La Niñez puertorriqueña, (1922-1932)

Harlem stories don’t always begin and end in Harlem.

Evelina López Cruz was born in Salinas, Puerto Rico on September 19, 1922. At that time, Puerto Rico was an official colony of the United States after the U.S. acquired the island following victory in the Spanish-Cuban-American War. U.S. governors ruled over the island, and economic exploitation led to widespread poverty. This did not imply a lack of rich cultural, intellectual, and political heritage, however, which Evelina carried with her throughout her life.

In a 1976 interview conducted by her sister, Lilian López, Evelina spoke of her childhood in Puerto Rico and her journey to New York at the age of ten.

What she remembered most about Salinas was the “beautiful beach…perhaps in my imagination it was beautiful…we had the run of the entire beach to play as a child… I remember the vegetation, the flowers, the beauty. Identifying with the land a great deal. The space.”

She also recalled the racial diversity.

“The people were racially mixed. Some whites from Spain, some Indians, and some blacks. They had all shades of skin coloring: green to black eyes, and blonde to black hair. A real rainbow mixture. But everyone was loving and caring, and no one considered these differences important. My great grandmother was tall and straight like her ancestors from Mali.”

While Evelina spent most of her young life in Salinas, she also lived briefly in Ponce’s Barrio San Antón, a neighborhood known for la plena and la bomba – traditional music and dance styles that blended Spanish rhythms with African beats and instruments.

“As you know, part of our history is that the slaves used to dance the bomba. And as they danced, they would tell a story or share secrets on how to escape while slave owners looked on believing it was an innocuous cultural tradition.”

Evelina’s father, Jose López (nicknamed “Pepin”), died when she was just ten years old. Her mother, Eva Cruz, cared for Evelina and two younger sisters with the help of her mother and extended family. Their grandmother, who had been born into slavery herself, used to tell them “a million little tales” to put them to sleep.

While Jose López came from a prominent family, and his father, Evelina’s grandfather, was a longtime mayor of a nearby small town, Eva’s origins were more humble. Yet that did not prevent her from engaging in public life.

“I tell ya, my mother was very active in Puerto Rican politics. She was forever involved in Puerto Rican politics trying to bring about change in order for us to not completely starve.”

And she always impressed on her girls the value of an education.

“No matter how bad we were off, the one thing she instilled in us was that we had to finish school. That school had to be finished no matter what. Which, at that time, was a quite a hardship–just to be able to go through high school.”

By the early 1930s, the Great Depression hit Puerto Rico and Evelina’s family hard.

“My family, like the rest of the villagers, was very poor… If it was bad here [in the U.S.] you can imagine what it was like in Puerto Rico. Since our economy is so tied to this economy.”

Poverty and hardship led Eva to send Evelina to live with a sister in New York City.

Reflection Questions

Many families in the U.S. came from somewhere else, either in the current generation or in generations past. Did your family immigrate to the U.S.? Or move from another region? If so, from where? What were the political and cultural traditions they brought from their previous home? Were they able to maintain connections to their homeland, or was it difficult?

For teachers and students: were any of your students or classmates and their families born elsewhere? What do you know about their countries of origin–their traditions, politics, intellectual history, and cultural life? What experiences did they bring from their home countries, and in what ways might that influence their interactions with the American education system?

The Other Great Migration: Puerto Ricans to New York City, 1910-1970

At the age of ten, Evelina boarded the ship El Ponce and made the five day journey from San Juan to New York. To make sure she didn’t travel alone, her mother found another woman from Salinas making the same trip, though Evelina recalled how the woman quickly became seasick and it was she, a ten year old girl, taking care of the woman instead of the other way around.

After arriving at South Street Seaport in 1932, she went to live with an aunt and her husband in the Puerto Rican enclave of East Harlem, known as El Barrio. Evelina remembered, fondly, the days with her “beautiful, colorful” Tia Elba with all her fashionable dresses and her uncle, always gambling to make ends meet because he couldn’t get a job. In her young mind they were both elegant, “black and beautiful,” and rich in love though not in material goods. Two years later, when Elba received some money from a settlement after breaking her arm at work, she was able to send for Evelina’s mother and two younger sisters.

