Read Online The Noise of Infinite Longing by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa - Free Book Online
Authors: Luisita Lopez Torregrosa
Ads: Link
fields and the coffee hills had already started, and San Juan, always a densely populated capital, was expanding. Slums sprouted on the edges of middle-class and upper-middle-class residential districts, and new low-cost subdivisions of modest, square-shaped cement houses were being built by the government wherever there was open land.
The island’s transformation began in those years. Sugar, coffee, and tobacco farms began to fold, leaving the field hands with noth- ing. Factories began to take the place of farms—small textile facto- ries where the luckiest earned their wages in stifling rooms, sewing cloth and leather on rustic machines and by hand. When the island gained a measure of independence, when it became a common- wealth of the United States in 1952, the changes accelerated. Bigger factories went up, more skilled labor was needed, and the poor flooded the cities, without jobs, without a trade. With that flow of people came a profound social and cultural change.
Tens of thousands of half-literate jíbaros, people from the slums and fields and towns, left the island for New York and cities farther west to find work, traveling more than fifteen hundred miles north with the dream—a steady daily stream of people who, like all immi- grants before them, congregated naturally with their own in a strange land, creating new barrios, living in the tenements once filled with Italian and Jewish and Irish immigrants. The island was now spreading, spilling outward, eventually giving NewYork the fla- vor of the mountains of Puerto Rico, the rhythms of the plena, the Spanglish of a people with a broken language, and a broken home.
No one in my family left the island seeking their fortune. They left to study abroad, to get degrees from Harvard and Columbia, to live the bohemian life, and to tour the great cities of Europe, to visit the Louvre and the Prado Museums, to put on the layer of culture that came with traveling, with seeing the world.
Before I was three, my mother was showing me pictures in the National Geographic, places she wanted me to know as well as she knew them, even though she had never seen them. She and my grandmother also talked about the opera and theater in Madrid and Paris, and Sarah Bernhardt became a name as familiar to me as the name of the governor of Puerto Rico, my grandmother’s cousin,
who had spent years writing poetry in Greenwich Village before becoming a politician.
But it didn’t occur to us that life would be better somewhere else (maybe in Madrid or Barcelona, mother used to say), and we pitied the poor families carrying their paper bags stuffed with their meager belongings—and their chickens and plátanos—that crowded the air- port terminal for the flights to NewYork.
My family lived in a society so small that we knew no one who left, except for the maids who believed the Bronx was paved with gold. A few of my mother’s friends and my father’s sisters married Americans they had met during the war, men posted to the island’s military bases, who went on to live in places like Pasadena and Coral Gables. But we didn’t need to escape. We were not rich, yet we seemed to be on an island where more than seventy percent of the people were poor. We could move from house to house, hire ser- vants, and attend private schools. And in that atmosphere of com- fort, the island seemed idyllic to me, the island being in reality my parents, my family, what we know as children.
Chapter Three
A City of Pyramids
A
fter the funeral, after the lunch at the church, we drove an hour away from Edgewood, to Sara’s house in Dallas. Her kitchen, a large all-white room dimly lighted in the sunset glow, a kitchen she kept immaculate, had the look of a war room, the wreckage of too many people, cold leftovers, empty beer bottles, overflowing ash-
trays. The dishes piled up in the sink.
Sara moved about, quiet as if in slippers, picking up after the rest of us, pushing her hair back off her
The island’s transformation began in those years. Sugar, coffee, and tobacco farms began to fold, leaving the field hands with noth- ing. Factories began to take the place of farms—small textile facto- ries where the luckiest earned their wages in stifling rooms, sewing cloth and leather on rustic machines and by hand. When the island gained a measure of independence, when it became a common- wealth of the United States in 1952, the changes accelerated. Bigger factories went up, more skilled labor was needed, and the poor flooded the cities, without jobs, without a trade. With that flow of people came a profound social and cultural change.
Tens of thousands of half-literate jíbaros, people from the slums and fields and towns, left the island for New York and cities farther west to find work, traveling more than fifteen hundred miles north with the dream—a steady daily stream of people who, like all immi- grants before them, congregated naturally with their own in a strange land, creating new barrios, living in the tenements once filled with Italian and Jewish and Irish immigrants. The island was now spreading, spilling outward, eventually giving NewYork the fla- vor of the mountains of Puerto Rico, the rhythms of the plena, the Spanglish of a people with a broken language, and a broken home.
No one in my family left the island seeking their fortune. They left to study abroad, to get degrees from Harvard and Columbia, to live the bohemian life, and to tour the great cities of Europe, to visit the Louvre and the Prado Museums, to put on the layer of culture that came with traveling, with seeing the world.
Before I was three, my mother was showing me pictures in the National Geographic, places she wanted me to know as well as she knew them, even though she had never seen them. She and my grandmother also talked about the opera and theater in Madrid and Paris, and Sarah Bernhardt became a name as familiar to me as the name of the governor of Puerto Rico, my grandmother’s cousin,
who had spent years writing poetry in Greenwich Village before becoming a politician.
But it didn’t occur to us that life would be better somewhere else (maybe in Madrid or Barcelona, mother used to say), and we pitied the poor families carrying their paper bags stuffed with their meager belongings—and their chickens and plátanos—that crowded the air- port terminal for the flights to NewYork.
My family lived in a society so small that we knew no one who left, except for the maids who believed the Bronx was paved with gold. A few of my mother’s friends and my father’s sisters married Americans they had met during the war, men posted to the island’s military bases, who went on to live in places like Pasadena and Coral Gables. But we didn’t need to escape. We were not rich, yet we seemed to be on an island where more than seventy percent of the people were poor. We could move from house to house, hire ser- vants, and attend private schools. And in that atmosphere of com- fort, the island seemed idyllic to me, the island being in reality my parents, my family, what we know as children.
Chapter Three
A City of Pyramids
A
fter the funeral, after the lunch at the church, we drove an hour away from Edgewood, to Sara’s house in Dallas. Her kitchen, a large all-white room dimly lighted in the sunset glow, a kitchen she kept immaculate, had the look of a war room, the wreckage of too many people, cold leftovers, empty beer bottles, overflowing ash-
trays. The dishes piled up in the sink.
Sara moved about, quiet as if in slippers, picking up after the rest of us, pushing her hair back off her
Similar Books
