NEW YORK

Most of the 1.3 million Puerto Ricans in the greater New York City area live in the grim, crumbling tenements of Manhattan's East Harlem and Lower East Side, or in Brooklyn's Williamsburg ghetto, or in the burned-out wasteland of the South Bronx. For them, life is mostly a grinding struggle for survival.

But then there are the festivals, especially Puerto Rican Day in June, when some 250,000 members of the community parade up Fifth Avenue and turn Central Park into a joyous 840-acre cookout. It is then that Puerto Rican exuberance blossoms. Hotels and nightclubs rock to the three-two rhythms of salsa. Hot dog vendors watch forlornly as their all-American offerings are spurned in favor of bacalaitos (codfish fritters), alcapurrias (plantain-meat rolls) and tostones (fried plantains). The community comes ablaze -- forgetting for a while the gritty realities of its plight.

Puerto Ricans are the largest -- and most beleaguered -- national group among the estimated 2.6 million Hispanics in and near New York City.* They are, of course, not ordinary immigrants but U.S. citizens, as are all 3.3 million inhabitants of the Puerto Rican commonwealth. Despite that advantage, the Puerto Rican experience today is all too often one of blighted hopes. Says Carlos Garcia, 20, a school dropout and part-time carpenter on Manhattan's Lower East Side: "I expected a West Side Story, and never got it."

Puerto Ricans are even more hard pressed than New York's ghetto blacks; 48% earn less than $7,000 a year, compared with 42% among blacks. The proportion of Puerto Ricans on welfare is 34%, vs. 32% for blacks. Among Puerto Ricans over 16 years old, only 6% have completed any job training; the rate for blacks is twice as high. With 14% of New York City's population, Puerto Ricans hold only 3.1% of police department jobs and 1.3% of those in the fire department.

With Puerto Rican youngsters now making up 25% of the pubic school population, one of the community's highest priorities is education. But according to New York's deputy mayor for education, Herman Badillo, the city's efforts on behalf of Hispanic pupils are a "disaster in all areas." Says Badillo, a Puerto Rican: "We have plenty of jobs in the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan; the problem is that kids can't spell."

After heavy prompting in the form of a judicial agreement signed in 1974, New York grudgingly began providing bilingual education for Spanish-speaking youngsters. By the New York City board of education's most recent estimate, there were only 2,333 Hispanics among the city's 48,813 teachers.

Meantime, Badillo estimates the Puerto Rican school-dropout rate at 85%. Discouraged youngsters are almost natural prospects for membership in the city's underclass, quickly contributing to the ghetto plagues of violent crime, drug use and arson. Says one Lower East Side youngster: "A lot of kids want an education to get out of here. But in order to survive, they're dealing [drugs]. Kids ten and eleven make more money than their old man in the factory." Says another: "I saw some pictures of this place 20 years ago, and it had benches and trees. We took it over and we burned it up."

That could be one result of the deep ambivalence that many Puerto Ricans feel about living in the U.S. Indeed, after two decades of steadily rising immigration, the trend in recent years has been in the opposite direction--back to Puerto Rico. On any night, airliners buzz over the Statue of Liberty filled with returning or visiting Puerto Ricans who can afford the $87 fare. At Christmas, there is a two-month waiting list for night-flight seats to San Juan. Successful Puerto Ricans often prefer to export their new affluence. Says John Torres, head of the Metropolitan Spanish Merchants Association in The Bronx: "We don't vote enough nor do we get involved in the political process. I know many, many people who have two dreams: to have a house in Puerto Rico and to educate their children."

Ex-Congressman Badillo points out that only 13 years ago he was the sole Puerto Rican actively engaged in elective politics. Now the community can boast three New York City councilmen, four state representatives and two state senators. Badillo's fellow Hispanics lamented his decision to abandon Congress for his deputy mayor's job, but his successor in Washington, Robert Garcia, is applauded as a compassionate, hard-working advocate of Puerto Rican concerns. Still, activists like Dora Collazo-Levy, 42, a Democratic Party district leader, complain that political passivity is the Puerto Rican community's principal bane. Says she: "People ask us why they should vote. We give them long-range answers."

Where music and dancing and painting are concerned, though, New York City's Hispanics are anything but passive. Salsa Bandleader Eddie Palmieri, 41, has become a latino superstar who packs halls across the U.S. No fewer than 169 recognized bands regularly tour New York City's circuit of Latin clubs and dance halls. Cityarts, an artists' collective now funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, mobilizes painters to create ghetto murals. Last March El Museo del Barrio, a Puerto Rican cultural museum begun in 1969, opened new quarters on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Its first show, "Resurgiemento," included Artist Domingo Garcia, whose work is in the city's Museum of Modern Art collection. Miriam ColOn, whose Puerto Rican Traveling Theater gives summertime performances in ghetto streets from the back of a flatbed truck, has opened the first Hispanic off-Broadway theater in a recycled West Side firehouse and will offer plays in both English and Spanish. On the Lower East Side, the New Rican Village cultural center lures actors and dancers and poets. So whatever else the New York experience has done to Puerto Ricans, it has not stifled the creative impulse.

*Among the others: 400,000 Dominicans, 220,000 Cubans, 200,000 Colombians, 170,000 Ecuadorians and 150,000 Peruvians. An estimated half of these are illegal residents.

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