A Puerto Rican in New York
Diaz, Eileen
The newest faces in our city are Puerto Rican. They have come in great numbers and settled primarily in the slum areas close to the Negro ghettos. Like the national groups preceding them...
...But they can never other...
...a family of three $63 and a family of four $74...
...I had one boss who made me punch my time card out at night and then go back to work a couple of hours for no pay...
...They treat you like you don't know what's going on, but when you need the money you have to play dumb...
...These standards are determined by the cost of items needed for minimal standards of health and safety...
...Even if we allow conservatively for a 50 per cent reduction in this ratio of three non-public assistance low income families to each public assistance family since 1956, there must be at least 375,000 people today in New York City whose incomes are below the public assistance allowances...
...I'd like to have a little business of my own...
...The kids are scared and they think things are never going to be better...
...They are taking part in "self-help" programs, in parish activities, in union activities, and, at times, political activity...
...NEW YORK is pulsing with music from candy stores and the 'Bodega Hispana," the local grocery that specializes in tropical vegetables and staples of island cookery...
...I'd like to walk anyplace I feel like, without feeling like looking down at the sidewalk when people pass like they were asking, 'what are you doing here.' We might save some money and go back to Puerto Rico, but it's not easy to go back because now this is my home...
...IT.1...
...The young girl puts on a starched white blouse and goes out to sell herself...
...the scurry of silent feet as a key turns and the light goes on in the kitchen and the roaches and mice run for cover...
...Hundreds are living in public housing projects, the newest of which are well kept, with trees and wading fountains, with imaginative play areas, and designed with large, airy rooms...
...itself incessantly...
...Above these income levels, no free lunches for children, no supplementary help.—Based upon report of Welfare Commissioner James R. Dumpson...
...color wall in many places...
...MANY PUERTO RICANS in this city feel that their new life has compensated for the loss of their homeland...
...It is this silent place which exploits the poor, which justifies A Puerto Rican Speaks "Sometimes it's hard to figure out what you really want, but I know if you have a clean house and some money in your pocket things don't seem so hard...
...Yes, there is help after ous wiring, disease-breeding overgetting through the tangles of the Wel-crowding, police cooperation with fare Department and certainly our racketeers on one hand and crackcharitable organizations are doing a downs on juvenile offenders on the dedicated job...
...They hope and work steadily for better things...
...They don't care what happens to them and start acting like big shots...
...guidance and recreation for the chilThe Puerto Rican encounters the dren trapped in these surroundings...
...Like the national groups preceding them they speak a foreign language...
...They have come in great numbers and settled primarily in the slum areas close to the Negro ghettos...
...They are more "secure," have better jobs than they could have had at home, are further protected by labor unions...
...It's easy to find trouble around here...
...the pale child with a rat bite on her ear walking with thin, bent legs to the hospital clinic...
...One thing I know...
...The straight hair...
...problems arise within families where Recently a Puerto Rican infant liv-the darker children are subtly placed ing in Brooklyn was chewed to death in an inferior social position even by rats as she slept in her bed...
...Who can erase memories of a deaf and dumb child with her mother and sister huddled in a small, dark room with an empty kerosene stove, the winter wind blowing in at them from broken window panes...
...You can't count on anything except the bills coming in and the super knocking at the door for the rent...
...until enough people care about reach everyone in need...
...How long has it been since inadequate plumbing, garbage-filled you've heard, "Nobody goes hungry in first-floor halls, broken boilers, dangerNew York...
...If they want clean tions, and even the fair Puerto Rican halls and toilets and the walls repaired in the United States finds it difficult let them do it themselves...
...Emotional afford to make improvements...
...For the great majority of Puerto Ricans, however, there is still a struggle to pay the rent, to buy the weekly bags of rice and beans and milk for the babies, the grinding and hopeless battle against an army of roaches, mice and rats and the decay of ancient, neglected buildings...
...Below Public Assistance Standards" There are today in New York City 70,000 families consisting of two or more people—a total of 250,000 persons—receiving public assistance, in one or another form...
...A place like this is too rough...
...Over 25,000 of those receiving supplementary help are either Puerto Ricans or Negroes...
...According to Welfare Department tables stating maximum income for eligibility for free school lunches in New York City (that is, an income equivalent to minimal welfare standards), a family of two would require $52 per week...
...The correct marriages, but these are exceprent is low enough...
...a huge water bug crawling out from under a cracked kitchen bathtub...
...the swirl of smoke rising up the stairs and the familiar fire engine sirens...
...Many have done very well if we are to make comparisons with island pov erty...
...She escapes the slavery of her life in vague dreams and the warm sleep into which she enters with the hypodermic needle...
...Looking past the glass and stone palaces of our skyline, we see a curtain of separation rising like a fog...
...In 1956, the State Interdepartmental Committee on Low Incomes estimated that for every person receiving assistance in New York there were at least 3 persons not receiving help whose income was below public assistance standards...
...The light in fact until there is no such thing as Puerto Rican has the opportunity to a slum or a segregated neighborhood, reject his background by establishing we have no right to call ourselves a himself as "basically" a Spaniard...
...but unlike them they come as citizens—citizens whose economic and social assimilation into the city's population is complicated by color...
...Only the experience of living can show us what it is like to be a Puerto Rican in New York, what it is like to be the victim of economic and social discrimination...
...a heroin-addicted youth deliberately setting fire to the curtains in his store front living-room in an orgy of suffering...
...We hear, "They are Rico keep their families "pure" by not used to anything better...
...The problems of New of the wealthier families in Puerto York are the problems of mankind...
...You know, a candy store or something like that with nobody bothering me all the time to work faster...
...a roaring fire in an empty lot piled with garbage and old mattresses smoldering in the sun...
...The newest faces in our city are Puerto Rican...
...If I had a good job I could move someplace where the dope addicts weren't always breaking into apartments and you don't get nervous when you see a bunch of guys running down the street looking mad...
...Breaking down this figure we find that 27,094 or 44 per cent are in families whose wages are being supplemented by Home Relief...
...Some just society...
...They put up with prejudice, with crumbling buildings and with the overcrowding of the slums...
...The Puerto Ricans live with music, a constant reminder to them that their homeland is a place of imagination and joy and deep traditions amidst its poverty and swamps...
...Back home in Puerto Rico it didn't cost anything to bury somebody...
...The hot street, damp with the sweat of idleness and the sweat of work, erupting violence and tenderness, streaked with the footsteps of God, the eager, swift running of the young, the tumultuous shout of vitality and play, the dull groaning isolation of death, persistent as the overflowing garbage pails and the glitter of broken glass crushed into the expressionless earth of empty lots: these are the images and sounds of the Puerto Rican slums in New York...
...Money means plenty when you haven't got it, for instance when someone dies and there's no money to pay for the funeral...
...What among themselves, because of the sodoes it take to shake a society out of cial desirability of white skin and its complacency and indifference...
...The spirit of the people rises like wavering candles in the churches, as heads under black mantillas and white communion veils and bare-headed men offer unceasing prayer, or in the store front meeting places where tambourines clash and voices cry out into the dark night...
...a hall toilet broken and flooded where the bursting water pipe had covered the walls with an inch-thick coat of ice and to which the children of the floor were still running...
...I know I'll never be rich unless I get lucky, but even if I did I probably couldn't get a nice place to move into where I could see my kids going to a good school and being the same as they others—nice clothes, birthday parties, playing with all kinds of other kids and meeting their mothers and fathers...
...In the dope-pusher streets of New York there is no hope of Eden or promise of abundant life, only small, dead hours of escape between hunts, between thefts...
...We can't to avoid color prejudice...
...Psychologically the hardest battle is against race hatred, which in its extreme is a reflection of the silent place in all of us that seeks for its own and remains cold to the world...
...Of these, 61,138 people are receiving Home Relief from the city...
...We can't keep up with things here, not making much money and with layoffs all the time...
...average "right neighborhood" citizen As long as we have steaming blocks has about as much chance of seeing a like some in East Harlem, ready to hungry child as he has of getting to collapse, with sinking floors, broken, Mars...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
