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The Introduction

Introduction

Framing Latinos in New Jersey: From Invisibility to Empowerment

ALDO A. LAURIA SANTIAGO

ULLA D. BERG

New Jersey is a state that barely knows itself. It is also a state that hardly wants to know itself. Scholarship on New Jersey is frequently framed by themes drawn from deeply rooted ideas that originate in eighteenth-century colonial history or simplistic derivations from the state’s peculiar late twentieth-century economic development.1 Phrases and terminologies commonly express these ideas, often with substance but also as cliches: empty, gateway, corridor, ethnic, divided, unintegrated, corrupt, postindustrial, posturban, postsuburban, larger New York. In New Jersey’s dominant discourses and professional knowledge economies, any visibility offered to postwar immigrants is squeezed into (and often out of) these frames built through narratives of enduring contrasts and liberal successes.

These frames created by ideas of continuity and development may be potentially inclusive of many aspects of the histories of Latinos in the state but, more often than not, they are limiting and exclusive. This volume parts from the assumption that any knowledge about Latino communities in New Jersey has to simultaneously reference these enduring narratives, but also challenges the limitations they impose. We suggest that the immigrant paradigm encloses any possibility of a truly integrated knowledge of Latino (and other) communities, as originators and owners of an organic New Jersey experience.2 As a result, and enhanced by the persistent marginality of its urban centers and the political weakness of its urban (and non-White) working-class sectors, New Jersey has simultaneously welcomed and hidden its Latino population in the state’s cultural, political, and educational spaces.3 Consequently, despite the production of some knowledge about Latinos in the last twenty years, Latinos have remained peripheral, incidental, local, and even evanescent, to major narratives about the state.4 Predictably immigration resonates with a framework that emphasizes development in the form of economic growth, employment and access to housing, welfare state resources, and public education is understandable. These are foreseeable, even obligatory, characteristics of the migratory and generational experience of most Latinos in New Jersey. These immigrant vectors may be framed in slightly different ways depending on which of New Jersey’s postwar development stages (industrial, postindustrial, administrative, distributional/ service) or regional economies (industrial, affluent/suburban, rural/agricultural) is under scrutiny, but they provide the basis of the diversity of places, moments, and experiences represented in this book’s chapters.5

Inevitably, suburbanization, housing and labor market dynamics, public school systems, and the complexities of the state’s changing economic landscape are all part of New Jersey’s success stories and frame many of the themes analyzed in the chapter contributions. Yet other less visible stories and dynamics of exploitation, poverty, immigrant detention and deportation, violence, racism, urban decline, police brutality, and socioeconomic marginalization do not so easily fit New Jersey’s persistent metanarratives. Several contributors address these themes as well.

The scholarly literature on Latinos in New Jersey is scant and until recently included no more than a few in-depth monographs and only a few dozen social science, education, and public-health studies. Pioneers of Puerto Rican studies like Maria Josefa Canino Arroyo, Hilda Hidalgo, Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim, Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, and Kal Wagenheim carried out the first studies in the 1970s and 1980s, often as part of community-oriented pedagogies linked to pro- grams in Puerto Rican studies. Mostly written by women, these works had a persistent focus on class, gender and sexuality, and the contribution of Latinas.6 One dissertation on Cubans in New Jersey took decades to be published as a book, joining one other study of Cubans, while an important book on Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia included significant content on Camden.7 The all-too- thin literature on the urban crisis in New Jersey often includes discussions of Puerto Rican urban communities with some attention to Camden and Newark.8 Yet Perth Amboy, Paterson, Jersey City, and other places remain largely unexamined. The Catholic Church and the religious practices of Latinos also received some attention.9 The growing presence of South Americans beginning in the 1980s and of Mexicans in the 1990s was noticed by the press but produced very limited scholarly research. Since the 2000s a small highly specialized but growing literature has addressed questions of health, diet, bilingual education, and educational outcomes.10 In some of these fields Peter Guarnaccia, a now retired Rutgers University professor, played a pioneering role.11 New Jersey entered the twenty-first century with little knowledge of its Hispanic or Latino populations at the same time that a massive third generation was already entering its educational and other institutions.

The chapters in this book represent the, by now, mature fields that intersect in the interdisciplinary arena of Latino studies. With roots in the Puerto Rican and Chicano studies programs of the 1960s and 1970s, Latino studies emerged in the 1980s as a dialog about the growing diversity of people with shared roots in the American spaces colonized by Spain and with Spanish-language cultures.12 An emphasis on culture and politics was followed by a historical turn and later a diverse social science and ethnographic literature.13 By the turn of the twenty-first century Latino studies matured in its interdisciplinary complexity, regional coverage, and rejection of facile oppositional concepts, inevitably losing some of the political baggage that gave origin to the discipline.

