Puerto Rican Chicago

     I usually watch the Super Bowl — for the commercials — but this year I think I'll pay a bit more attention to the on-field activities, since my wife and I began enjoying this football business watching the last two Bears playoff games.
    It'll certainly be exciting to see Bad Bunny perform. Not that I could name a song of his if you put a gun to my head. But the way MAGA swooned onto their fainting couch of faux victimization when he was named, and, laughably, created an alternate halftime show starring the Michigan excrescence, Kid Rock, well, one wants him to shine. He seems a nice person, based on his Carpool segment with James Corden, which you might want to take a look at. I really admired Corden's opening question: "When did you tell your family you were going to call yourself 'Bad Bunny' and not 'Benito'?"
     Bad Bunny is very proud of his Puerto Rican heritage. I learned something of Chicago Puerto Rican history when I wrote "Every goddamn day." Puerto Ricans are one of the city's most significant ethnic groups, and imagine many are swelling with pride seeing their guy in the spotlight

     The community exploded into Chicago's consciousness in 1966, after Puerto Rican teens clashed with the police:

June 20, 1966 

     Jose Cruz is not his real name. 

     Anonymity is in order when your life is splayed out in the newspaper in detail, from what you earn as a punch-press operator ($2.22 an hour) to the rent you pay for your second-floor West Side walk-up ($25 a week) to the fact that you purchased your refrigerator and television on the installment plan ($27.18 a month).

     “They belong to me,” Cruz tells the Daily News, jumping the gun. They will belong to him if he makes his payments, the kind of detail that can trip up an immigrant. 

      The story in today’s paper is notable for its ordinariness. Cruz is not a criminal or a victim; he has no complaints and the most modest of dreams: “I would like to move out someday to a larger place.” 

      But the profile does appear in an extraordinary context; a city suddenly waking to its Puerto Rican community. The week before, 100 police and 1,000 Puerto Ricans clashed on the Northwest Side. A police car was overturned and burned, firemen pelted with rocks, their trucks looted. The shock came not so much from the episode’s violence but because it happened at all. 

      In 1950, there were 255 Puerto Ricans living in Chicago. That number rose to 32,371 by 1960. Now it’s 65,000 and, during the riot, “to the police it seemed all of them were on W. Division St. between Damen and California.” 

      In the ensuing hand wringing, the Daily News runs a front-page editorial, in Spanish—“Puerto Ricans must not be strangers in our midst,” it says, translated. “Their culture—the oldest in the Western hemisphere—and their language—revered in world literature—must become part of the life in Chicago. This cannot be done by violence.” 

      Why the riot? Some blame is placed on a failure to communicate. Charles H. Percy, Republican candidate for US Senate, suggests teaching police Spanish. Then there is the difficulty of the scale of life in Chicago: 85 percent of Puerto Rican immigrants come from small rural towns. 

      “The Puerto Ricans come here with an inability to cope with the problems of the city,” Rev. Daniel Alvarez, head of La Casa Central, a social service agency, tells the Daily News. “They don’t find the proper services, they run out of money, they lack the ability to find employment, and they get trapped. . . . They borrow money, they risk everything they have for the $106 one-way ticket to Chicago.” 

      That ticket is significant. Puerto Ricans are “the first ethnic group to come to the United States predominantly by airplane.” The suddenness of the transition—no long voyage, no wait at the border—adds to the shock. Despite difficulties, Puerto Ricans are on their way to becoming the second-largest Latino group in the city. 

      “All these things bring problems, problems that did not exist at home,” says Alvarez. “We are trying to solve them. But it will take time—and understanding.”