, so I read everything I could get my hands on; watched the games the government would play between Afro-Americans and Puerto Ricans with social service monies; heard the poverty pimps tell their lies; watched the kids die of dope or heard about them getting killed down elevator chutes in the middle of a burglary; noted the high overpriced tags on old food being sold in the only supermarket in the neighborhood; knew of kids being raped and thrown off the roof.  And I asked, “Why?”

The socially active local parish church became my refuge.  It was there that I began to make connections with the poor whites, Afro-Americans, and Asians in my community, and said there had to be a better way for us all.  I participated in a variety of activities including youth programs, the local food coop, and newsletter, which basically involved me in community organizing, although I didn’t know you called it grassroots work then.  I got swept up by the energy of the civil rights movement and wanted to go to the march on Washington but my mother said, “No!” She worried about me—didn’t like me wearing my Martin Luther King button or getting involved in politics.  She was afraid I would get hurt.  I always liked being out on the street talking to people, however, and she knew from way back that I was not destined to stay inside. 

Tensions flourished when I turned fourteen and told my parents I was going out with a Puerto Rican boy in the neighborhood.  Unfortunately, “boyfriend” in America and novio in Puerto Rico did not translate to mean the same thing.  In 1968 I was chaperoned and followed by my father wherever I went because of that grave mistake.  Their biggest fear?  That I would get pregnant. They even threatened to send me to Puerto Rico.  I had it all planned out that I would run away and stay with my cousin.  She was the first to move out and get her own place.  At least we could keep each other company.  It never happened but we’ve been close ever since.

During this same period I started high school in a predominantly white school in the heart of Flatbush.  I found myself desegregating the Catholic school system, one of five or six latinas and Afro-Americans in my class.  I was known as one of the girls from the ghetto downtown and was constantly called upon to defend my race.  One day it went too far.  Someone said my father didn’t work and that their parents supported my coming to their school.  I “went off”! You just didn’t talk about my family!

I never told my parents about the racist slurs—never had the heart.  They were breaking their backs to send me to school; my father kept his job at a city hospital for thirty years and took on a second job at the docks.  We would all go help him clean offices at night and on weekends after our day outings together.  My mother went back to work in a paper factory down the street.  Prior to that, she had taken care of the children of women in the neighborhood who worked.  I’ve also worked since about the time I was fourteen. 

Anyway, I graduated high school with honors.  I had every intention of going to college—I thought it would give me the credentials to be in a position to act on the miseducation that I saw we were getting.  Of course I needed money to go, so I went to talk to my guidance counselor.  She always prided herself in being able to say a few words in Spanish . . . her way of “relating.”  I inquired about government grants programs as well as anything else that she could tell me about.  All she could say to me was, “Well, you’re not the only one who needs money to go to school, dear.” 

No thanks to her, I managed to get to college with the help of ASPIRA.  I marched over to their office on 14th Street—we didn’t have a club in our school, there were too few of us—and presented myself to one of the counselors there.  I’ll always be grateful that he took me under his wing despite the fact he had an overbooked case load.  I applied to about ten schools, got into most of them and decided to go to a new institution in New England that broke away from the traditional, predetermined academic program and was primarily based on a mentoring system between student and teacher. 

So I left home and landed in a progressive liberal arts college which looked more like a country club than anything else.  It was so quiet I had to study with my radio blasting to concentrate.  Ironically, it was there that I found my first Afro-American and Puerto Rican teachers.  I was relieved to know someone who understood the reference points in my life without my having to explain.  After pursuing some studies on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean—for the only formal mention of Puerto Rico in all my schooling up to that point had been in a geography class in which we had discussed its mineral resources—I studied questions of language planning, bilingualism and education, language, culture, and identity.  I thought that knowledge of these areas would be useful to the Puerto Rican community. . . . I was admonished not to study the reality of Puerto Ricans because somehow I would be “getting over” and not doing valid research.  Ironically, given my gender, class background, nationality, and race, I was as marginalized as ever in that setting. 

Which brings me back to our oral history project.  Listening to these women’s stories has served as a tremendous source of inspiration and validation of my own experience as a Puerto Rican woman.  They captured and brought back to life the struggles of my own socialization during the 1960s.  Though born in New York, I grappled with many of the same social issues and problems as Flor, Lucila, and Eulalia.  However, it was within the context of the educational opportunities historically afforded me through the civil rights movement, in conjunction with my own parents’ 
determination, that I was able to actualize myself in higher education and be in a position to help define this project.  This oral history project enabled me to integrate all the different parts of myself—my skills as an intellectual, organizer, and nurturer, as well as my experience as a working-class Puerto Rican woman. 

Through the public events linked to our research, I have been able to bring this experience back home: to my own neighborhood in Brooklyn, which I came to find out was one of the earlier Puerto Rican settlements in New York; and to my mother who came to our event on Puerto Rican garment workers and finally understood what it was I did at the university and how it was not a rejection but a continuation of her legacy to me.  Our relationship qualitatively changed after that event: there was more honesty between us; we spoke woman to woman.  And it is because of this convergence of historical and personal circumstance that I am sharing this collective experience with you the reader. 
 
 

SOURCE: "Stories to Live By: Continuity and Change in Three Generations of Puerto Rican Women." Excerpts from Oral History Review. Rina Benmayor, Ana Juarbe, Blanca Vasquez Erazo, and Celia Alvarez. 16:2 (Fall1988) pp. 1-46.

OAH EDITOR’S NOTE: While the layout is strictly of our design, the text is reprinted verbatim from the New York State Curriculum.