Despite its diverse demographics, New Jersey lags far behind other states and regions with similar or even smaller Latino demographics and communities. The Southwest, New York City, Chicago, and even New England and Florida have denser literature on Latinos. We are only beginning to catch up despite having one of the earliest programs in Puerto Rican studies in the United States (at Rutgers) with a decades-long trajectory of research, activism, and pedagogy, and a major Ivy League university in the state. The state that claims the renowned poet of Puerto Rican and Caribbean descent, William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), as its own does not even understand his origins.14

This book is an initial attempt to create Latino studies of New Jersey and to begin making up for the decades-long invisibility. The book is divided into four parts: Spaces and Places, Histories, Experiences, and Institutions. While these categories overlap in the individual contributions, they served us well as an organizing structure for the book. “Space and Places” both offers an overview of Latino demographics in New Jersey and accounts for the many kinds of Latino spaces and the social and racial processes that shape them, especially in northern New Jersey. “Histories” offers accounts of Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Peruvian migration and settlement through the perspectives of economic history, labor history, and cultural history. “Experiences” offers insights into the social struggles of different constituencies and social groups including Mexican immigrants fighting for educational justice in New Brunswick, Peruvian women’s participating in public life and community organizing in Paterson, church- centered community-building activities among elderly Latinos in Union City, and Trans Latinx experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, “Institutions” focuses on different institutional settings where the state’s Latino population have been educated and disciplined with long-lasting effects in the state and beyond.

Precisely because of this complex history and the limited scholarship available, this book represents only an initial and incomplete effort. Readers will note the absence of chapters or substantial discussions of Dominican-descent communities, of Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans, and of Ecuadorians and Colombians. Geographical coverage is also partial, with an emphasis on famil- iar Latino spaces and stories. The racial, class, linguistic, and ethnic diversity within the Latino category will need significant development in future works, particularly in regard to indigeneity and Afro-Latinidad.15

Other pieces are missing as well. There are many Latino experiences in the neglected and impoverished urban spaces of New Jersey. The decades of the 1980s, 1990s, and even early 2000s is nearly invisible and forgotten, with stories of housing discrimination, police abuse, and school failures, some of which are noted but not fully developed in the contributions to this book. New Jersey also has a growing Latino middle class populating the state’s many suburban communities and revitalizing main streets across the state with a variety of ethnic businesses. We also need more elements to understand New Jersey’s peculiar Latino politics, which has produced many Latino mayors (mostly democratic) and one of the few Latino U.S. senators. And moving beyond narrow examinations of Latino communities and Latin American national-origin groups, we need more research on how Latinos relate to other immigrant groups, to African Americans, to White New Jerseyans, and to the state’s unionized and social service sectors.16

Disclaimers aside, what the book does well, and how it benefits from the maturity of Latino studies at a national level, is worthy of attention. There is much we have learned in the last decades about handling knowledge and research about diverse but regionally focused Latino populations and histories. We no longer uncritically assume pan-Latino formations, identities, or solidarities unless they can be identified empirically. Class, racial, and gender diversities and differences within the communities have also been acknowledged and are well represented in this book. Cultural identities are no longer strictly counterposed to experiences of incorporation or assimilation into the U.S. mainstream especially for second-generation Latinos. The importance of generational distinctions and of national origin cultures and transnational connections remain part of the cases examined in this book.

Despite the noted invisibility, we have learned that New Jersey has two majority Latino counties—Hudson and Passaic—and a third that is well on its way. Here, the dynamics are denser and more comparable with other similar national-level spaces, but comparisons are rarely made. The distinction between urban and rural contexts so common in other regional Latino literatures are also challenged in New Jersey. What used to be suburbs and what used to be cities now flow into each other with an uneasy sociological haze. Generational upward mobility, the increasing presence of Latino groups of mixed origin, and the integration especially through educational institutions, that are so visible in the chapters presented in this book, suggest that New Jersey might have lessons for the national level.

The field calls for further research and more dedicated researchers, and the institutions in the state should learn more clearly that they need to support these efforts beyond the now-standard institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks in which Latino scholars and communities often end up as invisible and under resourced as before. This book should encourage substantial investment in young scholars that will bring New Jersey up to speed in Latino studies and help erase or at least complexify some of the facile generalizations made about the state and its communities. There is much we do not know about how this process should proceed. Yet the presence right now of hundreds of thousands of people of Spanish-speaking descent across multiple generations, and many more to come, are a call for projects of visibility, recovery, documentation, and participation. That it might one day contribute also to empowerment will depend on these communities themselves.

