Lanterna Rally

Author: Carlos Sanabria

Publisher:

Published: 2022-11-30

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781945662577

This project focuses on the Puerto Rican community in New York City during this period, and juxtaposes data and viewpoints from primary sources with photographic images. They were selected from the large body of work by Justo Ambrosio Martí, a Cuban-born professional photographer whose prolific collection of photos has become an invaluable record of the Puerto Rican experience in the city during the 1950s and 60s.The present study selects seven key topics that affected migrants daily. It begins with a short background to the migration itself, when an unparalleled number of new arrivals from Puerto Rico gave rise to a community that has now become part of the tapestry of New York City. The second section focuses on housing, which represented the immediate challenge of the newcomers. Martí's photos vividly show the difficulties they encountered in high-priced, crowded, even slum conditions, in addition to the protests over inequality and discrimination sparked by the abject conditions they faced. The third section, on labor, demonstrates the contributions of Puerto Ricans to the city's economy, but again, injustices often led to strikes and unrest, witnessed through Martí's lens. Welfare, the next section, was another area of struggle. In the face of prevailing stereotypes, Puerto Ricans detailed their plight and claimed their legal rights. Education, section five, captures the vision and persistence of the families who confronted the uphill struggle of helping their children succeed in a public-school system that was ill-equipped to deal with the surge in non-English-speaking students. Nor were young people impervious to dangers on the city streets, where reports of gang activity and violence were commonplace: a section on gangs explores this troubling phenomenon. The next section is on politics. Documented by Martí as well as in written reports, voter registration became an important step to political gains, although this, too, was fraught by complications and the unclear literacy requirements in a language that was not their own. Finally, the section entitled Resilience details Puerto Ricans' persistence and determination in the face of the overwhelming difficulties they faced.