land, ties renewed by the constant flow of
migration back and forth. As new, most-
ly unskilled immigrants, they tended to
be poor, working hard in mostly blue-col-
lar jobs for wages that were low by U.S.
standards, though high by the standards
of Puerto Rico. Many worked in the
manufacturing and service sectors as fac-
tory hands, garment workers, busboys,
and bellhops. Some were migrant farm
workers, filling the role on East Coast
farms that Mexicans filled in the
Southwest. With affordable housing
scarce, many Puerto Rican immigrants
were forced to live in rat-infested build-
ings in rough New York City neighbor-
hoods like East Harlem, the Lower East
Side, and the South Bronx.
Racial prejudice was a fact of life.
Most Puerto Ricans—like most
Latinos—are a mix of Spanish, African,
and Native American heritage and have
light-brown complexions called trigueño
(though many gradations of skin tone
can be found). This racial mixing so char-
acteristic of Hispanic America has made
strict racial categorization neither clear
nor especially meaningful to most Puerto
Ricans, or most Latinos, for that matter.
In the United States, however, the shade
of one’s skin has always been important,
and, as immigrants soon discovered,
many Anglo-Americans divide the world
into white and nonwhite. Carlos Pérez, a
light-skinned mulatto who immigrated
to the United States from the Dominican
Republic, told historian Peter Winn,
“From the minute I arrived at the airport
I was treated like a black. Any mulatto, no
matter how light, is a black in the United
States.” During the 1950s, this sense of
racial division was so culturally internal-
ized that it was even played out on the
Broadway stage. The musical West Side
Story memorializes the racial tension in
the 1950s between youth gangs living on
Manhattan’s West Side, an area where
Puerto Ricans were increasing in number
at that time.
Despite the hardships, many Puerto
Ricans in New York City were grateful
for their new opportunities. Herman
Badillo (1929– ), who as a representative
from New York became the first Puerto
Rican to serve in the U.S. Congress,
recalled coming to the city as an orphan
in 1941: “I thought I had come into
Paradise. I had been starving for seven
years and now I got three meals and
could eat my fill.... [I]nstead of the wide-LA RAZA UNIDA 177Migration to and from Puerto Rico (1950–1970) Puerto Ricans in New York City
(1950–1970)