Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

East Harlem

East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem or in Spanish simply as El Barrio (the neighborhood), is a New York City neighborhood generally bounded by Manhattan's East 96th Street on the south and East 125th Street on the north, and by 5th Avenue on the west and the East River. Although the neighborhood's history reflects the racial and ethnic diversity that defines New York City, the area has become identified since the 1930s as the unofficial capital of Puerto Rican New York. This entry describes its history and current environment.

Neighborhood Ethnic History

Dutch traders were the first European immigrants to settle in Manhattan following the establishment of Dutch trading posts during the early 1600s and Peter Minuit's subsequent purchase of Manhattan Island from a native group, possibly the Lenape, in 1626. Modern day East Harlem was named Hellegat, or sinkhole, for the bay that forms along the East River's curve just above modern-day 96th Street. This part of northern Manhattan became the center of Dutch tobacco cash crops and, as such, was popular as a bucolic country retreat for wealthy New Yorkers.

A little over 200 years later, public transportation projects funded by the City of New York began transforming East Harlem. The construction of railroads and tunnels brought German and Irish Catholic construction workers to East Harlem. In addition to providing convenient and inexpensive access to Manhattan, the Bronx, and parts of Brooklyn, the availability of reliable transportation connected the outer boroughs and was vital to the future development of northern Manhattan.

With the advent of public transportation, Central and Eastern European Jews began migrating from the overcrowded Lower East Side to the area that would become East Harlem. African Americans, Scandinavians, and Finns migrated to East Harlem simultaneously, with the 1920 census reporting twenty-seven different nationalities living in the area. The first Italians arrived in the 1880s as replacement labor for striking Irish trolley track layers and suffered extreme prejudice and discrimination in competition for jobs and housing.

From Puerto Rico to El Barrio

Migration from Puerto Rico to the U.S. mainland followed the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, with little more than 1,000 Puerto Ricans living in the United States by 1910. Made U.S. citizens by the Jones-Shafroth Act in 1917, Puerto Ricans on their home island were ruled by U.S.-appointed governors for the first half of the 20th century. Only at mid-century (1948) did the island elect its first governor, Luis Muñóz Marín, and adopt a new constitution (1952), making it a U.S. commonwealth (a “free associated state”). As a result of the overwhelming U.S. influence in Puerto Rican economic, political, and social development that followed annexation, the island was transformed from a rural, export-oriented, agricultural society into a center for multinational manufacturing primarily in the pharmaceutical, electronic, and chemical industries. These developments, in turn, gave rise to the out-migration of large numbers of displaced rural workers and their families to the continental United States.

Since the 1930s, New York City's East Harlem has become known as Spanish Harlem, taking on much the same geographical, economic, residential, and symbolic value in the lives of migrant Puerto Ricans that prototypical ethnic enclaves like the Lower East Side had for Eastern European Jews, Harlem has had for African Americans, and Washington Heights has today for Dominicans. Like these other neighborhoods, the geographical area now ethnically identified as Spanish Harlem (and increasingly marketed as “SpaHa” by real estate agents eager to gentrify the area) has a long history of ethnic succession—Dutch, Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, and African Americans—preceding the arrival en masse of the Puerto Ricans.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution