It is perhaps accurate to say that interest in the issues affecting Latinos in New York has intensified steadily in recent years. With greater frequency, journalists, academics,and government policymakers have discussed the growth of a diverse Hispanic population and its impact on employment, education, housing, crime, social services, and politics. In general, the increased scrutiny has focused attention on Latinos as a contemporary phenomenon associated with the “recent wave” of immigrants to the city;however, the origins and the evolution of New York’s Hispanic community can actually be traced as far back as the early nineteenth century and possibly even earlier.¹...

To the editor of The Evening Post:

Sir: I beg to be allowed the privilege of referring in your columns to the injurious criticism of the Cubans printed in the Manufacturer of Philadelphia, and reproduced in your issue of yesterday.

This is not the occasion to discuss the question of the annexation of Cuba. It is probable that no self-respecting Cuban would like to see his country annexed to a nation where the leaders of opinion share towards him the prejudices excusable only to vulgar jingoism or rampant ignorance. No honest Cuban will stoop to be received as a moral...

Early in the morning of August 2, 1916, I took leave of Cayey. I got on the bus at the Plaza and sat down, squeezed in between passengers and suitcases. Of my traveling companions I remember nothing. I don’t think I opened my mouth the whole way. I just stared at the landscape, sunk in deep sorrow. I was leaving a girlfriend in town . . .

But my readers are very much mistaken if they expect a sentimental love story from me. I don’t write to pour my heart out—confessions of love bore me to death, especially my...

My father arrived in America in 1920, a stowaway on a steamer that shuttled between San Juan and New York. At sixteen, he was through with school and had been since thirteen or fourteen when he left the eighth grade. Between dropout and migrant, the picture is not totally clear, but three themes dominate: baseball, cock- fighting, and cars. At sixteen, my father had lived in every town of Puerto Rico, had driven every road there in Ford Models A and T, had played basketball, baseball, studied En glish and American History, hustled tourists, and had heard the popular and...

Up on Manhattan’s high ground, nearly 250,000 immigrants from the Dominican Republic are taking a stand. In the 1970s and 1980s, they built an enclave that once seemed as cohesive and as vibrant as any the city had ever produced. Their neighborhood, Washington Heights, at the northern neck of the island, was a world apart. While other parts of New York decayed and were abandoned, this hilltop remained crowded and pulsating with life. When the Dominicans could not find jobs, they invented new ones. When others would not hire them, they opened businesses of their own. Undaunted by the ethnic...

We often forget that the earliest European settlers in what is now the continental United States were not English but Spanish. As early as 1513 Florida was discovered and explored by Ponce de León, and in 1527 the first colony of Europeans was established by Panfilo de Narváez near present-day Pensacola. The colony failed, but a halfcentury later, in 1565, a permanent colony under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded our oldest American city, Saint Augustine, Florida. By this time various expeditions had been conducted by the Spaniards in the Southwest so that when the Pilgrims reached Plymouth Rock such Spanish...

The history of Latinas—women of Mexican, Latin American, or Hispanic Caribbean heritage in the United States—has varied over time and region but they have left their imprints on the historical landscape and enable us to appreciate their roles in building American communities. The growing scholarship on Latina history begins to surface as stories told at the kitchen table or over backyard fences, passed down from generation to generation, and sheds light on their experiences as actors or witnesses to major historical events. It is found in the written record, official government and church documents, land grants, memoirs, diaries,...

[Our friends at Santa Fé, New Mexico, have just finish’d their long drawn out anniversary of the 333d year of the settlement of their city by the Spanish. The good, gray Walt Whitman was asked to write them a poem in commemoration. Instead he wrote them a letter as follows: —Philadelphia Press, August 5, 1883.] CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, July 20, 1883

To Messrs. Griffin, Martinez, Prince, and other Gentlemen at Santa Fé:

DEAR SIRS:— Your kind invitation to visit you and deliver a poem for the 333d Anniversary of founding Santa Fé has reach’d me so late that I have...

As we examine the experiences of recent Carib be an and Latin American immigrants to the United States, we see that they—like many previous immigrants—bring in their own perspectives on race and ethnicity. These perspectives may sometimes be at variance with the perspectives which prevail in the United States. We also see that there is an interest in issues of race and ethnicity that continues, indeed sometimes surfaces, well beyond the first generation. As more recent immigrants begin to contend with the racial structure and dynamics of the United States, the earlier experiences of Puerto Ricans with regard...

What happens when persons of several Latin American national groups reside in the same neighborhood? Our research in Corona, and more widely in the borough of Queens in New York City, suggests that a new overarching identity may emerge—one termed hispano or latinoamericano in Spanish, and Hispanic or Latino in English. This new identity does not simply replace one’s identification as an immigrant from a particular country. Instead, repeated interactions between individuals of various Latino ethnic groups may foster cultural exchange and create an additional identity, one that can be mobilized by Latino panethnic leaders and organizations. This book...

Luis is a young man who works in the stockroom of a tourist café in Havana. An inventory reveals five boxes of missing supplies and, despite his claims of innocence, the police consider him a suspect. In his distress, he seeks Marín, his spiritual godfather or padrino, a lifelong friend whose spiritual work in Santería, Regla de Palo, and Espiritismo follows the practices of his African ancestors. Marín summons the spirit of Ma Pancha, an African slave with whom he has communicated on previous occasions. Marín sits before a home altar that contains, among other things, the statues of the...

