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Puerto Ricans
Among the first Puerto Ricans to settle in New
York were traders in sugar, rum, tobacco, and molasses who during
the 17th and 18th centuries established an important commercial
link between the island and the city. Between the 1860s and the
1890s, New York became a haven for political exiles whose purpose
was to make Puerto Rico independent from Spain. Most Puerto Rican
independence organizations were disbanded in 1898 after the island
was surrendered to the United States at the end of the Spanish-American
War. Toward the end of the 19th century, cigar makers built settlements
in Chelsea and on the Lower East Side near Spanish-owned tobacco
factories. One such area was Cherry Street.1
Many working-class Puerto Ricans moved to the New York City in the
first decades of the 20th century to escape economic hardship in
Puerto Rico. After receiving American citizenship under the Jones
Act of 1917, over 10,000 Puerto Ricans migrated. Settling primarily
in East Harlem, most worked for low wages in light and heavy industry,
domestic service, cigar factories, hotels, restaurants, and laundries.
During the 1920s, 60% of working Puerto Ricans in New York were
employed in the tobacco industry.2
Puerto Ricans were numerically the largest Hispanic group to migrate
to New York City between 1945 and 1970, traveling largely by plane.
They settled in the barrios of East Harlem, the Lower East Side
(Loisaida), and the South Bronx, where housing was severely crowded
and in disrepair. There they took jobs in the city's garment industry
or in unskilled occupations. These arrivals discovered a New York
struggling with a changing economy as formerly thriving manufacturing
concerns relocated to other locations in the U.S. or abroad. Employment
opportunities in light manufacturing, such as the garment industry,
were bleak as thousands of jobs left the city. During the years
of the city's deteriorating economic situation, many Puerto Ricans
struggled to make ends meet. The 1990 U.S. Census reported that
the median family income for Puerto Ricans was about half that of
the rest of New Yorkers and that many Puerto Ricans continued to
live in poverty.3
Despite these obstacles, Puerto Rican migrants have made a significant
impact on New York, especially the Lower East Side. A small group
of Puerto Rican community activists gave birth to a movement that
reshaped lower Manhattan. The area was rechristened Loisaida, a
name that did not simply reflect the Lower East Side's shifting
demographics, but inspired Puerto Rican residents to claim the neighborhood
as their own physical and conceptual space. The Loisaida movement
was cultural as well as political. Activists used music, words,
poems and street murals to promote the name. And the groundbreaking
works of the Nuyorican Poets Café poets and Puerto Rican
musicians like Eddie Palmieri and Joe Bataan also galvanized Loisaida's
residents.4
See also: Immigration.
1 Frederick Binder and David Reimers,
All the Nations Under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of
New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995);Patricia
A. Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in
American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1987); Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New
York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Virginia
Sanchez Korrol, From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto
Ricans in New York City, 1917-1948 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1985).
2 Frederick Binder and David Reimers,
All the Nations Under Heaven; Patricia A. Cooper, Once
a Cigar Maker; Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia
of New York City ; Virginia Sanchez Korrol, From Colonia
to Community.
3 Frederick Binder and David Reimers,
All the Nations Under Heaven; Patricia A. Cooper, Once
a Cigar Maker; Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia
of New York City ; Virginia Sanchez Korrol, From Colonia
to Community; Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side:
Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
4 Liz Sevcenko, "Making Loisaida: Placing Puertorriquenidad
in Lower Manhattan," Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New
York, eds. Agustin Lao-Montes and Arlene Davila (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001), 293-314.
* It should be noted, however, that Angelo Gambino, who came over
to New York with Josephine Baldizzi's father, remembers paying something
like $7-8 per month for their apartment at 97 Orchard Street. The
discrepancy between this figure and the one above reveals how uncertain
we still are concerning the cost of rent at 97 Orchard Street.
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