Gloria Freire, Cleveland State University

The first settlement of Puerto Ricans on the Mainland corresponded with the granting of citizenship in 1917 (the Jones Act). The legislation provided the opportunity for a persecuted intelligentsia and an enterprising managerial strata to leave the Island of Puerto Rico that year and settle in New York City in Harlem and in the area near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where a number of people sought employment. The intellectuals had been oppressed by the Spanish government during the centuries it ruled the Island. They were singled out because they agitated for freedom of expression, of employment and unionization, of movement and to organize politically. Going to the Mainland meant exile from Puerto Rico for the leadership cluster. They were followed by another small influx of exiles in 1925-1930. This now made two communities. Records show that the second wave of exiles received aid and support from the first group. Citizenship, granted by the United States government, made it possible to leave the Island whenever people wanted and some were encouraged to do so under conflicted circumstances (Dietz, 1986; Fitzpatrick, 1987).

The community of Puerto Ricans in the Mainland would remain small until major migrations were stimulated by the availability of inexpensive air flights after World War II. In addition, Luis Munoz Marin, the Governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, encouraged migration from the Island. The Island’s economy was in depression. Puerto Rico’s economic development project, Operation Bootstrap, planned by Teodoro Moscoso, had opened the Island to industrialization by the use of tax rebates as incentives to Mainland companies but unemployment went unabated. Migration to the Mainland offered a safe political alternative. At the same time, recruiters for steel plants and other industries on the Mainland pitched job openings to the skilled workers in the lower economic classes. These recruiters offered the benefits of improved medical services and hygienic living conditions, scarce commodities on the Island, as reverse incentives for the workers to come to the United States (Dietz, 1986).

As migration continued, people dispersed to other neighborhoods in New York City, other states in the Northeast, and then to the Midwest, including Ohio. (Cleveland has been the base for my research).

Puerto Rico made a late entry into the post-industrial society. Its people had to adjust from an agricultural and rural provincial mindset to one rooted in an urban and technological sophistication. Many of its people have experienced severe dislocation. Puerto Ricans who came found that being on the Mainland was no different than staying on the Island. The economic conditions were not as good as had been predicted and the new setting presented its own torments. These factors required making adjustments and a searching for the means for making a livelihood. Puerto Ricans faced automation, the departure of factories from New York’s inner city for the suburbs, an economic decline in the manufacturing sector, blue collar structural unemployment, racial and ethnic prejudices, restrictive union policies, inadequate educational opportunities, and near exclusion from government employment. Quality of life was affected by discrimination (Alers Montalvo, 1985; Rodriguez, 1989).

When Mainlanders looked at the new migrants, they saw Black people mixed in with White Puerto Ricans. The Puerto Ricans experienced discrimination because of many differences, but they did not expect a racial factor. Puerto Ricans belong to both races, but ethnically are neither. Racial identification is subordinate to cultural identification in Puerto Rican society. The prejudicial attitude of Mainland Americans towards this spectrum of color and mixture of races served to intensify the cultural identification of White Puerto Ricans and they sought to support and protect Black Puerto Ricans from discrimination (Darder & Torres, 1998; Padilla, 1964; Rodriguez, 1989).

This behavior does not mean that prejudice does not exist on the Island, but it surfaces when the time or the circumstance suggests it. Whether or not racial prejudice exists in Puerto Rico as it is understood on the Mainland is fiercely debated and would be denied on the Island even as it occurs. For example, achieving economic success or having a friendship with a Caucasian can make a Black person "White". In the 1960s and 1970s, dark Puerto Ricans on the Island did not engage in a Black Power Movement while on the Island, but did take part in it on the Mainland. However, the support they gave to the Movement was done from within the prism of ethnicity as that concept was understood on the Mainland. Thus, Black Puerto Ricans distanced themselves from the Movement even as they supported it. In such ways, assimilation for the Puerto Rican on the Mainland is complicated by race, the last major barrier for all people of color in the United States (Alers Montalvo, 1985; Melendez & Melendez, 1993).

