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  The social assumptions of the day that looked down on single mothers were not confined to Puerto Ricans. Again, the debate over González’s entry could be based on her desirability as a resident of the United States as long as she was defined as an alien national, as someone the country could take or leave. Even in the midst of one of the greatest immigration flows in world history, concerns over newcomers weakening the country were a permanent part of the debate. As Williams testified at the González inquiry, “It will be a very easy matter to fill up this country rapidly with immigrants upon whom responsibility for the proper bringing up of their offspring sits lightly, but it cannot be claimed that this will enure to the benefit of the American people.”

  Isabel González. The petitioner in the landmark Supreme Court case for Puerto Ricans, Gonzáles v. Williams. The case affirmed the right of Puerto Ricans to move freely between their home island and the U.S. mainland. CREDIT: COURTESY OF BELINDA TORRES-MARY

  González’s family members living in New York and New Jersey testified that they could assure the government the young woman would not become a public charge. Her cause was undermined by the absence of her fiancé, Juan Francisco Torres, who could not leave work. González was again denied entry to the United States. At this point she might have simply gone home, as provided by U.S. law, another person of modest means and little clout steamrolled by the power and indifference of the state.

  González’s uncle, Domingo Collazo, had been active in the Cuban Revolutionary Party, and knew many of the leading lights in the Antillean freedom movement. Collazo filed a habeas corpus petition, a legal demand that a prisoner be brought to court in order for the state to justify their continued detention. Through other Collazo contacts, prominent lawyers took interest in González’s case. Another court, the U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York, sided with the immigration authorities, and affirmed González’s exclusion.

  All this was possible because under the seizure of Puerto Rico from Spain and the Foraker Act creating “citizens of Puerto Rico,” Isabel González was not a U.S. national, and had no legally enforceable access to the country that now governed hers.

  Again, fate intervened in a way that reflected New York’s status as a crossroads, filled with interested onlookers who knew an important cause when they saw one. Federico Degetau was another man molded by the ferment of the nineteenth century. Degetau was the son of a German-Puerto Rican family, educated in Spain, an anticolonialist and editor, and in the 1890s, one of the commissioners who represented Puerto Rico in autonomy talks with Spain.

  On the eve of the Spanish-American War, Degetau was the mayor of San Juan, and a member of the Spanish legislature, the Cortes. After the war, he was appointed a member of the first cabinet created by the new U.S. administration. Degetau was appointed or elected to jobs of increasing prominence and responsibility under the Americans, culminating in several terms as resident commissioner, Puerto Rico’s delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives. As resident commissioner, Degetau had already protested the turn-of-the-century decisions regarding the legal status of Puerto Ricans.

  After González exhausted her appeals through the immigration system, she and her legal team switched tactics, no longer arguing against the “public charge” clause of immigration law. González would now head back to court to argue that you could not exclude, detain, or block Puerto Ricans who wished to enter the United States for one very good reason: Once the United States took Puerto Rico in war, took control of her commerce, and appointed executives in Washington to run the place, Puerto Ricans were now living in a part of the United States and were American citizens. Degetau teamed up with González’s lawyers, Paul Fuller and Charles LéBarbier, and Frederic Coudert Jr., who had just argued the Downes v. Bidwell case, and headed to the Supreme Court.

  Degetau believed González provided a test case that would undermine the U.S. effort to hold on to the territory while excluding the Puerto Ricans themselves. The resident commissioner and the young migrant woman wanted the case to make law on behalf of all the residents of the island. The U.S. government’s lawyers continued to argue against González’s entry based on moral appeals, portraying the woman and her fiancé as unfit parents whose life choices should not win the approval of the federal government.

  Ironically, González herself made the landmark case, which misspelled her first and last name as Isabella Gonzáles v. William Williams, moot, by marrying Torres and thus becoming eligible for entry to the United States through marriage. She pursued the case anyway, out of the conviction that all Puerto Ricans were citizens.

  The justices agreed, sort of: They determined that González was not an alien, and thus could not be denied entry to the United States. At the same time, they refused to rule that González was an American citizen. The decision said that since the United States took control of the island from Spain, “The nationality of the island became American instead of Spanish, and, by the treaty, Peninsulars [people born in Spain], not deciding to preserve their allegiance to Spain, were to be ‘held to have renounced it, and to have adopted the nationality of the territory in which they may reside.’” Thus, if Spaniards chose not to declare themselves Spanish after the war, they were now part of the United States.

  The court noted that the resident commissioner, whose salary was paid by the United States, was chosen by voters in Puerto Rico, however limited the vote, given as it was to no one “who is not a bona fide citizen of Porto Rico, who is not thirty years of age, and who does not read and write the English language.”

  A door was pushed open by Isabel González, and as the young century progressed, more of her fellow islanders decided to improve their lot in life by walking through it. Between 1908 and 1916, seven thousand Puerto Ricans emigrated to the United States. Another eleven thousand came in 1917 alone. As free as they now were to move, however, they were still trapped in a legal limbo, now tagged with an ambiguous status, defined as “noncitizen nationals.”

