Helping the Mainland

Though heavily populated Puerto Rico has little gang warfare and few juvenile delinquents, the Puerto Rican in Manhattan seems, from the headlines, to be responsible for a frightening wave of gang killing, drug addiction and thievery. Dissenting from this impression, and in fact seeing hope in the Puerto Rican migration, is the Rev. Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, S.J., a Fordham University associate professor of sociology. Last week at a conference in Puerto Rico of the National Association of Intergroup Relations Officials,

Father Fitzpatrick put on the record his blunt views.

"New Yorkers had an old tradition, something like a tribal practice, I suppose," says he, "of blaming their recurrent ills on the latest strangers to populate the slums. The Irish and the Germans, the Italians and the Jews have now become respectable, but it looks as if the Puerto Ricans will enable the old tradition to survive."

Delinquent Irishmen. "Let's forget about Mayor Wagner for a few moments and listen to the man who was mayor of New York in 1825. He wrote in his diary: 'One of the evidences of the degeneracy of our morals and of the inefficiency of our police is to be seen in the frequent instances of murder by stabbing. The city is infested by gangs of hardened wretches.' One doesn't have to look very far to see whom Philip Hone blames for this distress: Irishmen, 'the most ignorant and consequently the most obstinate white men in the world.' "

Bringing their habits and values with them, the immigrant Irish, Germans, Italians and Jews became strangers in a new land, suffered from the cultural conflict, found it hard, at first, to escape from slums. Now this is the Puerto Rican plight. Says Fitzpatrick: "The poverty of Puerto Ricans, their language handicap, their lack of sophistication about mainland city life, leave them, at this moment, particularly exposed to exploitation. The things that gave a man or woman dignity and honor in a Puerto Rican village are greeted with ridicule in New York."

At the same time the people who were already in the city "find their own customs and way of life under the pressure of strangers they do not understand. They fear the threat to their own values. This is the fear that is reflected in the gradual creation of a stereotype of the Puerto Rican as criminal.

"People who moved out of neighborhoods to escape Puerto Ricans and have to pay much larger rents are inclined to blame their difficulty on the Puerto Ricans who moved in. People who have to stay although they would like to move out blame their distress on the Puerto Ricans, the scapegoat."

Racial Intermarriage. Fitzpatrick sees the Puerto Rican migration as a real boon to New York and America. Unlike the previous immigrants, the Puerto Ricans bring with them a history of rack-tolerance and a tradition of social intermingling that lets them marry people of other skin colors, from Negroes to whites.

"I did a study last year of the behavior of Puerto Ricans in six Catholic parishes in New York," Fitzpatrick reported. "I found that 25% of all the Puerto Rican marriages involved people of noticeably different shades of color. It is my own hope that they will make explicit the principles of human brotherhood, of universal respect for men and women, that have been implicit in their culture. If they do they will have brought a priceless contribution to the life of the mainland."

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