| Migrating to a New Land
The story of the Puerto Rican people is unique in the history
of U.S. immigration, just as Puerto Rico occupies a distinctive—and
sometimes confusing—position in the nation’s civic
fabric. Puerto Rico has been a possession of the U.S. for more
than a century, but it has never been a state. Its people have
been U.S. citizens since 1917, but they have no vote in Congress.
As citizens, the people of Puerto Rico can move throughout the
50 states just as any other Americans can—legally, this
is considered internal migration, not immigration. However, in
moving to the mainland, Puerto Ricans leave a homeland with its
own distinct identity and culture, and the transition can involve
many of the same cultural conflicts and emotional adjustments
that most immigrants face. Some writers have suggested that the
Puerto Rican migration experience can be seen as an internal immigration—as
the experience of a people who move within their own country,
but whose new home lies well outside of their emotional home territory.
At first, few Puerto Ricans came to the continental U.S. at
all. Although the U.S. tried to promote Puerto Rico as a glamorous
tourist destination, in the early 20th century the island suffered
a severe economic depression. Poverty was rife, and few of the
island’s residents could afford the long boat journey
to the mainland. In 1910, there were fewer than 2,000 Puerto
Ricans in the continental U.S., mostly in small enclaves in
New York City, and twenty years later there were only 40,000
more.
To find more photos of Puerto Rico in the early 20th century,
search in “Touring
Turn-of-the-Century America.”
After the end of the Second World War, however, Puerto Rican
migration exploded. In 1945, there had been 13,000 Puerto Ricans
in New York City; in 1946 there were more than 50,000. Over
the next decade, more than 25,000 Puerto Ricans would come to
the continental U.S. each year, peaking in 1953, when more than
69,000 came. By 1955, nearly 700,000 Puerto Ricans had arrived.
By the mid-1960s, more than a million had.
There were a number of reasons for this sudden influx. The
continuing depression in Puerto Rico made many Puerto Ricans
eager for a fresh start, and U.S. factory owners and employment
agencies had begun recruiting heavily on the island. In addition,
the postwar years saw the return home of thousands of Puerto
Rican war veterans, whose service in the U.S. military had shown
them the world. But perhaps the most significant cause was the
sudden availability of affordable air travel. After centuries
of immigration by boat, the Puerto Rican migration became the
first great airborne migration in U.S. history.
To hear firsthand about one Puerto Rican man’s journey
to the mainland in the 1950s, listen to interviews
with Ralph Soria in the collection “Working
in Paterson: Occupational Heritage in an Urban Setting.”
|
view basic version