The Puerto Rican Great Migration

Evelina was not alone in making the journey from Puerto Rico to New York. In addition to the Great Migration of six million African Americans from the South to the urban North between 1910 and 1970, a great wave of Puerto Ricans also made their way to mainland industrial cities in search of jobs. As a result of Puerto Rico’s colonial ties to the U.S., tough economic times at home, and new wartime opportunities, the Puerto Rican population in New York City rose from 61,463 in 1940 to 860,584 by 1970.

Due to the ease and frequency of travel, Puerto Rico and New York, particularly East Harlem and other Puerto Rican neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, the South Bronx, and in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, remained closely connected through the physical circulation of people, music, newspapers, books, art, and political figures. While Puerto Ricans first made the journey by boat, much like Evelina, by the 1950s cheap airfare rendered Puerto Ricans the first “airborne diaspora,” and many Puerto Ricans jokingly referred to planes that flew from San Juan to JFK and back as the guagua aérea, or “aerial bus.” Historians call this the “conquering of space by time,” but what it meant for everyday people such as Evelina and her family was that a journey that once took five days or more now took only a few hours.

Reflection Questions

What comes to mind when you think of the “Great Migration?” What similarities and differences do you think existed between the Puerto Rican and African American great migrations?

In what ways do you think Puerto Rican migrants kept in touch with family members, news, and events on the island? Or African American migrants with events in the South?

Puerto Rico: America’s Oft-Forgotten Colony

Evelina Cruz arrived in New York with full U.S. citizenship. She was not an immigrant, but rather a migrant.

The U.S. gained control of the island of Puerto Rico in 1898 following victory in the Spanish-Cuban-American War. In 1917 the U.S. imposed citizenship status on all island residents through the Jones Act, yet Puerto Rico remained an unincorporated territory, subject to the legislative and gubernatorial oversight of the federal government. This meant the U.S. president, who Puerto Ricans did not have the right to vote for, continued to appoint U.S. governors to rule over the island, and all legislation pertaining to Puerto Rico passed through the U.S. Congress, where Puerto Ricans did not have representation. This did not change until 1952 when Puerto Rico became a Commonwealth, which left many of the colonial ties in place but rid the island of its official colonial status. As culturally and linguistically Hispanic–Spanish-speaking and identifying more with Latin American than North American heritage–Puerto Ricans therefore occupied a precarious position within the American state: official citizens, but colonial subjects and cultural and racial Others.

Although educational opportunities remained fewer on the island than the mainland in the early 20th century, they were not absent. Schooling became an important tool of American colonization, as U.S. American statesmen used schools to mold Puerto Ricans into what they hoped would be loyal, Americanized, English-speaking subjects, or what they sometimes referred to as “tropical Yankees.”

“Colonization carried forward by the armies of war is vastly more costly than that carried forward by the armies of peace, whose outposts and garrisons are the public schools of the advancing nation,” reasoned the U.S. Bureau of Education in 1902.

Antonetty’s political life was therefore shaped not only by her experiences in Harlem and the continental U.S. working with civil rights activism, but also by a long history of Puerto Rican and Latin American anti-imperialism and island-based politics. In understanding Harlem stories, one must imagine the dense and tangled web of connections that residents brought from other parts of the country and world, and the histories, experiences, ideas, and memories from elsewhere that shaped life in Harlem and El Barrio.

El Barrio and Harlem

“It was a small community at the time. Maybe from 110th St. to 116th St. and maybe 5th Avenue to Madison Ave. and the West Side of Park Avenue… Everybody knew everybody else.”

In New York, Puerto Ricans largely concentrated in the neighborhood right next to the African American mecca of political and cultural life: Harlem. And similar to Harlem’s relationship to the Black community, El Barrio became the political and cultural center for the Puerto Rican diaspora, full of mutual aid societies, political organizations, Latin music and cultural spaces, Spanish-speaking parishes, and Puerto Rican businesses.

Puerto Ricans: Black, White, or Other?

Although racial discourse in the United States often reflects divisions between a “black” and “white” America, Evelina and her fellow Puerto Ricans didn’t fit neatly into either of these categories. Before a strong Latino identity solidified in the mid and late 1960s, Puerto Ricans occupied a precarious place in the racial landscape of American life. In the first two decades of the twentieth century the Spanish-speaking population of New York remained small, and Puerto Rican migrants often blended into the white-European Spanish population. Yet as more Puerto Ricans moved to New York, closely aligned in temporal and spatial proximity to the African American Great Migration, they became increasingly racialized as an “ethnic” if not “racial” minority distinct from the white majority, and unable to claim the “wages” or privileges of whiteness that Italians, the Irish, and Jews eventually could.

