Puerto Rico Is in the Heart: Emigration, Labor, and Politics in the Life and Work of Frank Espada

Emigration, Labor, and Politics in the Life and Work of Frank Espada

E. Carvalho

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137331434
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Set against the backdrop of contemporary US economic history, Puerto Rico Is in the Heart examines the emigration, labor, and political experiences of documentary photographer, human rights activist, and Puerto Rican community leader Frank Espada and considers the cultural impact of neoliberal programs directed at Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans.

1

Beloved and Reviled

Abstract: This chapter traces the emigration of Frank Espada and his family from the island to the mainland and contextualizes the dual identity of Puerto Ricans from a labor perspective, as a people who are both reviled and yet necessary to regulate the operational stability of U.S. imperial interests. Changing economic conditions on the island in the early twentieth century, as the economy moves from a monocultural plantation system to industrialization, are paralleled against changes to the Puerto Rican educational system under U.S. colonial rule. Puerto Rico thus reflects the connection between the economic policies and the political project that serve as the baseline for neoliberal orthodoxy (where the classroom functions as one of the central reproductive sites for cultural pedagogy).

Carvalho, Edward J. Puerto Rico Is in the Heart: Emigration, Labor, and Politics in the Life and Work of Frank Espada, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137331434.

“No Puerto Ricans Wanted.” So read the employment ads and signs in shop windows in Brooklyn when Francisco Espada (Marrero), Sr., and Luisa Beatriz Roig (Roig) emigrated from Puerto Rico to the United States in 1939.¹

The family abruptly left behind land, family, and careers on the island with the hope of starting a new life in America. Francisco was a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) who held a degree from a Lafayette College correspondence course and owned several small businesses.² Luisa was a homemaker and mother.³ The couple traveled to the mainland by boat with their two children: a daughter, Luisa, and their eldest child, a son, known today as human rights activist and documentary photographer, Frank Espada, father to the poet Martín Espada.

The “help wanted” signs encountered by the Espadas in 1939 could have just as easily read “Puerto Ricans (Not) Wanted,” for this was a people who were simultaneously reviled and yet necessary to the operational stability of empire, the “beloved spics.”⁴ Though we’d prefer to think of this painful history of racial intolerance and economic separatism as just that—history—today’s reality, still haunted, and to a large extent driven by the failed economic policies of neoliberalism, proves that Puerto Ricans, and the Latino community generally, continue to face marginalization in society and exploitation in the workplace: that is, by the logic of the market, they are both reviled and yet necessary.

And not by chance either. Neoliberalism has always depended on the exploitation of the Latino, repeatedly turning its gaze southward into Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean, impacting the populations living there much more overtly than any other minority group (for more on this, see Juan González’s Harvest of Empire). Of course, Latinos in America also have bore the brunt of neoliberal reforms. The history of Frank Espada and his family outlined in this study is testimony to that fact, as we will soon see.

Born Francisco Luis Espada Roig on December 21, 1930, in Utuado, Puerto Rico, Frank Espada would go on years later to capture a roughly twenty-year span of Puerto Rican culture in a photographic exhibit and follow-up book The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Themes in the Survival of a People, reflecting a documentary testimony that proves the contemporary history of Puerto Rico “is a long and sometimes tragic story” (F. Espada, “Book” n. pag.). With these words he could have just as easily been writing the opening lines to his own family’s diasporic struggle or, perhaps, the introduction to his autobiography. For when looking closely at the economic forces pressing against the many generations of Espadas—from his father and mother, Francisco and Luisa, to Frank and his wife Marilyn, and eventually to Frank’s son and daughter-in-law, the poet, Martín Espada and his spouse Katherine Gilbert-Espada—we find that life in America for the Espada family proves all too similarly, and all too often, a “long and sometimes tragic story.”⁵

Until now, there has been little discussion on Francisco and Luisa Espada’s economic status and migration from Santurce, Puerto Rico, to the United States in 1939. Despite the many portrayals of the extended family’s economic hardship found in the poetry of Martín Espada, conversely, life on the island for his paternal grandparents, Francisco and Luisa, was by no means so dire. By Frank Espada’s own admission, his father and mother were solidly “middle-class people”; they owned property and had stable incomes (qtd. in Carvalho, “Frank Espada” 7). Of course, this was not necessarily the case for all Puerto Ricans, as underscored in the research of César Ayala who notes, “In 1920, 95% of the rural population had no land and in 1930 the figure dropped slightly to 92.9%. In 1935, according to the Census of the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, 94.9% of the rural population was landless” (“From Sugar” 7). These statistics shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given that the island is, after all, yet a colony of the United States, taken from the Spanish in 1898 as the spoils of war. Thus its people, then as now, have been largely dislocated, displaced, disinherited, and dispossessed, as articulated by Martín Espada in his 2010 essay “The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive: Colonialism and the Poetry of Rebellion in Puerto Rico”:

Puerto Rico is the oldest colony in the world: four centuries under Spain and more than a century under the United States. In five hundred and seventeen years, Puerto Rico has not determined its own destiny for five minutes. (11)

Adding to the complexity of Puerto Rico’s economic situation, the global market immediately following the Great Depression offered little room for any kind of personal or professional enterprise, least of all in Puerto Rico where the local economy of the 1930s was primarily agrarian, driven largely by indigenous crop plantations—coffee, tobacco, sugar, bananas. Likewise, the economic prospects for the island, as with much of the Third World after the Second World War, were not only controlled by colonial overseers who exploited indigenous labor and natural resources, but were also very much deliberately tethered from modernization by a lack of industrialization and infrastructural investment. A telling example of this occurs in Puerto Rico in the 1920s and ’30s “when the virtual take-over of the sugar industry by large American corporations caused the collapse of the weakened coffee and tobacco sectors, effectively creating a one-crop economy” and subsequently “institutionaliz[ing]” unemployment (F. Espada, Puerto Rican Diaspora 10).⁶ In this respect, Francisco Espada’s accounting work that afforded him and his wife Luisa some modest status and economic security stands in stark contrast to the quality of life for the vast majority of the island’s workers and inhabitants.

