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As sociologist Peggy Levitt notes, “Transnationalism is the process of migrants remain[ing]
strongly connected to their homelands even as they become incorporated into the United States.
Migrants use a variety of transnational political, religious, and civic arenas to forge social
relationship, earn their livelihoods, and exercise their rights across borders.”1 Within the last two
decades, the concept of transnationalism has transcended disciplinary boundaries, among
historians, literary critics, sociologists, economists, political scientists, anthropologists, and
geographers increasing scholarly inquiry about its relevancy to the experiences of migrants from
Latin America. Since the 1950s, the United States has experienced a demographic revolution,
which changed the dynamics of identity and social orientation among various Latino2 populations.
Recent Latino/as studies have centered on the intersection of transnationalism and processes of
migration, racialization, political organization, and formation of identity across national spaces. The
following analysis expands the boundaries of current scholarship on transnationalism and Latino/a
migration, and investigates new forms of transnational agency and posits new questions.
Recent scholarship on Puerto Rican transnationalism has attempted to clarify the
ideological approaches of (trans)nationalist discourses. However, much of the historiography on
Puerto Rican transnationalism has silenced the presence of African culture in the formation of
transnational identity. Scholars argue that transnational identity constitutes a counter-narrative of
the nation that undermines essentialist nationalists’ identities. The case of Menen Osorio-Fuentes,
an Afro-Puerto Rican woman currently living in New Haven, Connecticut, challenges dominating
notions about transnational migration and identity formation in the United States. Moreover, her
testimony affirms a cultural (re)invention of individual and group identity impacted by processes of
1Peggy
Levitt, “Transnational Ties and Incorporation: The Cases of Dominicans in the United States,” in The Columbia History of
Latinos in the United States since 1960, ed. David Gutierrez (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 241.
2 For this study, the terms Latino/as are used to describe persons from Latin America in the plural form.
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transnational migration and racialization, which local agent(s) recapture a lost sense of being and
recreate an imaged “homeland” community. I frame this analysis around the following questions:
Can cultural expression—music, literature, food, and dance—shape identity among Puerto Ricans
in the United States? How have processes of racialization, cultural (re)invention, and transitional
migration impacted Afro Puerto Rican transnational identity formation in the United States? To
begin to understand the personal experience of transnational migrants living the United States, I
utilize the oral testimony of Ms. Osorio-Fuentes, which provides a ‘from below’ interpretation of her
individual and a collective construction of ‘Afro-Puerto Ricanness’ in New Haven, Connecticut.
Using oral history as a methodology creates a space for scholars to understand how the
past and present marries memory and language. More historians of cultural studies and
transnationalism are employing life histories as viable texts to construct historical scholarship. The
oral history approach, for this particular study is a feminist3 practice of oral history. This feminist
practice can be utilized to unearth realties that relate to the experience of women. In discussing
transnationalism among women from Latin America, feminist oral history as a historical method
provides an approach of exploring the continuity and change among women, which have been
silenced by the grand narrative of the transnational experience of ethnic male immigrants. In
Engendering History, Mary Chamberlain highlights, “Oral testimonies have been used as a prime,
or supplementary source in constructing histories of certain social group who, by reason of gender,
Although I have employed the feminist practice of oral history, I am familiar with past and recent debates that have challenged the
use of white feminist theory as a paradigm to explore the lives of women of color. For a discussion on the practice of feminist oral
history exploring women of color see, Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis and Michele Foster, eds., Unrelated Kin: Race and Gender in
Women's Personal Narratives (London: Routledge ,1996); Ruth Behar, "Rage and redemption: Reading the life story of a Mexican
marketing women," in The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, eds. Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1995); Mary Chamberlain, “Gender And Memory: Oral History And Women’s History,” in Engendering History eds. Verene
Shepard, Bridget Brereton, Barbara Bailey (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). For a general discussion on the feminist practice of
oral history see, Sherna Berger Gluck and D. Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, (London:
Routledge, 1991); Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson eds., The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 1998).
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class, education, race or culture have left few other…conventional sources.” 4 The challenge of oral
history is a matter of balancing the voices of the oral historian and the interviewee. Addressing this
issue of voice, the majority of what follows is Ms. Osorio-Fuentes’ voice with secondary information
to contextualize her story. The following testimony serves as a text for both scholarly and nonscholarly audiences; it will contribute to a community archive, yet brings women’s history and
memory from the periphery to the forefront in historical scholarship as an essential tool for
understanding process of historical change and continuity in women’s lives.
Historian Juan Flores suggests, “both dimensions of postcolonial identity are intensified by
the physical and geocultural remove and resonance of the diasporic location: a more intense urge
for continuity and a more dramatic sense of [discontinuities].”5 Flores illustrates how the process of
colonialization warrants a sense freedom and agency through the formation of cultural identity
amongst Puerto Ricans. “Cultural Identity” as defined by Stuart Hall:
is a matter of “becoming” as well as “being.” It belongs to the future as much as to the
past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture.
Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything, which is
historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being externally fixed in some
essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power.
Far from being grounded in a mere “recovery” of the past, which is waiting to be found, and
which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves for eternity, identities are the names
we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves, with, the
narrative of the past.6
Puerto Ricans of color forge this new cultural identity within the context of a hostile, racist, and
contradictionary environment, which denies Puerto Ricans United States’ citizenship. Moreover,
the processes of racialization, cultural (re)invention, and transnational migration foster agency and
Mary Chamberlain, “Gender And Memory: Oral History And Women’s History,” in Engendering History (eds.) Verene Shepard,
Bridget Brereton, Barbara Bailey, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995) 94.
5 Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity,(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 43.
6 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, eds. Williams and Chrisman
(Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 394.
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reaffirmation of a district Afro-Puerto Rican cultural identity in the United States. Anthropologist
Jorge Duany argues:
…the formal and informal associations tended to strengthen their members’ ties to their
homeland and among themselves. Many [migrant] groups represented themselves as
outposts of the Puerto Rican nation…Cultural activities such as the Puerto Rican Day
Parade or the Feast of St John the Baptist recycled many icons of the Island’s identity—
the pave, the guiro(a gourd instrument), the mofongo(boiled plantain), the cuchifrito(fried
fritters), the vejigante masks, the fiestas patronales, the flag, the anthem, the Spanish
language, the cult of the saints, the love of baseball, or the Puerto Rican Miss Universe. 7
Within the last four decades, Puerto Rican migrants of color have used African inspired-cultural
expressions-Bomba, Plena, and Vejigantes8--to answer the following questions about constructing
their cultural identity: Who are we? What are we? Where do we belong? These processes of
racialization, cultural intervention and transnational migration manifest in the life of Menen OsorioFuentes; and her Afro-Puerto Rican cultural identity. Furthermore, her testimony illustrates how
race, color, class, and gender juxtapose systems of inequality, formations of identity, and a site for
political agency.
The following pages represent the life of Menen Osorio-Fuentes, an Afro-Puerto Rican
who migrated from Loiza, Puerto Rico to New Haven, Connecticut in the 1960s. The testimony of
Ms. Osorio-Fuentes explains the struggle of cultural identity among Afro-Puerto Ricans in the
United States, and her role in preserving an African-influenced transnational, Puerto Rican identity
on the mainland. Told in her own words, this paper documents the life of Menen Osorio-Fuentes,
using Afro-Puerto Rican culture as a mobilizing tool to advance the Puerto Rican community in
New Haven, Connecticut. Like in George Sanchez’s book, Becoming Mexican American, he
Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican National on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States. (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2002), 204-205.
8 All three are African inspired cultural expressions. Vejigantes are masks, usually worn during the Fiestas or Parades in Loiza and
Ponces.
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argues, “This book is in part a study of how cultural change can take place without social mobility.”9
Puerto Rican scholars note the slow, almost, malignant process of social mobility of Puerto Ricans
in the United States; however, the historiography of Puerto Ricans in the United States neglects
the discussion of cultural (re)invention which is essential to their transnational experience.
Afro-Puerto Ricanness and Loiza, Puerto Rico: An historical context
In recent debates scholars fail to discuss Puerto Rico’s national culture as being
heterogeneous and having many variations—race, spatial, class, gender, and age—that are
demonstrated by individuals and groups. To understand why Ms. Osorio-Fuentes refuses to selfidentify as a “Latina”, but rather a “Afro-Puerto Rican” requires an exploration of two historical
factors that account for how many Latinos identify in the United States: race and culture. Scholars
argue, historically, Puerto Ricans have not been regulated to subordinate groups in a dichotomous
classification of black or white10; however, Roberto Rodriguez-Morazzani argues, “The status of the
African and the indigenous people, the Taino, in the making of the Puerto Rican nation was
subordinate to its European component.”11 Jorge Duany notes, “In elite as well as in popular forms
of culture, Afro-Puerto Ricans continue to be represented ass marginal and subaltern outsiders, as
less Puerto Rican that white people.”12 The process of racialization in Puerto Rico has followed
similar patterns throughout Latin America. Although in the early colonial context, the fluid hierarchal
racial orders in Puerto Rico were more malleable than U.S. racial politics; by 1898, when Puerto
Rico became a U.S. territory, the racial order assumed three categories: the largest being
George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles 1900-1945 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 13.
