Jumping the Puddle

.|. main .|. bio .|. poetry .|. prose .|. flows .|. reviews .|.

Jumping the Puddle
By Geoffrey Fox
From Hispanic Nation:
Culture, Politics and the Constructing of Identity

The first important Puerto Rican memoir written in English was Piri Thomas's story of growing up among violence, decay, and drugs in Spanish Harlem in the late forties and fifties, Down these Mean Streets (1967). This was the precursor of the literary movement that in the mid-1970s would take the name "Nuyorican" (for New York Puerto Rican).
Earlier generations of Puerto Rican writers in New York, such as the radical journalists Bernardo Vega and Jesus Colon or the poet Julia de Burgos, remembered life on the island (Puerto Rico, not Manhattan) and were most comfortable Writing in Spanish. They had a clear idea of who they were and no reason to question their membership in one of the great cultural and intellectual traditions of the world, the one that had begun in Spain and been enriched by its mingling with other cultures in the Spanish-speaking New World. And this may be why they felt no urgent need to write exhaustively about their own childhoods. Childhood had been the least problematic period of their lives.
But the New York-born children of the poor and mostly poorly educated Puerto Ricans who "jumped the puddle" (brincaron el charco) in DC-7s to La Guardia Airport in the 1940s or who had arrived earlier packed onto steamers, like the famous Marine Tiger, lost their connection to that proud Spanish tradition. In a climate and concrete canyons that were nothing like the place their parents remembered, surrounded by people who had no comprehension of and little sympathy for their culture, these children knew Puerto Rico only as a chimera glimpsed in photographs and the stories of their elders.
Piri Thomas's was the first of this generation to write of being made to feel ashamed of speaking Spanish and of looking neither quite white nor quite black. That he could not only survive the mean streets but write a book about it--and in proper English, which must have astonished his early teachers--was a major triumph. He wrote of his confusion about whether he was "black" or "white" because he "came out" dark like his father and his siblings were lighter, like his mother--a confusion that was entirely the product of encounters with the racial values outside his household, because within his Puerto Rican family such distinctions had not carried any special privileges. His meditations on such experiences, a process of discovery and healing for himself, helped other New York Latinos find a vocabulary to talk about their own experiences and thus heal themselves.
There have been many New York Puerto Rican memoirs since Thomas's, adding detail and variation to the basic urban narrative. But more recently a memoir has appeared that recounts a Puerto Rican childhood dramatically different, closer to the experience of many of the immigrants who arrive here from other, poorer countries of Latin America. Esmeralda Santiago's book When I Was Puerto Rican, tells of a girlhood in tropical rural poverty and wretched slums from which she only later arrived, in early adolescence, at a tenement in Brooklyn.
The title has disturbed some American-reared descendants of migrants from the island, for it seems to imply that one can cease being Puerto Rican. Santiago has claimed that she was not trying to be provocative, but merely to describe what was for her an obvious transformation. Until early adolescence, her only language was Spanish, her wisdom a mix of barnyard observation and the cryptic, resigned complaints of women about the infidelities of men, and her knowledge of the United States limited to her father's muted anti-imperialism and occasional glimpses of pink-skinned people who did not know how to behave. One scene lampoons the stiff, overdressed American experts who lecture the women in the rural hamlet on nutrition, recommending completely inappropriate and inaccessible foods, like apples, while confessing ignorance of the nutritional value of the local breadfruit. And no reader will soon forget the little girl's terror in the Santurce slum, when she has to pee over a hole in the floorboards above the horridly putrid sewage of the barrio.
When such experiences are what "being Puerto Rican" calls to mind, then clearly attending the High School of the Performing Arts in New York, graduating from Harvard, and becoming an English-language journalist in Massachusetts, as Esmeralda Santiago did later, is something different.
Amen!
-- Piri Thomas