Puerto Rican New Yorkers: Bad Press/Good Press
Large-scale Puerto Rican migration to New York City began again during the final years of WWII. New migrants joined a population with long-established migrant, second and third-generation roots in Puerto Rico that had already grown to about 225,000 people and that shared a larger Hispanic world with thousands of other Spanish speakers. The most dramatic years of the migration were from 1946 to 1953, extending the movement that had started with the migration and recruitment during the war and encouraged by the post-war effects of army veteran mobility and benefits. Tens of thousands migrated during the last three years of the war, and after the war, the stream grew to the tens of thousands yearly, not all of whom became long-term residents. The wartime and immediate post-war surge of migrants went mostly unnoticed by governments and the larger New York City community. However, by 1947, a crisis emerged that linked many players in a fight over the legitimacy and desirability of the rapid growth of the Puerto Rican community in New York and the implications of incorporating many new workers in the City’s complex social service and welfare state infrastructure. This response was varied and included attacks, public fights, and calls for attention to the needs of this growing community from New Yorkers and Americans, more broadly.
On one hand, a surge of public attention (especially in the press and city policy circles) to Puerto Rican migrants in 1947 was alarmist and hostile. The attacks were intense, and it would be easy to conclude that New York City gave an overwhelmingly hostile reception to the new migrants. But the story was more complex. Sharp responses of support and more nuanced positions quickly emerged in response to the right-wing press attacks on the migration and the migrants. About half of the journalistic coverage of this process was characterized as “neutral” or purely descriptive by one researcher from that period, and much of the press was supportive not only of the rights of Puerto Ricans but also framed the migrants in the context of a progressive move away from colonialism and economic need. Certainly, the Puerto Rican migration became the center of a huge controversy all the same. But soon enough, the controversies encouraged the creation of supportive discourses and programs and, especially, allowed Puerto Rican activists and their allies more visibility and resources in their efforts throughout the 1950s.
Scholars have discussed the negative aspects of these press controversies and some of the language is emblazed in the political memory of the Puerto Ricans. Eileen Findlay examined this negative press coverage in some detail. She found in it (not surprisingly) echoes of the racialized, gendered, colonial discourses that were part of US/Puerto Rican relations earlier in the century. Her work examines the articles and photographs from this negative coverage, especially in a few newspapers.[1] Other scholars also focus on the negative reception by the press but conjoined the negative and supportive responses by condemning the use of the term “the Puerto Rican problem” shared by practically all participants in the debate. They noted the discriminatory and exclusionary weight of this language in which all problems experienced by Puerto Ricans were somehow caused by their very selves, their presence or their culture. However, his conflation has obscured distinct responses that might have superficially used the same language but, when examined carefully, were dramatically different from the hostile press and other forms of attacks. The use of the term (but also the simplistic critique by scholars) has collapsed distinct responses that originated in different values and structural, historical, and political contexts.
Bad Press
The “bad press” was bad enough. The attacks had two variants. The first was “frontal,” or based on generalizations and rejection of the migrants as “alien.” Frontal attacks used language and images based on nativist, anti-colonial, anti-poor, racialized, anti-welfare state images and language. Second, more “nuanced” approaches focused on anti-communism, white racial politics, tropical disease, slum formation, street crime, welfare dependence, and language used to characterize migrants as unassimilable or likely to produce problems for New Yorkers. The most alarmist authors made links between the ability of Puerto Rican migrants to move freely because of their US citizenship status and the arrival of Cuban mobsters with links to the Italian mafia! Images of a huge (exaggeratedly large) tidal wave of ignorant, alien people overwhelming the city were aimed at producing fear and gross generalizations about the migrants.
Their descriptions of the slums “created” by Puerto Ricans were phrased in the language of older attacks on Italians as “Mediterranean” and Latin in character. The nativist thread and content in these attacks were dense. They included both elite WASP sentiment but also sectors opposed to immigration and echoes from the anti-Semitic, pro-fascist sectors from the 1930s, like Father Coughlin. Attacks on Jews were the closest and still strong sentiment among many white nativists.
