One November night in 1992, while sitting at his kitchen table with a reporter from theHartford Advocate, Edwin Vargas, Jr., then chairman of the Hartford Democratic Town Committee and leading light of the Puerto Rican Political Action Committee of Connecticut (PRPAC), reviewed his twenty years of political activism. “I really don’t like politics,” he said. The reporter, after nearly choking on a mouthful of food, exclaimed, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. Everything you do, everything you say, screams politics! Your pores sweat politics. How can you tell me something like that?” Vargas offered a simple explanation:...

A mid-nineteenth-century assessment of Hartford’s politics attributed its backwardness to the social character of its democracy. According to Samuel Goodrich, “The leading men were thrifty mechanics, with a few merchants, and many shopkeepers…. There were lawyers, judges, and public functionaries—men of mark—but their spirit did not govern the town.”¹

Writing at the turn of the century, James Welling noted how, instead of backward, Hartford was complex. Conservatism coexisted with liberalism and innovation, sometimes even conceding some of its privileged space. “Hartford is at once,” he declared, “‘the birthplace of American Democracy’ and the old historic stronghold of aristocratic...

The Puerto Ricans coming into Hartford in the 1950s were from diverse backgrounds. Some were from the semi-isolated mountain regions of the island who came to work the tobacco farms. Others came from larger towns—such as Ponce in the south—with skills that were mismatched to the jobs they took upon arrival. “Recent migration statistics,” reads one story of the early 1950s, “indicate that less than a third of the Puerto Rican newcomers are classified as unskilled workers…. Draftsmen take jobs as restaurant workers, school teachers become machine operators and carpenters work as maintenance men.”¹

According to another early...

Political capital is the balance of assets and liabilities that defines organizational capacity and the level of knowledgeability that enables political action. Ethnicity prompted and structured Puerto Rican political action, but this process did not take place in a vacuum. Instead, several variables—demographic growth, leadership development, and organizational efforts—shaped and influenced the expression of ethnicity. Similarly, rather than being a mere reflection of ascriptive traits, identity politics was a response to both endogenous and exogenous factors.¹ Black politics was of some assistance in this development, but it was also a source of tension and conflict. In seeking representation,...

To make public officials accountable and expand political representation, the Puerto Ricans in Hartford organized and mobilized inside and outside the Democratic party. They lobbied city hall, but they also organized marches and rallies, often storming into the chambers of the city council. Although they were reluctant to mount challenges within the party, they were quick to protest perceived threats to the physical and moral integrity of the Puerto Rican community. Their identity politics was both expressive and instrumental, helping them to articulate demands for respect and for political representation as well.

In 1975, Puerto Ricans pressed for representation in...

Although the Puerto Rican experience in Hartford cannot be reduced to a single dynamic, ethnicity had a singular role in the set of interrelated transitions that marked the community’s political development. The first arrivals were quickly defined as “the Other.” Initially this was not detrimental because their presence was placed in the context of a tradition of immigrant incorporation. Language, culture, and citizenship made their experience distinctive, but the reception they were given was similar to that offered their Irish, German, and Italian predecessors. Even during the early years of settlement, there were indications that ethnicity was a central category,...

When, at the end of 1995, Hartford made it to the front page of theNew York Timeswith the headline “‘Insurance Capital’ Hartford Finds Itself without Its Net,” the wording suggested that another president had told a U.S. city in trouble to “drop dead,” as President Gerald Ford had twenty years earlier when he had said that New York City’s fiscal crisis was none of the national government’s business. The Hartford story, however, was not about the abdication of federal responsibility. It was not about the loss of entitlements. Instead, it was about the decision by Aetna Life and...

The entry and meteoric rise of PRPAC in Hartford’s political scene forced public officials to be mindful of its actions and heightened the vigilance of out-groups. Not knowing what to make of this phenomenon, white and black members of the power elite simply redoubled their efforts to keep public policy safe from the deleterious influence of special-interest groups. In the civil service and third sector, blacks saw the emergence of Puerto Ricans as a challenge to their conquests. They were fearful that Puerto Rican gains would take away the power they had struggled hard and long to get. One effect...