Mambo Montage

The Latinization of New York City

Agustín Laó-Montes, Arlene Dávila, Agustín Laó-Montes, Arlene Dávila

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9780231505444
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Demography
• Index: Social Sciences

New York is the capital of mambo and a global factory of latinidad. This book covers the topic in all its multifaceted aspects, from Jim Crow baseball in the first half of the twentieth century to hip hop and ethno-racial politics, from Latinas and labor unions to advertising and Latino culture, from Cuban cuisine to the language of signs in New York City.

Together the articles map out the main conceptions of Latino identity as well as the historical process of Latinization of New York. Mambo Montage is both a way of imagining latinidad and an angle of vision on the city.

PART I

The Production of Latinidad

Histories, Social Movements, Cultural Struggles

CHAPTER ONE

“No Country But the One We Must Fight For”

The Emergence of an Antillean Nation and Community in New York City, 1860–1901

Nancy Raquel Mirabal

Cubans and Puerto Ricans! We suffer a common injustice. Let us be one in the revolution and in calling for the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico. And tomorrow we shall be able to form a confederation of the Antilles!

—Comité Revolucionario de Puerto Rico, New York, 1867¹

We have, Cubans, no country but the one we must fight for.

—José Martí²

In 1868 anticolonial forces in Puerto Rico and Cuba revolted against the Spanish colonial government. For revolutionaries in Puerto Rico, the rebellion known as the Grito de Lares would be short-lived, lasting no longer than a month. For those in Cuba, on the other hand, the rebellion would turn into a ten-year struggle, becoming one of the longest revolutionary wars in Cuban history. The failure of Cubans to achieve independence during the Grito de Yara would spark further revolutionary efforts, including La Guerra Chiquita in 1879 and the Cuban War for Independence in 1895.³

Despite the differences in the length of each rebellion, both efforts at gaining independence greatly influenced how Puerto Rican and Cuban migrants in New York City would view themselves, their community, and their role in creating a distinct and independent nation.⁴ This is not to say, however, that Puerto Rican and Cuban migrants agreed on a singular vision of what constituted nation, community, or a nationalist identity. On the contrary, the differences in opinion and in strategies employed would divide the migrant community and cause tensions among various factions. The annexationists and autonomists as well as the independentistas were locked in a political battle that often left the migrant community fragmented and tension filled.⁵ At the center of much of the disagreement were questions related to class, race, and the involvement of the United States. In turn, these questions disrupted definitions of what constituted a shared political vision of nation. Once independent from Spain, how would the Puerto Rican and Cuban nation be defined? Whom would it include, and whom would it exclude? How would migrants reconcile their vision of what constituted a nation with the vision held by those on the island? The competing ideas about nation as well as national identity engulfed the migrant community in New York and forced a rethinking of politics, nation, community, and identity on a number of levels.

One of the tactics used by many in the Puerto Rican and Cuban migrant community during this period was to develop a mutual identity based on alliances and a common belief that their struggle was a shared one. The emergence of what revolutionaries would call an Antillean nation and national identity was a powerful reminder of how determined many were to avoid any form of political and economic control. Fundamentally distrustful of both Spain and the United States, Puerto Rican and Cuban independentistas geographically reconfigured the islands so that they would have no connection to any form of colonialism present or future. The use of the term Antilles signified an association with the Caribbean devoid of any outside influences. In other words, instead of looking to Spain and the United States, Puerto Rican and Cuban migrants would now look to Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the West Indies to inform how they would define community and identity. As a result, the impact and importance of Africa, the African diaspora, and the history of the African slave trade in the Caribbean could no longer be avoided. Yet, as we will see later in the essay, negotiating and reconciling Africa within the exile and migrant nationalist movements would not be easy.

The creation of a shared Antillean nation and nationalist identity, one that was clearly imagined and shaped by nationalist rhetoric, reveals the ability of the migrant community to refashion itself to suit its political beliefs. As a result, Puerto Rican and Cuban migrants who subscribed to these notions ended up questioning the very idea of the nation-state as exclusive. For example, Cubans who believed in the concept of an Antillean nationalist identity would be at odds with Cubans who favored annexation to the United States even though they, too, viewed themselves as being Cuban. Because of the politics involved, being Cuban, as in this particular case, was not enough to sustain community. As a result, definitions of nation and national identity were continually in flux, causing the political migrant community to draw lines, make concessions, rethink the concept of nation, and forge alliances all in the name of making and solidifying a political community.

