December 1991
Most people think of inner-city poverty as a black phenomenon. But it is
also alarmingly high among Puerto Ricans, the worst-off ethnic group in
the country–even though Puerto Rico itself has made great progress against poverty and
there is a growing Puerto Rican middle-class on the mainland
by Nicholas Lemann
The term “Hispanic” which is used to describe Spanish-speaking American
ethnic groups–mainly Mexican-Americans, but also Cubans, Puerto Ricans,
Dominicans, Colombians, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and immigrants from
other Latin American countries–may wind up having only a brief run in
common parlance. It has been in official governmental use for only a few
years; the Census Bureau did not extensively use the term “Hispanic” until
the 1980 census. Now it faces two threats: First, although most Hispanic
groups are comfortable with the term, another name, “Latino,” is gaining
favor, especially on campuses, because it implies that Latin America has a
distinctive indigenous culture, rather than being just a step-child of
Spain. Second, the very idea that it is useful to try to understand all
Americans with Spanish-speaking backgrounds as members of a single group
tends to crumble on examination.
Cubans, who are much more prosperous than the other Hispanic subgroups,
have now risen above the national mean in family income. They are
concentrated in Florida. Mexican-Americans, who make up about two thirds
of the country’s 22.4 million Hispanics, live mainly in the Southwest,
especially California and Texas. Puerto Ricans are the second-largest
Hispanic group–2.75 million people in the mainland United States. A third
of them live in one city–New York.
As soon as the Hispanic category is broken down by group, what leaps out
at anyone who takes even a casual look at the census data is that Puerto
Ricans are the worst off ethnic group in the United States. For a period in the mid-1980s
nearly half of all Puerto Rican families were living in poverty. It seems
commonsensical that for Hispanics poverty would be a function of their
unfamiliarity with the mainland United States, inability to speak English,
and lack of education. But Mexican Americans, who are no more proficient in English than Puerto Ricans, less
likely to have finished high school, and more likely to have arrived here
very recently, have a much lower poverty rate. The Journal of the American
Medical Association reported earlier this year that, as the newsletter of
a leading Puerto Rican organization put it, “On almost every health
indicator…Puerto Ricans fared worse” than Mexican-Americans or Cubans.
Infant mortality was 50 percent higher than among Mexican-Americans, and
nearly three times as high as among Cubans.
The statistics also show Puerto Ricans to be much more severely afflicted
than Mexican-Americans by what might be called the secondary effects of
poverty, such as family breakups, and not trying to find employment–which
work to ensure that poverty will continue beyond one generation. In 1988
females headed 44 percent of Puerto Rican families, as opposed to 18
percent of Mexican-American families. Mexican-Americans had a slightly
higher unemployment rate, but Puerto Ricans had a substantially higher
rate in the sociologically ominous category “labor force
non-participation,” meaning the percentage of people who haven’t looked
for a job in the previous month.
Practically everybody in America feels some kind of emotion about blacks,
but Puerto Rican leaders are the only people I’ve ever run across for whom
the emotion is pure envy. In New York City, black median family income is
substantially higher than Puerto Rican, and is rising more rapidly. The
black home-ownership rate is more than double the Puerto Rican rate.
Puerto Rican families are more than twice as likely as black families to
be on welfare, and are about 50 percent more likely to be poor. In the
mainland United States, Puerto Ricans have nothing like the black
institutional network of colleges, churches, and civil-rights
organizations; there isn’t a large cadre of visible Puerto Rican successes
in nearly every field; black politicians are more powerful than Puerto
Rican politicians in all the cities with big Puerto Rican populations; and
there is a feeling that blacks have America’s attention, whereas Puerto
Ricans, after a brief flurry of publicity back in West Side Story days,
have become invisible.
The question of why poverty is so widespread, and so persistent, among
Puerto Ricans is an urgent one, not only for its own sake but also because
the answer to it might prove to be a key to understanding the broader
problem of the urban underclass. “Underclass” is a supposedly nonracial
term, but by most definitions the underclass is mostly black, and
discussions of it are full of racial undercurrents. Given the history of
American race relations, it is nearly impossible for people to consider
issues like street crime, unemployment, the high school dropout rate, and
out-of-wedlock pregnancy without reopening a lot of ancient wounds. To
seek an explanation for poverty among Puerto Ricans rather than blacks may
make possible a truly deracialized grasp of what most experts agree is a
non-race-specific problem. Although there is no clear or agreed-upon
answer, the case of Puerto Ricans supports the view that being part of the
underclass in the United States is the result of a one-two punch of
economic factors, such as unemployment and welfare, and cultural ones,
such as neighborhood ambience and ethnic history.
THE FIRST EMIGRATION
Puerto Rico was inhabited solely by Arawak Indians until 1493, when
Christopher Columbus visited it on his second voyage to the New World. The
island became a Spanish colony, and it remained one until 1898. In that
year an autonomous Puerto Rican government was set up, with Spain’s
blessing, but it functioned for only a few days; American troops invaded
during the Spanish-American War and the island became a possession of the
United States shortly thereafter. The U.S. conquest of Puerto Rico was not
the bloody kind that resonates psychologically through the generations;
there was little resistance, and the arrival of the troops was cheered in
many places. In 1917 all Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship and
allowed to elect a senate, but until after the Second World War the island
was run by a series of colonial governors sent from Washington.