Upon arrival to the mainland many Puerto Ricans therefore experienced discrimination, whether in the realm of employment, access to housing, or in daily interactions. Owing to the diversity of skin types and phenotypes within the Puerto Rican community, and the more common tradition of racial intermarriage on the island, some were treated as white, while others, mainly Afro-Puerto Ricans, experienced race-based discrimination similar to African Americans. Someone like Evelina, who could claim an Afro-Puerto Rican grandmother and also Spanish and indigenous lineage, sometimes had trouble fitting into the black and white world of American racial politics.

Space and Race in East and Central Harlem

Although the name “Harlem” often refers to the cultural capital of Black America, it is important to consider the geographic proximity of Harlem and El Barrio, and the ways in which daily life in Northern Manhattan–through experiences in schools, workplaces, unions, apartment buildings, and other venues–forged at times divisions between the two communities, and at others bonds of solidarity.

As a young girl, Evelina would often collect food stamp tickets from her neighbors too proud to collect charity from the government, or unable to speak English with the social service workers, and board a bus from her home in El Barrio to the YWCA in Central Harlem on 137th Street and Lenox Avenue. These types of excursions into the neighboring predominantly African American and Afro-Caribbean Harlem were one of many ways Evelina and her neighbors interacted with the Black community, challenging ideas that Harlem was a strictly African American space, or that El Barrio was strictly Puerto Rican.

Evelina recalled,”There was no hostility between the races. We had similar problems of poverty and unemployment.” She also recalled her boyfriend at age fifteen looking like Nat King Cole, a famous African American musician and singer. It is unclear whether he was African American, Caribbean, or Puerto Rican, though sources imply that he was most likely Cuban.

In fact, the boundaries between “Black” and “Puerto Rican” often blurred. Arturo Schomburg, the famous intellectual and founder of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture was actually Puerto Rican, but upon arrival to the mainland married an African American women and largely self-identified with the Black as opposed to Puerto Rican and Latino community. The infamous 1935 Harlem race riots were triggered by anger toward Afro-Puerto Rican boy Lino Rivera, though the media just referred to him as a “Negro boy.” And as Evelina’s childhood memories reveal, she considered African heritage crucial to the Puerto Rican story, and herself a member of the African diaspora.

In short, lives were mobile, neighborhood boundaries never prevented interaction between communities of different backgrounds, and categories of race and ethnicity were malleable and often changing. Yet in a city and country where skin color mattered, determining which neighborhoods you could live in, which jobs you could have, and how you were treated by the powerful white majority and the institutions they controlled, Puerto Rican residents often struggled to receive the full benefits of their American citizenship due to their race, language, and cultural heritage.

Reflection Questions

Think about your typical day: driving in a car, commuting on a subway, eating in a restaurant, going to work or school. Where do you interact with others that are not of your racial or ethnic background? What types of interactions do you have? Are they meaningful, or superficial? Do they create feelings of solidarity, or add to feelings of difference? In what ways does the city, its built environment, transportation systems, housing patterns, and schools either encourage or prevent interaction between racial and ethnic groups?

In what ways do you connect ideas of race to specific spaces in your city? Are there certain neighborhoods that you associate with a certain race or ethnicity? Which ones? Why? In what ways can concentrations of people of similar backgrounds be helpful for residents? Harmful?

What public policies prevent people of different backgrounds from being socially and economically equal in your city and country?

The Wadleigh Years, (1936-1940)

As a promising young student, Evelina was able to attend Wadleigh High School for Girls–Harlem’s best public high school for young women and the only high school for girls in Northern Manhattan. Although official records remain elusive, Evelina likely attended from 1936 to 1940.

“I went to the best academic high school in town, it was called Wadleigh High School at that time. It was right at 114th St. and 7th Avenue. Today it’s become a junior high school. But it was supposed to be the best academic high school in town. And, uh, I think it was. I really believe it was a good high school. Of course, you know, there were very few Puerto Ricans in the school and there was a lot of discrimination. I remember wanting to take Spanish and they gave me French and I was so confused. I would think in Spanish and translate French into English and you never saw a more confused girl in the world. To this day I really don’t know whether it’s French or Spanish or what.”