Nowhere was this more visible than in New York. With its long history of Puerto Rican and Cuban migration and settlement, along with it being the site where José Martí based his political operation and subsequently organized the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC), New York was one of the few places where Puerto Ricans and Cubans lived and worked for a significant amount of time. By the 1830s Puerto Ricans and Cubans had fashioned an anticolonial movement. Political organizations, exile newspapers, cultural clubs, and revolutionary groups were already present in New York. As a thriving political community, the city was transformed into one of the most important and necessary sites for Puerto Ricans and Cubans to reimagine a distinct Antillean nation and identity while still remaining loyal to their own notions of what constituted an individual Puerto Rican and Cuban nation.

This distinction, the ability to create one concept of nation based on mutuality without relinquishing another concept based on cultural exclusivity, was one that was easily understood and, more importantly, invoked. This ability was manifested in the formation of a number of important political clubs in New York, including the influential Sociedad Republicana de Cuba y Puerto Rico, which was founded in 1865.⁶ With time, Puerto Ricans and Cubans formed several other interacting and mutual revolutionary clubs that, as the records of Los Clubs Borinquen and Las Dos Antillas noted, were made up of “Puerto Ricans and Cubans who sympathized with the independence of Puerto Rico.”⁷ In the early 1890s the powerful PRC formed the Sección Puerto Rico to continue with the alliance-based politics initiated thirty years earlier by previous revolutionary clubs. For the PRC, this form of politics was especially useful in solidifying community and unifying what had been a fragmented migrant nationalist movement.⁸ Yet by this time, much of the exile and migrant political activity had been dominated by the impending Cuban War for Independence and the ever-increasing possibility of U.S. intervention in Cuba. The speeches, newspapers, and journals often asked Puerto Rican activists and migrants to focus on the events in Cuba with the promise that once Cuban independence was secured, the movement would then direct its energies toward Puerto Rico.⁹

Along with the revolutionary and cultural clubs, exile newspapers played a large role in the production of a political community. Puerto Rican and Cuban migrants found and disseminated a series of publications that covered issues of concern for both Puerto Ricans and Cubans in the United States. Newspapers such as La Doctrina de Martí, La Verdad, El Yara, and El Porvenir were instrumental in encouraging and sustaining the separatist and nationalist movements. These publications, in conjunction with the numerous clubs, helped to redefine nation in terms of a mutual independence and liberation for both Puerto Rico and Cuba. The existence and, moreover, recognition of a mutual alliance between both communities was evident in the frequent use of the term las Antillas (the Antilles) in revolutionary literature and publications. At the same time, other forms of print media existed that expanded beyond nationalist and separatist rhetoric to serve other purposes needed in the building of a mutual political community.

One of the more influential publications, La Revista Illustrada, was founded in 1890 by the Puerto Rican revolutionary Sotero Figueroa. This publication was not only a voice for “la independencia de Cuba y Puerto Rico” but was also a forum for “artículos sobre asuntos de interés cultural y político para Hispanoamérica.”¹⁰ The many journals, revistas, and newspapers published by the Puerto Rican and Cuban communities informed and entertained but moreover helped to acclimate the increasing number of Puerto Ricans and Cubans migrating to New York during this period. In one article published by the separatist newspaper La Gaceta del Pueblo entitled “Nueva York por dentro: Una faz de su vida bohemia” (New York from the inside: A facet of its bohemian life), Francisco Gonzalo Marín, better known as Pachín Marín, offers newly arrived immigrants in New York some tips on how to “attain an intimate knowledge of this elephant of modern civilization.”¹¹ Most of the advice Marín offers has to do with adjusting to the “incessant howling of the locomotives,” to the “agitation of factories,” and to the “vista of a million people hurrying past, trampling each other, yet going on their way as if nothing had happened.” Marín’s tone is both ironic and foreboding. He uses life in New York with its “eleven- or twelve-story building whose highest window seem to look down on you as if mocking your smallness”¹² as a way to get migrants to think about the differences between the United States and their home country. In spite of the technological advances and rapid industrialization, Marín reminds migrants coming to New York that life for a migrant who “does not speak English”¹³ can be lonely and isolating. An underlying point in Marín’s essay is the importance of creating community in New York while remaining conscious of U.S. political designs and maneuvers. The fear of the United States’s overwhelming power and the possible consequences of buying into it were also on the minds of a number of Puerto Rican and Cuban revolutionaries who began to incorporate a distinctly anti-U.S. imperialist politics into their platform.

This tension between using the United States as a geographic site for building new nations from the outside while at the same time resisting the U.S. move toward empire was endemic to how many in the community viewed their position in the United States. This tension was most evident in the bitter rivalry between those migrants who advocated annexation to the United States and those who adamantly refused having any ties to it.

