Researching the Histories of Puerto Ricans in New York: Maps, Detours and Lessons

Aldo A. Lauria Santiago

This article suggests strategies for developing research on Puerto Ricans’ history in New York and other urban contexts. How can historians and those wanting to incorporate historical research, arguments, and sources in their research approach the history of Puerto Ricans (and other Latinos) in New York?  The ideas I present below are rooted in my own experience developing various research projects on New York and New Jersey but also reflect many discussions, collaborations, and critiques with colleagues in the field, including the discussions of the Rutgers Workshop on the History of Puerto Ricans and Latinos.

As part of my research, I had to develop and apply a series of principles, which I will sketch below. As I pursued sources and materials, often with the help of staff or other scholars, I also sought to learn how to break the limitations imposed by my own (and often the field’s generalized assumptions) in my research practices. I had extensive training in research methods, starting at Princeton with librarian Peter Johnson in the late 1970s, then did extensive archival work in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. However, I had not trained as a historian of New York, nor was I ready for the challenges of researching the intersection of an ethnic/national origin group with the histories of work, labor movements, and working-class politics.  These principles started as questions, and in finding answers, I often found myself working against the grain and limitations embedded in the literature on Puerto Ricans in New York. These ideas are not intended to be applied rigidly but seek to promote reflection and further development based on the specific goals of research projects.

Foreground narratives

The often-shifting paradigms and theoretical “turns” in the social sciences and humanities have kept us from carefully embedding the primacy of narrative within the stories we tell about Puerto Ricans and their engagement with hundreds of institutions and thousands of other people in New York. Any claims to interpretation or generalization about a demographic that came to include nearly one million people must begin with the capacity to encompass or be compatible with known narratives of change over time. The emphasis on narrative helps move us towards acknowledging and understanding the great diversity of Puerto Rican experiences in New York. Along the way, I have distilled some common-sense suggestions that help reframe a debate, and the one that seems obvious here is why should we be able to describe the experience of Puerto Ricans in New York as any less diverse or complex than that of Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico?

Individuals first

Our field is rife with generalizations that are supposed to apply to tens, even hundreds of thousands of people. Still, often, scholars do little work to seek out the narratives of individuals and how they might confirm or provide evidence of large-scale claims or disprove or test our often rigid and over-generalizing claims. Suppose we cannot make sense of grand, abstract arguments through the stories of individuals and the analysis of their connections to others or their contributions to important trends. How can we justify any generalizations? Another challenge is embedded here:  individuals are intrinsically dynamic, and even a few individuals’ movements over time challenge our ability to create grand narratives or find larger patterns. Ultimately, following individuals helps us learn more carefully what arguments we can make about smaller contexts or spaces and challenges us to question any larger generalizations that apply to an entire ethnic demographic.

Context matters

One of the problems introduced by arguments that foreground Puerto Ricans (and other ethnic subjects) is that the questions we ask presuppose their own delimitation. When does a question and the research for an answer begin or end as you move from the certainty of the presumedly familiar boundaries of an ethnic subject (specifically Puerto Rican stories) and the multiple, crisscrossing context of institutions, people, and materiality that surrounds and intersects with them? Prejudging our subject imposes, at least initially, some rigidity, timelessness and fixed assumptions into our models, questions, and answers. Our assumptions and evidence about the content of an ethnic or racialized subject (what it meant to belong, identify, or be treated as one—different but connected dimensions) in a given historical context becomes even more important as we focus on shifting or varied social, political, institutional contexts.  It is not just the presentist bias but also the circumspection of categories that keep us from looking at potential relationships, links, changes, and parallel or alternative readings of identity and experience because we don’t expect to see them.

Ethnic and racial identities are not abstractions

Ethnicity and race do not stand alone and in the abstract, and ethnic identification and racialization are processes that affect the beholders as well as the beholden, which means that outcomes (how group members identify themselves or are identified by others or by society at large, or even if ethnicity is rejected, dismissed or resisted) can vary and change and manifest a great number of contradictions. These outcomes can change meaning and practice depending on conflict and negotiation and can change over time or be manipulated or redefined. Ethnic and racial identities are, therefore, rarely as rigid or definitive as we’d like to think.