During this period Puerto Rico underwent an economic transformation, as
big U.S. sugar companies came in and established plantations. Previously
the island’s main crops had been grown on small subsistence farms up in
the hills. The sugar plantations induced thousands of people to move down
to the coastal lowlands, where they became what the anthropologist Sidney
Mintz calls a “rural proletariat,” living in hastily constructed
shantytowns and often paid in company scrip. The most salient feature of
Puerto Rico throughout the first half of the twentieth century, at least
in the minds of non-Puerto Ricans, was its extreme poverty and
overpopulation. “What I found appalled me,” John Gunther wrote, in Inside
Latin America (1941), about his visit to Puerto Rico. “I saw native
villages steaming with filth–villages dirtier than any I ever saw in the
most squalid parts of China….I saw children bitten by disease and on the
verge of starvation, in slum dwellings–if you can call them
dwellings–that make the hovels of Calcutta look healthy by comparison.”
Gunther reported that more than half of Puerto Rican children of school
age didn’t go to school, that the island had the highest infant-mortality
rate in the world, and that it was the second most densely populated place
on earth, after Java.
From such beginnings Puerto Rico became, after the Second World War, one
of the great economic and political successes of the Latin American Third
World. The hero of the story is Luis Munoz Marin (the son of the most
important Puerto Rican political leader of the early twentieth century),
who founded the biggest Puerto Rican political party and, after the United
States decided to allow the island to elect its own governor, was the
first Puerto Rican to rule Puerto Rico, which he did from 1949 to 1964.
Munoz was the leading proponent of the idea of commonwealth status, as
opposed to statehood or independence, for Puerto Rico. Under the system he
helped to institute, Puerto Ricans forfeited some rights of U.S.
citizenship, such as eligibility for certain federal social-welfare
programs and the right to participate in national politics, and in return
remained free of certain responsibilities, mainly that of paying federal
income taxes. (Local taxes have always been high.)
Munoz’s main goal was the economic development of the island. He
accomplished it by building up the educational system tremendously at all
levels, by using the tax breaks to induce U.S. companies to locate
manufacturing plants in Puerto Rico, and perhaps (here we enter a realm
where the absolute truth is hard to know) by encouraging mass emigration.
Michael Lapp, a professor at the College of New Rochelle, unearthed
memoranda from several members of Munoz’s circle of advisers during the
1940s in which they discuss schemes to foster large-scale emigration from
Puerto Rico as a way of alleviating the overpopulation problem. “They
speculated about the possibility of resettling a breathtakingly large
number of people,” Lapp wrote in his doctoral dissertation, and described
several never
realized plans to create agricultural colonies for hundreds of thousands
of Puerto Ricans elsewhere in Latin America.
It’s doubtful that the Munoz government would ever have been able to
export Puerto Ricans en masse to Brazil or the Dominican Republic, but in
any case the issue became moot, because heavy voluntary emigration to an
extremely nonagricultural venue–New York City–was soon under way. In
1940 New York had 70,000 Puerto Rican residents, in 1950 it had 250,000,
and in 1960 it had 613,000. In general, what brought people there was
economic prospects vastly less dismal than those in Puerto Rico. Back
home, at the outset of the migration, industrialization was still in its
very early stages, sugar prices were depressed, and thousands of people
who had moved from the hills to the lowlands a generation earlier now had
to move again, to notorious slums on the outskirts of urban areas, such as
La Perla (“the pearl”) and El Fanguito (“the little mudhole”). “The whole
peasantry of Puerto Rico was displaced,” says Ramon Daubon, a former
vice-president of the National Puerto Rican Coalition. Among Munoz’s many
works was the construction of high
rise housing projects to replace the slums, but during the peak years of
Puerto Rican emigration little decent housing for the poor was available
locally.
In particular what set off the migration was the institution of cheap air
travel between San Juan and New York. During the 1940s and 1950s a one-way
ticket from San Juan to New York could be bought for less than $50, and
installment plans were available for those without enough cash on hand.
Munoz’s government may not have invented the emigration, but it did do
what it could to help it along–first by allowing small local airlines to
drive down air fares, and second by opening, in 1948, a Migration Division
in New York, which was supposed to help Puerto Ricans find jobs and calm
any mainland fears about the migration which might lead to its being
restricted, as had been every previous large-scale migration of an ethnic
group in the twentieth century.
THE SOUTH BRONX BECOMES THE SOUTH BRONX
At first the center of Puerto Rican New York was 116th Street and Third
Avenue, in East Harlem. This was part of the congressional district of
Vito Marcantonio, the furthest-to-the-left member of the House of
Representatives and a staunch friend of the Puerto Ricans. A rumor of the
time was that he was “bringing them up” because Italian-Americans were
moving out of Harlem and he needed a new group of loyal constituents. But
the migration increased after Marcantonio lost his seat in the 1950
election. By the end of the 1950s the Puerto Rican center had begun to
shift two miles to the north, to 149th Street and Third Avenue, in the
Bronx, which is where it is today.