Notes

  1. Richard Francis Veit and Maxine N. Lurie, New Jersey: A History of the Garden State (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
  2. The literature on immigrant New Jersey has shifted slowly from discussions of southern S. and European groups to non-European groups, especially South Asian immigrants. See Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, In Lady Liberty’s Shadow: The Politics of Race and Immigration in New Jersey (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017); Noriko Matsumoto, Beyond the City and the Bridge: East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018). But generic approaches that frame Latinos as only the latest part of the continuity of immigration into New Jersey persist.
  3. Harold Aurand , “Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey,” book review, Pennsylvania History 81, no. 4 (2014): 537–540.
  4. Perhaps the most consistent tracing of the diversity and continuity of the Latino communities in New Jersey since the 1970s has been produced by
  5. James Hughes and Joseph J. Seneca, New Jersey’s Postsuburban Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Stephen A. Salmore and Barbara G. Salmore, New Jersey Politics and Government: The Suburbs Come of Age (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013).
  6. For a discussion of the research projects organized by Canino (and other depart- ment chairs) see chapter 16 by Kathleen López in this volume, and the Department of Puerto Rican Studies Archival Project. Maria Josefa Canino-Arroyo, “Reflec- tions on Latino Advocacy and Welfare Reform in New Jersey,” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 15, no. 1 (April 2003): 177–195. Publications by these authors include Kal Wagenheim, New Jersey’s Hispanic Population: An Overview of Quality of Life (1980); Olga Jimenez de Wagenheim, “New Jersey’s Puerto Ricans Corralling Their History,” Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education (July 4, 2005): 25; Olga Jimenez de Wagenheim, “From Aguada to Dover: Puerto Ricans Rebuild Their World in Morris County, New Jersey, 1948 to 2000,” in The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives, ed. Carmen Teresa Whalen and Victor Vázquez-Harnandez (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 106–127; Brenda Bell and Hidalgo Hilda, Puerto Rican Lifestyles and the American Urban Experience: An Update of the Survey of 120 Puerto Rican Families in Newark (Newark, NJ: Mayor’s Policy and Development Office, 1976); Hilda Hidalgo and Joan L. McEniry, Hispanic Temas: A Contribution to the Knowledge Bank of the Hispanic Community (Newark, NJ: Puerto Rican Studies Program, Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey, 1985); Hilda Hidalgo, Lesbians of Color: Social and Human Services (New York: Haworth Press, 1995); Hilda Hidalgo, The Puerto Ricans in Newark, N.J. (Newark, NJ: Aspira, 1971); Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, Hispanics in New Jersey: A Survey of Women Raising Families Alone (New Bruns- wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, Latina Farm Workers and Families in the United States: Breaking Ground and Barriers (1993); Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, Organizing Puerto Rican Migrant Farmworkers: The Experience of Puerto Ricans in New Jersey (New York: P. Lang, 1988); Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, “Puerto Ricans Harvest a Victory,” Progressive 49, no. 12 (1985): 17–18; Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, A People in Two Communities: Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the United States (Washington, DC: National Puerto Rican Coali- tion, 1992); Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, Hispanics in New Jersey: A Survey of Women Raising Families Alone (Newark, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
  7. Yolanda Prieto, The Cubans of Union City: Immigrants and Exiles in a New Jersey Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); Eleanor Meyer Rogg and Rosemary Santana Cooney, Adaptation and Adjustment of Cubans, West New York, New Jersey (Bronx, NY: Hispanic Research Center Fordham University, 1980); Carmen Teresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
  8. Howard Gillette, Camden after the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Brad R. Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City (New Brunswick, NJ: Rivergate Books, 2009); Kevin J. Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Julia Rabig, The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). See also David Listokin, Dorothea Berkhout, and James W. Hughes, New Brunswick, New Jersey: The Decline and Revitalization of Urban America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016).
  9. Yolanda Prieto, The Catholic Church and the Cuban Diaspora (Washington, DC: Caribbean Project Center for Latin American Studies, Georgetown University, 2001); Ana Maria Díaz-Stevens, “Postwar Migrants and Immigrants from the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean: Their Impact upon New Jersey Catholic History,” New Jersey History 113, 1/2 (1995): 60–81. See also Larissa Ruiz Baia, “Rethinking Transnationalism: Reconstructing National Identities among Peruvian Catholics in New Jersey,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 41, no. 4 (1999): 93–109.