New York had, at that time, dozens of newspapers (nine of which were daily) and many periodicals and magazines, both popular and political. The right-wing press had attacked Puerto Ricans, and a few others made an echo of the panic that was created by red-voting, ghetto-dwelling, tropical, unassimilable immigrants. Most negative were The Daily Mirror, The Journal American, World-Telegram, and The New York Sun, all known for their sensationalist style. Alongside these newspaper attacks came national magazines, such as Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and American Magazine, which had articles that emphasized poverty and the problem-creation of migration. Right-wing outlets even repeated conspiracy theories about the political motivations for encouraging the migration—a leftist conspiracy to prop up East Harlem’s leftist Congressman Vito Marcantonio. They produced the ‘threat’ narrative of dangerous and foreign Puerto Rican bodies and culture, using language and imagery borrowed from anti-Semitic campaigns.
The Afro-American had an alarmist headline insert: “Extra! Puerto Ricans invade NYC at a rate of 1000 weekly,” while the Bronx Home News screamed, “Slums are heaven after Hungry Puerto Rico Swamps.” But the worst attacks came from the New York World Telegram and the New York Sun, “yellow” journalism tabloids that were notorious for their right-wing leanings:
“…the sinister communist angle in the problem of the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans now coming to east Harlem and other parts of this city; not immigrants but us citizens; yet thousands of them are so poor, jobless, ignorant and even diseased as to make their impact upon welfare and health authorities serious and inevitable; potential voters; of deep interest to communists, Marcantonio…easy prey for communist scouts and organizers unless sound counteracting American influences are speedily brought to bear on them.”[2]
Article after article framed with this language must have created the impression among many New Yorkers that they actually had something at stake in the migration of Puerto Ricans:
“Hordes of them live on the relief checks that Marcantonio wangles for them in exchange for their votes”
“Land this morning, get on the dole tonight…that is the magnet.”
“The natives are cursed with tuberculosis and syphilis before they arrive, a Puerto Rican leper was discovered not long ago. But once they are here, the venereal incidence is marked with rapid rise due to association with low prostitutes…”
“Journalists” Jack Lait and Mortimer wrote many of the articles which were serialized in a book New York: Confidential!:[3]
“…has descended on Manhattan island like a locust plague an influx of Puerto Rican”
“…referring to these Caribbean wards of the nation as a plague is not prompted by prejudice, anger or careless use of phraseology. Puerto Ricans were not born to be New Yorkers. They are mostly crude farmers, subject to congenital tropical diseases, physically unfit for the northern climate, uneducated, non-English-speaking and almost impossible to assimilate and condition for healthful and useful existence in an active city of stone and steel.”
“But the story is far more sordid. A majority of these people were lured here deliberately, because as American citizens, they can vote. They are a power behind congressman Vito Marcantonio, until recently the only American Labor Party member of the House, who rules the wretched section into which a majority of the 600,000 have poured from leaky ships and from miserable chartered planes which are almost beyond description….The Puerto Ricans at this moment are costing New York City $12,000,000 a year in relief. there is no residency requirement…”
The letters to the press followed. To President Roosevelt, Puerto Rico Senate President (and soon-to-be Governor) Munoz Marin, and others, with requests that Puerto Rico be given its independence in order to solve this problem. Others in the community complained of the attacks (especially to Governor Jesus T. Pinero and Munoz Marin). At the same time, a few Puerto Ricans even agreed with the criticisms of the “bad behaviors” of many Puerto Rican migrants that gave the community a bad name.
After the initial barrage of newspaper attacks came the national magazines, which toned down (for the most part) the frontal attacks but still framed the migration as a problem-creating dilemma driven by the desperation of tropical slums and plantations. Life, the Saturday Evening Post (the most rightist and the most hostile), American Magazine, and others. To understand the vehemence of the attacks on Puerto Rican migrants by the right-wing press requires a larger frame. Local and national media outlets hoped to use Puerto Ricans as tokens in pre-existing political, ideological, and cultural battles between Left and Right in the US. All the themes used to attack the migrants were already contested terrain in US post-war politics. In precisely these years, intense fighting raged over policies concerning immigration, welfare, the role of the state in the economy, the global role of the US, the opposition to the arrival of refugees, Jews, and other displaced persons (DP’s) from post-war Europe, the welfare department, the secret power of the Communist Party, and even opposition to the construction of public housing.