10Peter Winn, Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 277. Peter
Winn suggests, “In the other[Latin] Americas, a more complex consciousness of color sees black and white, but also recognizes
many shades in between…In the United States, any degree of African ancestry makes a person black, while in Latin America and
the Caribbean any degree of non-African ancestry means that a person is not black.”
11Roberto Rodriguez-Morazzani. “Mapping the discourse on Puerto Ricans and ‘Race,” in The Latino Reader: Culture, Society and
Economy (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1998), 148.
12 Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican National on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States, 25.
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blanco(white), the next largest being mulatto or trigueno; and the smallest being negro(black).13
Scholar Clara Rodriguez suggests by the 1950s, Puerto Ricans developed a continuum of racial
types: blanco(white), indio(dark skinned and straight haired), moreno(dark skinned but with a
variety of Negroid or Caucasian features and hair forms), negro(black), and trigueño(brown or
wheat-colored).14 Like other countries in Latin America, the process of racialization in Puerto Rico
emphasize physical appearance—skin color, facial features, and hair texture—and in some cases
social status to define racial identity. Jorge Duaney offers an extensive tracking of various racial
terms that expands Clara Rodriguez’s classification to nineteen racial terms used in Puerto Rico:
from Blanquito(Literally, little white; elite, upperclass), Colorao(Redheaded, reddish skin),
Cano(Blond, fair skin), to Jabao(Fair skin with curly hair), trigueño (Dark skin; dark skin mulatto),
Mulato(mixed race, rarely used in public), to Grifo(Dark skin with kinky hair, usually derogatory),
Negro(Black; rarely used as a direct term of reference), and Negrita(Literally, little black, often used
as a term of endearment).15 These historical processes of colonization and racialization on the
island factor into the complex reracialization of Puerto Ricans in the United States. Setup against
this background, I questioned how culture impacted the construction of Menen’s Afro-Puerto Rican
identity.
The Afro-Puerto Rican concept belongs to a particular historical and cultural context
characterized by two cultural and political movements—Cultura Negroide and Antillanismo. The
concept joined a larger discourse of the valorization of “Blackness” voiced through other
movements such as Harlem Renaissance, Negritude and Haitian Indigene movement. Since the
pre-colonial settlement of Nigerian slaves of the Yoruba tribe in the 16th century, there has been
Tomas Almaguer, “At the Crossroads of Race: Latino/a Studies and Race Making in the United States,” in Critical Latin American
and Latino Studies (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 209.
14 Ibid, 213.
15 For the complete table of the major racial terms in Puerto Rico see Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican National on the Move:
Identities on the Island and in the United States, 238.
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an African presence in Puerto Rico. After the abolishment of slavery in 1873, the town of Loíza
became heavily concentrated with newly freed slaves, and maintained the highest percentage of
African descendants in Puerto Rico over the past century. In the 1930s, the Puerto Rico’s Cultura
Negroide was expressed through food, Bomba, Plena, and in poetry, the cultural expression of
African patterns and traits (Africanisms) among people of African descent. Historian Juan Cordero
explains: “…though perhaps the larger frame of reference was not Africa, but something closer:
Blackness, lo negriode(the Negro).”16 Through its literature, dance and music the Cultura Negriode
celebrated blackness, yet highlighted issues of race, gender, and class. Particularly, this movement
valorized the beauty of black women who previously were eroticized in the national imagery.
By the 1950s, the Antillanismo held the African dimension of Puerto Rican national culture
through cultural expression—literature, music, and dance. The authors of this movement saw
blackness as part of a larger protest culture during the 1960s and 1970s. Although the Antillanismo
dominates the discussion of Afro-Puerto Rican culture, both of these cultural and political
movements represent an African Puerto Rican space created in Loiza, Puerto Rico. Popular circles
have characterized the town of Loiza, Puerto Rico as the locus of Afro Puerto Rican culture. Loiza
is known for the Annual Fiestas De Santiago, which is one of the most public displays of AfroPuerto Rican culture on island. The Afro-Puerto Rican tradition such as the Fiestas is an
expression of cultural-political resistance connected to a long tradition dating back to slave
resistance. The cultural context during the 1940s and 1950s of Loiza, Puerto Rico grounded Ms.
Osorio-Fuentes’ Afro-Puerto Rican identity.
Juan Cordero, “Afro-Puerto Rican Cultural Studies: Beyond the Cultura Negroide and Antillanismo,” in CENTRO: Journal of
Center of Puerto Rican Studies, 8, no.1 & 2(Spring, 96), 58.
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Growing up negra puertorriqueña (black Puerto Ricans) in Puerto Rico
On November 3, 2005, I pulled in front of a pale yellow three family flat in the heart of the
Fair Haven neighborhood, the heavily populated Puerto Rican community in the city of New Haven,
Connecticut. After ringing the doorbell, Menen Osorio-Fuentes, a petite dark-brownskinned woman
stretched out her hands to embrace me and said, “Come on in honey!” For the next three hours,
Ms. Osorio-Fuentes took me on a historical journey of being a black woman from Loiza, Puerto
Rico who migrated to New Haven, Connecticut.
Menen Osorio-Fuentes was born October 30, 1945 in Puerto Rico.
“I am one of ten[children], eight girls and two boys. Now, one of my brothers passed away
four years ago, so now it is nine of us. We were born and we grew up in a township in Puerto Rico
called Loiza. The Northeastern part of Puerto Rico between Rio Grande and Carolina. It is a very
small town that used to be called a village. Once [it became a municipality] in the 1950s, we
became a town. Whola! [Laugh]ж For us, it did not mean much, but it changed when it came to
government and politics, but for us it was just like another day. So, I grew up there. When I was
about eight years old…nine year old I will say, [I moved in temporarily with a friend of my mother
named Doña Fela, a seamstress who enrolled me in a school in Santurce, well that was an
experience.] [After a year, Menen moved back with her parents]. Then my mother took ill, and my
father could not take care of all of us because he had to go to work. So, [my oldest sister and I
went to live with my Aunt Juana] in the town of Isla Verde, a neighborhood in Carolina. Isla Verde
is a neighborhood, [famous for the airport] and my aunt had a business there, a restaurant there.
So, we went to live with her. Of course, going there to live with her that meant I had to transfer to
another school, school in Carolina. I went to school in [Sabana Abajo were there was a mixture of
kids, different from Loiza, well everyone in that school were mostly white or olive skin]. Well that
was an experience because the fact that, I mean ninety-eight percent of the people in Loiza are
black. [They are] African descent and I can remember, [well the story told by the elders, and from
reading] was a lot of us come from the Yoruba tribe. We have some background in that sector of
Africa and the other mixture would be Taino/Arawak.
So, I went to that school for a short period of time, and it was a very unpleasant
experience. It was surprising because we were in that town[Loiza], we were sheltered in a way that
we did not see the discrimination, and everyone in the classroom and at school were the same
color. There was no [lightskinned people], but when I went to that school[in Santurce] it was
different. There was a high percentage of lightskinned Puerto Ricans, so I was like a little bit, I will
say, intimidated. A lot of people might say, ‘Well how could that be in Puerto Rico, there is no
discrimination.’ Well I tell you. I lived it, so I know what I am saying. So, it was very a bad
experience [even though I did not stay there or moved that year]. I think we had, I must have of had
like one or two fights everyday because they would call me names, like ‘Oh my God, the girl[‘la
negrita’] from Loiza! You bring me some coconuts when you go back on the weekend.’ Things like
that, comments like that. So, I stayed [in Santurce for about one year of] my life, at my [Doña Fela’s
house and then went back to Loiza].”
(So was this area a mixture of Awrawak and white European?)
“White European, but the thing about this particular school, if anybody knows about that
area is that, this particular school, most of the people that attended the school[way back then] were
All
parts of the testimony in brackets are modifications made as a result of a revision session between Ms. Osorio-Fuentes and
myself on February 26, 2006.
жAll words in brackets and italicized indicate were I have inserted my voice for further explanation.
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lightskinned. I don’t think it was meant to be that way, it just happened, but the majority of the kids
in that school were lightskinned. And [Doña Fela] wanted me to go to a good public school, so she
had a friend that lived in the same avenue. That particular part, I can’t remember. So, she said, ‘I
want you to go to that school.’ So, we used [Doña Fela] friend’s address to go to one of the public
schools. So, that’s how I ended up in [that school]. But it was because of the area, most of the
people that lived in the area. It was a community school. Most of the people were olive type, or
very, very light, so it was pretty traumatic for me. That is when I started to see the different color
lines. It was incredible because in my hometown, we never talked about that. Why was it talked.
The neighbors, everyone was the same. So, in a way we were like sheltered. We had our own
utopia.”
(In Loiza?)
“In Loiza, because everyone was the same color and everyone was friends with
everybody. The neighbors sharing food and fish. It was very nice. I think I had one of the best
childhood that any child can ever have.”[Laugh]
(So, when you were eight you moved to lived with [Doña Fela] and then you came back
when you were about [nine, nine and a half] to Loiza?)