So what was life at Wadleigh like for young Evelina?

Schools as Sites of Racialization, Discrimination, and Empowerment

During the years Evelina attended Wadleigh, the student population was markedly diverse, particularly in comparison to Wadleigh’s demographics when it became a junior high school serving almost exclusively black and Latino students starting in the 1950s.

Evelina was one of few Puerto Rican students amongst a handful of Spanish-speaking young women of Hispanic heritage, but she also attended class and participated in activities alongside girls of European Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish backgrounds, as well as West Indian and African American girls, some whose families likely lived in the North for many generations, and some who recently migrated from the South or the Caribbean. This reflected both the demographics of Harlem, which was more racially and ethnically diverse at the time, but also the era before intense residential and school segregation solidified in the North by the 1950s.

Yet even if a page of Wadleigh’s yearbook, The Owl, paints a portrait of racial integration, daily life within Wadleigh did not always reflect a rosy racial utopia. Evelina recalled that administrators did not encourage black and Latino students to participate in cocurricular activities other than singing and dancing, viewing them as “just good for that.” And in another oral interview, the former African American teacher, Doris Brunson, recalled that some teachers seated African American students in the back of the classroom and away from white students. Such practices may have also included Spanish-speaking students and those of Hispanic background.

Schools and the field of education then, as now, served as key sites where Puerto Ricans and African Americans became racialized–considered not only different from but also inferior to white Anglo Protestants and immigrants of other European heritages. Labels such as “slow learners,” “problems,” and “juvenile delinquents” shaped discourses surrounding Puerto Rican students, whose numbers kept rising throughout the mid and late twentieth century. Already by 1935, three years after Evelina arrived in New York, a Special Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the New York Chamber of Commerce concluded that Puerto Rican children were “intellectually deficient,” and possible threats to the city due to a natural inclination toward crime and dilinquency. Throughout the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, reports ranging from the extensive 1953 Puerto Rican Study to Oscar Lewis’ La Vida continued to mark Puerto Ricans as culturally deficient.

The requirement that high schools keep records also forced students to either self-identify or be identified as a certain race or national origin. This was often difficult for Puerto Ricans, particularly before the category “Puerto Rican” was added to the national census in 1960 and the category “Hispanic” in 1970, though schools sometimes defined their own categories, and surveys attempted to capture the number of Puerto Rican students in the NYC system. School administrators often included Puerto Ricans in the “South American” group, though sometimes dark-skinned Puerto Rican students were classified as United States (Negro).

Daily interactions with peers and teachers in lunchrooms, classrooms, and clubs, as well as the curriculum, could also function to create racial categories and racial hierarchies that then carried outside the schoolhouse. For example, American textbooks from earlier in the 20th century often portrayed non-white, non-Christian, and even non-English speaking people in a negative light. White teachers sometimes expected less from non-white pupils, and students often targeted classmates of other backgrounds for bullying. One Puerto Rican student writing in the early 1960s noted that his first experience of feeling different after moving from Puerto Rico to the mainland was in school: “I realized that being Puerto Rican in New York meant being different and it meant not being as good as other Americans.”

Yet at the same time, schools could also function as sites of identity formation and individual and community empowerment. Evelina remembers some of her first interracial organizing happening at Wadleigh–an activity she would later become famous for.

“A student became ill in school and I and a few other girls felt that she didn’t receive adequate medical care. The medical room procedures were archaic. So we went on strike. It was the only strike recorded in the history of the school. Two Jewish, one black girl and myself decided to stay away from school until changes were made. Well we won. A nurse was hired for the medical room.”

Evelina’s experiences being ostracized for her accent at Public School 103, her grade school in Washington Heights, and at Wadleigh, also shaped her response to later waves of immigrants to New York. She reflected:

“The Hispanics from Central America, the Haitians, the blacks from the South and the Puerto Ricans all have problems with language and social customs. They experience rejection like I did. They feel like outsiders! That’s why I began to fight for bilingual education and tolerance. My own memories are still quite vivid.”

