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CHAPTER 1
Place, Race, and the Housing Debate
In the fifth-grade classroom of the public elementary school where I volunteered in Ponce, students were asked to build a representation of an Aztec city. The teacher explained that people of different classes occupied the city: traders, soldiers, priest, politicians, and slaves. “Who lived in the houses made of straw?” she asked.1 “Poor people,” a student answered. “And in the cement ones?” “Rich people,” said a couple of students in unison. After a brief discussion, the teacher divided the students and instructed two groups to build a barrio. One student said, “I’m going to build San Antón!” The teacher described the Aztec barrios and how to make them: “The barrios are where poor people live … You’ve got to build houses with straw roofing and clay walls … Each barrio has a sowing field, houses, and people. The other groups will build a marketplace, and the others will build temples.”
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Scholars of Latin America have underscored the importance of spatial dynamics and core-periphery hierarchies based on race, class, and “national representativeness” as assigned to regions (Wade 1993; Appelbaum 1999; Rahier 1998; Streicker 1997). Researchers have also examined the racialization of residential areas in cities, documenting the ways segregation produces ethnic enclaves, race-based subcultures, or “white habitus” (Hartigan 1999; Ramos-Zayas 2003, 2007; Bonilla-Silva et al. 2006; Dinzey-Flores 2013).
In the classroom I visited in Ponce, third graders learned spatial coordinates of class and the subordinate place of barrios through the use of wood, straw, and clay. This elementary school was located in Urbanización Constancia and served youngsters from San Antón and surrounding urban neighborhoods. Urbanización Constancia is a middle-class neighborhood built in 1960 in what used to be the eastern sector of San Antón before a series of modernizing projects (including the construction of Constancia) divided and significantly reduced San Antón (Mills-Bocachica 1993). During my stay in Ponce, I rented a small apartment in this neighborhood just across the street from San Antón. (Map 2 shows San Antón in relationship to Constancia.)2
Urbanizaciones like Constancia are an integral part of the changes that accompanied the economic shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy in Puerto Rico during the 1940s and 1950s. By the late 1950s, they were the model for private home ownership (Rivera-Bonilla 2003; Dinzey-Flores 2013). Cement houses in Constancia (which was once a cane field) are designed with garage space for a car and an area for a washer and dryer. They follow a linear configuration along streets arranged in an asphalt grid. The complex has a recreational area, a baseball field, two basketball courts, a playground, a community center, and a Catholic church. Save one basketball court, no such facilities existed in San Antón at the time of my fieldwork, and, as mentioned earlier, infrastructure was lacking. Furthermore, the need for protection against crime, made visible in the iron bars in windows and doors of houses in Constancia, distinguished it from the wooden and mostly ungated structures of San Antón.
Map 2. Ponce’s Historic Zone, the barrio of San Antón, and urbanización Constancia. Map produced by José Calderón Squiabro using combined Census Bureau data from the Census Block Maps Web-site: http://tinyurl.com/n3d5f4t and http://tinyurl.com/7vcaxm8.
Ironically, the area lacking bars (San Antón) was marked as unsafe. Distinction between safe and unsafe spaces became particularly prevalent during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Puerto Rico seemed to be “drowning in a crime wave” linked to drug trafficking (Dinzey-Flores 2013, 15). Sensationalistic print and TV media coverage of crime activity, combined with policies targeted at urban poor neighborhoods and especially caseríos (public housing complexes), constructed black neighborhoods and particularly black youth in urban areas as the main target of police surveillance against which a “decent” Puerto Rican middle class and whiter identity was affirmed (Dinzey-Flores 2013; Santiago-Valles 1996; Fusté 2010). As mentioned in the introduction, San Antón is also construed against the violent and delinquent schema of this “urban blackness.” A middle-aged ponceña I met at the airport, for example, exclaimed: “¡Ay Virgen!” (Oh, mother of God!) while pressing one hand to her chest, when I told her I had lived near San Antón during my fieldwork. While there, I also witnessed an unannounced police raid conducted with the mounted guard and a heavy display of police vehicles, including the canine unit. At least twenty police officers blocked the main entrance of the community with rifles and firearms on a Friday afternoon (October 11, 1996) while a helicopter overhead shone a spotlight on the residences. Police conducted violent searches against young men in the community during the almost two-hour raid. No one was arrested, and the police found no drugs or arms. No such interventions took place in Constancia during my fieldwork.
