NiLP Guest Commentary

Divided We Boricuas Stand?

The Complexities of a Colonial Mindset and the Comforts of White Castle Cheeseburgers

By Eric Medina

A couple of days before my moving to New York City back in 1984, an older brother approached me to give me what he saw as "one of the most important pieces of advice I could ever give my little brother." I found it strange, since we never had that kind of relationship where he would counsel me much on things. We lived in a rough neighborhood in Puerto Rico, a barrio of Villa Palmeras, right in the heart of Santurce. My brother, a no-nonsense character who had spent some healthy time in the South Bronx, seemed to feel like I would get the most out of my experience of barrio life by letting me figure things out on my own as much as possible, interfering strictly when he felt it was completely necessary.

On that particular day nearing my departure to New York, my brother, who planned on staying in Puerto Rico, sat me down. "Once in New York, " he proceeded to tell me, "try as much as possible never to let a fellow Puerto Rican decide your fate. If your teacher is Rican, try to switch courses, if your boss is Rican, try to switch departments, and if your pilot is Rican, try to switch planes, because you'll be the last one to get a parachute in an emergency."

I remember laughing something awful about the parachute but wondered what the hell he meant by all that. He went on to say, "Don't know why, but we're just not as united once out there, and I don't want you stepping in there with that illusion in your mind. Being Puerto Rican while in New York will feel great initially, but it gets a bit clouded along the way." Laughing, he concluded, "When feeling blue, go to White Castle and have a couple of cheeseburgers. They're great for taking your mind off bad things."

My being fairly young at the time, I just thought he was a bit nutty, that perhaps he was just having separation anxiety issues. But wiser words had never come from his mouth.

The moment came, and like fresh bread straight out of a Puerto Rican panaderia, I arrived at Kennedy Airport in September 1984, a jibarito with a light blue jacket and a new pair of Levis jeans, quite roasted from the sun and getting my first taste of mild chilly weather. I still recall how fascinating it was to witness all of the brick-solid buildings and graffiti-filled subway cars, a type of dirt in the city that somehow felt real in a sort of classical way. Fordham Road sounded like "Forum Row" then, but how great was that commercial street in the Bronx, connecting Jerome Avenue and Webster, and how epic Nobody Beats the Wiz (later justThe Wiz) Crazy Eddie, and the Alexander store seemed at the time! Everybody was carrying a boom box as big as I had never before seen on the Island and many kids were making break dancing moves that were completely new to me. I was in the middle of this all, me, in New York, where they filmed the Warriors movie! It felt like I was in a movie as the main character.

Shortly after that, I was registered in high school, my mother showing the dean two medals I had earned while in secondary school back in San Juan, as if that would factor into admitting a Puerto Rican kid into the bilingual curriculum of Evander Childs High School back then. But that was my mother in all of her Boricua splendor, typical of the Puerto Rican parent to find any conceivable reason to show pride in his/her child. I still remember the "you'd better" face she gave the Dean as he made a "that's fine, madam, we got him" gesture to her. It felt great to step into bilingual classrooms filled with students whose first question to me was whether Iwas Puerto Rican. There was a huge "yes!" of an answer.

Tougher on Our Own

But not much time went by before I started noticing the, "don't think you're going to get special treatment from me because we're both Puerto Rican" attitude around me as I hit the streets. It seemed almost implied everywhere as I stepped into the unknown and started interacting in more formal and mature settings with my kind. It wasn't always said and otherwise expressed explicitly, but I could tell in many of the interactions I saw among many of us that there was often a sort of a "just in case he thinks he can ride for free because I'm the driver" defensive tone taken.

The first time I saw it was at a video rental store, where a guy was returning a video game that was past due. The owner, a Puerto Rican man who had cemented a long business history in the neighborhood, took what I thought was a highly firm stance, repeating to the customer the store policy on late returns because he was, "new to the store and this is your first time." I remember feeling embarrassed for the customer and thinking that perhaps the owner had been a bit too aggressive. Once the customer apologized and paid the late fee (which felt more like a fine) and having left the premises, the owner snuck a comment to one of his employees that he probably thought no one else heard. "If you're not careful they try to get over on you because they're Puerto Rican just like you. But I treat everybody the same way."