Gender, Class, and Opportunity

Not only did Evelina experience discrimination based on the fact that she was Puerto Rican, she also faced obstacles due to her gender and social class. As a woman, Evelina’s job and life prospects remained limited. Although historians have noted that school curriculums remained surprisingly similar for young American boys and girls in the twentieth century, despite emphasis on the domestic arts for women, equality of opportunity often ended at graduation. Women were not allowed the same career paths as men, and many felt pressure to marry at a young age and have children. For someone like Evelina, patriarchal traditions from the United States also often collided with those originating from Puerto Rico, with both supporting the idea that the man should be the bread-winning figure in the household and the woman should be responsible for child-rearing.

Even when women were able to go to college and obtain certain careers, working class families often struggled to afford it. Although Evelina harbored dreams of law school, her family did not have enough money. She attended night classes at Brooklyn College soon after she married in 1940, but the lengthy commute eventually deterred her from continuing. Even living in a working class neighborhood without easy access to higher education facilities could act as a barrier to academic achievement.

While being non-white in the United States placed limits on Evelina’s opportunities, being a working class woman also impacted her experiences both in and out of school.

Education outside the Schoolhouse

Schools were not the only places where education took place in Harlem and El Barrio, however. Evelina learned many lessons from her family, neighbors, and the vibrant political life of the community. She participated in marches and political rallies, worked with Congressman Vito Marcantonio, Puerto Rican labor leader Jesús Colón, and joined the Communist Youth League and the International Workers Union. Evelina remembered that as a young person she was very well-versed on workers’ struggles all over the world.

“We were surrounded with culture and enrichment. The Cubans taught us Central American History. Organizations like the Workers Alliance and International Workers’ Order were active. It was the period of the Spanish Civil War. Names like Ben Davis, Marcantonio and young Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. were on everyone’s lips.”

113th St. and 5th Avenue was a particularly vibrant spot for political discussion. “Beautiful lectures. People would come from all over South America to lecture there.”

Public libraries also functioned as crucial community learning centers. Referring to the branch just north of Wadleigh, Evelina recalled, “My sister and I were avid readers and there was much to learn. My mother followed the Puerto Rican tradition in that we weren’t allowed much freedom. But we could visit the public library on West 115th Street, and we did several times a week.” She remembered the librarian, who would “read and tell us stories about Puerto Rico. She was like a bridge between the old and new worlds.” This librarian was likely Pura Belpre, a celebrated children’s author and folklorist, and the first Puerto Rican to serve in New York libraries.

Reflection Questions

In what ways did or does your school reinforce race, class, and gender categories?

In what ways did or does your school setting encourage multi-racial encounters, and equity amongst people of different genders and socioeconomic backgrounds?

Where else do you “become educated” in your community outside of school

Life After Wadleigh: Activist and Mother, 1940-1967

After Evelina graduated high school, she married and moved to the South Bronx, a neighborhood with a large and growing Puerto Rican population. For a while she juggled night school at Brooklyn College with becoming a young mother, but ultimately decided the commute was too much to handle. In 1946 she took a job as a union organizer and job developer with District 65, the wholesale, retailer, and distributive workers union. She worked there for ten years as one of the first Latina organizers, bringing hundreds of Spanish-speakers into the local and sharpening her skills as a leader of a multi-racial working class movement in the South Bronx.

Her first marriage did not last, though she describes her first husband as “a real scholar–a revolutionary type. The education I received from him was immeasurable.” Yet she also noted that he was never comfortable with her ambition. “The student became the teacher. I moved ahead of him,” which did not sit well in a male-dominated world. She remarried in 1955 to a man she met on a return trip to Puerto Rico, who then followed her back to New York.

As her three children grew to school age, Evelina became more involved in local school politics. In 1966 she worked a summer job with the Head Start Program at P.S. 25 (which would later become the first bilingual school in the city, thanks in part to Evelina’s organizing), and also took a job with the Puerto Rican Community Development Project as a Field Coordinator from 1965 to 1967.

As a Puerto Rican parent who could speak fluent English, she was also asked to join the PTA at her child’s school, P.S. 5. Just like the young Evelina who zeroed in on the injustice at Wadleigh, the adult Evelina likewise joined with parents to confront issues in the local schools.

