Puerto Ricans (Spoken Version)
Date: 1994
Caption: Writer Toni Cade Bambara recalled being a child in Harlem when new neighbors from Puerto Rico moved in. She observed the family and how the schools treated their new students.
Puerto Ricans became citizens of the United States in 1917, as part of the US’s claiming control of the island. As US citizens, those who wanted to come to the mainland faced fewer barriers than immigrants from other countries. In the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans made the choice to migrate. Many came to New York City. Racial segregation in housing meant that they often lived alongside Black families like Toni Cade Bambara’s in Harlem. They also lived alongside Italian-American and Black families in East Harlem and the Lower East Side.
Many Puerto Rican migrants spoke only Spanish, and many New York City schools were not prepared or willing to support them.1 Many Puerto Rican students and families wanted to learn English while also keeping and respecting their home language. Instead, many Puerto Rican children, like Bambara’s young neighbor, were quickly categorized as disabled by school administrators on the basis of their language and their race.
Decades after author Toni Cade Bambara witnessed this treatment of her neighbor, the same pattern still continued. Evelina López Antonetty and United Bronx Parents organized parents in support of bilingual education - so that Puerto Rican children could learn in both Spanish and English. They also called for careful testing of students in their own languages, so that not speaking English would not be interpreted as a disability, and so that students’ disabilities could be correctly identified.
It was 1948—the year after the big snow in New York, I was in the 4th grade… living in that part of Harlem strivers called “Washington Heights”—151st Street between Amsterdam & B’way.
New people moved into the apt bldg—big family—babies, school children our age, teenage married couples, two or three sets of elders… We’d see them gather at the mailbox—they always seem to be waiting for the mailman…the whole family came down sometimes. They didn’t speak much English. That didn’t strike us as very strange in New York. There was a Chinese family next door—several “Bengali”s in the neighborhood—Bengali was what we called East Indians—to distinguish them from West Indians and American Indians—there were Polish butchers, Jewish delicatessen owners—it was New York— many languages, many cultures.
We didn’t see a lot of the NEW tenants—it was winter—they didn’t have winter clothes. That didn’t strike us as particularly strange either. Folks up from the south didn’t have winter coats—and folks from the Caribbean usually took two or three weeks to get a wardrobe together—They did have jewelry tho, we noticed—little girls had pierced ears and the women wore lots of jewelry and bright colored clothing.
So… we thought they were Gypsies. A new kind of Gypsy. The kind that intended to stay put for a while—so moved into an apt rather than a store front.
One of the boys was in my class—for about a minute. We didn’t even get a chance to hear him speak, say his name, tell us where he came from. They parked him on the bench in front of the principal’s office—next thing we heard he was in the CRMD* class—the assumption being—you have No English/you have no I.Q. We were very curious [about] that boy—Not because of where they put him—it seemed standard procedure to put people from down south** back a grade and to assign remedial speech. What we found strange about the new boy and his family was—some of his relatives looked like Gypsies and some of his relatives looked just like us.
Who were these people?
When warmer weather came, they came outside and we got a closer look. Mothers would take the babies to the park at 151st and Amsterdam. The children our age would go with their aunts and uncles down to the playground on Riverside Drive. The older men would go down to the river and fish off the rocks.
In Spring the softball teams from the various neighborhoods would compete against each other in Central Park. My Dad played a whole lotta ball. He said one day, “Mannnnn those Spanish guys play. some. ball.”
Ohhh, so they Spanish. Quite naturally we children began speaking “Spanish” which of course nobody could understand—including us. It was the candy store man who explained that these New people came from Puerto Rico not Spain. We’d heard of that place in school— This was the 40s keep in mind—the era of Chiquita Banana and Good Neighbor Policy. They were eager to tell us about the “Spanish American War” and how Uncle Sam “saved” Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico from the bad guys. Not a word on the Cuban War for Independence or anything like that—just sunshine, Uncle Sam’s heroics, and Chiquita Banana.
*=Children with Retarded Mental Development, the NYC Board of Education’s term at the time for children with intellectual or developmental disabilities. The term “retarded” is not appropriate for use today.
**=“people from down south” refers to Black migrants coming to the North from the US South. This is a reference to the “Great Migration,” which brought millions of Black Southerners to New York and other northern cities from 1910 to 1970.
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Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth Century New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); John Puckett and Michael Johanek, Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School: Education as If Citizenship Mattered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). ↩︎
Categories: Bronx, K-12 organizing, parent activism, community activism
Tags: Spanish language, racist segregation, immigrants and migrants, disability labels, Latinx people, Black people
This item is part of "Evelina López Antonetty and United Bronx Parents/Padres Unidos del Bronx" in "Black and Latina Women’s Educational Activism"
Item Details
Date: 1994
Creator: Toni Cade Bambara
Source: Toni Cade Bambara, “Realizing the Dream of a Black University and Other Writings, Part I.” Makeba Lavan, Conor Tomás Reed, Ed. Series 7, Number 2, Part 1, Fall 2017, https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/read/realizing-the-dream-of-a-black-university-other-writings-part-i/section/e29ebe26-4067-4c4f-8570-e182a32a2cf3
Copyright: Under copyright.
How to cite: “Puerto Ricans (Spoken Version),” Toni Cade Bambara, in New York City Civil Rights History Project, Accessed: [Month Day, Year], https://nyccivilrightshistory.org/gallery/puerto-ricans.
Questions to Consider
- What did Bambara notice about the new family? Where and how did she get information about them? Who else was gathering information or making judgements about the new family?
- What happened to the children in the new family when they went to school? Think about the phrase “you have no English/you have no I.Q.” How does this idea relate to the new child being placed in a “CRMD” class? How do you see racism and ableism in this situation?
- In the last paragraph, Bambara criticizes what her school taught her about Puerto Rico. She gives examples of what the schools did teach, and what it left out. What is the pattern that she noticed? Why do you think this mattered to her? Why do you think it would have mattered to Puerto Rican children going to school in New York?
References
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