  After decades of leadership in the Puerto Rican struggle for autonomy from Spain, writer and politician Luis Muñoz Rivera tried to prick the conscience of Americans with a challenge that made his people’s predicament plain: “The United States has not been fair to us. We are a people without a country, a flag, almost without name. What are we? Are we citizens or are we subjects? Are we your brothers and our property your territory, or are we bondsmen of war, and our islands a crown colony?”

  Puerto Rico. The early decades of American presence on Puerto Rico brought little in the way of economic development. The Great Depression hit the U.S. hard, and it was devastating for the island territory. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  The Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917 was an attempt to clear up the ambiguity, but it continued the pattern of never granting anything without taking something in return. The act gave Puerto Ricans full and unequivocal citizenship. It also opened the men of the island to conscription in the middle of the First World War. Twenty thousand Puerto Ricans would serve in the armed forces during the war.

  There was no way the early arrivals could possibly know what was waiting for them in New York. A relative few Puerto Ricans were sending home the kind of intelligence immigrants often rely on to make up their own minds. Many years later, a migrant named Bernardo Vega recalled watching his homeland disappear in the distance from the deck of a ship carrying him to Brooklyn. “I did not want to lose a single breath of those final minutes in my country. I stayed up on deck until the island was lost from sight in the first shades of nightfall.” A young tobacco farmer, Vega left his native Cayey, Puerto Rico, aboard the steamship Coamo. During the trip he shared his immigrant dream with his fellow passengers. “The overriding theme of our conversations was what we expected to find in New York City. First savings would be for sending for close relatives. Years later the time would come for returning home with pots of money.” New jobs. Remittances. The immigrant family dream would eventual
ly lead to a triumphant journey home. “Everyone’s mind would be on that farm we would be buying. All of us were building our own little castles in the sky.”

  Hailing from a small town tucked in the mountains of western Puerto Rico, Vega was a jíbaro, a peasant who is an island archetype. The jíbaro of folktales and national memory is stolid, wise, independent, and decent. At the same time, in jokes jíbaros are simple, uneducated, and sometimes gullible. Whether they were possessed of common sense born of experience, or credulous hicks, nothing back home could have prepared jíbaros and jíbaras for their new lives in New York.

  A Puerto Rican farmworker. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  For a large number of Puerto Ricans, their first castle on the U.S. mainland was an aging tenement building in East Harlem. The neighborhood had been welcoming immigrants for decades: southern Italians, Germans to the south, African-Americans to the west in Central Harlem. Before long, corner groceries catering to Puerto Rican tastes appeared, along with botánicas selling potions, amulets, herbs, and statuary that featured in Puerto Rican folk religion. The heat of the summer streets was broken, a little, by piragüeros, shaved-ice men who rasped a metal scrape across the top of a shrinking block of ice, molded it into a cone shape, and topped it with flavored syrup. A bit of home, far away from home, eaten as familiar music drifted down from upper-story windows.

  East Harlem was the core of a community that would eventually far outstrip San Juan in size. Though Spanish-speaking immigrants had come in small numbers throughout the nineteenth century, the growing barrios in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx represented something new. These were the first major Spanish-speaking communities in the United States outside Florida and the Southwest.

  Unlike other arrivals in New York, Puerto Ricans arrived as citizens, but they were still outsiders. “Like all those who live in another culture, the people of Spanish Harlem felt a little lost,” says Juan González, journalist and historian whose parents brought him to New York as a little boy. “They were citizens, but citizenship didn’t change the way Anglo-Americans looked at them, since most Americans didn’t differentiate one group of Hispanics from another. New York felt so strange and so cold, but it had opportunities. So they were in a kind of nowhere land, not truly part of any nation. And yet they were at home in this one.”

  One of the restless Puerto Ricans who headed to Nueva York was Rafael Hernández. One day his name would be known across Latin America, his music emanating from radios and phonographs from Santiago, Chile, to the tenement streets of Spanish Harlem. After serving as a musician in the legendary Harlem Hell Fighters regiment in World War I, he moved to New York. The story often told is that during a snowy Harlem winter, while working at his sister’s music store, he composed one of the most famous Puerto Rican songs of the twentieth century, “Lamento Borincano (Puerto Rican Lament).”

  A happy task, well begun, was followed by disappointment and a foretaste of disaster. It may be only the slightest exaggeration to say every Puerto Rican knows this song. It reflects the want and pain of the island in the twenties and thirties, and the poverty that drove so many people to try to find something better in the United States. That the man widely celebrated as the greatest Puerto Rican songwriter of the twentieth century wrote this profoundly Puerto Rican song in New York deeply resonates with a people who sing of their island the way people usually sing about a lover. Puerto Ricans would go on to become the only Latin American people who created their most significant and best-known music on other soil, away from their homeland.

  The United States, and New York in particular, would continue to both lure and confound Puerto Ricans for the rest of the twentieth century. After beginning the century with the possibility of self-government snatched away, and paradoxically continuing it with a fight to join America as citizens, Puerto Ricans would find in New York the stage for their greatest triumphs and the most profound heartaches.