At the time, the South Bronx was not a recognized district. A series of
neighborhoods at the southern tip of the Bronx–Mott Haven, Hunts Point,
Melrose–were home to white ethnics who had moved there from the slums of
Manhattan, as a step up the ladder. These neighborhoods were mostly
Jewish, Italian, and Irish. Most of the housing stock consisted of
tenement houses, but they were nicer tenements than the ones on the Lower
East Side and in Hell’s Kitchen. From there the next move was usually to
the lower-middle-class northern and eastern Bronx, or to Queens. During
the boom years after the Second World War whites were leaving the South
Bronx in substantial numbers. Meanwhile, urban renewal was displacing many
blacks and Puerto Ricans from Manhattan, and the city was building new
high-rise public housing–much of it in the South Bronx. During the
mid-1960s another persistent rumor was that Herman Badillo, who had been
appointed the city’s relocation commissioner in 1961, tried to engineer
the placement of as many Puerto Ricans as possible in the South Bronx, so
that he would have a base from which to run for office. (Badillo was
elected borough president of the Bronx in 1965, and in 1970 he became the
first Puerto Rican elected to the U.S. Congress.)
For most of the Puerto Ricans moving to the South Bronx, though, the
neighborhood was just what it had been for the area’s earlier occupants–a
step up (usually from East Harlem). All through the 1950s and 1960s it was
possible to see Puerto Ricans as a typical rising American immigrant group
(rising more slowly than most, perhaps), and their relocation to the South
Bronx was part of the evidence. The idea that New York was going to be
continually inundated by starving Puerto Rican peasants for whom there was
no livelihood at home had faded, because spectacular progress was being
made back on the island: per capita income increased sixfold from 1940 to
1963; the percentage of children attending school rose to 90.
In a new preface for the 1970 edition of Beyond the Melting Pot, Nathan
Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote, “Puerto Ricans are economically
and occupationally worse off than Negroes, but one does find a substantial
move in the second generation that seems to correspond to what we expected
for new groups in the city.” In keeping with the standard pattern for
immigrants, Puerto Ricans were beginning to achieve political power
commensurate with their numbers in the city. And the War on Poverty and
the Model Cities program created a small but important new cache of jobs
for Puerto Ricans which were more dignified and better-paying than jobs in
the garment district and hotel dining rooms and on loading docks and
vegetable farms.
But the 1970s were a nightmare decade in the South Bronx. The statistical
evidence of Puerto Rican progress out of poverty evaporated. After rising
in the 1960s, Puerto Rican median family income dropped during the 1970s.
Family structure changed dramatically: the percentage of Puerto Ricans
living in families headed by a single, unemployed parent went from 9.9 in
1960 and 10.1 in 1970 to 26.9 in 1980. The visible accompaniment to these
numbers was the extraordinary physical deterioration of the South Bronx,
mainly through arson. Jill Jonnes, in We’re Still Here: The Rise, Fall,
and Resurrection of the South Bronx, wrote:
“There was arson commissioned by landlords out for their
insurance….Arson was set by welfare recipients who wanted out of their
apartments….Many fires were deliberately set by junkies–and by that new
breed of professional, the strippers of buildings, who wanted to clear a
building so they could ransack the valuable copper and brass pipes,
fixtures, and hardware…Fires were set by firebugs who enjoyed a good
blaze and by kids out for kicks. And some were set by those who got their
revenge with fire, jilted lovers returning with a can of gasoline and a
match….”
Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but it seems safe to say that the
South Bronx lost somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 housing units during
the 1970s, and this produced the vistas of vacant, rubble-strewn city
blocks by which the outside world knows the South Bronx. Two Presidents,
Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, paid well-publicized visits to burned-out
Charlotte Street. Theories abound about why, exactly, the South Bronx
burned: the excessive strictness of rent control in New York, the
dispiriting effects of welfare and unemployment, the depredations of
drugs. It is not necessary to choose among them to be able to say that the
burning took place because most parties had abandoned any commitment to
maintaining a functional society there. It is rare for the veneer of
civilization to be eroded so rapidly anywhere during peace time. Fernando
Ferrer, the Bronx’s borough president, says, “I remember in 1974 walking
around Jennings Street. One weekend everything’s going, stores, et cetera.
The next week, boom, it’s gone. It hit with the power of a locomotive. In
’79, ’80, it seemed like EVERY goddamn thing was burning.”
By virtue of the presidential visits and its location in New York City
(and its prominence in Bonfire of the Vanities), the South Bronx has
become the most famous slum in America. To visit it today is to be amazed
by how much less completely devastated it is than we’ve been led to
expect. The area around 149th Street and Third Avenue, which is known as
the Hub, is a thriving retail district, complete with department stores
and the usual bodegas (corner stores) and botanicas (shops selling
religious items and magic potions). A neighborhood like Lawndale in
Chicago, in contrast, hasn’t had any substantial commercial establishments
for more than twenty years. During the daytime the Hub area feels lively
and safe. Also, there is new and rehabilitated housing all over the South
Bronx, including incongruous ranch-style suburban houses lining Charlotte
Street, row houses on Fox Street, and fixed-up apartment houses all over
the old tenement districts from Hunts Point to Mott Haven.
