World They Never Made

This immigration had been different. The Puerto Ricans came not by ship, huddled in the steerage, but by plane. Being U.S. citizens, they beat at no immigration bars, never had their pictures taken in colorful native costume behind the wire enclosures of Ellis Island. They simply seeped in, landing by 20s and 30s from battered planes at La Guardia field, Teterboro and Newark, suddenly appearing beside their cardboard suitcases on the city's sidewalks outside a hole-in-the-wall travel agency.

Jobless, speaking a strange tongue, crowded into miserable tenements, thousands soon turned up on the relief rolls, costing the city $15,600,000 a year. Their children crowded the already crowded public schools. With shrill cries of outrage and alarm, the sensational journals gave tongue, blaming them for every civic woe. Feature writers found them living five and six to a room, two and three families to an apartment, in cellars and abandoned stores, even in coalbins. The average Puerto Rican was pictured heaving his disease-racked body off the plane and heading straight for a relief center. More sinister yet, he was herded about to vote for Communist-minded Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

Willing But Beset. There was some truth, but a lot of exaggeration in this alarming picture. Last week it was possible to get a clearer and cooler idea of the "Puerto Rican problem." Even Marcantonio's hold on the immigrants was not what it once was. Mayor William O'Dwyer's administration had done a lot to cut down Marcantonio's power, by installing Spanish-speaking teachers and relief workers in the neighborhood, thus convincing the new people that someone besides Vito Marcantonio took an interest in them.

Columbia University had just completed the first comprehensive study (which Harper will publish next month) of New York's Puerto Ricans. Columbia men surveyed 1,113 Puerto Rican families comprising 5,000 people. They found that one out of every three had been on relief at one time or another. They found a willing people, beset by all kinds of difficulty. "The opportunities for advancement seem increasingly narrow for the poor, the uneducated, and 'the foreign,' " said Columbia's report.

But the Puerto Ricans had also done better than anyone expected. Nine out of ten had found jobs. The percentage of Puerto Ricans on relief, authorities estimated, was now no more than other bottom-of-the-ladder groups, e.g., the Negroes.

"When you consider the language handicap and the economic position of these people when they arrived," said City Commissioner of Welfare Raymond M. Hilliard, "it is remarkable that the relief figure isn't higher than it is."

The Puerto Rican invasion began long ago, and slowly. But at the end of World War II, thousands of Puerto Ricans were seized with a sudden, simultaneous urge. In the four years-since V-J day, 122,935 Puerto Ricans have poured into the U.S. To them, the U.S. is New York City and 275,000 to 300,000 of them now live in its five boroughs.

To the Barrio. North from Manhattan's 96th Street, the railroad tracks that run muffled under fashionable Park Avenue burst noisily into the open. The proud avenue itself splits around it, plunges down into narrow, squalid lanes flanked by ancient tenements. There, in what New Yorkers now call Spanish Harlem, the Puerto Ricans clotted. The Puerto Ricans call it "the Barrio."

Gradually, the swarming Puerto Ricans pushed the Negroes north, the Italians eastward. They expanded across the top of Central Park, crept down the other side. Other pockets established themselves on the lower East Side, in Brooklyn and The Bronx.

But the Barrio remained the receiving station, and the Puerto Rican core, This is the noisome, teeming squalor that greets the hopeful immigrant seeking the promised land.

Piraquas & Manure. Garbage cans line the curb, from many of them refuse spills over on to the sidewalk. A fire burns in a cluttered gutter. A honking car scatters a game of stick ball in the street. On the corner, a cart vendor sells piraguas (shaved ice flavored with colored sirup) for 3-c- a cup. An old woman scrambles on her hands & knees under a horse-drawn cart, scooping fresh manure into a cardboard box.

In a vacant lot, two kids wrestle among the blackened cans and broken glass. Men sit on the stoops of the rotting brownstone tenements, or stand in curiously static groups around a store front. There are girls in short, shiny black dresses, insolent-eyed young bucks in sharp, striped suits. Dogs, furtive and thin-ribbed, slink through the areaways sniffing for scraps. In an abandoned building, windows glare emptily, but a family is living in the basement. From other windows patched with adhesive tape and cardboard, women watch the noisy street with worried eyes. They seldom scream-at the kids, as women of other lands do.

Bodegas & Charms. In the Barrio (i.e., district), the Puerto Ricans have created their own city. The store signs are in Spanish. At the bodegas (grocery stores) they sell green coconuts, chick peas and mangoes. The carnecerias (butcher shops) sell Spanish sausage, salt pork fat, chicken feet (3 Ibs. for 25-c-) and salted pigs' tails.

In cafes, men sit for hours playing dominoes or cards, quietly sipping rum or beer.

Every morning the sidewalks are thronged with vendedores, selling chances on the day's bolito (the numbers game). From tiny store-front churches comes a strange calypso-like music of tambourines, banjos and maracas.