Negative portrayals of Puerto Ricans as welfare-dependent were part of a larger battle over cutbacks to the poor and the influence of the Communist Party over unions. The loudest concern was restricting the free migration of people seen as culturally and linguistically alien, who were perceived to put pressure on scarce social services and a welfare state that was still in the process of being built.
The core of the attention came from this sort of less frontal attack where the migrants themselves were not rejected but issues raised by the rapid influx of large numbers of non-English speakers. It included paid media advertisements and pressure on and from the administrative circles of judges on this question. The main driving force was the “problems” “created” by the Puerto Rican presence in New York and incipiently in other US cities.
Together, these responses shared a common nativist frame. The US (and NYC) had not received any significant migration since the start of WWI (1914), and the country had gone through nearly two decades of intense change that helped create a stronger common identity while sharpening both conservative and liberal arguments against immigration. It should not be surprising that a nativist response was part of conservative thinking and also a sort of common-sense approach shared by most Americans (including a significant part of the earlier Puerto Rican migrant community).
These responses were based on pre-existing issues that already divided New Yorkers. Italians had experienced similar attacks and explicit fights in the press, including one which resulted in Frank Sinatra punching Mortimer over his portrayal of Italians as criminals and of Sinatra as a Communist sympathizer because of his liberal politics.[4] Hollywood leftists were also being attacked as fellow travelers of the Communist Party, including actor Jose Ferrer. Blacks were the constant subject of a discourse about ghettos and crime. Sensationalist, right-wing, and “yellow” newspapers were experts at stirring panic over these issues. The continuities of portrayals of Puerto Rican migration with those of central and southern European immigrants were obvious to many Americans involved in this debate.
Good Press?
Then, there was “the other half” of the debate. These articles and discussions had a different tone that ranged from ethnographically curious or careful to supportive and even celebratory. Initially, they were framed as an explicit response to the right-wing attacks and the sense of panic they were creating, providing better facts and alternative narratives. Eventually, they changed to more complex arguments, including considerations of the causes of migration, the island’s conditions, and its relationship with the US. It is important to consider the motivations and origins of these Catholic, Jewish, leftist, and liberal voices.
New Yorkers were already divided in their responses to the relative surge in the immigrant population. Anti-racist politics, welfare state liberalism, New Deal liberalism, and popular front radicalism were central—and divisive–aspects of New York politics and society. Jews—then not fully considered “white” and subject to continued discrimination—were actively pursuing a politics of multi-linguistic multiculturalism in many unions and had developed broad organizations and ideologies in support of civil rights, equality, and anti-discrimination, often in alliance with African American groups. This meant that many Jewish leaders and organizations were positioned in support of Puerto Rican migrants.
In general, however, New York’s daily and magazine press was the principal “public” space in which support for the migrants took place. Soon the liberal press moderated its alarmist headlines and sent journalists into the communities and to the island. The liberal, Jewish, and African American press moderated their initial panicked and sensationalistic tone about the numbers involved, shrinking the estimates from the hundreds of thousands (600,000!!) to the tens of thousands of recent arrivals. Soon, the Left-inflected, African American, and liberal newspapers and magazines reported distinct versions of the Puerto Ricans as hard-working, struggling citizens seeking the same basic rights as any other migrant group. Many of these changed their focus from the migrants themselves and their characteristics to assigning blame to various institutional and structural contexts. PM, The Nation, Commonweal, pro-labor daily like the Daily News and New York Post, The Amsterdam News, the Catholic Christian Century, and the Militant turned to cover the migration and its complexities in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even the New York Times appeared to have learned its lesson after having repeated the alarmist and grossly mistaken demographic numbers that circulated in 1947, turning instead to produce far more nuanced and careful articles. Depending on the source and the timing, this friendlier treatment of the Puerto Rican migration varied from curious and naïve to firmly anti-colonial and celebratory of Puerto Rican citizenship rights. The narratives emphasized, sometimes in a stereotypical way, the poverty that the depression and the sugar economy had created on the island without considering any of the recent economic changes that had facilitated the emigration. Some in the left, pro-labor, and liberal press took direct issue with the attacks by right-wing and sensationalist writers and linked the “plight” of the Puerto Ricans to those of earlier immigrants who had faced both opposition and discrimination.
