Nuyoricans

Puerto Rican Migration to the United States

Puerto Ricans have lived in New York City since the end of the 19th century, when they were part of independence movements to free the remaining Caribbean colonies of the Spanish Empire: Cuba and Puerto Rico. Among the most famous Puerto Ricans living in New York at the turn of the century were Eugenio María de Hostos and Alfonso Arturo Schomburg.

The island came into the possession of the United States in 1898 at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War; 20 years later, inhabitants of Puerto Rico were granted U.S. citizenship, which facilitated travel to the continent. In the first decades of the 20th century, there was a relatively steady stream of workers moving from towns on the island to New York in search of employment. By 1930, there were approximately 52,000 Puerto Ricans living in the United States, 88 percent of whom (approximately 46,000) lived in New York.

Operation Bootstrap

In the 1940s and 1950s, the numbers of migrants increased dramatically, spurred by industrialization efforts on the island. Prior to the war, Puerto Rico was primarily a plantation economy that depended greatly on the production of sugar; the Great Depression, however, highlighted the problems of a single-crop economy when prices of sugar fell dramatically, affecting an already impoverished populace located primarily in rural areas.

During World War II, construction projects to improve the roads connecting military installations prompted the creation of cement factories. In the aftermath of the war, there was a sustained investment of capital from U.S. businesses to diversify the economy, changing the emphasis from rural to urban production. Laborers who had previously worked in sugar production were no longer needed. Those left without employment moved from the countryside to the cities, and after the cities were saturated, on to the continental United States. In the decade of the 1950s, 450,000 Puerto Ricans migrated to the mainland.

Island-Mainland Tensions

The moniker Nuyorican emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and applies to the community that settled permanently in New York. The late 1960s saw the emergence of a heightened cultural nationalism in the form of the Young Lords Party. Inspired by the civil rights movement and the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party called for the independence of the island from the United States as well as an educational system that taught Puerto Rican history and culture, among other demands.

The New York community continued to claim Puerto Rican, rather than an American, identity. Often, upon returning to the island, they were confronted with hostility, as the populace there claimed that the offspring of Operation Bootstrap were not genuinely or authentically Puerto Rican. Children born and raised in the United States often did not speak fluent Spanish and knew little of the history and culture of the place idealized by their parents.

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