The NEw Immigrants
BEICHMAN, ARNOLD
The New Immigrants The Puerto Rioans. Reviewed by Arnold Beichman By Christopher Rand. Special correspandent Oxford. 178 pp. $3.75. "Christian Science Monitor" sion of Soviet reality more than...
...For the tragedy of the post-Hitler, postwar immigration, this ingathering of the refugees from Europe, has been the one-generation transformation of the huddled masses into middleclass mercantile respectability...
...When things get tough here, a Puerto Rican can pick up and go home, where the welcome mat is always out...
...Rand's chronicle, most of which appeared in the New Yorker some months ago, is a smooth, absorbing account of this hegira, full of information and observation...
...Christian Science Monitor" sion of Soviet reality more than it illuminates it...
...The author has made a brave reportorial beginning with his feuilletons, but I wish somebody like Oscar Handlin would now take over the assignment...
...Underemployment, I was told by competent economists in Puerto Rico, is 30 per cent, not 15 per cent as Rand has it...
...On the island, people belong, it is their land ; in the Barrio, 600,000 strangers (now well spread into other parts of the city) are seeking love and life in a cold climate, undergoing all the unhappy experiences of an alien people in its pre-assimilation stage...
...Rand's book has a number of unaccountable errors for a most reputable reporter...
...Puerto Rico's population is not "only about two million" —it is about 2,300,000...
...One looks back upon these wanderers, many of whom were memorably photographed by the great Lewis W. Hine on Ellis Island, and sees the faces which made New York, which gave it its strangeness and warmth, its uniqueness and multi-cultural chaos and, sadly, its later eventual sameness...
...The two are as different from each other as is the Lower East Side from Tel Aviv or Naples...
...THERE ARE two Puerto Ricos— the island Commonwealth 1600 miles to the south and El Barrio, New York's Harlem quarter with its Spanish-speaking migrants...
...The sense of politics which once drove the persecuted to America's shores finds little echo today, except among the "professional" refugees...
...But it lacks body and a sense of history, evoking the drama of past migrations: Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Negroes, Slavs...
...The Puerto Rican wave, as Rand points out, is one which, having dashed itself on our littoral, also ebbs back to the island, unlike any other group of immigrants...
...No other group of immigrants has been as nomadic as the Puerto Ricans which, perhaps, accounts for so many of their social and economic difficulties, and their peaceful non-existence in the intellectual life of the community...
...There is a great going and coming—in six hours now, three hours by jet—the plane fare being the equivalent of a good week's wage...
Vol. 41 • December 1958 • No. 47