  • • •

  MEANWHILE, BACK ON the border, the World War I era brought change and tumult to Mexico and Mexican-Americans. A giant Latino migration to the United States was under way, and the number of Mexicans, an estimated one million between 1900 and 1930, dwarfed the numbers coming from Cuba and Puerto Rico.

  Porfirio Díaz. More than three decades of dictatorial rule in Mexico created the conditions that led to the Mexican Revolution of 1910. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Porfirio Díaz had ruled Mexico with gradually strengthening dictatorial powers for more than thirty years. Under Díaz, Mexico was crisscrossed with railroads that transported wealth pulled from the country’s rich mines. His power was so complete that this one man lent his name to the era, the Porfiriato, but opposition had been gathering and was about to burst into action.

  Díaz finally consented to elections in 1910. He jailed his opponent, Francisco Madero. When the results were finally announced, the Mexican people were told Díaz had gotten the vast majority of votes, with only a tiny number cast for Madero. The “defeated” candidate called for an uprising, and the revolution began. Díaz fled the country, but the beginning of war unleashed long-simmering conflicts in society that could not be put back in the box.

  The Mexican Revolution of 1910 created modern Mexico, set in motion forces in Mexican life that would play out over the rest of the century, made enduring heroes of José Doroteo Arango Arámbula (better known as Pancho Villa) and Emiliano Zapata. However, the tumult of the nearly ten-year war disrupted millions of lives and sent hundreds of thousands of families fleeing to the United States.

  One of them was a little boy, Salvador Villaseñor, who headed north in 1918. The war had stretched on for eight long years. Los Altos de Jalisco sat at Mexico’s waistline, in Jalisco state on the Pacific Ocean. Author Victor Villaseñor, who has written extensively of his family’s journey from rural Mexico to the United States, said his father, just seven years old, was one of the last survivors of fourteen children.

  Though the war had taken a long time getting to his town, it came with horrifying violence. “One day the little boy, Juan Salvador, went out searching for some firewood. He saw some wild men shoot the horses out from under six people, then hack the riders to death with machetes, just to get some clothes and shoes. Juan Salvador was crazy with hunger; he tried to take a bite out of the hide of a dead horse. His teeth weren’t big enough, he went hungry. But he survived, and my grandmother survived—because she relied on miracles. She always relied on the spirit world of miracles.”

  One of Díaz’s economic development projects was the completion of a north-south railroad that tied Mexico together and linked the country’s interior to the United States. When the revolution dragged on, the rail line became an escape route. In 1918, Victor Villaseñor’s grandmother grabbed his father and Victor’s uncle, Francisco, and headed to the train tracks. They would wait for days. “Finally, a train came,” said Villaseñor. “Juan Salvador and his mother and brother got on the train with thousands of other people.” The empty cattle car was full of manure, which had to be shoveled out by hand. Their goal was El Paso, still the destination to the north from Mexico it had been since Juan de Oñate crossed there more than three hundred years earlier.

  “Juan Salvador’s brother told him that in El Paso there was a big pond full of huge lizards the size of dragons, with big rows of sharp teeth. Every night these monstrous alligators were turned loose into the Rio Grande to eat Mexicans who tried to cross the border. So Salvador’s brother taught him to practice these words: ‘ Hello, mister. Where’s the alligators?’”

  The boy saw no alligators. The Mexicans who streamed north with him, for all the long and difficult relationship between the United States, Mexico, and Mexican-Americans, still dreamed of el Norte as a place that promised riches and a better life.

  The reality was often very different. Villaseñor remembered his father’s first encounter with his new
home. “That morning, as the train came into the El Paso basin, Salvador couldn’t believe what he saw. He expected a luscious green valley; he saw nothing but dry earth, rock and sand. Not even one blade of grass. Nothing could live there except lizards and snakes. This was the end of the world. In El Paso, it got even worse. Everywhere Salvador saw crowds of poor, ragged, starving people. He woke his mother. She looked out at the dry country, then the mob of desperate people. ‘What a beautiful day!’ she said. ‘See all those vultures in the sky over there? There’s so much to eat here that even the vultures get their share.’”

  Historian Gary Gerstle sees similarities with other immigrants. “In many ways Mexican immigrants were not so different from the Europeans who came at the same time. Italians fled from civil war. Jews came to escape oppression, war, and poverty. And Mexicans were faced with exactly these fears and crushing burdens. People today think of Mexicans as strictly economic immigrants, but the first great wave were generally refugees from a horrible, bloody war.”

  El Paso was Ellis Island for Mexicans, in the view of historian Vicki Ruiz. While New York was one of the continent’s economic engines, El Paso was not. The new arrivals from southern and eastern Europe entered a densely populated, rapidly industrializing region hungry for labor, with a highly stratified economy. West Texas a hundred years ago had an operating economy, but hardly the same kinds of opportunity as existed in the northeast.

  At the same time, Ruiz says, offers for work could come with the first steps into the country: “When a man crossed over Stanton Street Bridge to El Paso from Ciudad Juárez, he’d go past a line of labor contractors promising all sorts of things—you know, high wages, beer with dinner, benefits. But if it was a single woman or, God help her, a single mother, immigration inspectors would pull them aside and mark them, ‘Likely to become a public charge.’”