“I came back to Loiza. Yeah, with my parents, for about a short period of time, for about
year then I moved back with my aunt because my mother was very sickly. My father was a foreman
for the sugar cane fields. My mother was a cook to those workers. There was income coming in
from both ways until she got sick. She was in the home; she would cook from the home. A couple
of people would come and pickup the lunches. She would do lunches for [the sugar cane workers].
We lived close to the beach, so there were like activities galore[jump rope with salgaso
vines, rag dolls my mother made for US, and swimming]. And there were lot of fruit trees. So we
were very, very active. And back at my Aunt Juana’s house, which is very, very close to the beach.
She would allow us to go after we had chores. So after the chores, we were allowed to go to the
beach and play. And she would use Carey. Carey is like a sea turtle shell, the huge one. Back then
[Carey steak meat was popular]. I do not know whether they still eat it, but they would catch ‘em
[and sell them to my Aunt Juana for the restaurant]. We made like a hallow. We cleaned the shell
and then we would make believe we were turtles and [used it for swimming]. And we would, you
know, go to the beach inside those huge, hallow shells. It was fun. I’m telling you. I had it
good.”[Laugh]
(Can you describe some of the gender norms in Loiza, or how it may have differed when
you moved with your Aunt? Were women predominantly working in the home or were they working
also in the fields?)
“That is very interesting. In my hometown, women ruled. I am not saying that just to be
sarcastic. In my hometown the majority of the women they worked, they worked. Whether it was in
the field, in the pelt, or whether it was sewing, I mean they all had jobs. When I was growing up,
they all had jobs. Domestics you would go to the ‘whites.’ I don’t want to call a Puerto Rican ‘white’,
but the lighter-skinned, the upperclass Puerto Ricans. They would hire people from my hometown.
So you would see people everyday people leaving early in the morning. So the women in my
hometown were very, very, I would say self-sufficient. Well, my aunt who owned a restaurant, you
see, from the beginning we saw that, we saw women very involved bring the bread and butter. So,
it was not a difference. In the areas were I was, I saw a lot of women working.”
(What types of classifications or labels did you use to differentiate yourselves from
someone of African descent versus someone of European descent?)
“In Puerto Rico, they say that classification is by power and money. No, matter how black
you are, if you have money, you fall into that[upperclass]. But, in my hometown it, my aunt would
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go to work. I am going to use her as an example. My [Aunt Isabela] went to go as a domestic,
another aunt that I have, not the same one, this other one[Aunt Juana], was self-sufficient, she had
her own business [and refused to be a domestic]. But another aunt[Aunt Isabela] that I have, she
went to work with this family who own a jewelry store, a very famous jewelry store in San Juan. So,
when we asked, ‘Where you were going? She would say, ‘I started working with whites in San
Juan,’ you see blancos. ‘Oh I going to be working with los blancos in San Juan.’ So, over there[San
Juan], yes, you say blancos or negros. It’s funny you never mentioned Indians when you speak [of
the people]. You say, oh nosotros somos negros puertorriqueños, you know! We are black Puerto
Ricans or nosotros somos blancos puertorriqueños, white Puerto Ricans. It is interesting that I say,
my God, I am looking, looking and never hear, ‘Oh nosotros somos Indios puertorriqueños.’ You
never hear that. It’s like [they say there are no Tainos anymore] and to this day I say, ‘Why do we
believe that? Why do we let people put into our minds that [there are no Tainos], like that really
happened?’ When in reality, when you look around, and you see resemblances from Taino people.
But, like again, to answer the question, black or white, just like in the United States, but with a
different tone. In a way that in here[US] it is very, very pronounced, it is either white or black. Over
there[Puerto Rico], it is like, like there is a hesitation to say it. ‘Oh, es trigueña’, meaning like,
trigueña is like brown. You know what I mean? It is either black or white, you know? ‘Pero, no, no
ella es trigueña,’ of color. They always tried with the answer like they have an excuse or
something. Like, she is negra, but she pasable. Pasable means like she’s [not that black], or she is
not that bad. I say, ‘why do we need an excuse?’ It’s either white or black. So, I don’t know, maybe
someone who has more experience with that might describe it better, but that is my description, I
have lived sixty years with that description.[Laugh]
If you ask a Puerto Rican scholar, any Puerto Rican, especially the ones that are scholars,
they will say, We are Puerto Ricans,’ ‘We were Puerto Ricans and that’s what we are.’ Fine, but my
dear scholars, what has happen is that a groups like us, lets put myself as an example. A group
from the town of Loiza, ok I am Puerto Rican, but then you grow up. But then what else? We are
Puerto Rican, but we forget to study ‘the other.’ ‘Ok, I am Puerto Rican, you are Puerto Rican, but
why are you different from me?’ See what I mean? A child that grows up like [that], sooner or later
the bomb is going to explode, ‘Why I am different from you?’ Back in the late ‘60s, they started to
put more emphasis in that and describe it more. You say, ‘You are Puerto Rican, I am so proud of
being Puerto Rican.’ But then it covers, what I mean, it doesn’t really describe the different races in
there. Why do people from Loiza cook [most every dish with] coconut milk, and people from San
Juan don’t even know what that is? Why is it that we use so many things like Yuca. And we cook
different. We dance different. There are some words from Loiza that if we would have been; we got
[ac]transculturated into the ‘San Juan culture’. So much that we lost so much of the [dialect]. We
had a [dialect] that I don’t know what the heck [happened to it]. Yeah, amongst those people from
there[Loiza] that we say words that they never heard before in the other part of the island. You
know, we have lost all that. And then a child like me growing up, I kept asking questions and I went
to the metropolitan area for the weekend. I would come back from the weekend asking questions,
after questions, after questions and my father, God bless his soul, he passed. He would tell us, he
would explain a little bit, he said, ‘Never mind that, if they call you names, they call you
monkey…go home give me a coconut. Don’t pay attention to that, because that is going to hold
you back. You are going to sit on that corner and the years are going to pass by you and you will
amount to nothing. Nothing but complaining about the whites.’ He would use the word whites,
‘What the whites are doing to us.’”
(In looking at your cultural heritage, it sounds like your family really had or recognized their
African heritage, how did religion play into that? How did your family celebrate it?)
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“Religion was a mixture. For example, my Aunt Fonza who since passed away, my aunt
had in her front of the house. The front of the house over there[Puerto Rico] is like this the road
then you had a walk, you had a deep inside. So, in front of the house she would have Bomba
dances. She would have like gatherings of music, drumming, and my Aunt Fonza, I did not even
remember what religion she was from. All I know she was very, very focused on the African culture.
Very, very, very much focused on the African culture. My father was geared towards the Catholic
religion. My mother was Catholic for a short period of time. When we started by maybe age seven,
she became Pentecostal. So, you see what I mean, down in Loiza, you had a mixture of religions,
the interesting part is that one respects the other. There is a mixture of culture, and with that we
have taken, because we are so focused on the African influence, we are described throughout the
island and outside the island as people who follow the African religions and that they call you
names… They call you, ‘witches’ and that you practice witchcraft. Never voodoo. I never heard
voodoo. So that you practiced witchcraft or other type of witchcraft related activities. So, when you
say Loiza, it is like if you say Salem, Massachusetts. We have that in Puerto Rico. ‘Oh, you from
Loiza? Oh you from the town of the warlocks and witches.’ But it is funny because the majority of
the people in my hometown are either Catholic or Pentecostal, you see? But it is like the legend
that has continued on, even now 2005. Oh you hear, ‘people from Loiza, forget it, she’s a witch, he
is a warlock!’”
Coming to New Haven
With the passing of the Jones Act in 1917 and in the post-World War II era, by the 1960s,
over 15, 237 Puerto Ricans were living in Connecticut.17 Although, Puerto Ricans became legal
citizens of the United States in 1917, they were discriminated against and became targets for white
American racism. Beginning in the 1950s, the northeastern region of the United States
experienced a mass migration of Puerto Ricans, particularly to New York City, Boston, and various
cities in Connecticut The post-war era brought an unprecedented among of migrants to
Connecticut as cheap labors in the agricultural and industrial industries. Also, migrants joined
relatives of war veterans who migrated to the urban centers for better economic opportunities. The
New Haven Register described the mass migration in the following statement: “A wave of Puerto
Rican movement to the city occurred after World War II. Many Puerto Rican war veterans, having
traveled in the armed forces, chose to seek opportunities on the mainland...gradually, the Puerto
Rican colony started growing in the city.”18 White suburban sprawl in the 1950s and 1960s left
Puerto Ricans to settle in ghettos of cities like Hartford, Willimantic, Waterbury, and New Haven.
“When I finished the eighth grade I wanted to go into, with my friends, into a vocation
school.
My aunt say, ‘No! I don’t want you there. I want you to finish high school and then enter the
University of Puerto Rico.’
[Menen said,] ‘My friends are all going to the vocational school.’
And she[Menen’s aunt] said, ‘Well, you are not going to a vocational school, I want [you] to
have a four year university.’
So, then I decided to go back to my parent’s house.’ I kept going back and forth from Loiza
to Isla Verde. So, my intermediate years finished, I finished in Isla Verde in Carolina. At the public
Ruth Glasser, Aqui Me Quedo: Puerto Ricans in Connecticut (Middletown, Connecticut: Connecticut Humanities Council, 1997),
11.