The proliferation of such churches, largely sponsored by obscure evangelical Pentecostal sects, is by far the most conspicuous religious activity in the Barrio, though most Puerto Ricans (83%) are nominally Roman Catholics. Columbia University investigators found that though most Puerto Ricans still profess themselves Catholics, they attend church less regularly than they did back home.

Under the guise of "religious articles," stores do a thriving business selling spiritualist charms. There is Attraction Incense, incense "to vibrate the powers of Lady Luck," Compelling Incense, High Conquering Incense ("Its fumes the steppingstone to the mighty conqueror condition"). Harder to find are the brujos, who cure asthma by hanging a tiny dead green frog in a bag around the neck.

The Immigrant. The Puerto Rican migrant is neither Puerto Rico's scum, nor its ignorant, nor its shiftless, as he is often pictured. The average immigrant is better educated (six years of school) than the island's average, Columbia found, and almost all of them left jobs in Puerto Rico. Nor is he a peasant. Most come from the island's two biggest cities, San Juan and Ponce.

With a prodigious birth rate and a declining death rate, Puerto Rico's one-crop sugar economy cannot keep pace with its population, which is increasing at a rate unequaled anywhere else in the world. The average Puerto Rican earned only $14 a week. In New York, he could confidently expect to double his wages. Some dreamed of their children becoming doctors, lawyers, nurses. In the bucket seats of a DC-3, passage was only $40.

The migration, unlike any other in history, numbered more women than men. Many came ahead of their husbands. They arrived clutching the address of relatives, moved in with them until they found jobs and an apartment, then sent for husband and children. Often, parents, brothers & sisters followed. In New York City, it was easy for the Puerto Rican woman to find a job. Garment factories valued their skilled needlework; housewives sought them as domestics.

The City's Lessons. The big city taught the Puerto Ricans more evil than they brought with them. Few arrived with any fluency in English. Though Puerto Rican blood carries racial strains from white through Indian to Negro, most considered themselves white. In New York, they found that two-thirds of them were considered colored, in a land where color makes a great deal of difference. Older Italian immigrants, their unwilling neighbors, resented the fact that "people who could not even speak English" had all the rights of citizenship. Negroes found them competing for rooms and jobs, and there were fights because Negro girls went out with Puerto Rican boys. Puerto Ricans learned what it is to be the object of prejudice, often met discrimination. "The poorest they have in the store is good enough for the Puerto Ricans," is a common observation in the Barrio.

Men Behind the Scenes. Shouted at by bus drivers, buffeted in subways, battered by a strange language, the Puerto Rican is shy and afraid. He learns tracks through the urban jungle, never ventures far from them for fear of getting lost. Apartments are found only after a search of months and the newcomers must pay an average $600 for the furniture to fit out three cramped, scabrous rooms, renting for $25 a month.

Naturally tidy, they keep the shabby rooms spotless, but there is no keeping down the cockroaches that scuttle across the linoleum flooring or the rats that infest the blocked-off dumbwaiters and the rotting spaces between the walls. (Every week 15 to 25 Barrio babies are bitten by rats as they sleep.) And Puerto Ricans, reared under a tropical sun that burns dry any refuse, have no feeling about garbage. They just heave it into the alley. The men have a hard time getting jobs. When they do, they find the U.S. tempo exacting. Said one plaintively: "If one fails to report for work a single day, someone takes his place." They work in small factories, soldering lipstick cases making zippers or paper boxes, packing vegetables or candy. They dig ditches and work ships. Often, they are the big city's men behind the scenes. They wash the dishes, make the beds, clean the offices, launder the clothes, change the tablecloths. All in all, the Barrio seems a disappointing promised land. Nearly half of the immigrants live doubled up, or take in boarders. The average family income is only $36 a week, and 40% make less than $30 a week. The Barrio's death rate from tuberculosis is two or three times the city's average.

The women worry about their children. Even the adults are afraid to go out on the streets at night. Wailed one mother: "Our children grow up to be bandits, playing on the streets. They cannot be scolded or punished." Like other slum children, Puerto Rican boys get into trouble. They fight each other, run away from home, cut school; sometimes there are knifings and rapes. But there are seldom robberies or gang assaults. And once they learn English, teachers report, Puerto Rican children are responsive and quick to learn.

Why do they stay? The Puerto Ricans of the Barrio dislike the big city's impersonal hostility ("People here are cold and act as if they didn't trust each other"), miss the music and dancing of the easygoing life they left. But the slums they came from were no better than the slums they live in now. If they have little chance in this generation of rising to the wide levels of opportunities as lawyers, doctors or businessmen, they have already begun to find places in U.S. society as workers and laborers. And then there are their children. Said one Puerto Rican mother: "Children are better here. Better hope." That, the old immigrant's hope, also holds the new.

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