The existence of a parallel discourse among Puerto Rican and Cuban migrants was made more effective by their use of Spanish to articulate both publicly and privately their concerns, beliefs, and disagreements. In so doing, Puerto Rican and Cuban migrants reinforced the connection between what Benedict Anderson has written is the power of the printed media and consciousness, a connection that is part of the “embryo of the nationally imagined community.”¹⁴

In this regard, Spanish was a tool by which Puerto Rican and Cuban migrants could create an exclusive and distinct political community that could exist and even thrive in a place where Spanish was not the official language. By using Spanish to discuss policy, tactics, and strategies, Puerto Rican and Cuban migrants were not only including those who spoke Spanish but also making a point to exclude those who did not. Furthermore, because the newspapers were written in Spanish, they could also be read by the population in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Often smuggled in by revolutionaries, the newspapers were read widely by political activists on the islands who desperately wanted and needed to know what was taking place outside of the island. Because the Spanish colonial government in Puerto Rico and Cuba censored newspapers or even made them unavailable to the public, the circulation of exile newspapers was both coveted and dangerous.

In addition to the use of Spanish, geographic location was also key to the development of a distinct Antillean community. Because New York was geographically located outside of both Puerto Rico and Cuba, not only could revolutionaries publish newspapers without fear of reprisal, but they could also remake the movement so that it would continually evolve. Ensuring that the movement would change and not become stagnant or irrelevant was key to its success. As long as Puerto Rican and Cuban revolutionaries remained outside of their respective homelands, they could imagine and articulate multiple definitions of nation and national identity at any given time to suit the current political climate in their homelands as well as in the United States.

The building of nation from the outside allowed Puerto Ricans and Cubans to move theoretical and ideological constructions beyond the purview of their respective homelands to reconstruct the parameters of nation. It also allowed them the space necessary to devise a language that spoke to this reconstruction. The development and ensuing use of a language that addressed the process of nation building from the outside is found in “With All and for the Good of All,” one of the more famous speeches given by José Martí. In it Martí spoke of a patria, a homeland, “que allí se cae a pedazos” (that over there would fall to pieces) while “aquí se levanta”! (over here it rises).¹⁵ In this passage, Martí makes clear the power of geographic location. As long as the Spanish colonial government remained in Cuba, it was doubtful that what Martí and other revolutionaries had in mind for Cuba would ever be realized.¹⁶

Locating nation outside of the islands also meant a reconfiguration of geography so that whatever was built in terms of politics, ideologies, institutions, and organizations in New York could in the end be transferred back to their respective homelands. The rhetoric of returns and returnings was pivotal to the overall success of the movement; after all, most migrants who advocated independence intended on moving back. In privileging returns and returnings as a viable option, New York City was delineated as a temporal site for building nations and a national identity. The creation of New York as a place of exile, migration, and temporary political refuge represented a different set of geographies that inspired Puerto Ricans and Cubans to cultivate alliances and continually reinvent themselves, a strategy that led to the formation of Las Dos Antillas.

LAS DOS ANTILLAS AND TOTAL INDEPENDENCE: DEFINING AN ANTILLEAN NATION AND NATIONALIST IDENTITY

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. government was engaged in a policy of economic colonialism and geographical expansion. The unsteady political climate in Puerto Rico and Cuba seemed ripe with possibility to U.S. government officials, notably President William McKinley, who openly expressed his desire to economically and politically control much of the Caribbean. Many in the exile and migrant Puerto Rican and Cuban community who settled in New York City were aware of growing U.S. interest in the area and rightly suspected any attempts made by the U.S. government for assistance. At the same time, any discussion involving the possibility of annexation to the United States was quickly rejected by Puerto Rican and Cuban independentistas. It was the fear that Puerto Rico and Cuba could potentially fall into the hands of the United States that led the members of the all-women La Hijas de Cuba to denounce the actions of the members of the all-male Junta Revolucionaria de Cuba y Puerto Rico.¹⁷

On February 6, 1869, in the St. Julien Hotel located near Washington Square in New York City, fourteen Puerto Rican and Cuban women met to debate the recent political turns made by the Junta Revolucionaria de Cuba y Puerto Rico. At the head of the table sat Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, a staunch independentista who, as the acting president of Las Hijas de Cuba, wasted little time in accusing the members of the Junta of “annexationist maneuvers and betrayal of the independence movement.”¹⁸ The possibility that a revolutionary organization would include the United States as an ally was enough to usurp the power of men in a time when women had almost no institutional power in the movement. Denied formal membership to revolutionary and cultural clubs, women organized their own clubs where they would ironically wield a formidable amount of informal and collective power. It was f...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York City
• Part I: The Production of Latinidad: Histories, Social Movements, Cultural Struggles
• Part II: Expressive Cultures: Narrating, Imaging, and Performing Latinidad
• Illustrations
• Part IV: Latinizing Cityscapes