The African American, Catholic, liberal, and left response shared many elements in understanding the emigration in the context of Puerto Rico’s “tropical” colonialism. One observer of the radical and black presses thought the response was less interested in supporting the migration and more in using the process to support their own political positions. Other coverage framed the worst aspects of the Puerto Rican presence in New York as part of their own critiques of American urban, working-class society and the limitations of liberal capitalism. This included the knowledge that recent migrants always occupied the worst possible housing, preexisting slums (defined mostly as low-quality housing and dense settlement patterns) that were being vacated by other ethnic groups—ethnic groups who had also been viciously attacked as ghetto-dwellers, slum creators or welfare dependent. Housing costs, inflated for the newcomers by a variety of general and specific conditions, were also linked to the low wages they found in their jobs.
These supportive responses, which accounted for a third of the coverage of Puerto Ricans in the press and periodical publications, sought to not only legitimize the presence of Puerto Ricans but also to explain their problems and support the improvement of city services in their growing communities.[5] Sometimes, the supportive press relied on realistic but still problematic descriptions that highlighted facts spun as positive characteristics to dispel the myths that emerged about the migrants. In some stories, readers were reminded that Puerto Rican migrants were literate, hard-working, white, had skills, and were family-oriented.
However, it was the liberal establishment press that produced the richest and most ethnographically sensitive journalism about the Puerto Rican migration. The New York Times, the Daily News, the New York Post, the New Leader, the Nation, and others—all part of the diverse constellation of non-Communist social democratic and liberal politics sought to place their stories in a dialog with the complexity of the migrants and the various institutional frames in which their lives could be understood. In this way, they also changed the questions and language and helped consolidate liberal support for Puerto Rican migrants and emigration in New York City by the early 1950s.
Some of the most respected liberal “social” and left journalists wrote extensive, ten-piece coverage of the new New Yorkers in sympathetic and often brutally honest tone that shifted the debate from simplistic support or opposition to the presence of the migrants. Some of these journalists published at various levels, in newspapers, in liberal weeklies, and eventually would publish book versions that focused on specific neighborhoods or on the Puerto Rican community itself.
Bigger Contexts
The granting of US citizenship to Puerto Ricans opened the door to very positive assertions of rights and responsibility, especially in the context of migration to New York and other cities. When Puerto Ricans joined the Korean War effort by the tens of thousands, these discourses expanded dramatically as a form of patriotic inclusion framed by ideas of manhood, national maturity, equality with the US, and contributions to US claims about the assertion of democracy around the globe. In this context, it became more difficult for the right wing to attack the migrants and the community, as military service served as the basis for the assertion of respectability and worth.
Yet, intractable problems of perception and image persisted for Puerto Ricans. One critical issue for the Puerto Rican migrant community was the question of “slums.” Americans found “slums” particularly abhorrent and unacceptable. Even when not blaming Puerto Ricans for the impoverished conditions in which many lived, the broader American public expressed alarm at the worsening conditions of many blocks in East Harlem. It reproduced old narratives that linked ghetto conditions to “ghetto behaviors.”
The intellectuals and journalists around the Socialist Party, former Communist Party members, and the large liberal establishment (especially the Jewish civil and labor rights establishment) expressed support for the migrants in different languages and contexts, sometimes reproducing stereotypical perceptions even as they tried to contribute to solving problems for people in the community. This was most clearly visible in newspapers like PM, The New Leader, The New York Post, The Nation and the Amsterdam News. They even expressed interest on the “push” forces that drove migrants out of Puerto Rico, probably misleading their readers as they emphasized Puerto Rico’s economic failures, the decline of sugar and urban slums as the processes that produced emigration in those years rather than the dramatic attraction power of better jobs and higher wages for those already employed and with some industrial skills, as shown consistently by the social science data.