What accounts for the signs of progress is, first, a decision during the
prosperous 1980s by the administration of Mayor Ed Koch (“kicking and
screaming,” Ferrer says) to commit a sum in the low billions to the
construction and rehabilitation of housing in the South Bronx. This has
led to the opening of many thousands of new housing units. Some of them
are very unpopular in the neighborhood, because they are earmarked to
house homeless people who are being moved out of welfare hotels in
Manhattan. Community leaders in the Bronx grumble that there’s a master
plan to export Manhattan’s problems to their neighborhood.
Several impressive community-development groups, including the Mid-Bronx
Desperadoes, Bronx Venture Corporation, and Banana Kelly, have played a
part in the rehabilitation of the neighborhood, by using funds from the
city and foundations to fix up and then manage apartment buildings.
Nationally, a generation’s worth of efforts to redevelop urban slums
haven’t worked well on the whole. The lesson of the community groups’
success in the Bronx seems to be that if the focus of redevelopment is on
housing rather than job creation, and if there is money available to
renovate the housing, and if the groups are permitted to function as
tough-minded landlords, then living conditions in poor neighborhoods can
be made much more decent.
The biggest community-development organization in the South Bronx is the
South East Bronx Community Organization, which is run by Father Louis
Gigante. Gigante, a Catholic priest, is a legendary figure in the Bronx.
He is the brother of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the reputed head of the
Genovese organized-crime family. He has been associated with St.
Athanasius Church in Hunts Point since 1962, but he is an atypical priest:
he is tough, combative, politically active (he served on the New York city
council, and once ran for Congress), and immodest. The area surrounding
St. Athanasius is an oasis of clean streets and well-kept housing, which
Gigante runs in the manner of a benevolent dictator. He is known for his
tough tenant-screening policy. “You’ve got to house a base of people with
economic strength,” he told me recently. “We look at family structure–how
do they live? We visit everyone. We look in their background and see if
there are extensive social problems, like drugs or a criminal record. Back
in the late seventies, I’d only take ten or twelve percent of people on
some government subsidy–including pensions. I was looking for
working-class people. You cannot put a whole massive group of social
problems all together in one place. They’re going to kill you. They’re
going to destroy you. They’re going to eat you up with their problems.”
For many years the politics of Hunts Point was dominated by a rivalry
between Gigante and Ramon Velez, another legendary figure who was also a
New York city councilman. Velez ran the Hunts Point Multi-Service Center,
a large, government
funded social-services dispensary that provided him with a base of
political patronage jobs. Born in Puerto Rico, Velez came to the South Bronx as a
welfare caseworker in 1961, the year before Gigante arrived. A fiery
street-corner speaker, he quickly became the kind of up-from-the-streets
community leader that the War on Poverty liked to fund. He made the
multi-service center into a big organization, ran for Congress once,
registered hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican voters, became a power in
the Puerto Rican Day parade, and led demonstrations that helped induce the
city to rebuild a large South Bronx hospital, which has been by far the
most significant new source of jobs in the area. He was investigated and
audited many times because of government money unaccounted for at his
organizations. His aides were rumored to carry weapons and to threaten
political rivals with violence. (Velez says this isn’t true.) Once Velez
and Gigante got into a fistfight after Velez called Gigante a maricon
(“queer”). (Velez insists that this never happened.)
Today Gigante and Velez are both in their late fifties, gray-haired (at
least they were until recently, when Velez dyed his hair black), and
mellowed. Each professes to have developed a grudging respect for the
other. No doubt they will soon be representatives of a certain period in
the past–the rough-and-tumble period when the Bronx was just becoming
Puerto Rican. Fernando Ferrer, on the other hand, is part of the first
generation of Puerto Ricans born and raised in the Bronx to come to power.
He has been groomed for leadership ever since, as a teenager, he joined a
program for promising Puerto Rican kids called ASPIRA.
A different group–Dominicans–is now streaming into New York (mainly
Washington Heights, in Manhattan, but also the South Bronx) but is too
recently arrived to have produced the kind of leaders whose names are
widely recognized. A common Dominican route to the United States is to pay
a smuggler $800 or $1,000 for boat passage from the Dominican Republic to
Puerto Rico, and then to buy a plane ticket from San Juan to New York.
Estimates of the number of Dominicans who have moved to New York City in
the past decade run between a half million and a million. Dominicans are
known for their industriousness, and many of them are illegal aliens
ineligible for any kind of social-welfare program; they have gone into the
undesirable, illegal, or disorganized end of the labor market, working in
sweatshops, driving gypsy cabs, dealing drugs, and operating nightclubs
and other perilous small businesses. In New York City, according to Ramon
Velez, 6,500 “Puerto Rican Judases” have sold their bodegas to Dominicans.
Gigante says that many of his tenants are now Dominican. Partly because
the Dominican migration is predominantly male and the Puerto Rican family
in the South Bronx is predominantly female-headed, Dominican-Puerto Rican
marriages and liaisons are becoming common. Surely the Dominican migration
is partly responsible for the increased vitality that the South Bronx has
begun to display.
