Puerto Rican New Yorkers: Workers Respond to the Depression

When the Depression began in October 1929, few programs were in place to assist the massive, long-term loss of income by tens of thousands of working-class New Yorkers. City and Federal authorities were slow to respond with solutions to match the scale of the problem. After conditions worsened through late 1929 and 1930, the city created a special relief commission that gathered funds, distributed cash payments, and provided on-site meals.[1] Through the mid-1930s, various relief and employment programs helped the thousands who were left without an income through very modest direct relief payments or through various sorts of employment. WPA-supported public jobs began in 1936, at the same time as slow economic recovery was underway. New York City’s Mayor La Guardia proved adept at using federal funds provided by the Roosevelt government to develop public works projects throughout the City.

Like most working-class and poor New Yorkers, Puerto Ricans encountered many problems getting access to these emergency employment and aid programs, not because of their scarcity but also because of language and political obstacles. The community could not access Civil Works Administration jobs in 1933 because the local employment office did not receive the listings. The Puerto Rican community was aware of these programs and fought for access.  El Curioso, a weekly variety newspaper with a populist tone, published by Jesus Colon, Bernardo Vega, and others, covered changes in policy closely.[2] The Spanish-language press also followed policy changes and programs carefully. Initially, Puerto Ricans had difficulty getting Works Progress Administration (WPA) jobs as officials doubted their citizenship, and they often had no papers with which to confirm their status. Relief and service programs improved for Puerto Ricans and other barrio residents throughout the 1930s, especially after La Guardia was elected mayor (1934) and Vito Marcantonio was elected to Congress (1934), marking a significant difference between the worst years of the Depression and the late 1930s. Mayor La Guardia, who came from the same neighborhood in East Harlem, had committed to working-class Italians and Puerto Ricans. In 1936, they supported the opening of a major health and service center on West 110th Street, which had Spanish-speaking workers and volunteers.[3]

Starting in the mid-1930s, Communist Party and American Labor Party activists helped Spanish-speaking people enroll in relief and WPA employment programs. Verdad, a Communist Party newspaper, explained relief policies to its readers. One author estimated that 25% of all Harlem (Italians, blacks, Puerto Ricans) depended on relief payments. The WPA suggested similar numbers.[4] Congressman Vito Marcantonio’s East Harlem office and his Puerto Rican staff members provided a clearinghouse for paperwork and support services relating to relief and WPA work. His office helped young people get Civilian Conservation Corps jobs and helped Puerto Ricans and Italians with their new unemployment insurance and social security benefits.[5]

Struggling to live with relief or WPA jobs was difficult and led to many daily sufferings and conflicts. Evictions, lack of food, and daily conflicts were part of the lives of Puerto Ricans, which resembled the problems faced by other New Yorkers. Still, these were exacerbated by language barriers, lack of political clout in the Tammany Hall hierarchy, and the proletarian character of the community. The very context of the Depression also politicized people’s responses to need. Julian Hamas refused a non-union job at a barbershop the Home Relief agency offered to him because it was “against his principle.” As a result, he was taken off the relief rolls and soon evicted from his apartment. In protest, five members of the “Lower Harlem and Puerto Rican Unemployment Council” (one of the committees of the unemployed, likely organized by the Communist Party) hurled his furniture into the local relief office.[7]

Puerto Ricans organized through the International Workers Order, the community’s largest network of politicized mutual aid clubs, held public meetings to discuss how to confront relief policies. In 1937, the “Provisional Committee, International Workers Order” called a meeting of “Latinos-Americanos” with representatives from all the community’s organizations, held at the local of the Association of Puerto Rican Employees in West Harlem’s’ Barrio (2163 8th Ave.).[8]

During the early 1930s, Hispanic workers close to the Communist Party reported discrimination, favoritism, and corrupt practices in the administration of relief employment by the City.  Because of a lack of clout in a traditional corrupt ethnic-based patronage system, Latinos were given the worst jobs and often treated rudely. At the same time, funds went to “ghost” employees, overpaid supervisors, and internal scams.[9]

An orphan who had migrated from San Juan in 1926 because he “could see no future there” remembered the many low-wage jobs in factories for “people just off the boat” through the early 1930s—a battery factory, a hotel kitchen, a plant in Long Island, a button factory, and then 11-hour days at a mattress factory. At that factory, “everyone was indignant at the terrible exploitation, and we went out on strike for six months” in 1935. When he lost his job, he found “red tape, many forms” when applying for relief.  Soon, he joined the Unemployment Council, the Workers Alliance, and the Communist Party. Soon after, he got a WPA job, paying $15/week.

Another migrant experienced similar problems. A woman from Manati had worked stripping tobacco since an early age in San Juan, but after the strikes in 1927, she lost her job and was “boycotted…fired from all the factories.” In New York, her husband, from Curacao, made only the bare minimum with his WPA job. Illiterate in both Spanish and English, she faced greater challenges than the men but was taking classes with the WPA schools, had joined the Workers Alliance, and was supportive of her husband’s membership in the Communist Party, helping him canvass in support of State Assembly candidate Oscar Garcia Rivera through the American Labor Party.

Puerto Ricans also were part of larger responses to the Depression’s economic conditions from the left. The Workers’ Alliance marked an important instance of collaboration between the Socialist and Communist Parties through their work supporting the unemployed and later as an informal union for WPA workers.[10] The Communist Party played a big role in the first large demonstrations against unemployment and union drives in the early 1930s. Still, these were done in a spirit of competition and hostility towards other left and working-class organizations. The Workers Alliance, a mass movement founded in 1935, recruited 800,000 members nationally in 1400 local chapters and worked to lobby politicians and Congress.[11]

Spanish-speaking workers within the orbit of both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party organized their own branches and called them the Alianza Obrera Hispana. They aimed to organize the unemployed and Spanish-speaking workers in WPA-sponsored public works programs. In 1937, the Spanish section of the Workers Alliance organized a march for the unemployed, in which 800 workers participated. It wound its way through Spanish Harlem and ended at the public assistance office in central Harlem. Frank Quintana spoke for the Communist Party, and Consuelo Fuentes presented her story of seeking relief. The marchers presented a folio of complaints to the superintendent of the office.[12] The Workers Alliance Local 98 in the Bronx was also known as the Alianza Obrera Hispana and maintained contact with Vito Marcantonio’s office. It linked Spanish speakers to other workers and activists.[13] Another section identified itself as the Alianza Obrera Puertorriquena de Nueva York, while yet another identified as the Alianza Obrera del Bronx. These Alianza chapters helped set the basis for founding some of the IWO lodges and some of the expansive political work of the Hispanic Popular Front. One participant remembered the important social role of his Alianza chapter, which included meetings, listening to music on the vitrola, talking, eating ice cream, dances, and fundraisers for “members in trouble.”[14]

Next: Testimonies of the Depression

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