The labor press was a delayed participant in these debates. Some unions were already aware of their Spanish-speaking members, and some, especially those under the leadership of Communist Party members or sympathizers, had already acknowledged their Spanish-speaking members by recruiting Hispanic staff or rank-and-file leaders or by including bilingual sections or advertising in their newspapers. But once the massive entry of Puerto Ricans into the many unions became clear during the late 1940s and through the Korean conflict the labor press also became a major player in legitimizing and supporting the needs of Puerto Ricans, depicted as hard-working unionists with citizenship rights and with unmet needs in housing and community-based services.
Puerto Ricans themselves participated in these debates. They wrote articles, organized protests, and wrote letters to counter right-wing attacks, and many second-generation activists from the community pressured liberal and leftist outlets to respond. Puerto Ricans, both recent migrants and elements drawn from the earlier migrant community and its second generation, were involved in responding to the “bad press” and redefining “the Puerto Rican problem” in different directions. Puerto Rican “politics of respectability” came to form a large part of this response. Puerto Ricans, including migrants, second generation, and islanders, quickly condemned and called out any visible form of bad behavior by Puerto Ricans in New York, while newspapers in Puerto Rico briefly pondered the bad image that New York ghettos were creating for both migrants and islanders. This was visible in Puerto Rico and the New York City Spanish language press and in the letters sent to public officials, including Luis Munoz Marin himself. The respectability aspect had diverse roots, but the journalism that came closest to knowing the real bad behaviors of ghetto-dwelling Puerto Ricans were the Puerto Rican newspapers themselves, who thought they saw the habits of the rural poor transferred to the ghettos of New York. In other words, the “respectability politics” defense came with the caveat of reproducing class prejudices and class differences in the Puerto Rican community, in disservice to a reality that was in actuality very complex, as complex as the society that produced the migration itself.
The “pathologies”—real, perceived, feared, or manufactured—of the migration would soon become a major issue for all, even if they involved only a very small minority of the migrant population. Since 1945, Spanish Youth Bureau leaders had been pushing exactly for the kind of debate and attention to the needs of the poorer sectors of the community. The debates and fights of 1947-1949 gave them the opportunity to gain more traction and develop more allies, especially with the special commission created with the Welfare Council and its 1948 study of the community’s welfare and educational needs.[6] The promotion of Columbia University’s Puerto Rican Study (paid and promoted by the island’s government and effectively led by Clarence Senior, Director of the University of Puerto Rico’s Social Science Institute and soon to be Migration Division National Director) and the creation of the Migration Division office in New York also helped change the focus of the conversation, especially among political and policy circles. Soon after, when Mayor O’Dwyer was pressured into forming a committee that focused on interfacing Puerto Rican community leaders with the City’s agencies the conversation, driven to some extent by political pressure from many sides, of how to link Puerto Rican migrants to problem-solving forms of support from the city and the many private agencies involved in supporting working-class New Yorkers.
The arrival of Puerto Ricans in large numbers produced a real sense of crisis for those interested in providing services to a Spanish-speaking population that had grown very quickly, but also many debates about the community’s legitimacy and needs, about the city’s preparedness to deal with a large influx of migrants which in fact were alien to the city’s dominant languages, culture, norms and conditions, as well as American responses to US colonial rule and reformism in Puerto Rico. Later, after the initial turmoil was over and the post-war Right-wing turn had subsided somewhat, the question of Puerto Ricans in New York in the 1950s became one of the critical litmus tests for the success of local liberalism and the strength of New York City’s welfare state. Puerto Ricans themselves were able to weigh in decisively on this debate, tipping the balance of New York Politics towards liberal, reformist social democracy, even as the older Puerto Rican community and the city itself moved away from popular front politics.
