Latinos in New York

Communities in Transition, Second Edition

Sherrie Baver, Angelo Falcón, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Sherrie Baver, Angelo Falcón, Gabriel Haslip-Viera

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268101534
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Diskriminierung & Rassenbeziehungen

Significant changes in New York City's Latino community have occurred since the first edition of Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition was published in 1996. The Latino population in metropolitan New York has increased from 1.7 million in the 1990s to over 2.4 million, constituting a third of the population spread over five boroughs. Puerto Ricans remain the largest subgroup, followed by Dominicans and Mexicans; however, Puerto Ricans are no longer the majority of New York's Latinos as they were throughout most of the twentieth century.

Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition, second edition, is the most comprehensive reader available on the experience of New York City's diverse Latino population. The essays in Part I examine the historical and sociocultural context of Latinos in New York. Part II looks at the diversity comprising Latino New York. Contributors focus on specific national origin groups, including Ecuadorians, Colombians, and Central Americans, and examine the factors that prompted emigration from the country of origin, the socioeconomic status of the emigrants, the extent of transnational ties with the home country, and the immigrants' interaction with other Latino groups in New York. Essays in Part III focus on politics and policy issues affecting New York's Latinos. The book brings together leading social analysts and community advocates on the Latino experience to address issues that have been largely neglected in the literature on New York City. These include the role of race, culture and identity, health, the criminal justice system, the media, and higher education, subjects that require greater attention both from academic as well as policy perspectives.

Contributors: Sherrie Baver, Juan Cartagena, Javier Castaño, Ana María Díaz-Stevens, Angelo Falcón, Juan Flores, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Ramona Hernández, Luz Yadira Herrera, Gilbert Marzán, Ed Morales, Pedro A. Noguera, Rosalía Reyes, Clara E. Rodríguez, José Ramón Sánchez, Walker Simon, Robert Courtney Smith, Andrés Torres, and Silvio Torres-Saillant.

PART ONE

The Context

CHAPTER ONE

The Evolution of the Latina/o Community in New York City

Early Seventeenth Century to the Present

GABRIEL HASLIP-VIERA

PHASE ONE: 1613–1898

It is, perhaps, quite accurate to say that interest in issues affecting Latina/os in New York has intensified steadily in recent decades. With greater frequency, journalists, academics, and government policy-makers have discussed the dramatic growth of a diverse Hispanic population and its impact on the city’s employment, education, housing, crime, social services, and politics. In general, the increased scrutiny has continued to focus on Latinos as a contemporary phenomenon associated with the more recent waves of immigrants to the city; yet the origins and evolution of New York’s Hispanic community may actually be traced as far back as the early seventeenth century.¹

The first phase in the evolution of New York’s Latino community as defined in this chapter (1613–1898) may appear much too long and unwieldy, but I adopt this chronology because this population remained consistently small and ethnically unchanged in comparison to other communities in the city throughout this period. Important historical events of relevance to the Latino community and the history of Latin America, in general, also took place during this period, but they were episodic for the most part and did not follow a clear linear progression, especially during the period of Dutch and English colonization.

A man named Jan Rodrígues was, perhaps, the first Latino to establish, at the beginning of the colonial period, what appears to have been a temporary residence in what became the city of New York. Described as a “free mulato” from the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, Rodrígues was left somewhere in the area by Dutch merchants in 1613, with the authority to trade with local Indians before the formal establishment of the New Amsterdam colony eleven years later.²

Claims have also been made that the fifty-four Sephardic Jews who came to New Amsterdam from the Dutch colonies in Brazil in 1654 should also be listed as Latinos in New York, but this claim is controversial. It is not clear that the Sephardic Jews spoke Spanish or Ladino, and they were most probably the assimilated descendants of Jews who had fled persecution in Spain and Portugal 160 years earlier, in the 1490s.³ It is clear, however, that the so-called Spanish negroes can be listed as Latinos in British New York during the eighteenth century. These were individuals of free or enslaved status who were captured by English privateers or the British Navy during wars with Spain in the early 1700s and sold to New Yorkers in the East River slave market that existed at the foot of Wall Street at that time. During the years of the Anglo-Spanish war of 1739–48, a series of suspicious fires and other disturbances broke out in the city, feeding rumors that the Spanish negroes were leading a slave population in a plot to take over New York and turn it over to the Spaniards. These rumors led to arrests, several sensationalized trials, and the execution of convicted prisoners, usually on trumped-up charges, in the immediate aftermath of the disturbances.⁴