I don’t mean to make the South Bronx sound happier than it is. Only a
block and a half from the Hub, at the corner of 148th Street and Bergen
Avenue, is an outdoor drug market, one of many in the area. There is still
a great deal of deteriorated housing and vacant land where housing used to
be. I spent a couple of mornings recently at Bronx Venture Corporation, a
job-placement and community
development organization in the Hub, talking to Puerto Ricans who had come
in to get help finding work. Without exception they wanted to leave the
South Bronx. They complained about absent fathers, angry mothers, brothers
in jail, sisters on welfare; about ruthless competition with the
Dominicans for jobs, shoot-outs between drug dealers, high schools where
nobody learns, domestic violence, alcoholism, a constant sense of danger.
Something is badly wrong there.
WHY IS THERE A PUERTO RICAN UNDERCLASS?
There is no one-factor explanation of exactly what it is that’s wrong. In
fact, most of the leading theorists of the underclass could find support
for their divergent positions in the Puerto Rican experience.
One theory, which fits well with William Julius Wilson’s argument that the
underclass was created by the severe contraction of the unskilled-labor
market in the big northeastern and midwestern cities, is that Puerto
Ricans who moved to the mainland during the peak years of the migration
were unlucky in where they went. New York City lost hundreds of thousands
of jobs during the 1970s. Particularly unfortunate for Puerto Ricans was
the exodus of much of the garment industry to the South. “What I see is a
community that came here and put all its eggs in one basket, namely the
garment industry and manufacturing,” says Angelo Falcon, the president of
the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy. When the unskilled jobs in New York
began to disappear, Puerto Ricans, who had little education and so were
not well prepared to find other kinds of work, began to fall into drugs,
street crime, and family dissolution.
The ill effects of unemployment have been exacerbated by the nature of
Puerto Rican sex roles and family life. The tradition on the island is one
of strong extended-family networks. These deteriorated in New York. “You find the extended
family in Puerto Rico and the nuclear family here,” says Olga Mendez, a
Puerto Rican state senator in New York. The presence of relatives in the
home would make it easier for Puerto Rican mothers to work; their absence
tends to keep mothers at home, and so does the island ethic that women
shouldn’t work. In 1980 in New York City, 49 percent of black women and 53
percent of white women were out of the labor force-
and 66 percent of Puerto Rican women. Even this low rate of labor-force
participation is much higher than the rate for Puerto Rican women on the
island. In the United States today the two-income family is a great
generator of economic upward mobility, but it is a rare institution among
poor Puerto Ricans, whose men are often casualties of the streets,
addicted or imprisoned or drifting or dead. Also rare is the female-headed
family in which the woman works. “That poverty rates soared for Puerto
Rican families while they have declined for black families largely can be
traced to the greater success of black women in the labor market,” says a
1987 paper by Marta Tienda and Leif Jensen, two of the leading experts on
Puerto Ricans.
Conservatives who emphasize the role of the welfare system in creating the
underclass would say that since other Hispanic groups have labor-force
participation rates and family structures markedly different from those of
Puerto Ricans, the real issue must be the availability of government
checks, not jobs. Other than Cubans, Puerto Ricans are the only
Spanish-speaking ethnic group for whom full U.S. citizenship (and
therefore welfare eligibility) in the immigrant generation is the rule
rather than the exception. “What should be an advantage for Puerto Ricans-
namely, citizenship–has turned into a liability in the welfare state,”
Linda Chavez writes in Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of
Hispanic Assimilation. “They have been smothered by entitlements.”
In the community of underclass experts the role of pure skin-color
prejudice is not much stressed these days, but the case can be made that
it has contributed to the woes of poor Puerto Ricans. A staple of Puerto
Rican reminiscence, written and oral, is the shock and hurt that
dark-skinned Puerto Ricans feel when they come here and experience color
prejudice for the first time. Blacks were enslaved on Puerto Rico for
centuries–emancipation took place later there than here–but the
structure of race relations was different from what it was in the American
South. Plantations were relatively unimportant in pre-emancipation Puerto
Rico, blacks were always a minority of the island’s population, and there
was a much higher proportion of free blacks than in the United States.
Puerto Rico never developed the kind of rigid racial caste system that
characterized places with plantation economies and black majorities.
Intermarriage was common, and there was no bright legal and social line
between those having African blood and whites. (The U.S. Census Bureau no
longer asks Puerto Ricans to identify themselves by race.) In Puerto Rico
the prosperous classes tend to be lighter-skinned, but dark-skinned people
who acquire money don’t find the same difficulty in being accepted in
neighborhoods and social clubs that they do here.
On the mainland racial prejudice may play a role in shutting Puerto Ricans
out of jobs, in ensuring that they live in ghettos, and in instilling an
internalized, defeatist version of the wider society’s racial judgments.
But what’s striking about the racial consciousness of Puerto Ricans as
against that of African-Americans is the much lower quotient of anger at
society. The whole question of who is at fault for the widespread
poverty–the poor people or the United States–seems to preoccupy people
much less when the subject is Puerto Ricans. For example, conservatives
now commonly attribute the persistent poverty of the black underclass to
the “victim mentality” expressed by black professors and leadership
organizations. I think that the victim mentality among blacks is much more
a part of the life of the upper-middle class than of the poor. But even if
we grant the premise that ethnic groups are ideologically monolithic, the
Puerto Rican case would indicate that the victim mentality doesn’t have
anything to do with persistent poverty: the Puerto Rican leadership does
not have a victim mentality, but persistent poverty is much more severe
among Puerto Ricans than among blacks. The National Puerto Rican Coalition
publishes first-rate studies about Puerto Rican poverty that take
different sides on the question of whether or not it’s completely
society’s fault–something it’s difficult to imagine of the NAACP.
