A Puerto Rican in New York

The newest faces in our city are Puerto Rican. They have come in great numbers and settled primarily in the slum areas close to the Negro ghettos. Like the national groups preceding them they speak a foreign language; but unlike them they come as citizens—citizens whose economic and social assimilation into the city’s population is complicated by color.

Looking past the glass and stone palaces of our skyline, we see a curtain of separation rising like a fog. Only the experience of living can show us what it is like to be a Puerto Rican in New York, what it is like to be the victim of economic and social discrimination.

Who can erase memories of a deaf and dumb child with her mother and sister huddled in a small, dark room with an empty kerosene stove, the winter wind blowing in at them from broken window panes; a hall toilet broken and flooded where the bursting water pipe had covered the walls with an inch-thick coat of ice and to which the children of the floor were still running; a huge water bug crawling out from under a cracked kitchen bathtub; the scurry of silent feet as a key turns and the light goes on in the kitchen and the roaches and mice run for cover; the swirl of smoke rising up the stairs and the familiar fire engine sirens; the pale child with a rat bite on her ear walking with thin, bent legs to the hospital clinic; a roaring fire in an empty lot piled with garbage and old mattresses smoldering in the sun; a heroin-addicted youth deliberately setting fire to the curtains in his store front living-room in an orgy of suffering.

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