Several decades of relative silence follow the disturbances of the 1740s, because of the tiny number of Spaniards and Latin American colonials living in the city, and because of the predominant anti-Spanish attitude that prevailed in the British colony during these years. However, reports of a Latino presence in the city began to increase with the establishment of an independent United States through the Articles of Confederation in 1781. A small group of Spanish diplomats and merchants led by Diego de Gardoqui, a Basque banker, became residents of New York in the 1780s. Francisco de Miranda, an early leader in the effort to end Spanish colonialism in Latin America, also came to New York to generate support during the same period.⁵ Reports on the actual number of Latinos also began to appear by the mid-nineteenth century. A federal census enumeration of 1845 found that there were “508 persons from Mexico and South America” living in the city, but probably this was the start of a persistent undercount of Latinos that prevailed for this and other populations for the rest of the nineteenth century—an observation already made by Puerto Rican activist Bernardo Vega in the early twentieth century—a pattern that continues up to the present.⁶

In his important memoir, Vega refers to the large political gatherings of the 1880s and 1890s that were organized by advocates of Cuban and Puerto Rican independence and their supporters in the United States and other Latin American countries. He also refers to the 3,000 cigar factories that employed “many Puerto Ricans and Cubans” during the early 1890s. However, these claims are not confirmed by the official statistics for this period (see table 1.1). According to the census of 1890, the city had a Latino population of just under 6,000, which included 218 Mexicans, 1,421 Spaniards, 907 persons from Central and South America, and only 3,448 persons from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and other parts of the Caribbean.⁷

In contrast to what developed later, Latino migration to New York continued to be quite small despite some growth in the later part of the nineteenth century. However, this growth was clearly outpaced by the increase in the city’s overall population. Hispanic emigration was generally discouraged by the socioeconomic conditions that prevailed in Latin America throughout the nineteenth century. Most of the Central and South American republics and colonial possessions were underpopulated or were going through the first stages of economic modernization or industrialization. In Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil, the importation of African slave labor continued into the 1850s and 1860s because of labor shortages in the expanding plantation sectors. As the economy of the Hispanic Caribbean changed during the late nineteenth century, slave labor was increasingly replaced by Native American and Chinese contract labor, and by an increased flow of mostly impoverished European immigrants who were attracted by the growth of the Caribbean sugar, coffee, and tobacco sectors. In the rest of Latin America, economic modernization and industrialization contributed to a significant increase in European immigration, as was the case in North America during this same period. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and a number of other countries or regions absorbed large numbers of immigrants from Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Portugal, Great Britain, Ireland, and Eastern Europe, and also from Lebanon, Syria, and other parts of the Middle East.⁸

Table 1.1 The Latino Population of New York City, 1870–1890*

*Total “foreign-born population” includes (before the creation of “Greater New York”) Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan for the 1870 and 1880 census. For the 1890 census it also includes “Long Island City” (for all countries), Queens County, and Staten Island (for Spain, South America, Cuba, and the West Indies only).

**Probably includes many persons of Spanish origin or background who lived in Cuba and Puerto Rico, which were Spanish colonies throughout this period.

Sources: US Department of Interior, Census Office, Compendium of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 387–91, 449; Compendium of the Tenth Census, Part 1 (June 1, 1880) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882), 547, 551; Census of 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892), 645–47, 670, 672, 674, 676.

Most of the immigrants who specifically came to New York from Latin America in the late nineteenth century were business people, professionals, white-collar workers, specialized artisans, and their dependents. It appears that a network of merchants and their subordinates were the predominant group during the early nineteenth century; however, after 1860, the Latino community became much more diversified and included the owners and employees of factories, artisan shops, grocery stores, pharmacies, barbershops, rooming houses, restaurants, and other enterprises. Skilled and semiskilled artisans and laborers also came to New York in increased numbers during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Most artisans and laborers were apparently employed in the city’s tobacco-manufacturing sector, which expanded in the years between 1880 and 1920. However, in time, the artisans were also supplemented by a growing number of semiskilled and unskilled industrial laborers who came to New York in search of employment in factories and services.⁹

Political exiles also came to New York during the late nineteenth century. They included disaffected liberals, socialists, and anarcho-syndicalists from Spain and Latin America. They also included alienated labor leaders, writers, poets, artists, teachers, and intellectuals. In fact, New York became the headquarters for the exiled leaders and supporters of Cuban and Puerto Rican independence during this period. The Cuban patriots José Martí, Tomás Estrada Palma, and Dr. Julio Henna, an advocate of Puerto Rican independence, became residents of New York during the 1870s and 1880s. For a time, Martí worked for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, which was one of the city’s major newspapers, while Henna, a practicing physician, became one of the founders of Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospitals in upper Manhattan.