VA Y VEN
A final theory about why Puerto Ricans are so poor as a group has to do
with migration patterns. During the peak years of migration from Puerto
Rico to the mainland, the people who migrated were apparently worse off
than the people who didn’t. A paper by Vilma Ortiz, of the Educational
Testing Service, cites figures showing that in 1960 a group of recent
Puerto Rican immigrants had a lower percentage of high school and college
graduates than a control group on the island. Ortiz’s view that it was not
a migration of the most ambitious and capable–that people with less
education and lower-status occupations were likelier to move–fits with
the idea that for Munoz emigration was a way to reduce the crush of
destitute former peasants on the island. Since about 1970, most experts
believe, the pattern has been changing and better-educated Puerto Ricans
have become more likely to leave the island, because of a shortage of
middle-class jobs there. Oscar Lewis wrote in La Vida, his 1965 book about
Puerto Rican poverty, “The majority of migrants in the New York sample had
made a three-step migration–from a rural birthplace in Puerto Rico to a
San Juan slum to New York.” (Lewis did a lifetime of work on Latin
American poverty which contains a great deal of interesting material, but
he is rarely quoted anymore; his reputation is in total eclipse in
academic circles because he invented the phrase “culture of poverty,”
which is now seen as a form of blaming the victim.)
Social critics commonly complain that Puerto Ricans lack a true immigrant
mentality–that they aren’t fully committed to making it on the mainland,
so they don’t put down deep neighborhood and associational roots, as other
immigrants do, and they are constantly moving back and forth from Puerto
Rico. Glazer and Moynihan wrote,
“In 1958-1959, 10,600 children were transferred from Puerto Rican
schools, and 6,500 were released to go to school in Puerto
Rico….Something new perhaps has been added to the New York scene–an
ethnic group that will not assimilate to the same degree as others
do…”
This is known as the va y ven syndrome; those who dispute its existence
say that the heavy air traffic back and forth between New York and San
Juan is evidence that Puerto Ricans visit their relatives a lot, not that
they relocate constantly. “Where’s your data [about constant relocation]?”
Clara Rodriguez, a sociologist at Fordham University, asks. “There’s
nothing but travel data.”
The migration patterns of middle-class, as well as poor, Puerto Ricans
have become an issue in recent years. As has been the case with other
ethnic groups, the well-educated and employed Puerto Ricans leave the slums. For Puerto Ricans who
came to New York during the 1940s and 1950s–in slang, “Nuyoricans”–the
most common sequence of moves was from the island to East Harlem to the
South Bronx to Soundview, a blue-collar neighborhood just across the Bronx
River from Hunt’s Point, and then to the middle-class North Bronx, Queens,
New Jersey, or Connecticut.
The consequent isolation of the Puerto Rican poor seems to be even more
pronounced than the isolation of the black poor. Churches in black ghettos
are all black institutions often dominated by middle-class blacks; the major
churches in the South Bronx are Catholic and aren’t run by Puerto Ricans.
The work force of the New York City government is a third black and only a
tenth Puerto Rican, meaning that middle-class blacks are much more likely
than middle-class Puerto Ricans to return to the slums during the workday
to perform professional social-service functions. The most common form of
upward mobility in the South Bronx is supposed to be military service
(South Bronx soldiers were often in the news during the Gulf War), but
that makes people more successful by taking them thousands of miles away
from the neighborhood.
The leaders of the South Bronx often don’t live there. Ramon Velez has a
residence in the Bronx but also ones in Manhattan and Puerto Rico; Ferrer
and Badillo live in more prosperous sections of the Bronx; Robert Garcia,
Badillo’s much-loved successor in Congress, who resigned in a scandal,
owned a house north of the New York City suburbs during the time he was in
Congress; Yolanda Rivera, who as the head of Banana Kelly is one of the
most promising young community leaders in the South Bronx, keeps a house
in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. The Reverend Earl Kooperkamp, an Episcopal
minister who was recently transferred to a South Bronx church after tours
of duty in several poor black neighborhoods in New York City, says,
“Anybody who was living here before and making anything got the hell out.
In Harlem, East New York, Bushwick, Bedford Stuyvesant, you had the
occasional professional. There are no lawyers and doctors in this
community.”
When middle-class blacks move out of black ghettos, they usually relocate
to more prosperous black neighborhoods, which form a nonblighted locus of
the ethnic culture. Puerto Ricans who leave the South Bronx for other
parts of the New York area tend to melt into more integrated
neighborhoods, where it’s much harder to maintain the fierce concern with
“the race” that has historically existed in the black middle class. Ramon
Daubon, of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, goes so far as to say,
“There is no distinctive middle-class Puerto Rican neighborhood in the
United States.”