  10. Maria Zarza and Rachel H. Adler, “Latina Immigrant Victims of Interpersonal Violence in New Jersey: A Needs Assessment Study,” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma 16, no. 1 (2008): 22–39; Nia Parson, Rebecca Escobar, Mariam Merced, and Anna Trautwein, “Health at the Intersections of Precarious Documentation Status and Gender-Based Partner Violence,” Violence against Women 22, no. 1 (2016): 17–40; Sandra E. Echeverría, Punam Ohri-Vachaspati, and Michael J. Yedidia, “The Influence of Parental Nativity, Neighborhood Disadvan- tage and the Built Environment on Physical Activity Behaviors in Latino Youth,” Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 17, no. 2 (April 2015): 519–526; Michele Ochsner, Elizabeth Marshall, Lou Kimmel, Carmen Martino, Rich Cunningham, and Ken Hoffner, “Immigrant Latino Day Laborers in New Jersey: Baseline Data from a Participatory Research Project,” New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy 18, no. 1 (2008): 57–76; Pauline Garcia-Reid, “Examining Social Capital as a Mechanism for Improving School Engagement among Low Income Hispanic Girls,” Youth and Society 39, no. 2 (2007): 164–181; Chris Rasmussen, “Creating Segregation in the Era of Integration: School Consoli- dation and Local Control in New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1965–1976,” History of Education Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2017): 480–514; Debbie Salas-Lopez, Linda Janet Holmes, Dawne M. Mouzon, and Maria Soto-Greene, “Cultural Competency in New Jersey: Evolution from Planning to Law,” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 18, no. 1 (2007): 35–43.
  11. Igda E. Martínez Pincay and Peter J. Guarnaccia, “‘It’s Like Going through an Earthquake’: Anthropological Perspectives on Depression among Latino Immigrants,” Journal of Immigrant Health 9 (2007): 17–28; Peter J. Guarnaccia, Pilar Parka, Aura Deschamps, Glen Milstein, and Nuri Argiles, “Si Dios Quiere: Hispanic Families’ Experiences of Caring for a Seriously Mentally Ill Family Member,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 16 (1992): 187–215; Peter J. Guarnaccia, Teresa Vivar, Anne Bellows, and Gabriela V. Alcaraz, “‘We Eat Meat Every Day’: Ecology and Economy of Dietary Change among Oaxacan Migrants from Mexico to New Jersey,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35, no. 1 (2012): 104–119.
  12. The flagship journal of the field is Latino Studies. The Center for Puerto Rican Studies’ Centro Journal and Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies are the For reviews of the history of the field see Pedro A. Cabán, “From Challenge to Absorp- tion: The Changing Face of Latina and Latino Studies,” Centro Journal 15, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 126–145; Pedro Cabán, “Moving from the Margins to Where? Three Decades of Latino/a Studies,” Latino Studies 1, no. 1 (March 2003): 5; María E. Pérez y González and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, Puerto Rican Studies in the City University of New York: The First 50 Years (New York: Centro Press, 2021). The field also has a good number of surveys and readers: Chon A. Noriega, Eric Avila, Karen Mary Davalos, Chela Sandoval, and Rafael Pérez-Torres, eds., The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán, 1970–2015 (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2016); Ramon A. Gutiérrez and Tomás Almaguer, The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa, Critical Dia- logues in Latinx Studies: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2021); Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela Páez, Latinos: Remaking America (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 2002); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
  13. The literature on Latinos in the United States is now massive, with thousands of monographs and diversity of ways of addressing language, ethnicity, race, and color lines within Latino communities. Historical research has grown the most and displaced studies of Monographs like this one addressing a region or state began in the 1970s and include texts like Ruben Orlando Martinez, Latinos in the Midwest (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011); David A. Badillo, Latinos in Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003); Debra J. Schleef and H. B. Cavalcanti, Latinos in Dixie: Class and Assimilation in Richmond, Virginia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009); Andrés Torres, Latinos in New England (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Heather A. Smith and Owen J. Furuseth, Latinos in the New South: Transformations of Place (Burling- ton, VT: Ashgate, 2006); David E. Hayes-Bautista, La Nueva California: Latinos in the Golden State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Gabriel Haslip- Viera and Sherrie L. Baver, Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). Some notable textbook-like surveys include Juan González, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New York: Penguin Books, 2022). There are also ethnic-group-specific historical surveys: Zaragosa Vargas, Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from Colonial Times to the Present Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Lorrin Thomas and Aldo Lauria-Santiago, Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights (New York: Routledge, 2019); Marc S. Rodriguez, Rethinking the Chicano Movement (New York: Routledge, 2014).
  14. Peter Ramos, “Cultural Identity, Translation, and William Carlos Williams,” MELUS 38, 2 (2013): 89–110; Armando Rendon, “William Carlos Williams: Latino Poet,” Somos en Escrito 16 (September 2018), https://www.somosenescrito.com/writings-escritos/flashback-william-carlos-williams-latino-poet.
  15. The majority of the state’s indigenous population are now from countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and Ecuador.
  16. Ana Ramos-Zayas’s study of Puerto Ricans and Brazilians in Newark is one of the only book-length ethnographies that describes and analyzes intra-Latinx relations in New Jersey, including how these groups imagine one See Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, Street Therapists: Race, Affect, and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). A recent book by Mercy Romero explores the substantial relationships and social life between the vacant lots that make up the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in Camden where Romero grew up. See Mercy Romero, Toward Camden (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).