Frank notes that the Roigs⁷—his mother’s side of the family—were educated people, many of them working successfully as “architects, engineers, and so on,” who migrated from Spanish Catalonia to Puerto Rico in the early nineteenth century (qtd. in Carvalho, “Frank Espada” 42). “[T]hey did a lot of good stuff in [Utuado] when they came over,” he adds, “[a]nd they became politically involved” (42). Frank emphasizes the long-standing political involvement of his family, particularly when speaking of his maternal grandfather, Buenaventura Roig (Cruz)⁸—of the Martín Espada poem and book La tumba de Buenaventura Roig (The Tomb of Buenaventura Roig)⁹—a man who served as one of Frank’s earliest models of activism and humanism. Roig was not only the mayor of Utuado on at least three known occasions in the 1930s,¹⁰ but also “one of the early organizers of the Popular Democrático [Partido Popular Democrático de Puerto Rico, PPD or The Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico (PDP)],” which added political traction to the pro-independence movement and was originally intended to “improve the conditions of the lower classes [. . .] under the slogan ‘Bread, land, and liberty’ ” (Frank Espada qtd. in Carvalho, “Frank Espada” 7; “Puerto Rico” n. pag.). Frank remembers back to those early years when he would watch his grandfather work from his office at alcaldía, the city hall. The interaction had a decided effect on raising his political consciousness.

In one case, Frank remembers a “jíbaro, this peasant, came in and started talking about hard times. [My grandfather] would reach into his desk drawer and pull out two or three cans [of food]” (Frank Espada qtd. in Carvalho, “Frank Espada” 7). What makes this act of human decency even more poignant is that irrespective of Roig’s tenure as mayor, Frank says that his grandfather was by no stretch well-off: “He had a small farm; he was an agronomist, not with any formal schooling, but on his own. [. . .] [F]or the most part, he was a man from the people” (qtd. in Carvalho, “Frank Espada” 7). And yet, as Frank elaborates, despite his modest means, Roig cultivated the few resources at his disposal to assist others in his community who might have been struggling: “It was that kind of thing that struck me—it never left me: the act of this man doing this [giving of himself for his people]” (7). Roig’s charity defined the professional sacrifice required to be mayor of Utuado, an office that brings to mind, quite literally, the purest notion of the term “public servant”: “We need to understand that was an unpaid position,” though, as Frank adds, “it was desirable for the prestige it conferred on the recipients” (“Re: Remaining Interview Questions” n. pag.). Perhaps even more remarkable is that Roig served and gave to his people, “during the worst economic times one can imagine. There was no safety net then, so there was a lot of hunger, and the only health facility was the only hospital in town” (“Re: Remaining Interview Questions” n. pag.). It is little wonder then that in his passing, Buenaventura Roig was memorialized by his people, as “peasants in the thousands / streamed down the hillsides / to witness the great eclipse” of his burial (M. Espada, “La Tumba” 2–4).¹¹ According to Frank, his mother once had a newspaper photograph of the procession, “what was estimated [to be] over 100,000 people” in attendance (“Reply to First Draft” 1).

There were other educational lessons for Frank on the island, though not all of them were so pleasant as those instilled by his grandfather. One short poem from Martín Espada’s A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000) is simply titled, “What Francisco Luis Espada Learned at Age Five, Standing on the Dock,” and appears to capture a moment from Frank’s childhood in Santurce. The poem reads in its entirety:

Sometimes

there’s a

tarantula

in the

bananas. (1–5)

The deceptively simple five-line poem contains several different layers of meaning that extend far beyond Martín Espada’s retelling of his father’s surprise (if not fearful) encounter with the above-referenced spider.¹² Of course, the poem can be read from the vantage of Frank learning at this formative age that phobias can manifest even out of the most seemingly innocuous and the least expected of places. But there’s something else to be said about a boy coming to terms with pieces of his home(land)—its resources, culture, etc.—which are about to be exported even more aggressively from the island for profit maximization on the U.S. mainland, not unlike the American co-optation of the Puerto Rican sugar industry noted above. Is this poem then also not about a boy coming to terms with himself and his cultural identity?

In this respect, “What Francisco Luis Espada Learned” both calls to mind the island’s reliance on an export economy, and, at the same time, it serves as a fateful portent for what will eventually befall Frank and his family following their emigration to the States. Not far removed from Anthony Burgess’s notion of a “clockwork orange”¹³—that is, to the extent the state influences human conditioning—Espada suggests in this poem, via the symbol of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Beloved and Reviled
• 2  We came to this country broke.
• 3  [N]ot good enough
• 4  Organizing: [A] question of survival
• 5  Conclusion: The Return
• Postscript: Without love...
• Works Cited
• Index