There IS a Levittown for Puerto Ricans who are pursuing the standard dream
of escape to suburban comfort–just outside San Juan. “If a Puerto Rican
makes fifty or sixty thousand a year here, he wants to move back,” says
Ramon Velez. “He wants to buy land, build a house.” Black middle-class
emigrants from ghettos tend to remain in the same metropolitan area.
Middle-class Puerto Ricans who move back to Puerto Rico can hardly
function as role models, political leaders, counselors, or enlargers of
the economic pie for the people in the South Bronx. “Look around in Puerto
Rico,” Velez says. “The legislature, all the influential people–they’re
all from New York. Two of my former employees are in the state senate.
Those who are able to achieve something here and make money, they go
back.”
When young middle-class Puerto Ricans leave the island for the mainland
because they can’t find work as doctors or engineers at home, they often
gravitate not to New York but to Sun Belt destinations like Orlando and
Houston. The Puerto Rican population of Florida rose by 160 percent in the
1980s. New York now has a reputation on the island as the place that poor
people move to, and later leave if they make any money. The percentage of
mainland Puerto Ricans who live in New York has dropped steadily over the
years, and if you exclude Nuyoricans from the social and economic
statistics, Puerto Ricans look much less like an underclass.
Douglas Gurak and Luis Falcon, in a 1990 paper on Puerto Rican migration
patterns, argue that poverty, nonparticipation in the labor force, and
unstable marriages were often characteristic of the Puerto Ricans who are
now poor here, rather than resulting from the economic and social
conditions of New York. They write,
“It is clear that the selectivity of the migration process…results
in an overrepresentation of women in the New York region who are
characterized by traits associated with poverty. Those with less labor
force experience, less education, more children, and more marital
instability are the ones most likely to migrate to the mainland. Those
with more stable unions, fewer children and more education are more likely
to return to the island.”
In Puerto Rico, especially rural Puerto Rico, common-law marriage and
out-of-wedlock childbearing are long-established customs. Before Munoz’s
modernization efforts brought the rates down, a quarter of all marriages
on the island were consensual, and one third of all births were out of
wedlock. (Munoz himself had two daughters out of wedlock, and married
their mother only when he was about to assume the governorship of Puerto
Rico.) Female immigrants to New York, Gurak and Falcon say, tend to come
out of this tradition, and they are more likely than those who don’t
emigrate to have recently gone through the breakup of a marriage or a
serious relationship. Other Hispanic emigrants, such as Dominicans and
Colombians, tend to rank higher than non-emigrants on “human capital”
measures like education, family structure, and work history; and Puerto
Rican immigrants who settle outside New York aren’t generally more
disadvantaged than people who remain in Puerto Rico. The overall picture
is one of entrenched Puerto Rican poverty becoming increasingly a problem
in New York City rather than nationwide.
Although their explanations vary, experts on Puerto Rican poverty tend to
agree on how to ameliorate it: both Marta Tienda and Douglas Gurak, for
example, call for special educational and job-training efforts. There is
something about black-white race relations in America that leads people in
all camps to dismiss those kinds of anti-poverty efforts in behalf of
blacks as unimaginative, old-fashioned, vague, unworkable, or doomed to
failure. The self-defeating view that the problem is so severe that it
could be solved only through some step too radical for the political
system ever to take seems to evaporate when the subject is Puerto Ricans
rather than blacks.
THE STATUS QUESTION
Or it may be that the reason for the relatively calm and undramatic
quality of discussions of Puerto Rican poverty is that the whole issue is
really only a side show. The consuming policy matter for Puerto Ricans,
including mainland Puerto Ricans, is what’s known as the status question:
the issue of whether Puerto Rico should become a state, become
independent, or remain a commonwealth. “It affects our psyche, our
opportunity, our identity, our families,” says Jorge Batista, a Puerto
Rican lawyer who is a former deputy borough president of the Bronx. “The
only analogy for you is the Civil War. It permeates all our lives.”
Puerto Rico occupies an unusual economic middle ground–worse off than the
United States, better off than most of the rest of Latin America. Progress
is now coming much more slowly than it did in the Munoz years. Munoz
retired in 1964, after handpicking his successor. During the next four
years, however, Munoz’s commonwealth party split into factions, and in
1968 Luis Ferre, the head of the archrival statehood party, won the
governorship. Munoz, then in retirement in Spain but still a god in Puerto
Rico, handpicked another successor, Rafael Hernandez Colon. Hernandez
unseated Ferre in the l972 election, and the statehood party passed into
the hands of Carlos Romero Barcelo. The next few gubernatorial elections
pitted Hernandez against Romero: Romero won in 1976 and 1980, and
Hernandez won in 1984, and was re-elected against a different opponent in
1988.
The essential features of commonwealth are federal-income-tax exemption,
only partial participation in the U.S. welfare system, and a lack of
voting representation in Congress. Psychically, commonwealth status
implies a certain distance from the United States–a commitment to the
preservation of the Spanish language and of Puerto Rican culture. Like
other liberal parties of long standing around the world, the commonwealth
party is perceived as both the party of the establishment–of the way
things are done in Puerto Rico–and the party of the common man. The
party’s symbol is the jibaro, the agrarian peasant from the mountains, the
closest thing there is to an emblematic national figure. The typical
Puerto Rican is no longer a jibaro, but that doesn’t matter–the typical
Texan is no longer a pickup-driving country boy named Bubba, either.
