Puerto Rico: Forgotten Family

Marc outside a registration booth in El Barrio.

To be sure, Puerto Rico existed before a recent hurricane blew the island, and its debt, onto the front pages of national publications.

It came as something of a surprise to most citizens of the United States that they count Puerto Ricans among their numbers.

Puerto Rico, everyone found out, had deep financial problems, all of which were served up as novelties to a largely oblivious American public.

If we had not forgotten Vito Marcantonio, we might have been more aware of Puerto Rico's plight, for as Professor Gerald Meyer has asserted, in his time, he was the unofficial congressman for Borinquen.

Puerto Rico's problems have been long in the brewing and a reading of Vito Marcantonio's extensive remarks in the House of Representatives will provide the curious with all they need to know about the subject.

On May 6, 1936, Marcantonio introduced into Congress the first of many bills aimed at Puerto Rican independence from the U.S.

Carmen Yulin Cruz Soto, Mayor of San Juan

Puerto Rico and Nasty Girl.

He outlined the misery wrought in Puerto Rico by U.S. occupation after the Spanish-American War: 

“Only these gentlemen who stand for reaction in America, the American Tories, the banks and sugar corporations, who have kept the Puerto Rican people in hunger and misery, are interested in Puerto Rico as a colony, not only for their profits, but also as a fortified war base.”

Marcantonio's activities in support of the island's independence movement, on behalf of his own constituency and as an advocate in Congress, represent a significant page in the history of Puerto Rico, yet have gone largely unrecorded, according to Meyer.

Meyer's work, “Vito Marcantonio: Congressman for Puerto Rico,” addresses these efforts in detail. 

“In this capacity,” Meyer writes, “Marcantonio introduced bills to meet the island's specific needs, provided services for individuals and, in general, acted as spokesman for Puerto Rico and its people.”

In his piece, Meyer identifies two valuable sources for filling in the portrait of Marc as Puerto Rico's stalwart: “Vito Marcantonio y Puerto Rico: Por Los Trabajadores y Por La Nacion,” and Bernardo Vega's “Memorias.” 

Puerto Rican women in Mother's Day celebration of
Cervantes Federation, International Workers Order. 

Not only was Puerto Rico in the headlines following the tropical tempests that battered it, but Marcantonio was also in the news – “The Daily News” – regarding his strong bonds to the island.

The article, reproduced from an earlier printing, was written by the now-departed Jay Maeder, and observed that European immigration had slowed to a trickle when New York City suddenly found itself awash in a new arrivals.

“They came from the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico,” wrote Maeder, “catastrophically overpopulated, desperately impoverished, devastated by decades of sugar company plantations. All at once there were many thousands of them in the city, where it was said a man might earn in a week what he labored for a year to earn at home. Thus did a new people arrive, as had the forlorn others before them.”

The difference between these new immigrants and the earlier European edition, Maeder pointed out, was that the Puerto Ricans had come during hard times, rather than boom times. The other difference, he noted, was that they were citizens of the U.S. and could vote.

The final fact, Maeder said, did not escape Vito Marcantonio's attention: 

Newsman Jay Maeder

“Vito Marcantonio indignantly denied suggestions that he had personally engineered the postwar Puerto Rican migration purely to pad voter rolls in his district. Still, it was a fact that in November 1946, as the new arrivals came and came and came, he was running for mayor.”

Maeder's piece parrots the urban legend that “Marcantonio brought the Puerto Ricans to New York.”

The article touches upon the break between Marcantonio, a backer of Puerto Rican independence and Luis Munoz Marin, the island's first and newly elected governor, and how it played out in Marc's 1950 mayoral bid. 

Those interested in the subject would do best to watch Professor Edgardo Melendez's authoritative discussion of the same.

Marc's commitment was not a trawl for bought votes. His commitment was genuine. He left the continental U.S. just one time in his life. And that was a trip to Puerto Rico. 

As we noted in our inaugural essay, “Where's Marc?”: “Style, philosophy, attitude, and analysis are all lost when Marcantonio's voice is erased from the historical accounting of the times in which he played so vital a role.”

And so is Puerto Rico. 

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