Researchers see the challenges for the Puerto Ricans settling on the Mainland as comprising a lengthy list. Most studies on Puerto Rican migrants have been written either about the migration experience or life in New York City. It is true that the original settlements of these migrants were in New York and that the largest concentrations are still there. It made sense to view the challenges, problems, and successes these Puerto Ricans experienced through the prism of that particular city. The lack of writers and authors outside of that city has made it difficult to document the distinct cultural differences of life reflected by other cities that are smaller and less crowded (Fitzpatrick, 1987).

The support systems that are so critical to the quality of life, the intense family life and extended kin relationships along with community supports, though with little church involvement, were there in the ghetto. It was fortunate that the interactions for both micro (individual and family) and macro (schools, church and organizations) were situated in the ghetto, the place migrants would call home when arriving from the Island. The challenges were monumental.

The challenges are: 1.) a breakdown in the solidarity of the Puerto Rican community and the weakening of its ability to confront stereotypes about Puerto Ricans; 2.) difficulties with color and race; 3.) religious identification; 4.) psychological nearness and the reality of easy access to Puerto Rico; 5.) employment recessions; 6.) public schools and the need for bilingual education; 7.) the political status of the Island; 8.) problems of housing, public welfare, drug abuse, mental illness; 9.) a lack of political representation in city, state and federal government and finally; 10). nationalism and militancy (Maldonado-Denis, 1976; Rodriguez, Sanchez & Alers, 1980; Rodriguez, 1989).

The ghetto gives the appearance of being a cushion against discrimination. Everyone living in this environment is like everyone else and all expect to be treated equally, but the ghetto also is a segregated environment that experiences high levels of discrimination from the wider community around it. Consequently, in the ghetto there are poorer services, inferior housing, higher retail prices, and other devaluing elements. That said, since the discrimination experienced is not direct and personal, it doesn’t have the same strong affective impact as say being the first Black in an all White neighborhood would (Darder & Torres, 1998; Fitzpatrick, 1987; Padilla, 1964).

The ghetto is a psychologically supportive environment for people who are suffering discrimination. At the same time, it tends to cushion those living there from an awareness of discrimination and causes them to be more or less content with their social status. It perpetuates the group’s existence as a distinct body, but in so doing, it supports that group’s inferior position in society. The experience of living in the ghetto delays the transition of new arrivals within it to other communities and satisfies the dominant society’s desire to keep the newcomers in their place. Thus, the ghetto stifles rapid mobility even as it makes itself a more desirable destination for those in need of its supports (Rodriguez, 1989). Generally speaking, what mobility there has been in the Puerto Rican experience in New York has been a matter of moving from one barrio to another. Employment and education incentives present opportunities to leave the ghetto even as doing so would mean losing the ghetto’s psychological supports.

With mixed feelings, some of those people who become professionals leave and bury the past ghetto life in their minds. They may even refuse to discuss their experiences. They establish themselves in a white middle-class community and learn a new style of living. The shift into middle class is a highly significant change in lifestyle, cultural values, and personal experience and it creates an uncertain and anxious situation. Attaining middle-class status has not been common in the Puerto Rican experience, at least on the Mainland. People have either been rich or poor, never in between. Now, these new professionals find themselves in unfamiliar territory. It is necessary to determine the norms of middle class so as to feel comfortable and confident. Since the norms are generally obscure and ambiguous, there is considerable anxiety (Zambrana, 1995).

The social cost of what has to be given up in order to achieve has not yet been researched because the number of Puerto Rican college graduates continues to be too small to sample. As an entry point into the middle class, many tend to cluster in programs or professions that serve their culture. Although this may be self-protective, there remains an almost moral need for Puerto Rican professionals to do this to empower their people. They go to colleges where there are other Puerto Ricans and gravitate to equal opportunity positions that may be serving Puerto Ricans but are viewed as an incentive for betterment. It is very comfortable to stay within one’s culture, so this is done with a minimum of social cost. One would expect that as people achieve, they would begin to move out to other professions and careers. However, changes such as this are regarded as a threat by people from the dominant culture, and it frequently results in covert discrimination (Friedman, 1992; Kieffer, 1984).

The internal conflict over the shift to a life governed by white middle-class norms creates an anxiety for the Puerto Ricans who make the move by blurring what has been their world view shaped by such traditional Puerto Rican values as family loyalty, personal relationships, individual dignity, and respect, with that of the Mainland and its emphasis on competition for economic advance and success, as well as the impersonality of a money economy where a person is evaluated on what she or he makes rather than on personal qualities (Zambrana, 1995).