Another time, I was working at a factory where a Puerto Rican supervisor was not particularly well liked because of his firm style. I was not there for very long but did notice that most of the employees complaining were themselves Latinos, a large portion of them Puerto Rican. As I took to observe further, he seemed just a tiny bit rougher on us. He was not a bad guy overall but was just a bit tougher on us Latinos. As he lived in the neighborhood, the word on the street was that he was a prick to his own. I never saw him while out in the neighborhood, but this certainly rang true at the factory although he seemed to let his guard down a bit during lunch time. But during working hours, he certainly was the gung-ho type, especially when it came to us Ricans.

Finally, there's the cop who himself being Puerto Rican, having pulled over a car and then noticed the Puerto Rican flag hanging from the windshield. He would ask the driver which part of Puerto Rico he is from and share his own only to keep the driver immobile for 15 minutes while he checked every detail of his background and, finally, upon finding nothing, made sure he printed very clearly every detail of the ticket he issued. This one happened to me, and boy did I think about my brother then and longed for a White Castle.

Now, I am not at all suggesting that a store owner should not hold customers up to store standards, or that supervisors should not exercise their authority under their role as managers. Least of all I am not suggesting that cops should not uphold the law. Each in their way was doing what they were supposed to under their respective responsibilities.

Becoming a Collection of Wooden Sticks?

There is an underlying angle here to consider, something of a gray area, if you will. We live in what is perhaps the most polarized nation on earth. Everything in this country is group oriented. We may not so much notice this as we go about our daily lives, but everything is either gay or straight, young or old, female or male, black or white, republican or democrat, conservative or liberal, Muslim or Christian, Catholic or Protestant, pro or anti- abortion groups, socialist or capitalist, Michael Jackson or Prince followers, as I recently found out after Prince's passing. Don't look now, but each one of these groups represents a special interest.

And where many of these have been very effective is in becoming the collection of wooden sticks that would be much harder to break than would be a single one taken out of the bunch, as the old teaching goes. Whether we consider gays, blacks, people with disabilities, Holocaust survivors and their families or folks united to save the whales, one can sense an unyielding aura of fortitude behind each of these causes that are reflected in most every one of their respective members. There seems present, in every one of these cases, a firm display of solidity in the conviction that's unwavering insofar as it's unmistakable and insofar as it is clearly understood by all. Thus, whether cops, firefighters, blacks, women, or deer hunters, and save any small, insignificant internal bickering, in the end, they all often have one another's backs.

But what are we to make of the Puerto Rican? Puerto Rico has recently been going through a very trying period in its history of many. To make bond payments that were due on January 4, it had to delay tax refunds and not pay government vendors for various essential services, all of which has greatly impacted the quality of life for Islanders. Many of these issues, as one might imagine, have no doubt played a factor in crimes committed on the island, of which there were 681 homicides recorded in 2014, an improvement in a land of roughly 3.5 million people. And just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, we also have the sudden emergence of the Zika virus, over which a condom price freeze has been declared on the island to help fight the spread of the disease. Under this circumstance, how do Puerto Ricans create some momentum and rally to tackle the many problems facing the Island at this moment?

Agenda Setting

The principle of Agenda Setting in the field of public policy describes the process by which an issue reaches the table of legislators by way of public exposure such that this policy might be enacted accordingly, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Brown vs. the Board of Education a decade earlier, for example. A problem in and of itself could mean very little. Everyone has problems. But if enough people in society or hemisphere rally around a specific problem, then it becomes an issue.

As such, it seems that Puerto Rico needs a profound battle cry, an epic point of departure that would bring all Puerto Ricans together in the same way (or perhaps even more closely, given this being a plight of international implications) as the groups that rallied around the efforts above. Such unity would propel them to stand up and raise awareness regarding the many struggles that the island and its people are facing.