San Antón residents criticized these interventions and people who stereotype the community as “dangerous” because of the illicit activities of a few. Other community members, like Carlos “Cao” Vélez Franceschi, the director of the bomba and plena musical group Los Guayacanes de San Antón, also question the stark division people make between the two adjacent residential areas. Cao lived in Constancia and said:
I’ve never been outside of San Antón. Remember that Constancia was the cane field of San Antón. My aunts still live in San Antón, my family, I mean I’ve always made my life in San Antón and I live next door in Constancia…. I mean, Constancia is nothing other than part of San Antón. It was San Antón’s cane field. We moved to Constancia around 1971, my mother, my brother—we had already started playing professional baseball. It wasn’t a drastic change, because I had the same friends. I played baseball in San Antón. I didn’t change my ways, my friends, because, like I said, one is so close to the other. The baseball park that we, the baseball players of San Antón, use is in Constancia, because we still don’t have a baseball park here. I mean, that sharing that bond was never interrupted; and it’s never going to be interrupted, because we have strong roots that unite us to San Antón. And I believe that I can be wherever I can be, and my spirit and my soul will keep on being in San Antón. Simple … that’s the way it is.
Still, group distinctions and the privileges attached to class and racial identities often become naturalized and marked through the spatial structures and neighborhoods people inhabit (Dinzey-Flores 2013, 133–41; De Certeau et al. 1998). Thus, although San Antón residents visited the Catholic church, convenience store, baseball park, and elementary school located in Constancia, there were clearly distinct social implications associated with living in a barrio or in an urbanización. Luis “Cuto” Colón, a local candidate for the pro-statehood party who was born and raised in San Antón, commented:
There are some stereotypes … If a young barrio woman gets pregnant, she’s degenerate, a sexual whatchamacallit. [Hesitation.] Well, they even call her a prostitute. A young girl from an urbanización…”No! No! She made a mistake!” I mean, look at these two things. And so, a young man from San Antón goes to ask permission to visit a girl … at her home. [And they ask him,] “Where are you from? From San Antón! Umm let me think about it, I’ll let you know later.” Then a boy from an urbanización comes along with a whole bunch of bad ways, “No! No! That’s so-and-so’s son.” … That’s the way it is; we’re in Puerto Rico. La gente se mide más, no por el valor del ser humano, y sí por el de dónde viene y lo que representa … o sea de acuerdo al sitio donde venga. [People measure others not by their value as human beings, but by where they come from and what that represents … meaning according to (the) place they come from.]
Maria Judith Banchs Cabrera, a teacher and community leader who grew up in San Antón, says she was made aware of this stigma attached to place from an early age:
At the beginning I saw myself as a person who was equal to others. But later I realized that there were very marked differences socially … people called San Antón a barrio [with a pejorative tone]. And I asked myself, “Why do people call it a barrio?” Why do they call Constancia an urbanización? What is the difference between one and the other?” Well, the houses that were there, next to us, which are the urbanizaciones, were arranged in linear fashion, had services we did not have … They planted their trees in a linear fashion in a very stylish way. Us, our trees are, as we say, wild. Besides that, people dressed differently—and isn’t it a curious thing that the place where they lived used to be part of the place where I was born. Yet they were called urbanización and we were called barrio [she laughs sarcastically]. Then the curious thing is that when you analyze the term barrio in relationship to who you are, you realize that people slowly define who you are, and sometimes that definition does not have anything to do with who you think you are. And you say, “But my God, does that mean that the place where you come from defines how you will be, how you will behave, and how you really are?” I say this because I have heard a lot of people who don’t know I am from San Antón say, “People there are stupid little black folk, and well … the majority are drug addicts, prostitutes, burglars—people who don’t have manners, who don’t know how to speak well …” All that forms part of coming from a barrio. And one has to fight against all that … because others have already programmed things so that you will only get to a certain point. If you go beyond that, you’ll be considered a rebel. You are a person who likes to make trouble. You are controversial, you are una negrita atrevida, una afrontá [a defiant little black woman, a loudmouth]. All these things come to delineate how you will project yourself in the future and in your life. In other words, this is more profound, being from a barrio is more profound than saying “barrio San Antón.”