The other major shift has been in the attitudes of families toward the desires of their daughters to improve their situation. Many of these women are ambitious and achieving. There has been a significant change over the past ten years with an obvious lifting of taboos against women working and securing an education (Darder & Torres, 1998).

The Puerto Rican has never had a church on which she or he could rely, whether on the Island or the Mainland. The Catholic Church came to the Island with the Spanish conquest over 500 years ago with the goal of converting the indigenous people and the slaves the Spanish brought. But few priests were sent to preach, thus creating a circumstance where Catholicism diluted those forms of religion already in the environment. The faith people constructed did not necessarily resemble the Catholic religion as it was understood at the Vatican. This dynamic changed again with the American conquest in 1898 and later when American Protestants were permitted to come in and evangelize. (Fitzpatrick, 1987; Murphy, 1993; Office of Pastoral Research, Vols. I & II).

When the Puerto Ricans came to New York City, the Catholic Church dispersed them into "integrated" parishes. Ironically, dispersed public housing was the only accommodation available for low-income people. "Dispersed" by both church and government, the migrant Puerto Ricans lost major cultural and social unifiers and a feeling of security in their new home on the Mainland. This affected the poor as well as the existing middle class of the time. These factors, coupled with their ambiguous political status and the rapid social and economic changes occurring in both places, continued to create problems of identity for Puerto Ricans both on the Mainland and the Island. These factors prevent creating unified sense of community and self (Fitzpatrick, 1987).

Leadership studies through the 1950s report small gains for Puerto Ricans in taking on middle-management decision-making roles in the New York environs but not in sufficient depth and quantity to develop visible powerful leaders. New York City provided the example for all that was possible in the growing communities of Puerto Ricans of the Northeast and the Midwest. Primarily, it was the Puerto Rican women who had achieved prominence in the public and economic life on the Island who used their talents to accomplish the same feats on the Mainland. They were able to maneuver past prejudice, which allowed their talent, plus the change in women’s roles in the United States, to open the door to taking leadership roles. Particularly striking factors disdained by the dominant culture that aided this success were the mixed racial background, the lack of attachment to institutionalized religion and independence from political parties. Professional training and education, and participation in the civil movements of the 1970s, were the avenues open for rising through the ranks in such fields as social service and educational organizations, and arts and culture groups, as well as new organizations founded on the Mainland by these women and the social clubs that were themselves transplanted with the migration from the Island. Political groups, Puerto Rican migrant organizations, and church groups were not seen as instruments for social mobility (Martin, 1977; Office of Pastoral Research, Vols. I & II; Rodriguez, 1989). Notably these women have not taken leadership roles in the welfare, mental health, and drug addiction treatment field. Although all of these avenues are empowering roles for women, they do not provide the key to making significant change in the lives of the Puerto Ricans migrant. Problems in past situations involving political parties were hostile, so no attempts were made to become a part of the political system. Yet the key to opening doors for power for a new ethnic group is to influence government policy. Along with that goes a need for more elected officials from the new ethnic group. The chief political problems for Puerto Ricans on the Mainland have been of two kinds: internal and external. Internally, Puerto Ricans have not participated in elections in numbers sufficient to have an appreciable impact. They lack knowledge of the political system, political resources, and political apparatus. There are divisions within their community and they are faced with the struggle to make ends meet. Externally, Puerto Ricans have faced discrimination, weak political candidates, disenfranchisement, and generally have been denied a fair share of a role in government by the dominant culture. Their efforts outside their jobs on behalf of their community have been impressive, but these connections lack the influence that working from within does and that is needed in order to make a difference (Martin,1977).

There is a slow growth in the number of elected officials who are of Hispanic heritage across the country. This is as true of Puerto Ricans as it is of other Hispanic groups. Hispanics still do not represent the population in the proportions one might expect. The cultural blending of Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics with mainstream United States society is in the hands of organizations as churches and agencies that serve both Hispanic and non-Hispanic populations (Gleason, 1992; Kieffer, 1984).