“They thought we were supposed to drink tea. When I began asking the wrong questions, the principal realized he had made a mistake…I was organizing parents and asking why our children could not read, and why there wasn’t any staff that reflected the community. And why the school was an island in the community…and I began to ask all the wrong questions as far as they were concerned.”

This type of questioning led to a number of positive changes in the school environment, including the dismissal of an administrator charged with sexual abuse allegations after an arduous, seven-month long campaign that involved parents, local businesses, and community leaders. From her PTA work at P.S. 5, Evelina realized that many of her community’s struggles were either reflected in or caused by the schools, and that school reform could become a major vehicle for social change.

Reflection Questions

Evelina used her role as a mother to advocate for change in her local schools and community. Does this make Evelina a “feminist?” Why or why not?

Do you think schools mirror society’s problems, or cause society’s problems?

Parent Power: The United Bronx Parents, 1965-1980

“Our children can become the educators, doctors and leaders of tomorrow. Don’t let anyone tell us differently…that our children [are] uneducable or mentally retarded.”

In 1965 Evelina founded the United Bronx Parents, Inc. (UBP), a community-based organization dedicated to improving educational opportunities for minority children in the South Bronx. The UBP focused on organizing and training parents to advocate for school reforms that would better serve their children and reflect the needs of the community. As historian Adina Back explains, the “UBP challenged not only inferior schools in one under-served community but also the mind-set of New York City Board of Education officials, who labeled that community’s children as victims of an impoverished culture that did not value education.”

In the 1960s, “culture of poverty” arguments emanated from social scientists and policy experts who claimed that Black and Puerto Rican cultures and family structure caused academic underachievement and reproduced poverty from one generation to the next. Evelina Antonetty and her fellow parent activists, however, countered those claims, instead pointing to inferior and poorly trained teachers, bureaucratic mismanagement, tracking of minority students into vocational rather than academic programs, and other forms of discrimination. As a graduate of an academic rather than a vocational track herself, Evelina felt strongly in the value of educating all students in a rich and challenging curriculum. UBP therefore trained parents to evaluate a school using their own metrics, productively participate in parent-teacher conferences, join PTAs, lobby for better facilities and curriculum, and navigate the often overwhelming bureaucracy of the NYC BOE and the New York State educational system.

UBP became particularly famous for its work with community control, bilingual education, Black and Puerto Rican Studies curriculums, and free lunch programs. Frustrated with the slow pace and ugly politics of school integration efforts, Evelina and many other Black, Puerto Rican, and Chinese activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s argued that schools should not be controlled by a centralized administration, but rather by the community itself. The history, language, and literature of school curriculum should also reflect the rich history of Africans and the Black diaspora, as well as Puerto Rican and Latin American heritage. They also believed schools should employ more teachers and administrators that reflected the racial and ethnic composition of the community, and decisions should be made in and by parents and school leaders from the neighborhood. Such advocacy led to the creation of three community-controlled demonstration districts, the passing of a 1969 Decentralization Law that created 30 districts within the larger NYC school system, and greater bilingual and Black and Puerto Rican Studies programming.

The United Bronx Parents, Inc and the “Black and Puerto Rican” Struggle

In many ways, Evelina’s life journey mirrors the ways in which the African American and Puerto Rican communities related to one another throughout the twentieth century. In the 1930s and ‘40s when Evelina first arrived in East Harlem, Puerto Ricans considered themselves distinct from, though sometimes in alliance with African Americans in Central Harlem. Yet through experiences such as living in close proximity, working in the same unions, serving in the same wars, and experiencing similar forms of discrimination—notably school segregation, by the 1960s and 1970s many Puerto Ricans understood their struggle as almost one and the same as their African American neighbors. The 1964 school boycott against segregation, and a failed attempt by the BOE to integrate middle school I.S. 201 in East Harlem, were two of the most important events that brought the two communities together, as well as shared experiences with second class citizenship. They also found common cause against U.S. imperialism, which they saw at work in Puerto Rico, across the world in places like Vietnam and Latin America, and in how communities of color were treated in “internal colonies” within the United States.