18 Gummarchindo Del Rio, “The Puerto Ricans; Fast Growing Group,” New Haven Register, 9 September 1976, 4B.
17
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schools in Carolina. So, the argument was that she wanted me to finish four years of high school
and then enter into the University. And I went back, so I lost all, almost all the ninth grade I lost and
part of the tenth grade.
So, when I sixteen, my sister[Selenia], who was here[New Haven, Connecticut], came here
in the 1960s with her husband[Kelo]. He was a veteran from the army, and they hired him from
Loiza to come and work on the farms. Remember the migrants? So, they stationed in New Haven
because her husband was working one of those farms in Orange or Branford. And she was going
to have her second, or third baby, and she needed someone to watch the other two while she was
having the baby. I said, ‘I’m off.’[Laugh] So I went, this was how I ended up here.”
(Did you travel here by yourself?)
“Right, by plane, and I decided to say, ‘Sure, I will babysit for you’ because I was not doing
anything anyway; and then from there, here I have been here all these years. [Menen’s
parents]Well, they had no problem, they just wanted me to do something. Because if you’re not
school in my hometown, if you don’t go to school or have a profession like you have girls fourteen
sixteen who were seamstress already. If you didn’t have either of that or you were going to have to
work as a domestic, and my mother hated that. My mother never, never allowed her daughters to
be domestics. [Menen’s mom would say,] ‘You’re not serving no white person, you are not going to
be a domestic. You have to go to school.’ She reinforced that, ‘You ensure and become a nurse or
teacher.’ Way back then, it was either a nurse or a teacher. You know there was nothing else. After
that, it was nothing. So, I said, ‘I think I going to travel.’ And that’s how I decided to become my
sister’s babysitter.’”
(When did you come to the States?)
“February 1964.”
(What were your reactions, first what were your expectations then reactions when you first
got to America?)
“The Mainland…to be honest, the only reaction was when I arrive the sun was shining and
it’s so cold. You know how when you’re in school they teach you all these things, but you don’t pay
attention. Because English was a second language in Puerto Rico. So, I mean the reaction. The
way we were raised, we were raised in such a positive attitude. I mean it was incredible, my
parents did everything they could to raise us well. And when I came here it was just another
experience. I was very, very happy, but I was complaining that it was cold and I did not understand
why. You know, and you know how you have to wear the coats and my sister would tell me to take
it off [when entering some place] and put back on because it was cold outside. That is the only
thing I remember.
So, I was concerned about school because I said, ‘My God, I am [almost eighteen] and I
am not getting my high school degree. So, I was very concerned about that, in which I enrolled in a
night school. In New Haven, there was a school called Prince School, and on the second floor
every Wednesday they give you English, English as a Second Language. So, I enrolled there just
to learn the language, and then from there I was offered a kit to study to finish the high school. It
didn’t set well, because I went to school, but I could not stay, it was very difficult. You know with the
language barrier. Way back then, you didn’t have this bilingual programs that we have now, so it
was difficult. But later in life, in my early twenties I decided to take high school exam and I took it
and I passed. I had good grades in Puerto Rico in English, but it was, you know, it here was
conversational English versus what you read. I guess you learn how to read it, you know how to
read first rather than conservational English. There was no conversational English in Puerto Rico,
so that was a barrier, a challenge.”
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Coming of Age
In the 1960s and 1970s, growing up in the United States as an ethnic American presented
a life of both freedom and democracy, yet a life of contradiction, paradoxes, confusion, and facile
interpretations. Out of all the ethnic groups in the US, the latter characterizations crystallized the
experience of Afro-Puerto Ricans who migrated from the island to the mainland.
In the foreword of Growing Up Puerto Rican by Joy L. DeJesus, Ed Vega conqueratizes
the Puerto Rican situation:
Growing up in the U.S. as a member of an ethnic group, especially if Puerto Rican, places
the individual with the biggest contradiction, that of personal identity…What makes
growing up Puerto Rican uniqueness is try if to define your self with the unsettling
condition of being neither here or there: “Am I black or white?” Is my primary language
Spanish or English” “Am I Puerto Rican or American19
In the 1960s, Puerto Ricans who came to Connecticut found themselves living, working,
and going to school among people of different ethnic backgrounds. However, particularly in New
Haven, Menen explains how Puerto Ricans experienced discriminatory acts from the police, and
language barriers that also led to cultural misunderstandings.
“…I came; we came to live on [Hallock] Street in The Hill area. [Hallock] Street in The Hill
area [early ’64] was mixed. You had African Americans, mostly Puerto Ricans, and no other
Hispanic culture that I can remember. There were some Cubans, but not many. Then you had a
large Italian population, large Irish population, and Greek. We came to live here, when my sister
moved again. When my sister [Selenia with my brother-in-law, Kelo,] came here in 1960, she lived
on St. John Street, what it’s called now, [Little Italy]. But from there they had to move to a larger
one because [they now had] children, so they took another apartment, a multifamily apartment on
[Hallock] Street in The Hill area on the second floor.
During this time, African Americans and Puerto Ricans experienced the low-end jobs and
lived in the worst areas in New Haven, in The Hill area.
When I was seventeen, I decided to venture out and find a job. I went to a place in West
Haven. I will never forget it. They used to make lifesavers boats in West Haven on [Orange]
Avenue. I went there with a friend, a good friend Carmen, God Bless her. Carmen took me
because Carmen used to work there, but Carmen was nineteen years old, I was seventeen. Way
back then if you weren’t eighteen, you were not allowed to work.
[Madeline, the supervisor, said], ‘So, how old are you, eighteen? You know how to sew?‘
[Menen said,] ‘Sure!’ Never saw a sewing machine in life!’
‘So, how old are you, eighteen? Do you know how to sew?’ [Madeline said].
Madeline, I remember this Italian woman, she said, ‘I am not even going to question you anymore.’
So, put me for week on a machine to sew the long strips, you know were on the lifesaver boat the
long strip that hang up to this thing, the handle. So, I had to sew a straight line [out], that’s all I had
to do, just go brrrrrrr [make a straight line].
I said, ‘This was tuff,’ then I started to do it curvy.
So she said, ‘You have more two days and you don’t come out with a straight line or you
will go.’
19
Joy L. DeJesus, Growing up Puerto Rican, (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997), vi, xviii.
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So, the next day I brrrrrrr. See I am like that, when I need to focus on something.
She go, ‘Ohh!’ Then, she thought someone did it for me.
And I said, ‘No, no.’
Then, she sat down, I went brrrrrrr and made a straight line. So, I took my job for about
four years and with that I saved money. I saved a lot of money. The first books I got, I got em
because the money I saved.”
(So, were most of your friends Puerto Ricans?)
“I made a lot of friends and I discovered that there was something called [Savin] Rock in
West Haven, an amusement park. We used to go to every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. My
friends would work because they were over eighteen, so they worked in during the week. So,
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I would go there and they would pay for my rides and stuff. You
know way back then, the Puerto Rican community, it was so amazing, there was so much more
unification. You know the neighbors talking to each other, gatherings. It was very, very nice and
they would teach me English as well. They would say, 'No hablas español! No español, so Menen
can learn English!’ So, I appreciate it that. , I had a, except of an older friend I had, her name was
Juanita. She was about forty-three years old, and she used to work at the place I worked. We
became very good friends, African American Juanita, and guess I got kind of attached to her
because she resembled my Aunt Juana so much. Long, tall, slender and she had her hair curly and
long, then she had on a hat. She reminded so much of my aunt, so we became very good friends.”
(What types of traditions and celebrations did you participate in here in the area that
reminded of Puerto Rico?)
“Well, ok, we are still back in my teenage years and in my early twenties, so not much
because the celebrations in Puerto Rico were more outdoors. Here, with the winters and the
changes of seasons, I found that, we found we had a lot of celebrations like baptism, birthdays
inside, weddings inside. Everything was inside. If there were any social gatherings it was inside an
apartment, somebody’s apartment. And in the summertime, we would go to the parks, the different
parks, beach, what they called, but wasn’t a beach.[Laugh] There weren’t any festivals that I can
remember of [in the late 1960s]. Clubs, shh, are you kidding me? My sister would have killed me.
No, no clubs, like I said only like birthdays and baptisms.”
By the early 1970s, Menen moved to the Fair Haven area.
“I never married. I have two girls with this wonderful person from Puerto Rico. I remember that as
we were going to get married, I pulled back. I said, ‘I didn’t want to get married.’ I chickened out. I
didn’t want to get married, so we lived together for years, about three years. Then I ended raising
my two daughters on my own. I moved out of my sister’s apartment when I was close to twenty-two
years old and I went to live with one of [our family, Crucita and Jesus, a couple]…When I was
twenty-one, I went to live with one of my friends and then my boyfriend and I we took an apartment.
Then I had my daughter when I was twenty-two, first daughter. Menen lived in the] Same
community, same community and I never have, all these years, for over thirty years in the
community I never moved anywhere else. I never moved to Norwich, or Hamden. Never, I always,
we always stayed, my family is kind of steady, we do not move around. We never went back to
Puerto Rico and come back here. We just don’t like that. It’s funny if I tell you this, if we move we
would [the thought of having to] carry the refrigerator, the bed. That for us is such a humongous
task. That’s why when we take an apartment, when we take an apartment, we make sure that that
was the apartment. I was twenty years old when I left the job, and I was still going to night school.
