HispanicVista Columnists
A Typical American Rican
By Manuel Hernandez
April 21, 2006
copyrights 2006 @Manuel Hernandez
My parents came to America in the late 1950's.
The Caribbean Island of Puerto Rico has one of the highest rates of
emigration in the world. Puerto Ricans began migrating to the United States
as early as 1870, but it was not until after World War II that their
presence as a community was felt. Manuel and Carmen were part of a massive
immigration movement inspired by the new Puerto Rican Commonwealth
government of 1952 and its political and economic ties to the United States.
They joined thousands of other Puerto Ricans and immigrants in their quest
of the American dream.
Manolín was born during the height of the Great Depression. Times were hard and there were a lot of people without work. He was the second born in a family of seven. His parents separated when he was five years old. Grandfather had dreams of a better life in the United States, and grandmother wanted more rice and beans on the plate.
After Ramona, Manolín, Modesto, Félix and Toño were born, Grandfather Joey abandoned the family and decided to go back to New York City. He had been born in California but spent his early youth in the city of New York and wanted to go back to his beginnings.He had tried to establish himself in San Juan through a group of cigar rollers, but they never kept their promises of work and a future.
After three months in the capital of Puerto Rico, he went back to his father's roots in Naguabo. There he fell in love, married and began a family, but he got tired of the monstrous Rio Blanco Hills and felt the desperate urge to find himself once more with his past.
Manolín as his family called him was forced to drop out of school to help support the family at the age of seven. He sold his mother's "papaya" sweets in the morning and worked as a delivery boy in the local bakery in the afternoon. When Manolín was ten years of age, grandmother asked her brother in Naguabo, Puerto Rico, to take care of Manolín. He spent seven emotionally torturous and unforgettable years living with his uncle in the hills of a small town, east of San Juan, Naguabo. His uncle was a beast with the whip, and Manolín paid a costly price.
Many of Naguabo's rural neighborhoods are kilometers up in the mountains. The recently arrived young boy worked like a stubborn mule from dawn to sunset for his uncle. At 5:00 a.m. each morning, he walked two miles to get to the farm to milk the cows and pick up fresh eggs from a couple of hundred chickens owned by his uncle. He then ran another two miles to make it to school on time. But he was just another mouth to feed, and every time he ran into mischief, he was physically and emotionally abused. One hot humid tropical night, the boy's uncle came home drunk and looking for him. "Donde está Manolín?" he asked angrily.
"Por ahí jodiendo", answered the young boy who had just arrived from a friend's house.
"Mira pendejito, ven acá", yelled my father's uncle.
"No tío, no me des", screamed my father at the sight of his uncle charging over him with an old heavy broomstick.
It was too late. Manolín had already been clobbered over the head several times with a heavy broomstick. There was a stream of blood coming down his forehead, and he ran for his life. The blood looked like a river running out of its course. He ran away and slept outside that night. It wasn't the first or last time that he was the victim of his uncle's rage. He came back the next day and stayed out of sight from him for months. A week later, the mad man tested his nerves by throwing him on an untamed horse and hitting it with a whip. Luckily, he fell off it before it headed for the races.
Life was extremely difficult in Puerto Rico
for my grandmother, so she decided to give up custody of the children.
Grandfather Joey, who was living in New York City, decided to send for the
children. Manolín's brothers and sister went first. A few
days before his seventeenth birthday, he received a one-way airline ticket
to New York City.
It was a cold dark night when the old noisy plane reached
the New York Airport. Turbulence on the way down to New York was
disturbingly rocky. The thousands of flashing lights he saw from
inside the plane startled him. When the plane hit the runway, it
bobbled up and down until the tires settled on the unwelcoming
airport. The plane came to an immediate halt, and the passengers
sighed relief when the exit door was thrown open.
As he walked down the stairs outside the plane, the stark
wind felt like it could cut his skin. He had an old worn sweater, and
he felt the icy breeze crawling in every bone of his body. His lips
began peeling, his ears felt like solid rock, and his knees trembled
like an earthquake. He looked at the line of the sun in his hands,
and they seemed to be out of their usual position.
His old man arrived two hours late, and Manolín walked up
and down the airport until he noticed the figure of his father
getting off an old 53 Chevy. Even at a distance, Manolín recognized
his father, he noticed that he had a black hat and wore a black coat.