The “community” is not monolithic

We must question the very existence of a singular community and how our thinking (and research) assumes a central or fully shared experience among a group that now numbers over a million people. Of course, when referring generally to Puerto Ricans, we can use this term. Still, ordinarily, we should question exactly how it applies in given contexts and in the search for evidence of and narratives of shared (or not) contexts. We make assumptions about who or what community we are writing about. We often do not clarify the center and boundaries of the community and rarely explicitly acknowledge the great variations within our bounded arguments. This is a critical problem within Puerto Rican Studies, where linguistic, generational, regional, gender, color, and other differences are often not acknowledged, let alone narrated into discrete arguments.

Arguments, even small ones but especially large ones, need to be evidence-based

Our use of evidence must challenge or at least test assumptions and assertions by others, even ideas we hold as certainties. We often work with assumptions about specific narratives, and especially if we have our own personal familiarity with a specific site or conditions, we may accept uncritically that if we know this to be the right argument and evidence for that specific context, it must apply broadly.[the rest of this sentence needs to be fixed…and I think an example would help nail down the point.]

Color matters.  Puerto Rican Studies scholars are used to discussing color and Black identities in the abstract. Still, they often fail to research the history of Blackness and Black-identified people and the role of color within specific contexts and locations.  This has meant that scholars often do not even try to distinguish the experience of Black-identified or dark-skinned Puerto Ricans from those of others. And sometimes, when claims are made about Black Puerto Ricans, little evidence is provided, and the claims rest instead on general understandings of racism and racial hierarchies in New York.  Similar arguments could be made about the role of whiteness in the Puerto Rican community.

Puerto Ricans are everywhere in the archive

Puerto Ricans are everywhere in New York City (and other places). Still, we should not only go looking for an archive generated or stored by Puerto Ricans and certainly not limit our search to sources classified somehow as being about Puerto Ricans (or Hispanics, Spanish-Speakers, etc.)… We need to look from the top and sideways. We are trained to find “sources about or by Puerto Ricans,” and typically, we start (and don’t go much further) than familiar places closely related to Puerto Rican communities and history. Yet most archival sites on and from New York contain materials that intersect with Puerto Rican stories simply because Puerto Ricans are embedded in nearly all of the city’s spaces. Not only because Puerto Ricans had multiple identities and social roles but also because they intersected with every other possible site for creating archival records, including state entities, non-profits, etc.

Use (and challenge) the old social science data and arguments

New Yorkers and Puerto Ricans, together and separately, were subject to thousands of observations by multiple agencies and individuals. There are hundreds of theses at every level of government. State agencies, community-serving institutions, and social science researchers developed their own insights, research, and data sets into the slice of New York that they were interested in.  This data can be recovered, and nearly all twentieth-century institutions gathering wide data noted distinctions for the Hispanic, Puerto Rican, or Spanish-speaking population.

The Spanish language press is imprescindible

No one should publish anything having to do with the history of Puerto Ricans in New York without looking at some portion of the Spanish language press. The Spanish language press is the single most important source created by Spanish-speaking communities in New York. It includes important newspapers like El Diario and La Prensa, leftist newspapers, and short-lived cultural, political, and commercial publications. There are also New York editions of Puerto Rico-based newspapers, and the Puerto Rico press followed stories in New York from the 1940s through the 1970s. Some of the most important recent contributions to the study of the Puerto Rican community have come from careful reading of the press. And a corollary of this is that we cannot rely only on the New York Times.  New York had dozens of daily and weekly publications with liberal, radical, labor, ethnic, religious, or conservative editorial lines. Neighborhoods had their own weeklies and major voluntary organizations as well. Now forgotten are the pro-labor and pro-immigration editorial lines and respected journalists of the Daily News and New York Post. And Puerto Ricans are present, incidentally or centrally, in all of these

Follow the money. A common assumption within our field is that most Puerto Ricans were poor or working class. Economic diversity within the community is rarely acknowledged or studied carefully, which means that Puerto Ricans’ experience of economic mobility is often ignored. let alone the larger contexts of wealth, well-being, and mobility in which Puerto Ricans participated. Every major sociological study done in the mid-twentieth century understood the need to gather careful income data. Still, historians rarely acknowledge these income differences, let alone the paths that led Puerto Ricans to often experience dramatic income differences.  The larger bias here has been the persistent focus on poverty in late 20th-century social sciences, with few in-depth historical studies of paths into or out of poverty or narrative treatment of specific poor communities that may have experienced both poverty and some degree of mobility.

I thank Lorrin Thomas for her comments and suggestions for this text.