Then, I worked in a place binding books. I really enjoyed that. You know, I kept switching from job
to job. Way back then, [as now], who ever would pay more, ‘No, no, they pay .75 cents more over
there’ everybody would move to the other place. I was twenty-two when I had my first child I was
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living with my fiancé, and he was working. I went to school, but I was not working. Then, I had my
first child and I didn’t work for about three years, maybe four because he was the provider. So,
when I had my second child we separated, when I had my second child. Then I took another job.
My sister was again my [big] support, she would babysit, cook, etc.
I used to take English as a Second Language. My sister used to push me a lot, ‘You gotta
go to school, you gotta to finish, you gotta get out of this hole. You cannot stay in there.’
I remember her saying, ‘No, you have to make it. Look at me, I have three kids, I barely
finished high school, never went to college, you got to do it.’
College in my hometown believe it or not was a big thing. But we, called it University [not
‘college’], was a big thing, big, for people from Loiza. I went to Southern Connecticut State
University. I almost finished my Associate’s, then I finished at Springfield college in the late eighties
or nineties with my Bachelor’s at Springfield College. I started going to Wesylan for my Master’s in
Liberal Arts and Humanities, and I dropped out of that one because I got involved in the
Connecticut politics. That absorbed [a lot of my time].”
To counter-act discrimination, the Puerto Rican community in Fair Haven started to create
a place of their own. Ruth Glasser described community building in Connecticut’s Puerto Rican
sections as intimate gatherings, Puerto-Rican-owned restaurants and stores, and social services
agencies.
“Agencies, we had several agencies. We had a Puerto Rican restaurant in the area. One.
Two or Three. The biggest one was in Bridgeport. So, on weekends we would go to Bridgeport.
Believe or not, even though there were cultural institutions that were focused more on social
services. It was funny because they had the name of a cultural, but they were more like a social
service provider. All the agencies were towards social services. So that is why in 1977, we said
‘wait a minute,’ we incorporated the Fiestas de Loiza.”
Diasporic Exchanges: The 1960s-1970s
The Black Power era in the late sixties and early seventies brought great interaction
between Puerto Ricans and African Americans. Black Power along with the Chicano Movement
changed the social, political and cultural landscape in the United States. Although the history of the
exchange and borrowing of ideals between the two oppressed groups has been marginalized in the
historiography; Roberto Rodriguez-Morazzani explains the influence of the African American
experience on Puerto Ricans, “Certainly, one can isolate certain ideological currents originating
among the African American people, which Puerto Ricans employed for understanding their
situation in the US.”20 During the Black Power era, the rise of ethnic nationalism, the social
interaction between other oppressed groups color impacted the re(invention) of an Afro Puerto
Rican cultural identity that answered the question: Who am I(We)?
“We were there for the riots…I remember coming to Congress Avenue, walking the day
after I arrived. I asked my sister what were they doing there. There were people on the corner,
gathering African Americans and Puerto Ricans and I was curious.
My sister said, ‘They are waiting for the bus.’
The buses kept going back and forth, and I said ‘They waiting for the bus?’
She said, ‘No, No they are just hanging out.’
Roberto Rodriguez-Morazzani, “Mapping the discourse on Puerto Ricans and ‘Race,’” in The Latino Reader: Culture, Society and
Economy, 145.
20
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And I remember that there were only African Americans and Puerto Ricans. I was just
curious, and I said, ‘Why are they waiting for it?’
My sister said, ‘Them don’t know, they are just waiting for it. Know your business, keep on
walking.’ But everybody was so nice, you know what I mean?
Like you would hear, ‘Oh my God Congress Avenue, no I am not going to go there.’
And we were living there, and I saw nothing wrong, you know what I mean? They were nice
people. That just, people that didn’t have a job or just down on their luck. But they were good
people, they were my neighbors.
The only thing that I remember in New Haven, ever that I can remember, is that, you know
coming from a farmland in Loiza, I used to drink a lot of milk. And remembered we didn’t have any
more milk in house, and that was when I was nineteen…twenty years old, three, four years in the
city. And there was a restaurant in on the corner of, I am not gong to name the name of the
restaurant. It was on Washington Avenue and Daggett Street, an Italian restaurant. And I went in to
get a class of milk, to buy milk.
So, I said, ‘Why?’ I went to the guy with my broken English, and said, ‘You don’t sell, you
don’t drink milk?’
The guy said, ‘No milk for you.’
Then later I said, ‘I don’t think he wanted to sell me the milk.’
I did not pay much attention to it. I really didn’t experience much because I stayed mostly
with African Americans, Puerto Ricans, you see what I mean? Here we go again with our own
utopia, our own shelter in everyway. [There was] a lot of migration from the South, African
Americans. A lot and I, my sister, we ended up with a lot of black friends. I think my sister makes
the best collard greens [Laugh]
I think the relationship, the good relationship [between African Americans and Puerto
Ricans] in terms of kind of the same color, you see what I mean? Back in The Hill area you had to
stick together. You had to. I was single, we were living in the Hill and the riots started and with that
the whites felt, not as the book says, but as I saw it, the whites felt that they were being attacked.
And Hell’s angel was coming from California and from the Black Panthers. The Guardian Angels
came from New York to defend the Puerto Ricans, so you have a clash of three cultures in there.
History tells you it that was ugly. We were there, we lived on [Hallock] Street. We were right in the
middle of it.
It was very, very scary. It created consciousness as to racism. Not that we were absent
from it in Puerto Rico, but it was not like that. This was very pronounced. ‘I don’t like because you
are of color and I am going to do everything impossible to erase you from earth.’
(Did someone say that to you?)
“No. No. That was the feeling. If you don’t have a job, you don’t have an education, you
don’t have food, then they are trying to take away what you value. That’s erasing you from earth,
you know? So, that part was scary, I mean I was a young girl in the middle of war.”
(How did you identify at this particular time, did you consider yourself, Puerto Rican, Puerto Rican
American, Afro-Puerto Rican or black Puerto Rican?)
We always considered ourselves black Puerto Ricans. ALWAYS! We grew up with that.
Black Puerto Ricans. Later on in the sixties, Afro-Puerto Ricans and in my hometown,
‘Oh she’s negra puertorriqueña(black Puerto Rican) or Afro-puertorriqueña(Afro-Puerto
Rican).’ We just say it without hesitation. This who I am, how I grew up in the sixties, that’s how we
described ourselves. So, it’s funny because I have a very dear friend. I said let me prove it to you.
So I got books written way back then that said, ‘Afro-Puerto Rico.’ [Menen said,] ‘So you see right
here…look, look, this book wasn’t written yesterday, it was written years, years, years.’ This is our
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description, black Puerto Ricans, Afro-Puerto Ricans. Most of the books, the old books, they
described a person from Puerto Rico or the Caribbean of color, they would say AfroPuertorriqueño, Afro-Cubano, Afro-Dominicano that was the description.”
With the rise of cultural nationalism during the 1950s, Puerto Rican leaders and
intellectuals pointed to folk symbols or the Puerto Rican flag, as embodiments of their national
culture. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Puerto Ricans in Connecticut established several
community organizations and organized festivities (such as the Puerto Rican Day Parade) that
reaffirmed their national identity. The New Haven Register states, “Panchi Cruz, chairperson of the
San Juan Festival, said that in conjunction with the third annual San Juan Festival, ‘efforts are
under way to establish the San Juan Folklore Center, which will focus on Hispanic Culture.’”21 The
mass transnational migration during the 1960s and 1970s increased the movement of people,
culture, and commodities to and from the mainland and Puerto Rico.
“There was a [wonderful] woman named Panchi Cruz who started a committee to do
festivals. She did, with a group of people, she did the first Fiesta de Loiza. She did the first one, the
biggest, then we kind of like joined her, and we celebrated the first Fiestas de Loiza. Then after
that, they passed one the responsibilities to us, and we got incorporated in 1978. So since 1978,
we’ve been doing activities like that, not just Fiestas de Loiza, but other activities about the stories.”
The spread of the Antillianismo in Loiza, Puerto Rico; the Puerto Rican movement and the
Black Power era in the United States transformed the United States sociopolitical and cultural
landscape. With the social interactions between other ethnic Americans and homeland black
Puerto Ricans, Puerto Ricans on the mainland began to create a space to deconstruct their held
notions of Puerto Rican transnational cultural identity and the role of the African element. During
this time, New Haven experienced an increase in cultural activists who set a mission to preserve
Puerto Rico’s heritage for the growing migrant enclaves.