The importance of New York as a center for nationalist and revolutionary sentiment was reflected in successful efforts to raise funds, publish newspapers, and hold political rallies. It also was reflected in the frequent visits by important political and cultural leaders who came to New York to participate in various activities but were not residents of the city. These persons included Cuban revolutionary leaders such as Antonio Maceo and Máximo Gómez, who was actually a native of the Dominican Republic. They also included Spaniards, such as the labor leader Santiago Iglesias; other Dominicans, such as Enrique Trujillo, the author of the epic El Enriquillo; and educational and revolutionary leaders from Puerto Rico, such as Eugenio María de Hostos and Ramón Betances.¹⁰

The political exiles who lived in New York at least temporarily during this period became part of a small, vibrant, and growing community. In general, Latinos lived in scattered concentrations throughout Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn. Bernardo Vega suggests that there was relatively little housing discrimination against Hispanics during this period. However, he also acknowledges that the darker-complexioned or more “African”-looking Latinos were compelled to live in neighborhoods where African Americans predominated. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a Puerto Rican activist who later achieved fame as a Black bibliophile in the Central Harlem community, established his first family residence in an African-American neighborhood called “San Juan Hill,” which was located in Manhattan, west of Amsterdam Avenue, between 60th and 70th Streets. Despite this and other instances of racial segregation and discrimination in housing, Hispanics were generally found in most working-class neighborhoods of the city during this period.¹¹

Concentrations of working-class Latinos were found in Harlem, Chelsea, Yorkville, the West Side, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They were also found in the Columbia Street and “Navy Yard” districts of Brooklyn. In general, most Hispanics lived in the midst of larger immigrant communities, where Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Hungarians, and other groups from central and eastern Europe predominated. Bernardo Vega states that affluent Cubans lived in the largely middle-class section of south-central Harlem, north of Cathedral Parkway. He also notes that less-affluent Latinos were found in the midst of a working-class Jewish community, along Madison and Park Avenues, between 100th and 110th Streets. These last two concentrations were the nucleus of what later became known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio.¹²

PHASE TWO: 1898–1945

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Spaniards were the predominant groups within the Latino population of New York City. This trend continued during the next phase of the migratory process, which began in 1898 and ended around 1945. It was during this period that Puerto Ricans became the largest Hispanic subgroup in the city, despite an island population that was very small when compared to Latin America as a whole. According to the estimates compiled at that time, the Latino population of New York had reached 22,000 by 1916, 41,094 by 1920, 110,223 by 1930, and 134,000 by 1940.¹³ Of the 134,252 Hispanics enumerated by the US Census Bureau in 1940, 61,463 (45.8%) were Puerto Ricans, 25,283 (18.8%) were Spaniards, 23,124 (17.2%) were Cubans and Dominicans, 4,653 (3.5%) were Mexicans, and 19,727 (14.7%) were persons from Central and South America (see table 1.2).

The Antillean orientation of New York’s Latino community between 1900 and 1945 reflected the socioeconomic and political changes that gripped Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the rest of the Caribbean during this period. Cuba and Puerto Rico were annexed by the United States as a result of the military victory over Spain in the War of 1898. Cuba was granted its independence in 1903, but Puerto Rico became and remains an “unincorporated territory” of the United States despite the granting of autonomous status in 1952. Direct political involvement by the United States had an impact on emigration from Cuba and Puerto Rico in the years after 1900, but it was the relative geographical proximity to New York and the dramatic infusion of United States investment capital in the economies of both islands that had the greatest impact.

Table 1.2 The Latina/o Population of New York City, 1920–1940*

*Includes “foreign born population” (except for Puerto Ricans) for the 1920 census, the “foreign born white population” for Cuba and the West Indies in the 1920 census, the “foreign-born white” and “native white of foreign or mixed parentage” population (ex...