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The “pathologies”—real and perceived—of the migration would soon become a major issue for all even if they involved only a very small minority of the migrant population. Since 1945 Spanish Youth Bureau leaders had been pushing exactly for the kind of debate and attention to the needs of the poorer sectors of the community, and the debates and fights of 1947-1949 gave them the opportunity to gain more traction and develop more allies, especially with the special commission created with the Welfare Council and its 1948 study of the community’s welfare and educational needs.[6] The promotion of Columbia University’s Puerto Rican Study (paid and promoted by the island’s government and effectively led by Clarence Senior, Director of the University of Puerto Rico’s Social Science Institute and soon to be Migration Division National Director) and the creation of the Migration Division office in New York also helped change the focus of the conversation especially among political and policy circles. Soon after, when Mayor O’Dwyer was pressured into forming a committee that focused on interfacing Puerto Rican community leaders with the City’s agencies the conversation, driven to some extent by political pressure from many sides, of how to link Puerto Rican migrants to problem-solving forms of support from the city and the many private agencies involved in supporting working class New Yorkers.
The arrival of Puerto Ricans in large numbers produced a real sense of crisis for those interested in providing services to a Spanish-speaking population that had grown very quickly, but also many debates: about the community’s legitimacy and needs, about the city’s preparedness to deal with a large influx of migrants which in fact were alien to the city’s dominant languages, culture, norms and conditions, as well as American responses to US colonial rule and reformism in Puerto Rico. Later, after the initial turmoil was over and the post-war Right-wing turn had subsided somewhat, the question of Puerto Ricans in New York in the 1950s became one of the critical litmus tests for the success of local liberalism and the strength of the New York City’s welfare state. Puerto Ricans themselves were able to weigh in decisively on this debate, tipping the balance of New York Politics towards liberal, reformist social democracy, even as the older Puerto Rican community and the city itself moved away from popular front politics.
The core of the attention came from this sort of less frontal attack where the migrants themselves were not rejected but issues raised by the rapid influx of large numbers of non-english speakers. It included paid media advertisements and pressure on and from the administrative circles of judges on this question. The main driving force were the “problems” “created” by the Puerto Rican presence in New York and incipiently in other US cities.
Together, these responses shared a common nativist frame. The US (and NYC) had not received any significant migration since the start of WWI (1914) and the country had gone through nearly two decades of intense change that helped create a stronger common identity while sharpenning both conservative and liberal arguments against immigration. It should not be surprising that a nativist response was part of conservative thinking and also a sort of common-sense approach shared by most Americans (including a significant part of the earlier Puerto Rican migrant community).
These responses were based on pre-existing issues which already divided New Yorkers. Italians had experienced similar attacks and explicit fights in the press, including one which resulted in Frank Sinatra punching Mortimer over his portrayal of Italians as criminals and of Sinatra as a Communist sympathizer because of his liberal politics.[4] Hollywood leftists were also being attacked as fellow travelers of the Communist Party, including actor Jose Ferrer. Blacks were the constant subject of a discourse about ghettos and crime. Sensationalist, right wing and “yellow” newspapers were experts at stirring panic over these issues. The continuities of portrayals of Puerto Rican migration with those of central and southern European immigrants were obvious to many Americans involved in this debate.
[1] Findlay, Eileen J. “Dangerous Dependence or Productive Masculinity? Gendered Representations of Puerto Ricans in the US Press, 1940-50.” Radical History Review 2017, no. 128 (2017): 173-98.
[2] 22 October1947.
[3] Lait, J., and L. Mortimer. New York: Confidential! Chicago: Ziff Davis Publishing Company, 1948.
[4] Jon Weiner, “When Old Blue Eyes Was ‘Red’: The poignant story of Frank Sinatra’s politics.” The New Republic, 31 March 1986.
[5] Goldsen, Rose K. “Puerto Rican Migration to New York City.”Ph.d. Dissertation, Yale University, 1953.
[6] Welfare Council of New York City. Committee on Puerto Ricans in New York City. Report of the Committee on Puerto Ricans in New York City. New York: Welfare Council of New York City, 1948.