Leaders of primarily Puerto Rican organizations in the year 2000, are reporting a new influx of people from the Island. Some of the smaller towns in Puerto Rico have resorted to the methods used during the days of Bootstrap and are giving $100.00 and a plane ticket to those who leave. Puerto Rico is suffering a major recession even as the United States prospers. The American Protestant churches have been very active in providing assistance to the people who choose to migrate.

In this migration are semi-skilled workers and professionals who are leaving because the salary levels are very low on the Island. Both groups are confronted with a language barrier when they come to the Mainland, though this migration group has been resourceful in seeking ESL classes. However, the lack of a sufficient number of organizations aware of these migrants’ needs impedes progress in acquiring language skills as well as employment. Notable has been the continuing poor record of public agencies in providing bilingual assistance. Furthermore, the cultural informal mutual support system has been gradually receding as the generations who came earlier improve their incomes and move to the suburbs as noted earlier. They have discontinued their return trips to the ghetto and the mutual aid assistance once given to the new migrant has become unavailable. These changes fit together with the developing middle class discussed earlier. Finally, another condition that many of the new migrants were unaware of is the discontinuance of the public welfare system that previously existed. This expected resource is thus unavailable (Darder & Torres, 1998).

Needless to say, all family styles have been affected by the political and economic changes that have occurred on the Island. New ideologies permeate the Island. The farmer has been displaced by mechanization and has moved to the city. Women have been forced to go to work. Educational opportunities have expanded and provide impetus for those who seek upward mobility. This has been subject to many pitfalls. The first of which is that the English language is critical for success even on the Island. Second is that individual independence has become more important than deferring one’s plans for the good of the family. Subordination, patriarchal authority and primacy of the group over individual fulfillment have come to be challenged by women with respect to family arrangements. Even children have become more questioning, a behavior that would not have been tolerated in an earlier time. The father’s role changed when the mother was required by necessity to go to work. Now that both adults are working and women are expected to be independent in the workplace, behaviors have required more adaptation in family relationships. Women have new attitudes about birth control and even will consider divorce as an option in marriages where intolerable situations have developed. Conflict ensues when they are adamant about their opinions.

The communication between family and relatives on the Island with those on the Mainland is so close that what happens in one place can be expected to happen in the other. So the shifts that have occurred on the Island become the same issues for the people in the migration from Puerto Rico to New York City and to the other states and cities where people have gone.

The conflict between the culture of the Island with the culture of the Mainland comes in the difference of behaviors expected as norms in each culture. They were noted earlier as one of relationships versus individual achievement in a money economy. The second conflict is the adoption of the Mainland culture to the loss of one’s roots. Relationships are constantly reinforced by continuous return trips to the Island. As was stated earlier, the lack of unifying social factors on the Mainland, has continued to weaken family support systems. Those fortunate enough to sustain an extended family, have integrated more smoothly into Mainland culture and maintained stronger family stability.

Many businesses on the Mainland regard Puerto Rican males as interlopers and have been reluctant to hire them. The women are more easily accepted and find work quickly. This has caused strains in families. Another problem has been that women have had to continue to carry the burden of performing household duties along with the expectations of a full-time job. Both adults are exposed and to a degree jointly participate, in the social, community and political activities of their barrios. Also, as earlier noted, the women have used these activities as stepping stones to leadership roles in the organizations.

In moving to the Mainland, tensions between parents and children are exacerbated by the children’s exposure to the U.S. culture because of the differences in behavioral expectations for children (more assertive and self-reliant), knowledge of the English language and child training techniques (parenting skills). Adolescent boy-girl relationships are viewed very differently in each culture and are a major source of conflict as are American peer groups. The family where companionship is emphasized, where love and caring is shared and freedom of choice and movement is permitted, more easily incorporate the new patterns into their family life even as they preserve tradition.

The struggle for Puerto Ricans today is the transition to build a life within the Mainland culture and yet to continue to preserve family values and traditions in the face of the impact and influence of the larger culture around them. Their struggle is to learn the English language in order to survive. Their ability to accomplish is dependent on achieving training, education and employment. They are confronted by prejudice and discrimination stemming from the lack of information and assumptions by other people. Yet they continue to come to the Mainland because it is their birthright and the economics of the Island leave them no other alternatives.

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