The UBP aligned with other Black and Puerto Rican organizations, such as the Young Lords, who fought for community control of institutions such as schools and against racism and capitalist imperialism. The Young Lords called explicitly for self-determination, both on the island of Puerto Rico and in urban neighborhoods within the United States. “Viva Puerto Rico Libre,” a 1969 song by the Puerto Rican band the Ghetto Brothers, which captures the Puerto Rican Nationalist sentiment of the era.Controlling local schools was one key part of achieving that self-determination.

By the ‘60s and ‘70s, as Evelina’s educational organizing hit its peak, “Black and Puerto Rican” became the moniker to reference the racial minority population in New York in the postwar period. Although African Americans outnumbered Puerto Ricans across the city, both groups significantly altered the racial, cultural, and political life of the metropolis, and “blackness” and “Latinidad” were intertwined and mutually constitutive categories. As historian Sonia Song-Ha Lee argues, Puerto Ricans “were as vital as African Americans in shaping New Yorkers’ notions of ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘minority’ in the civil rights and Black Power eras” owing to their numbers, robust activism, and crucial alliances with African Americans. The UBP reflected this moment of solidarity within the fight for educational and racial justice, claiming many members of both African American and Puerto Rican heritage.

As one African American mother said in reference to the relationship between the two groups: “We [blacks and Puerto Ricans] acted as one because our children were suffering the same oppressors. We had the same issues, the same concerns. That’s why we got together.”6 The UBP therefore advocated for better schools for all children, and Black and Puerto Rican studies to be added to the curriculum. Evelina would carry this multiracial, anti-imperial vision with her from Harlem to the South Bronx to the national level, and even back to Puerto Rico, throughout the rest of her life.

Reflection Questions

Do you think conditions have greatly improved since Evelina’s time organizing in the 1960s and 1970s? What seems familiar from the documents? What has changed?

Who do you think is responsible for involving parents in their children’s education: the community itself, or the school and school district?

Would you have joined Evelina in her fight for community control of schools, or do you think a centralized system can more effectively meet the needs of students, particularly of disadvanted backgrounds?

The Legacy of a Community Activist

“For Puerto Ricans she was our Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hammer, our Mother Jones and our Mother Teresa. She was a warrior, an activist, an educator, an organizer while also being a leader of a powerful community organization. She was a mother for her children and a mother for many of us who were lost children. She understood us, cared for us, pushed us to be strong, provided support and contributed in so many ways to the success of many, many people. She was Evelina Antonetty.”

Towards the end of her life, Evelina remained active in school reform and community development issues. She continued to work with the UBP and many other organizations, serving on a number of boards, advising other nonprofits, giving speeches, and participating in conferences and workshops on issues ranging from women’s empowerment to bilingual education to drug abuse counseling. Manhattan College awarded Evelina an honorary doctorate degree in 1970, and she taught classes at both Hunter College and SUNY Westbury under course titles such as “The Puerto Rican Child in the American School” and “The History of the Puerto Ricans in New York City.” She received numerous awards throughout the seventies and early eighties, and visited the White House on a number of occasions as an honored guest at important conferences and press events.

This rare clip shows Evelina as she joins other Puerto Rican activists in strategizing how to best protest the 1980 film Fort Apache, which depicts Puerto Ricans and African Americans as drug dealers, gang members, and criminals.

Evelina passed away in 1984, but the Wadleigh graduate’s legacy remains strong. In 2001 a play entitled Evelina’s Heart/El Corazon de Evelina was written to honor the life and legacy of the great community leader, and in 2011 156th St. and Prospect Ave. was renamed “Dra. Evelina Antonetty López Way.”

Evelina’s legacy, perhaps most importantly, also lives on in the continued struggle for educational equality for Puerto Ricans and historically marginalized children of all backgrounds, bilingual education programs across the country, and the Black and Puerto Rican studies departments at a number of university and college campuses. Puerto Ricans continue to fight for educational justice in New York through important community organizations such as Aspira, El Puente, Latino Justice/PRLDEF, El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, and the #BarrioEdProject, to name just a few.

Even though Evelina, “The Mother of the Puerto Rican community,” is no longer with us, her words remain prescient:

“We will never stop struggling here in the Bronx. Even though they’ve destroyed it around us. We would pitch tents if we have to rather than move from here. We would fight back, there is nothing we would not do. They will never take us away from here. I feel very much a part of this and I’m never going to leave. And, after me, my children will be here to carry on…I have very strong children and very strong grandchildren.”