But note that there should be a focus, a central idea in all of this. And in my humble yet unyielding view, this focus should be on what Puerto Rico has been losing both politically and culturally as a result of its subordinate status to the United States. This would seem like a tall order, given the annexationist culture to which we have grown accustomed. But the time has come to make a very serious effort to explore the connection between our woes and our inability to self-determine into whom we could be as a people if we did. What's more, we will probably never have a better moment in history to show what type of substance lies behind all the ¡Wepa, Boricua! noises we continuously make. If a higher sense of morals hasn't done it so far, then, by all means, let us take a look at our current circumstances!

Standing Against Ourselves?

A brief look at our history might tell us something regarding the damage we have been doing to ourselves all this time. In 1825, for example, and under orders from the Spanish Government, we executed Roberto Cofresi by firing squad at what we know today as El Morro, that great castle located in Old San Juan over which we take such great pride. A Corsair from Cabo Rojo who became a renowned figure during Puerto Rico's contraband era, some historians portray him as a patriot whose work benefited people of lesser means, while others portray him as an opportunist outlaw. What is beyond dispute is that Cofresi was a Puerto Rican with fairly well developed nationalistic ideas in what was then an emerging young culture and who was executed in at the behest of foreign influences.

Just as well, the Gag Law or (Ley de la Mordaza), a law that made it a crime to display certain sentiments of patriotism on the Island, which included owning or displaying a Puerto Rican flag or singing a patriotic tune. It was enacted by none other than the Puerto Rican legislature, signed into law back in 1948 by the very Puerto Rican and Carolina native, Jesus T. Piñero, Governor of the Island at the time. Just like this, we have Cerro Maravilla, La Masacre de Ponce, La Masacre de Rio Piedras and the list goes on and on where we show just what we are capable of doing to ourselves to accommodate the interests of others against our very own, perhaps an unprecedented phenomenon in world history.

It's possible that some of us may have fallen into this awkward mode of withholding our support of our own or even harming one another because we grew tired of trying. And there was a time when Boricuas truly tried, as evidenced by El Grito de Lares, the rise of the Partido Union, Don Pedro Albizu Campos,Los Macheteros, and the Young Lords.

Taking a different or opposite approach, one in which we would put our own before all else, would mean having to go back and admit how wrong we have been during times we chose not to try. Perhaps this involved cutting the wings off of those who did, both now and in the past, which, in turn, would mean taking a closer look to contend with very painful facts about ourselves even before looking at anything anybody else has done.

Much like a victim of domestic violence, we might just hide in the mistreatment, fearing to allow ourselves to heal. So if it seems that we Boricuas, despite all of the displays of Puerto Rican pride, are not as united force, perhaps that is because at the core we're punishing ourselves for never truly having been, with our very identity continuing to pay the price. We continue to shut the doors on our own, take the side of others against our brethren without any empathy and all this while enthusiastically singingQue Bonita Bandera and roasting the pernil.

Clearly some of us have taken apathy to another level as a culture, showing little care at times when we should do the most. If Puerto Rico is to survive its current woes, let alone rise above the history of itself, assuming a "collection of sticks" attitude would be the best place to start. We need to see a brother or sister in every other Puerto Rican out there. But, as it stands now, it would appear that not much has changed in that department since that this jibarito first arrived here from the Island back in 1984. I still continue to see my brother in much of what we Ricans do to ourselves . . . and White Castle cheeseburgers continue to be an occasional cure for the blues.

Eric Medina is a doctoral candidate in public administration at Walden University and has worked as an adjunct professor of sociology at Hostos Community College. He has been active in the non-profit sector for over 20 years, having been responsible for management operations at New Era Veterans, Project Renewal, and the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, and also served as a translator for Watching America, a website committed to informing on world views and opinions regarding the United States. He can be reached at ericmedina@medina.com.

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