Racial Migrations by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof

Author:Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

MEN OF TRUE MERIT

In their manifesto to the Puerto Rican people, Figueroa, Marín, and Vélez Alvarado also explained why they disagreed with Puerto Ricans who favored annexation to the United States. It was here that they engaged directly with the question of race. They did not wish, they wrote, “to resign ourselves to the complete absorption of our race by another, we cannot be seduced to the point of forgetting our language, customs, traditions, sentiments . . . everything that constitutes our physiognomy of a Latin American people.” The question of race, they suggested, was central to their politics. Race, though, was not an issue of biology but rather of the conscious efforts of cultured men to construct common “language, customs, traditions, and sentiments.” Furthermore, race was not a matter of divisions within the Puerto Rican national community. It was instead a hemispheric divide between a “Latin race” and Anglo-Saxons. Here, two highly visible nonwhite members of Martí’s coalition, mentors and supporters for the black men who established their own political clubs in New York, presented themselves as spokesmen for a Latin American race whose definition had little to do with divisions of color or heredity. They endorsed a project of racial assimilation: the absorption of African-descended people into the Latin race. And they highlighted the contrast between such a view and the racial hostilities that they had witnessed in the United States. “One must live in this country for some years to understand that this race does not tend to perfect and improve, through crossing, those races that it believes to be inferior.”72

This performance of racial unity drew on a view of Latin American identity that had growing purchase among wealthy and highly educated exiles. But what did they mean by it? What impact did living in the United States “for some years,” at precisely the moment of the consolidation of Jim Crow, the peak of lynching, and the rise of racial explanations for empire, have on their understanding of race in Puerto Rico? This returns us to the question, posed in an earlier chapter, of migrating while black, or in this case, migrating while something that was (in the cities of Puerto Rico) other than black but also not fully white. When Figueroa, the typesetter and journalist, arrived at the piers in New York in June 1889, he was not, like the traveler Marín described in his famous vignette, “lacking resources of any kind; as clever and agile as a student and as hungry as a school teacher.” He and his wife Inocencia traveled in the first-class compartment in the company of a prominent Autonomista physician from Ponce.73 It is impossible to be certain, when he set off to find a “friend” or a “countryman,” in which direction he turned. Yet it seems likely that—rather than walk to one of the cigar factories near the piers, the home of Germán and Magdalena Sandoval on Thompson Street, or the Bonillas’ flat on West Third Street—he sought as quickly as

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