Questions for Reflection

Do you believe Antonetty’s legacy is alive and well in the current world of education politics? Or is it lost?

What role do you think parent-led community organizing should play in your local school district? Why?

Sources

Primary Sources

“Evelina López Antonetty, Biographical Information, 1973-,” United Bronx Parents Records, Box 3, Folder 7, El Centro de Estudios Puertorriquños, Hunter College, CUNY, New York, NY.

Antonetty, Evelina López. Interview with Lillian López, 19 February 1976, audiocasette. Lillian López Papers, Box 3, Folder 19, Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos, Hunter College, CUNY, New York, NY.

Brunson, Doris. Interview with Ansley Erickson and Robert Randolph, December 2, 2014.

Morales, Julio. “A Question of Identity,” address delivered at Puerto Rican Youth Conference, February 12, 1963, Columbia College, Box 29, Folder 4, ASPIRA of New York, Inc. Papers, El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY, New York, NY.

Secondary Sources

“Thoughts on Evelina,” NYC Latino Politics.

Back, Adina. “Exposing the Whole Segregation Myth: The Harlem Nine and New York City’s School Desegregation Battles,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980 (New York: Palgrave, 2003)

Back, Adina. “Parent Power:’ Evelina López Antonetty, the United Bronx Parents, and the War on Poverty,” in The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

del Moral, Solsiree. Negotiating Empire: The Cultural Politics of Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898-1952 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013).

Lee, Sonia Song-Ha. Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, 2014).

Korrol, Virginia E. Sanchez. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

Perez, Nelida. “Evelina López Antonetty,” Virginia Sánchez Korrol and Viki Ruiz, eds., Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2006).

Sugrue, Thomas. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2013).

Thomas, Lorrin. Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in 20th Century New York (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Walsh, Catherine E. Pedagogy and the Struggle for Voice: Issues of Language, Power, and Schooling for Puerto Ricans (New York: Praeger, 1990).

Tyack, David and Elizabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1990).

Additional Archival Resources

Guide to the Records of United Bronx Parents, Inc. at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, CUNY

Additional Reading

“Antonia Pantoja: Community Activist, Leader, and Academic,” Digital Exhibit, El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY, New York, NY.

MacDonald, Victoria-Maria. Latino Education in the United States: A Narrated History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Nieto, Sonia. Brooklyn Dreams: My Life in Public Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2015).

Nieto, Sonia. “Fact and Fiction: Puerto Ricans in U.S.. Schools,” Harvard Educational Review 68:2 (Summer 1998), 133-163, http://www.hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.68.2.d5466822h645t087?code=hepg-site.

Nieto, Sonia. Puerto Rican Students in U.S. Schools (New York: Routledge), 2000.

“Pura Belpre: Author, Storyteller, and Librarian,” El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY, New York, NY.

Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. “History of Puerto Ricans in the U.S., Parts I-VII,” El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY, New York, NY.

Vélez, William. “The Educational Experiences of Puerto Ricans in the United States,” in Rodríguez, H., Sáenz, R. & Menjívar, C. (eds.) Latina/os in the United States: Changing the face of América (New York: Springer Science and Business Media, LLC), 2008, pp. 129-148.

Credits

This exhibit was created by Lauren Lefty for the Harlem Education History Project. It began as an assignment in Professor Ansley T. Erickson’s “Harlem Stories” course at Columbia University’s Teachers College in Fall 2016, and has evolved through a process of open review on the Harlem Education History website. Many thanks to Dr. Erickson, all of the participants in that course, the reviewers, and the entire HEHP team.

Lauren Lefty is an assistant professor of history and social studies education at Northern Arizona University. Her dissertation “Seize the Schools, Que Viva Puerto Rico Libre: Cold War Education Politics in New York and San Juan, 1948-1974” (NYU, 2019) examines transnational connections between education policy and activism in New York and Puerto Rico in the postwar period. Lauren was a 2016 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow, 2021-2022 ACLS Leading Edge Fellow at the Children’s Defense Fund’s Freedom Schools Program, contributor to The Gotham Blog, and co-author of Teaching Teachers: Changing Paths and Enduring Debates (Johns Hopkins, 2018).

This exhibit was peer reviewed by Dominique Jean-Louis and Barry Goldenberg.