Puerto Rico’s idea of itself is as an island of earthy, unpretentious,
good-hearted people who treat each other with dulce carino “sweet caring.”
It’s easy to see how American culture could be perceived as a threat to
this ethos, and thus something that should be kept at arm’s length.
The statehood party is prepared to take the plunge into American life,
although it promises, by way of soothing people’s fears, to establish an
estatidad jibara. Politically, the statehood party is to the right of the
commonwealth party (and far to the right of the small, left-wing
independence party) on the classic Latin American issue of whether or not
to view the United States as a benign force in the hemisphere.
In terms of what would actually happen under statehood, though, the party,
conservative though it may be, would bring into being a conservative
counter-utopia. As a state, Puerto Rico would have two U.S. senators and five or
six congressmen, all of whom might well be Democrats. And if Puerto Rico
became a state, Republicans would find it more difficult to maintain their
opposition to making the District of Columbia, even more solidly
Democratic, a state too. Taxes on the island might rise significantly,
because Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, the big Puerto Rican tax
break, would be abolished; businesses would presumably relocate elsewhere.
Puerto Rico is now given parts of the U.S. social
welfare benefits package, and 1.4 million people, nearly half the island’s
population, receive food assistance. Statehood would bring full benefits
and the welfare rolls of the new state might swell tremendously, not just
with islanders but possibly also with mainland Puerto Ricans who would
move back. A bitter controversy could be expected to emerge over whether
to make English the island’s official language.
Robert L. Bartley, the editorial-page editor of The Wall Street Journal,
who in conservative battles can usually be relied on to side with the
ideologues against the pragmatists, recently concluded after a visit to
Puerto Rico that “what the statehood issue really needs is a good
vacation.” Advocates of statehood–a mixture of business interests and the
rising lower and middle classes, like Margaret Thatcher’s coalition in
Britain–acknowledge that it would be worse in the short term, and stress
the overriding historical importance of the island’s becoming fully
American.
The last time the status question was put to a vote in Puerto Rico was in
1967; commonwealth won. There the matter rested until 1989, when Governor
Hernandez, at his inauguration, issued a surprise call for resolution of
the status question–and then, even more surprising, President Bush
announced that he favors Puerto Rican statehood in his first address to
Congress. Bush’s Puerto Rico policy is usually explained as an example of
his tendency to make decisions more on the basis of personal loyalty than
of political analysis. Luis Ferry the first statehood
party governor, now an eighty-seven-year-old patriarch, is an old friend
of Bush’s, and endorsed him for President in 1980. Soon after the 1988
election Don Luis came to Washington and stayed as a guest in the Bush
home. There, the rumor goes, Bush asked him what he wanted as his reward
now that the long crusade for the White House was over, and Ferre said,
“Before I die, I would like to hear a President of the United States say
before a joint session of Congress that he wants statehood for Puerto
Rico.”
Bush’s remarks in favor of statehood set off a two-year process in
Congress to arrange another plebiscite in Puerto Rico. It was supposed to
take place this year, but negotiations fell apart over such issues as
whether the results would be binding on Congress and whether mainland
Puerto Ricans would be allowed to vote. Now the plebiscite is sure to be
put off until a year or two after the 1992 election. In the meantime, the
commonwealth party’s dream is that the U.S. Congress will allow it to be
represented on the ballot by an option called “enhanced commonwealth,”
which would give Puerto Rico greater political autonomy, including the
right to negotiate with foreign governments; even if this happens, it is
not a foregone conclusion that the commonwealth option will win the
plebiscite.
Every possible outcome of the status question would have some effect on
Puerto Rican poverty on the mainland. In the almost completely unlikely
event of independence, the new Puerto Rican nation would be unable to
offer anything like the current level of food-stamp benefits, and
presumably there would be another mass emigration of the poor to the
United States, motivated by fear of privation; when independence took
effect, islanders would lose the right of free immigration to the mainland
that they now have as U.S. citizens. Statehood would raise food assistance
and other benefits on the island to their mainland levels, and so would
engender some migration of the poor from the mainland to the island, thus
making the problem of Puerto Rican poverty less severe in New York and
other big eastern cities.
Enhanced commonwealth is the only one of the three status options that
holds any real promise of spurring economic development on the island in
the near future. Even a muted reprise of Munoz’s economic miracle could
surely be expected to help alleviate Puerto Rican poverty in New York, by
drawing people back to the island to find the unskilled jobs that they can
no longer find on the mainland.
Obviously, a great deal could be done on the mainland to reduce Puerto
Rican poverty. That it can even be discussed as an island problem,
suceptible to island solutions, may be the most important of all the
differences between the situations of Puerto Ricans and blacks. For many
blacks there is, psychologically, a homeland off stage, in the South or in
Africa, but nobody can really think of it as a place where the wrenching
difficulties of the present might be worked out.
Copyright © 1991 by Nicholas Lemann. All rights
reserved.
“The Other Underclass”;
The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1991, issue.
Volume 268, Number 6 (pages 96-110).
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