Community Builder & FLECHAS
In the aftermath of the Black Power era and the radical politics among Puerto Ricans,
cultural activists began reconstructing a new cultural identity that celebrated the complexity of their
indigenous culture, rejecting American notions of Puerto Rican identity. “We want to bring
that(island) culture into the Hill Neighborhood to bring about some unity… Once you do things
like[festivals, pageants, concerts] this in the neighborhood, you increase cultural awareness of the
community, and the broader community can see our talent is not limited, and the youths don’t lose
their cultural identity, ” explained Freddy Perez, director of Latino Youth Development in 1977. 22
Menen along with other Afro-Puerto Rican cultural activists, developed Fiestas de la Loiza and the
Caribbean in Honor of Apostol Santiago(FLECHAS), the first Afro-Puerto Rican organization in the
New England region. In an interview with Ruth Glasser, Menen described her mission for
promoting Afro-Puerto Rican culture:
It’s about you as a black Puerto Rican person, [your] responsibility to let other know that
there’s a presence there and that it didn’t come from nothing, there’s a background. I think
the African history is fading away, little by little…This is something that people don’t way to
know about because it’s connected with a lot of misery, a lot of anguish, agony, suffering,
21
22
Bob Greenlee, “Festival, Center set with Hispanic Theme,” New Have Register, 6 June 1977, 36.
Jack Millea, “Even The Reporter Knew,” New Have Register, 11 November 1977, 40.
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poverty. When you have an African connection it; not as elegant as saying, I’m of Spanish
decent or I’m of Indian or Taino descent.”23
Menen represents a cultural actor who has used cultural expression--music, dance, arts and
literature—influenced by an African tradition to politically and culturally mobilize her community.
“My family, my Aunt Fonza, the place to go to see Las Fiestas de Loiza. The place to go to
hear the drums or to dance was to Fonza’s house. The outside of her house, so you see my family
did participate when I was small, when I was growing up.“
(And that[The Fiestas de Loiza] is to commemorate the Apostol de Santiago?)
“The Fiestas de Loiza, it’s made in honor of Saint James the Apostle or Apostol Santiago.
It’s to honor Apostol Santiago, but it is not all about Apostol Santiago. It’s more about all the
different cultures. The different ways of cooking, dancing, it’s just a fiesta. It’s a town fiesta,
[brought by the Spaniards] grew up so huge they dedicated to St. James because of the legend.
They say they found St. James, they found [the statues of St. James, and so,] they named the
statues of the children, of the women, and of the men. Apostol Santiago. And that came into my
town from Spain when the Spainards were in town they did the [Fiesta] of St. James. When they
left, after the abolition of slavery in 1873, everyone took cover and [went to another part of the
island] because [slaves] were ‘released.’ So, a lot of Spaniards that were habitating in the town,
they just left. We continued the Fiestas, but if you look at La Fiestas the way they do it in Galicia,
Spain or the way they used to do it in Loiza, to what we[FLECHAS] turned it into, it is more of a
cultural celebration. If you look, it is totally different if you go to Spain and you see La Fiestas, and
maybe way back then it was like that. But the addition of things we added, the drums, and all the
other type of flavor from the African culture and the Indian culture. It turned into a diverse fiesta.
So, it is not the same, so I think we call it or now as Apostol Santiago out of respect [to the Fiesta’s
meaning] and because they brought it to Loiza. But, it is a different thing, [a different meaning now]
I wish that someday I see the comparison, La Fiestas in Spain and La Fiestas of Loiza. We have
the procession of the Saints, and we go to the Catholic Church. I am Catholic, so we do have those
elements in there and the other additions.”
(These are traditional masks of Loiza. Why are masks so important, the coloring?)
“It is funny, we grew up, you know how kids are afraid of things, we grew up not being
afraid of this mask. Usually, if you are from a religion, like the Pentecostal religion, [they tell you
these are all] mask of the Devil. But in our minds, they are festival masks. Growing up with this
mask, ‘Oh por Las Vejigantes de la Fiestas?’ Nothing else, nothing more, never comparing this
masks with the Devil’s masks until, believe it or not, until I came to the United States. Isn’t that
something?”
[Pointing to Catholic statues in the book, Las Terceras Raices]
“The festival mask, it does have a meaning, like in African this mask over here, represent
harvest. They use this mask when they are harvesting. But then we don’t have the meaning is a
festival mask. But a lot of people, have given it many labels like ‘Oh mascara de Diablo.’ The
Fiestas of St. James in Spain. You compare with Fiestas of St. James in Loiza is totally different It
is almost the same with the expectation that we only [celebrate it] do it for three days. The way the
used to do over a hundred years ago was three day only. We do it in three day, the procession of
the Saints, we haven’t been able to successfully do a good procession of the Saints. The three
Saints. We do one. Saint of the women marches that‘s the only one we do now. But we have to do
23
Ruth Glasser, Aqui Me Quedo: Puerto Ricans in Connecticut, 185.
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[all three], Saint of the children, women and men. We bringing a lot of crafters that come from
Puerto Rico, so they can display, do workshops, and sell their stuff. Arts and crafts, cooking, a lot
of different dishes both including American and a lot of groups singing and dancing.
A big difference is that in Loiza, you don’t have to really engage people to participate,
people participate widely. In here[United States], you have to engage people, you have to make
costumes so people will dress up. Over there[Loiza], people made costumes, at a certain time they
are already choosing what fabrics they want fabrics they are gonna use. They do their own. They
are self-motivated. Over here, you have to engage people, so that they can become more active.
My mentor who [was a master] mask maker in Loiza, said to me when he came to visit me in
[1978], ‘Don’t expect this evolution overnight. This is going to take a long, long, long slow process.
Trying to do something that people that left the island, when they are here, they [look at it as]
something that is holding their progress. Even though it is not like that, they will see it like that. If
you don’t have a lot of participation, then just keep going.’ In other words don’t be scared. So,
that’s a big thing. People here don’t get as engaged as people in Loiza. You have to kind of push
the envelope more. It took Loiza some thirty years to actually get fully get engaged, so how many
years 28 years we have a couple of more years.” [Laugh]
(Why did you develop FLECHAS during that time?)
“Ok, we developed, it wasn’t just me. It was a group of people. The Fiestas de Loiza in
Connecticut in Honor of Apostol Santiago that’s what it stands for. We decided that there was a
tool there that we could use [as you, as you progress], to better ourselves and the beautiful culture;
and the beautiful music and history we have; combining all those to help us continue with the other
struggles. Job, education, housing, you name it. All the social problems. Maybe by us doing this, it
would be [a motivator for] us to continue to looking for that. And I believe to this day, the best way
to really engage people, is by that—food, music, gatherings like that, healthy gatherings get to
know your neighbors. The neighbors feel better about you because they know who your are. It is a
knocker, it’s a good way to knock on doors. We have discovered that through out all these years,
and to this day all of us believe, the people who had founded this, the founders, we believe that this
is a beautiful tool to get acquainted with your neighbors and to get more enthusiasm. Whether it is
getting a new job, [getting an education]. Saturdays and Sundays, you know once a year for three
days. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday once a year, you celebrate your culture. As a tool! As a
founder of FLECHAS, founder and former organizer, I see my role as organizing. Plant the seed,
nurture the see with water, and when it starts coming up, you move on. That’s what I do. As a
founder of FLECHAS, we have trained people to take over FLECHAS because we don’t want, the
founders, we don’t want to stay there. We want to move on. So, we found the people who we’ve
trained are doing an excellent job and now their kids in FLECHAS growing up and picking up and
learning. So, that doesn’t stay with one person, it keeps moving on. We entrust people with the
FLECHAS administration, hoping that they see it is not their stuff, but also the community. ‘You are
an integral part of it, you don’t own it. You are to deliver that to the community.’ If somebody want
to come in and wants to become for this coordinator for that, go ahead. If we see that they are
changing the mission…
The mission of FLECHAS is to promote, to preserve, and share the Puerto Rican culture,
focusing on the African experience, the African influence in Puerto Rico. Why that? Because where
we are from, and that’s the influence that has been put under the rug for years, and years, and
years. It’s good to know how to play the guitar and the castanets, the Flamingo, that’s beautiful,
that is part of our rich culture, but it doesn’t stop there. Kids needs to know why you have course
hair, why your nose is wider than Carmen’s or whoever, so we focus on that. We said, ‘Oh by the
way this is also part of your culture.’ This is a way you are like that. So, the mission is make sure
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that we promote and preserve the culture, the three cultures. We call ourselves a Puerto Rican
expression of three cultures and we talk about the three to our kids. I don’t know if Kevin24 talked to
you about this. Kevin has been very instrumental making sure that the workshops go through all
the schools, to teach children about our culture place. And he’s been very, very instrumental and I
know we hold other activities, fairs, abolition of slavery, March 22nd , which is something that is real
big for us. There you have a goal, you have the opportunity to teach [and learn] something, our
history. Kevin is coordinator of the Fiestas, but we have other people who contribute much. We
have our own historian, Raul Avila, who has a beautiful description of the three cultures, so he is
available for that particular aspect. So, everyone in FLECHAS has their role, and some of them are
not as active as they are because whenever you have someone who want to demonstrate how to
do it. We give full range, we give that person the opportunity, [if we feel the] mission is changing or
things are changed the Afro-Puerto Rican experience, then we come back, the founders will come
back. We said, ‘Wait a minute something [is not right.’ But,] so far so good. Kevin is doing a
wonderful job, so are the others who have different roles in the organization. Well when we started
there were little activities about things Afro-Puerto Rico, now 2005 everyone wants to have a
portion of that aspect. So, when you measure success, you see it in college, in schools, in
museums, libraries. You see it, our [Loiceño], or Afro-Puerto Rican culture being displayed and
everyone wants to do activities and they want to include a little bit of the Fiesta’s tradition. That to
me is an accomplishment and a success. That people are now [more into] the African influence in
Puerto Rico. I think we did a wonderful job.”