He was anxious to see his father. It had been seven years since he
last heard his voice. He could hear his heart beating like a drum.
While other passengers received warm welcomes by relatives and
friends, Manolín's father hardly noticed his eldest son. He shook his
son's right hand and picked up his luggage.
He lived in East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem. The
new immigrants had founded a Puerto Rico of their own called "El
Barrio". It stretched across 96th Street North to 127th Street and
Fifth Avenue East in Manhattan. Grandfather Joey lived on East 98th
Street. The apartment was on a third floor tenement building. He had
a three-room flat. The rooms were all lined up across each other. It
had three bedrooms, a kitchen-living room and a bathroom. There was
no space in his brother's bedroom, so Manolin slept on an old sofa in
the living room. There was a fire escape in the kitchen. During the
long and cold winter nights, the heater hardly kept him warm. They
fought with the landlord for more heat, but the landlord shouted back
that they had to wear coats and sweaters inside the apartment too.
During the summers, El Barrio came alive with the sounds
of "La Isla Del Encanto". Puerto Ricans brought their music, food and
traditions with them to New York. The breathtaking smell of rice and
beans, "arroz con gandules", "sancocho" and "frituras" filled the
air, and the sounds of Tito Rodriguez, Machito and a young mambo
king, by the name of Tito Puente were common denominators in El
Barrio. Puerto Rican flags were displayed on balconies, cars and
window apartments. Men played dominoes outside, and women gathered in
apartments to talk and gossip and share experiences. Manolin thought
he was still in "The Island of the Enchantment".
Once in New York, he learned his father had sent for him so
he could help and work to sustain the family. He started to work in
his father's bodega. Puerto Ricans worked in the tobacco industry,
factories, hotels, city jobs, and a few owned small grocery stores
also known as bodegas. The bodega was small and uncomfortable. It had
two narrow aisles filled with products from The Island. He had a
connection at a post office in Puerto Rico, and they would send him
boxes of Goya beans and Bustello coffee. The old man was making a
living for himself, but it meant hard work and sacrifice. His setting
changed, but Manolín still felt enslaved.
He spent evenings roaming around the neighborhood, and he
wondered why neighborhoods seemed to have boundaries. Italians were
jammed up in Hell's Kitchen and African Americans lived in Harlem,
and the Irish were in a place called The Hill. It was practically
impossible to get out of the neighborhood. If you crossed those
boundaries, you had problems. Italians didn't want Puerto Ricans to
walk into Third Avenue, and African Americans didn't allow them into
Fifth Avenue.
Puerto Ricans arrived all at once and in different colors
making it more difficult for other ethnic groups to accept them.
Father quickly learned some painful lessons about prejudice. Once day
he roamed a bit too much and found himself lost in the middle of
Hell's Kitchen. A policeman with a strong Italian accent stopped his
car and yelled at him with an accusing tone.
"Hey you, what you doing in this neighborhood?"
"Aim sorry. Aim lost", said my father in broken Puerto Rican
English, fearing the worst.
"Turn around and get the hell out of here, we don't want any
spics invading the community. Let this be the first and last time I
catch you around here. Now, walk up two blocks, turn right and you're
back where you belong".
"Sank you", said my father with a sigh of relief and ran back
to El Barrio. He had never run faster in his life.
The day after his eighteenth birthday, he decided to take
his future in his hands. Thanks to a friend, he heard of the General
Motor's automotive training program in Tarrytown, New York. It was
my father's obsession to get out of El Barrio, and he saw Tarrytown
as a way to escape the city life and begin a new one in Westchester
County, New York. My father registered in the General Motors
automotive training program without his old man's approval. Because
he worked close to sixty hours a week, he knew his father needed his
hand at the bodega. When he broke the news, he practically disowned
him, but he packed his few belongings and took a train to Tarrytown.
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Hernandez lives in Naguabo, Puerto Rico and enjoys spending his free time with his beautiful wife, Maria and his seventeen-year old son, Jose Manuel and his newborn son, Josue Esteban. He is a disciple at Abundant Life Church in Fajardo. Also visit: http://www.puertoricans.com/
(Editor's note: Manuel Hernandez created a Yahoogroup for the discussion of literature and education. HispanicVista highly recommends this effort and urges its readers to join and participate. Write to Manuel at: mannyh32@yahoo.com or visit and join at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/latinoliterature