The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives

Abstract

The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives. By Carmen Teresa Whalen and Victor Vazquez-Hernandez, eds. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. 306 pages. $21.95 paperback. As diasporas go, the Puerto Rican numbers are relatively small, 3.4 million in the United States in 2000. However, given that the population of Puerto Rico was only 3.8 million in 2000, the impact of this out migration on Puerto Rico has been great. In the U.S., the geographic distribution was originally limited to the old industrial states. Although the diaspora spread to the south and west in the late twentieth century, following the pattern of other Hispanics in seeking opportunity in the Sunbelt, the stories told in this collection are of Puerto Rican communities begun in an earlier era. Although Puerto Ricans migrated to Hawaii early in the twentieth century, they mainly located to New England and the general northeast, the "rust belt" extending to Chicago. This collection of essays is fairly representative of academic surveys that focus on a particular ethnic group. Structurally the work includes an introductory overview and synopsis of the chapters to follow, histories of Puerto Ricans in various cities, and a final chapter that ties the essays together by highlighting patterns across the essays. Whether discussing Boston, Chicago, the various cities of Connecticut, a county in New Jersey, or a small city in Ohio, most essays begin in the nineteenth century with the first Puerto Rican merchant or cigar maker or some other respectable individual identified through the census or city directories. The story continues through long years of a small presence, recruitment of a different class, perhaps the agricultural worker, and then the surge to the cities as the Puerto Rican economy becomes unable to support the available workforce. Sometimes there is a secondary migration from the fields to the cities or from a larger to a smaller community. Regardless of how the first Puerto Ricans entered a new setting, the early migrants received a hospitable welcome, but just as commonly the surge created identifiable neighborhoods and provoked negative responses. Prejudice gave way in time to ethnic pride on the model of the African American movement, and Puerto Rican communities created activist organizations, protested, gained federal money and recognition, and moved slowly toward middle class status while creating an identifiable Puerto Rican section of the city (Boston's Villa Victoria, for example). Eventually Puerto Ricans became a political force, although the first statewide electoral victory of a Puerto Rican candidate in Massachusetts was not until 1988. Although the numbers are relatively small, tens of thousands in most cities rather than the hundreds of thousands that characterize the comparable surges in the Southwest, a given Puerto Rican community quickly reached the critical mass that tipped them into a status as outsiders, aliens, or "undesirable" competitors for resources, including housing, jobs, and community services. …