(Can you describe some of the African inspired-traditions such as the Bomba, the food,
dances, dress and what does that’s that signify?)
“All those things that you mentioned as empowering. It is a strength to stay here, to help us
not to move around, back and forth, back and forth, and to this day I don’t understand, I really don’t
understand what they are looking for. Whatever it is got to be there, you need something to give it
strength. You can kick open those doors, kick them open doors for you. Whatever little we have
that is the delivered African influence, how little they are, they play a very strong part in our lives.
The food, the music, some of the dance, a little of the language, we lost, like African Americans, we
lost it all, we lost all the language. But, there are a few words we still use, those little things…oh my
God…it is vitamin for our spirits.”
(What type of words or food?)
“Words like [Gandinga, Tun-Tun], words like that. It tell us that we are here for a reason,
not to give up. It’s telling us to pass it on, whatever little information we have, don’t store, keep it
preserve it, but pass it on. Don’t just preserve it, pass it on. My grandchildren they need to know it,
and if we don’t then it will disappear completely. We make it, if we don’t do anything about and it
disappears then the other generations will be more confused about where they come from. Those
little things that you mentioned, even food, it plays a big part, because you place it there it will force
the persons or child to ask questions, ‘Where is this from?’ And that’s when you engage the
person, then you open up again the bookshelves and then you start looking for information to give
to that child or that person. My parents and my aunts, they all talked about it, and what they were
doing was passing it around. We used a lot of coconut milk in our food, a lot of roots like yams, a
lot of those vegetables are African-descended. That coconut milk, African-descended. We do a, it’s
like a porridge; we call it [‘Caldo Santo’] ‘Holy Porridge,’ we all make it during Easter season. We
discovered that it came from Madagascar. How we discovered that? A Yale-student who knew how
to read French. He was reading a French book at the community school that talks about [Caldo
24
Kevin Diaz is the former commissioner of cultural arts in New Haven and the current executive coordinator of FLECHAS.
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Santo] in Madagascar and we compared the ingredients we use in Loiza with the ingredients in
Madagascar, and it is the same ingredients. The same ingredients. How it ended up in Loiza? We
don’t know. But as long as I can remember, we’ve been eating [Caldo Santo] or Holy porridge. It is
made with fish, roots, yams, coconut oil and coconut milk that is very from the African culture. The
mass immigration from Latin America in the 1980s influenced by globalization and transnationalism
forged a pan-Latino identity amongst all persons, particularly second- and third generations, from
Latin America. Despite the cultural shifts in New Haven’s Puerto Rican community towards a
Puerto Rican specificity; within the last two decades, the Puerto Rican population has struggled to
distinguish themselves from the growing pan-Latino culture
Afro-Puerto Rican identity: Latino or Hispanic?
First used by the late 1970 U.S. Census Bureau, the term “Hispanic” described persons in
the United States who are descendent from Spain or from a Spanish-speaking country in the
Western Hemisphere. While scholars have debated over the use of Hispanic to Latino, the terms
Hispanic or Latino, continues to be a source of contention within both Latin American migrant
populations and in academic circles. In the 2000, the U.S. census designated six major racial
categories (white, black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Alaskan native, native
Hawaiian or other Pacific islander, and some "other" race) and two ethnic categories (Hispanic and
non-Hispanic). Puerto Ricans, like most persons from Latin America, selected “other” to indicate
the inadequacy of a classification that describes the complex origins of their racial identities.
However, despite their purpose of classifying population from Latin American, these racialized
terms have carried negative connotations, which have subjugated certain populations to racial
discrimination and socioeconomic marginalization within the American capitalist society. Social
categories such as "Latino" (or "Hispanic") used to describe persons from Latin America are
ambiguous, which homogenize the diverse groups of person from Latin America.
(How did you feel about the labels that derive during the late 1970s of “Latinos” or
“Hispanic” that is grouping the persons of Latin America?)
“I think it is a very bad idea because you are putting everybody, everyone who is Spanishspeaking, dumping them into that bag and you calling them Latinos. But I am trying to get out of the
bag, crawling back up and say, ‘I am not Latina.’ I am a Caribbean black women from Puerto Rico.
Then they say, ‘Well the Latina is the word that you should use.’
No, I am not going to use[Latina]; I am not going to identify myself as a Latina. I am not from South
or Central America. They describe themselves like that. I describe myself as Caribbean, Puerto
Rican, or Hispanic woman. And there is a big controversy with that. So, the same controversy that
was there with African Americans, black or Negro women, women of color, black. It is the same
thing. Why do we get into this? I don’t know, what, is it to use up time because it is not getting what
we need. Nonetheless, but when someone tries to impose it on you that’s when you make it an
issue and fight to try to change it. Not until somebody tells you this or that then you are this have
problems that you should talk about, and I am talking about it because someone in New York
decided to put all of us in a bag and call us Latinos, so it blew up like dynamic and everybody is
calling us Latinos or Latinas.
I never use it though, I never described myself as Hispanic or Latino, I use Puerto Rican or
black Puerto Rican or Afro-Puerto Ricans or Caribbean. I never use Latino or Hispanic, I always
use those terms. So, the problem that I have with the Latino thing is that it is so broad; it extends
itself all the way to Brazil and the island, Portuguese, Italy. If I were a person looking for funding, I
can go, tap into any of those programs because when they made those proposals they said for the
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Latino community. So, I am Portuguese, I tap into funding for a Puerto Rican because they call
themselves Latino. You know what I mean? Wouldn’t that bring complications? I never heard that
before, that came about that started to surface in the 1980s.
Like I said, ‘Puerto Rican’ we hear something that’s New York, then all of the sudden
everyone what to be called Latino. I said, ‘God, we are so unstable.’ At sometimes we appear to be
so unstable [as a race].’”
Political Activism: Afro-Puerto Ricans in New Haven
Since the 1980s, the Puerto Rican community has remained at the bottom of the
socioeconomic out of all Latino immigrants. Between the 1984 to the 1986 forty-two percent of
Puerto Rican families lived in the U.S. mainland, which was the highest among all U.S. Latinos. By
the late 1980s, the average annual income of Puerto Rican families in the United States continued
to rise to $11,000; this was still thirty-three percent of the median annual income for non-Latino
U.S. families (approximately $33,000).25 The socioeconomic and spatial marginalization of Puerto
Ricans forged a creation of Puerto Rican barrios around the United States. Within these barrios,
the tension brought on by the socioeconomic conditions on both the island and the mainland
brought Puerto Ricans together across class, racial, and oceanic divides.26 Puerto Rican women
led the political activism that became mainstream among Puerto Rican communities. Menen’s
testimony highlights the gap in the historiography on Puerto Ricans on women’s agency in
mobilizing the Puerto Rican community, particularly through cultural expressions and politics.
“We became more involved about five years after the creation of FLECHAS; it was
because in here[New Haven], the political machine representing us, they didn’t understanding us
people from that part of Puerto Rico. They didn’t know us. They did very minimal, they knew
minimal about us. See, a lot [of Puerto Rican] politicians, they were born and raised here. Whether
they were, they didn’t have black Puerto Ricans in office, the people involved they were not aware
about of the elements in our culture. And if they knew about it, they certainly did not show us. So,
you have a large percentage of people from Loiza in here, and politics in New Haven is dictator no
matter what you do, it is, it is not a secret. Well we said, ‘Let’s be participants, lets participate.’ So
that is how I became involved. My daughter became involved as a young girl. My sister and my
brother-in-law were already involved in the process. So, a few years ago, about twelve years ago,
we decided to ‘Let’s run one.’ A person from Loiza in office. I’m it. I think I became the first
[Loiceña] involved in politics as co-chair of the Democratic Party. Then, soon after that, eight years
ago, my daughter became alderwoman, and not just for the [Loiceños] or Puerto Ricans, but for
everyone. Every person of color or every person who were being left behind or discriminated
against. We were put in a corner in a since we don’t. It was difficult to get the park [and other
permits]. It was difficult to get the police to help us out. Against getting stuff ready, nonsense
against getting trash cans for the festivities. You know what I mean, things like that, everything was
an issue or a problem.
I don’t know if it was of color, or if it was because we were not known. We were not known
in the political arena. In New Haven you have to know or you have to be known in the political
arena. [And most serving us in office knew little or nothing about these types of traditions from
Puerto Rico. They were born here under beliefs and religions that were and still not friendly to
Kevin A. Santiago-Valles and Gladys M. Jimenez-Munoz, “Social Polarization and Colonized Labor: Puerto Ricans in the United
States, 1945-2000,” in The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States since 1960, (ed.) by David Gutierrez (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003), 106
26 Ibid, 97
25
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certain traditions. For example, the Vejigantes mask is scary for some people, to us it’s a cultural
artifact]. I have to tell you, we are very outspoken, that’s is sometimes is not a very good idea, but
nonetheless you have to do it. If you see something that is productive to your benefits as a group,
you can’t keep your mouth shut, you have to talk. You have to talk and make sure that in a very
nice way you come to a consensus or you find ways to fix it.