Maria Judith’s compelling statements illustrate that racism is not just a structural force, but also a personal one that carries meanings and affects life chances in ways that are emotionally experienced. The stigma of place she describes informed her own personal struggle for upward mobility against barriers that are not just set in the landscape, but that are, as she says, “more profound,” becoming internalized and ingrained in one’s sense of self.
Urbanizaciones endow their dwellers with a different set of personal assets and social expectations. Originally intended to replace arrabals, or slum habitations, they stand for modernity and for a “decent” way of living (Joplin 1988, 256; Dinzey-Flores 2007). Notions of dignidad (dignity) and respectability acquired through ownership and nuclear family arrangements are also fundamental meanings of urbanización houses (Joplin 1988, 258). Their widespread emergence in Puerto Rico responds not only to post-1940 industrialization developments in Puerto Rico, but also to the desires of a then-expanding upwardly mobile class whose taste, food habits, and leisure options became more and more Americanized.
Despite their general correlation with progress, urbanizaciones vary and serve different socioeconomic sectors. Constancia was not a high-end complex. The cost of a house there in the 1990s could range from seventy thousand to one hundred thousand dollars.3 Located in the south-central part of Ponce, Constancia has a population primarily composed of teachers and employees of the service and government sector. My landlords, for example, were a couple in their late fifties who worked for the government. He was a recently retired lawyer and she a public school principal. They lived on the first level and I on the second level of a two-story cement house.
One day, as I left the house to walk to San Antón, my landlord told me he regretted the fact that Constancia could not expand all the way into San Antón. He believed San Antón should not continue to exist as a separate entity from the urbanización and said he failed to understand why people insisted on preserving the barrio as it was. He disagreed with the local commonwealth government’s preservationist plans and argued that, although there still might be some old people in San Antón who preserve the traditions of the bomba and plena, the majority of the young people who live there have nothing to do with that tradition. They should not be seen as any different from Constancia.4 Then, to illustrate the advantages of integration, he established a pedagogical analogy about the benefits of mainstreaming “slow” kids with normal kids in the classroom. San Antón, he argued, could also be slowly mainstreamed into the “modern” normality of Constancia.
Emplaced Race
Besides representing San Antón as dangerous, “backward,” and different from the “mainstream,” people also distinguished Constancia from San Antón in terms of race. In formal conversations, however, this distinction was rarely made by calling the barrio negro (black) explicitly. Rather, people spoke of bomba and plena, “traditions,” or “deep cultural roots,” or used other racially oriented terms that indirectly suggested blackness. For example, one of my neighbors—an English teacher and father of four—compared San Antón to the color of his dark brown pants when talking to two Italian tourists who were visiting me. He said, “In Puerto Rico everybody is mixed. You can see that down there [pointing to San Antón] there are about three hundred people who are of ‘this color’ [pointing to his dark pants], and here [meaning Constancia] there is everything. And here, in my house, we are of all colors, there are prietos [blacks] of my color.”
Then Rita, his wife, jested—“prietas rubias” (blond blacks) as she laughed at her self-description. (Her hair was dyed blond and she often changed her haircolo...