This essay will explore from a historical point of view the coordinates legitimating the contention that New York City is an important Hispanic cultural center. To this end we have explored the following themes: first, the trajectory of Hispanic immigration, the use of the Spanish language, and the establishment and evolution of the principal Hispanic sociocultural institutions in the city, and second, the production of Hispanic culture in the New York City region. Within this second theme, we will examine publications and the media, many of the genres of literature, popular music, graffiti, and the arts. For reasons of space,...

Like so many other islanders, I was only peripherally aware of the English-language literary production of my fellow Puerto Ricans living in the United States. I had received part of my education in the mainland, and some members of my extended family were among the several thousand who migrated after World War II, settling primarily in cities of the Northeast, especially New York.¹ Nevertheless, neither in my readings nor as an assiduous student of Puerto Rican literature had I followed the writing of a sector of our population that had been forgotten, for all practical purposes, on the island and...

I remember the signs in shop windows when I was growing up in the South Bronx in the 1950s: Aquí se habla español “Spanish spoken here.” My mother and father made their purchases in English because they had been in New York City (NYC) for decades and spoke it with ease, but increasing numbers of Puerto Rican immigrants were aided by Spanish-speaking merchants, often Sephardic Jews. Their centuries-old Spanish, maintained in the diaspora since the expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain in 1492, was rekindled to serve the burgeoning Puerto Rican community. Puerto Ricans formed the earliest Spanish-speaking...

On my street corner, at 107th and Broadway, there are almost daily get-togethers, except on the very coldest winter days, of Cuban seniors. They disappear during the harshest weeks of snow and ice. But as soon as the sun manages to stay out for a while and warms up the air, there they are once more, wearing caps and earmuffs and heavy jackets in winter and guayaberas with white socks in summer. You can tell by looking at them, even from afar, by the way they sit in their chairs on the edge of the sidewalk, by the way they...

Soon after Hispanic musicians began to settle in New York at the end of World War I, the city became the capital of Latin music. Artists were drawn to the Big Apple by its recording and entertainment industries. Most of the new immigrants first lived near the port, in an area called Red Hook in Brooklyn. Later on, many of them moved to East Harlem, a section that eventually was called Spanish Harlem or “El Barrio.”

As would be expected, the first Latin music landmarks in New York were to be found in Spanish Harlem. The earliest locations were small...

In some ways it’s obvious what we mean by salsa. Salsa is a style of music that dominates dance floor tastes in Latin music clubs throughout the United States and Latin America, with extravagant, clave-driven, Afro-Cuban-derived songs anchored by piano, horns, and rhythm section and sung by a velvety voiced crooner in a sharkskin suit. On the other hand the definition of salsa is the subject of endless dispute in Latin music circles. If mambo was a constellation of rhythmic tendencies, then, as leading salsa sonero (lead singer) Rubén Blades once said, salsa is a concept, not a particular rhythm....

Up the street from Macy’s in downtown Brooklyn is a modest little shop called Fast & Fresh Deli, which, at a glance, appears to be a down-at-the-heels grocery-and-sandwich shop like thousands of others in New York, but turns out to be, at second glance, a bit of Mexico City transplanted into the distant north. I stop at that place a few times a month and order beef tacos, and I sit on a stool at the counter and listen to the boom box above the stove. And, like everyone else at Fast & Fresh, sometimes I find that one song or another...

Consider the following statements:

The Museum of Modern Art began to acquire work by European artists right from the time of its founding, in 1929.

The Museum of Modern Art began to acquire work by North American artists right from the time of its founding, in 1929.

The Museum of Modern Art began to acquire work by artists from Latin America and the Caribbean in the early 1930s, virtually from the time of its founding.

These statements seem banal. However, since we could not insert Asian, African, or Oceanic artists into the last sentence, this one, indeed, becomes quite striking....

In New York City, the 1970–1980 decade gave way to a multi-ethnic, queer-inflected urban culture that spurred new forms in music, the visual arts, and dance. In the words of curator Jeffrey Deitch, it “was an era of greater sexual openness to different cultures, and interchange between races.”² Though fueled to a great extent by blacks and Latinos, it was white artists like Keith Haring and Madonna who mostly injected this fusion into the main cultural bloodstream. Yet few figures from this—or indeed any other time—most fully embody the torment and triumph of the commodification of New...

When the 2000 census confirmed that Hispanics outnumbered African Americans as the second largest ethnic group in the United States, the country was already spellbound by the Latino craze. A self-consciously pluralistic America, ready to celebrate its ethnic and racial diversity, sings and dances to the pace of the Caribbean salsa, eats Mexican burritos or Spanish tapas, and embraces the cult of tango. The very word Latino has become a badge of honor for the Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. American citizens of Hispanic descent proudly claim a dual identity in which the traits of their cultural ancestry blend with...

Carlos Gardel arrived in New York on December 28, 1933, from Cherbourg, France, aboard the Champlain. He was in the company of his musical director, Alberto Castellano, and guitarist Horacio Pettorosi. Waiting for him at pier 57 was Uruguay’s Hugo Mariani—then conductor of the NBC orchestra—and a member of that musical group, Argentine violinist Terig Tucci. The main sources of material available with which to reconstruct the tango singer’s days in the city are Gardel’s personal correspondence and a book that Tucci published in 1969 called Gardel en Nueva York (Gardel in New York). Tucci recalls that the...