Like in Loiza, the politics were driven, have been driven by women. We drive the political
machinery. It’s happening now. We were strong, we were very strong as women of color in politics
then, and we are stronger, much stronger today. My mother was very political, very political. In fact,
I have a copy when she became a registered voter in Puerto Rico in 1931[Pointing to the copy].
She had many copies of that, so when she died that was my copy. I took that one. So, my mother
was very political. Not so much, more like organizing like making sure the politicians kept their
promise. You know like ,’if you vote for me I make sure I fix the road or whatever.’ So she, her vote,
when she went to vote she said, ‘it was here you have to fix my road.’ She would look at them. So,
when I came here[New Haven] I met a few people doing voter registration and just joined,
automatically, I just joined. Voter registration, I have been doing voter registration since I was
twenty years old, in my late twenties. Very involved, particularly with the classes. The local,
municipal voter classes. My sister, and I and my brother-in-law. We’ve been participants ever
since.
Although, I was never a [political] participant, I was never in any way, shape or form a
participant in Puerto Rico. By you reading, you know, that’s different. What I find here, when people
come here because it is a new culture. They find themselves as victims to individuals who know
the political process here on the mainland. And I see the advantage they take on those who don’t
know the process. So, those people who come here and they are in need, of course, I mean you
come to a new land of course you are in need, socially speaking you are in need. So, I noticed, I
noticed that well, ‘you need a job, you need shelter, you need food, you need clothing.’ Those are
the tools that they use to get people to vote. I don’t think it should be like that…I think it should be
that, people should be educated. Well we have a responsibility to educate people who come here
to vote for the first time, you know what? You educate the person, to empower the people in such a
way that if the person becomes self-sufficient as a voter then they don’t become a victim of the few
individuals or does not become dependent. You know what I mean? You do your part and then it is
your time to give the vote, you go ahead and challenge that person, But you choose. They don’t
give them the opportunity to choose. You know what I mean, like the boogeyman type of approach.
If you don’t vote, you’re not going to get this. It’s true! If you don’t vote, they see the numbers, not
of the benefit of the few. I have that problem. In that part, I am very controversial, anybody can tell
you. I am. I just finished an election as a write-in candidate because I don’t agree with the
approach that this individual is using my people to get her elected. So, I said, ‘So, what I am telling
her as a write-in.’ She may say, ‘Don’t do that, it’s a lot of work?’
So what, but it has to be done. You have to be, people have to be educated.
I feel that, we have done a tremendous contribution, and when I say we, I say a group that
I am involved with, including my sister. We have registered and educated thousands, thousands of
Puerto Ricans and Latinos. In the political process, we have registered so they can participate in
the political process. So, I find it an accomplishment is that not only the way they register them, but
we take time to educate them [and hundreds of politicians have benefited from this labor]. Their
rights for them to seek office, so, we‘ve done a lot. We’ve done thousands.”
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The Legacy
Currently, Ms. Osorio-Fuentes lives in the heart of the Fair Haven neighborhood where she
continues as a political and cultural activist. Besides being the founding member of FLECHAS,
Menen Osorio-Fuentes is committee member of the Democratic 16th Ward Committee in Fair
Haven; she has served as the Enterprise Community member for Empower New Haven, Inc, and a
founding member of the Fair Haven Development Corporation. Over the last forty years, Menen
has become a household name within the Latino community in New Haven, and continues to see
her role as a cultural and political activist on-going.
“…at age sixty, I was saying, ‘How do I want to be remembered?’
Well I think I want to be remembered as a contributor, as one of the soldiers of the Puerto Rican
community. Not a hero, but one of the soldiers. Because we work like a co-op. We work for
FLECHAS a co-op. We are all Indians, there is no chief. I want to be remembered as a good
soldier as someone that did not give up. I don’t know what it means to give up. I wish I knew how to
give up because it not good sometimes. Because I have to do it, I have to do it, and like my tongue
is about two yards long, ‘I have to do it!’ In everything, everything, and I say, ‘I am so happy that I
am trying to live a good, long, abiding life, as a person, because otherwise I would have been killed
by now.’ Because see I start something and I have to do finish. It is not an obsession, but it is like
deep inside, it is my obligation, I have to finish, I have to finish. We don’t know how to give up. My
sister is worst; my sister is a bad example for me, [in that sense] she is like that too, she doesn’t
give up. The people that join us, we give them a warning. My sister says, ‘Sin o nada’ Do you know
what that means?”
(All or nothing)
“You know, someday, my dream is that someday Fiestas de Loiza in the United States will
have the same appeal as Saint Patrick’s Day. You’ll see it in every store, you see green, green,
green. One day you are going to see masks in every store, and people getting ready with customs
and you can go to certain places and purchase the costumes. That is my dream.”
The sociohistorical positioning of persons from Latin America in the United States
generates new concepts, questions, conceptual approaches, and theories about the experience of
identity formation amongst Latin America immigrants. Scholars have begun to explore class, color,
race, gender, sexuality, time, space, and contexts as factors that impact the construction of identity
among migrants. Over the last two decades, Puerto Rican historians have suggested alternative
approaches to understanding the formation of identity in the United States: internal colonialism, the
process of barriozation, Clara Rodriquez’ Rainbow thesis. The recent theories and conceptual
approaches emphasize the impact of context, race, space and class. However, one of the recurring
gaps in the historiography of Puerto Ricans in the United States neglects the role culture as a tool
of individual and group identification and social mobility.
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In the case of Puerto Ricans, like other ethnic immigrants, the process of transnationalism
closes the gap between homeland and hostland. Technology, the media, airplanes, and the postal
services provide immigrants means to stay connected to their land of origin. Although the circular
migration of ideas, values, commodities, and people impact the transnational experience of
immigrants; this process is essential to the reinvention of cultural identity among Afro-Puerto
Ricans in the United States. Born and raised in a cultural context that created a space for AfroPuerto Rican culture, Menen Osorio-Fuentes uprooted her notions of race and culture, and
refashioned it when she moved to New Haven, Connecticut. While Menen believes the Fiestas de
Loiza characterizes her Afro-Puerto Ricanness, since its incorporation in 1977 she states the
Fiestas changed to include various American traditions as a part of its festivities. Through her
testimony, Menen explains the struggle of “betweenness,” also experienced by other migrants; the
search for ways to reconcile their Puerto Rican heritage with a new role as an American citizen.
Moreover, the paradoxical situation illustrates how cultural identity undergoes constant change
impacted by a certain context.
With the rise of transnationalism, the term Latino has become a mainstream
characterization of Latin American immigrants in the Untied States. Analyzing the construction of
cultural identity among Afro-Puerto Ricans unearths the broader implications of culture and identity
formation in the late twentieth century. Ms. Osorio-Fuentes’ testimony dismantles the American
notion of Latino and self-identifies as a black Puerto Rican or an Afro-Puerto Rican, which does not
fit into the Latino paradigm. Ms. Osorio-Fuentes’ choice to define herself as a black Puerto Rican
woman entails an element of control, which rejects racialized labels such as Latino/a. Her story
raises new questions about the contours of the terms Latino/a: What are determinants of a panLatino identity? Can Bomba culturally define an immigrant from Costa Rica or Chile? Latino/a
overshadows the cultural specificity and the racial identity among Afro-Puerto Ricans in the United
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States. Ms. Osorio-Fuentes’ testimony challenges scholars’ qualifications of the label Latino to
define persons from Latin America.
Aside from the above discussion, the complexity of this life history is the actual oral
testimony. Life histories share personal experiences that unpack concepts, paradigms, and
theories created by scholars to understand the transnational experience of immigrants. The oral
history used in this analysis provides a text for scholars to understand the cultural agency in
transnational experiences of Afro-Puerto Ricans in the United States. Moreover, the oral testimony
stands as a performance of identity. The title, “In her own Words,” represents the individual agency
of Ms. Osorio-Fuentes in defining her “Afro-Puerto Ricanness.”
In the pervious pages, I have tried to explore a different perspective of a Puerto Rican
migrant who continues to reconcile and redefine her cultural identity on the mainland. The previous
personal experience highlights how space and cultural contexts impact the formation of cultural
identity. This testimony raises new questions for historians to complicate the Puerto Rican
experience in the United States: How does the examination of cultural contexts and spaces serve
as conceptual approaches to understanding formation of Afro-Puerto Rican cultural identity in the
United States? Why is cultural expression central to understanding identity formation among
Puerto Ricans of color? How does the process of racialization in the United States differ among
Puerto Ricans based on race, skin color, class, gender or ethnicity? Can dominant white/black
dichotomy in the United States capture the complex racial situation of the Puerto Rican Diaspora?
The story of Mrs. Osorio-Fuentes is a community history, yet it contributes to the historiography of
the transnational experience of Puerto Ricans by complicating traditional notions of migration
patterns, race relations, class struggles, changing gender roles, and re-conceptualizations of
identity amongst Puerto Ricans of African descent in the Unites States.
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