From Colonia to the Present:
Puerto Rican History in New York City
By Virginia Sánchez-Korrol (March 20, 2013)
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my first book, From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1917-1948, which was based on my doctoral dissertation. This seemed like a good time to reflect a bit about it and its place in Puerto Rican history.
Although Puerto Ricans had lived in New York City since before the turn of the twentieth century, their historical footprints were seriously absent from the records. During the sixties and seventies, studies such as Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan's
Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, - required reading in college classrooms --- were not uncommon. In their work Moynihan and Glazer profiled and assessed the inroads urban minority groups had made in the City of New York.
They found that Puerto Ricans fell into a "deficit model" category. Furthermore, their overwhelming assessment of this community was that of an anemic underpinning to Puerto Rican organizations, leadership, and institutions; an absence of spontaneous grass-roots organizing and a lack of coping institutions to structure their community. Newspaper articles and other scholarly studies followed suit, buoyed by the reputable reputations of university scholars who authored such works, and labeled Puerto Ricans as a people mired in a culture of poverty or a culture of welfare.
Overall, the general characterization of Puerto Ricans in the press and the extant literature at that time presented a problematic community, riddled with crime, dropout rates, poverty, unemployment, and large extended families. These negative images fueled discriminatory attitudes among the broader society that had already viewed mixed-race Puerto Ricans with suspicion, as dangerous interlopers, and 
not Americans entitled to the rights of citizens. Painted in the same broad brushstrokes, that narrative of deficiency followed Puerto Ricans as they began to establish communities throughout the nation.
Absent from this narrative was an understanding and appreciation for the coping institutions that were indeed being created as early as the 1920s and that were documented by Jesús Colón, Bernardo Vega, and even earlier Puerto Rican migrants. These structures became a way of ensuring survival. They offered cohesion and progress within a community that could not turn to the larger municipality for any support in addressing dislocation, the ills of poverty, and the discrimination that befell it.
From Colonia to Community was among the first historical monographs to trace the development of the New York Puerto Rican community during the inter-war years. 2013 marks its thirtieth anniversary.The book first appeared in a hard cover edition. Within ten years, Colonia had become an e-book and an affordable soft covered edition that is today approaching its tenth printing.
From Colonia to Community was written to shed light on the complexities and strengths of these community support systems, to restore a historical framework, and to challenge erroneous perceptions expressed in the studies and newspapers. Infused with information from municipal records, census data, demographics, labor force participation, education, organizations, politics, and socio-cultural practices, a positive narrative of the Puerto Rican community began to emerge from its early beginnings in the nineteenth century to the colonias of the inter-war years.
Particular emphasis on the genesis of vibrant, visible colonias, the forces inherent in the migratory process, and the special role women played in molding the early neighborhoods around Brooklyn's Columbia Street, and the Navy Yard; Manhattan's Chelsea, the Lower East Side, and El Barrio; and the South Bronx, revealed a world drastically different from what had been accepted as the prevailing wisdom.
Told in the words of the pioneros, the working class men and women who migrated from the 1920s to the 1940s, Colonia stood as testimony to a generation that tasted the bitter fruits of uprooting but also the joys of re-invention and re-creating community. Through club records, newspaper and personal accounts, the colonias of the inter-war years demonstrated resiliency, and self-determination acting as agents on their own behalf. Puerto Rican grit and sacrifices forged the inroads to creating aNueva York that cushioned the arrival of the massive migrations from the Island following the Second World War, and subsequent Latino immigrations after that.
An array of primary sources supported the migrant stories. Bernardo Vega's memoirs were in manuscript form, and a collection of Jesús Colón's essays was in print. The relatively new CUNY Center for Puerto Rican Studies had embarked on a comprehensive study of the migration that posited a theory of the capitalist circulation of labor. And because the Puerto Rican migration after the Second World War received ample attention in the social science literature, there were secondary sources to draw upon.
Colonia's thirtieth anniversary marks an important landmark. While the longevity of a monograph is always worthy of note, the anniversary serves to remind us that the histories of Puerto Ricans in countless communities throughout the United States remain unwritten. It is time to document these stories. Inscribing our past empowers our future, and enables us to better negotiate the complexities of the present.
Virginia Sánchez-Korrol, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College, CUNY. An historian, she is the author of From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City(1994), coauthor with Marysa Navarro of Women in Latin America and the Caribbean(1999); and coeditor with Vicki L. Ruiz of Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography and Community
(2005) and the award-winning Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia(2006). The historical novel, Feminist and Abolitionist: The Story of Emilia Casanova, the saga of a nineteenth century Cuban New Yorker, is her most recent publication. She currently serves on the American Latino Scholars Panel of the National Park Service dedicated to identifying historical sites in Latino history. She consults on museum exhibits, television documentaries, and educational projects, and serves on the boards of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage and the New York Academy of History. She directs Latinas in History, an interactive project for pre-collegiate students, and researches New York Latinas in the Antillean independence movement. She was the recipent last year of The Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR)'s tribute at their Siglo XXI Fourth Biennial Conference as "a symbol of recognition for work of her colleagues and all those scholars who devote their careers to Latino Studies." Dr. Sanchez Korrol can be reached at vsankorr@brooklyn.cuny.edu.