A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches

Although I must confess a great ignorance of Puerto Rican and Latinx literature, Jesus Colon's A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches is an excellent collection of vignettes of Puerto Rican life in the American metropolis. A pioneer in English Puerto Rican migrant literature, Colon was also of African descent. Hence, my reason for reading his experiences in New York were related to my larger interests in Afro-Caribbean radicals of the first half of the 20th century. Winston James, for instance, includes Jesus Colon in a chapter on "Afro-Hispanic" radicals in his magisterial Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America, but sets up a potentially problematic dichotomy between Colon and Arturo Schomburg. 

Colon, according to James, was mainly interested in class, Puerto Rican, and Latin American struggles, which is no surprise considering Colon's early contact with socialists and Communists. Schomburg, on the other hand, is depicted as black nationalist and the anomaly, at least in terms of the political inclinations of Puerto Ricans of African descent. Colon, supposedly, represented a more typical experience for Puerto Ricans engaged in radical politics and the Communist Party of the interwar years. Any overt black nationalist politics is supposedly an aberration for Puerto Ricans in New York. However, this dichotomy implies race consciousness must lead to a form of black nationalist or "race first" politics.

Nonetheless, when one peruses the pages of A Puerto Rican in New York, one cannot escape the constant references to racialization, anti-black discrimination, and the interplay between race and class. While Colon did not allude to Garvey or black nationalist politics, his roots among the artisans and working-class of Cayey and San Juan, which would have been comprised mainly of African-descended people, likely indicates a more nuanced view of the tangled relationship between race and class. A Puerto Rican in New York is definitely proletarian literature, identifying the Puerto Rican experience in New York entirely with anti-imperialism, working-class cultures, ghettoization, and the larger proletarian world of New York. And this proletarian world included Vito Marcantonio's Puerto Rican supporters, Jewish radicals, Panamanian West Indian workers, African Americans, and Latin musicians.

Experiences with reading in bed or the bathtub, leftist camp groups, strikes, monolingual Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans getting lost in the city, and more abound in the book. And while African-Americans and West Indians are clearly distinct from Puerto Ricans, I don't think James was entirely fair to Colon and his growing racial consciousness as an "Afro-Latino." The mainly black and mulatto workers, artisans, tabaqueros and working-class Puerto Ricans of Brooklyn were certainly aware of their commonalities with African-Americans and West Indians, but those rooted in the early Puerto Rican labor movement, like Colon, would have, not surprisingly, been attracted to the socialists and Communists. Others, like Schomburg or M.A. Figueroa, turned to Garvey and the UNIA. Colon himself was involved with the NAACP and civil rights campaigns. His penetrating "Little Things are Big" make it demonstrably clear that he knew he was black. Yet, like the Anglophone West Indians, Colon remained firmly attached to his colonized homeland, Puerto Rico. Black and Latino, Afro-descendant and Latin American. ANd clearly he saw US rule, plus the centuries of Spanish colonialism, as part of the ongoing oppression of Afro-Puerto Ricans in the island and New York.