Pace University
Justice David Souter will retire from Supreme Court. Obama can make history with the first Hispanic appointment to the Court. El Diario-La Prensa says Judge Sonia Sotomayor should be a leading candidate.
Esquire magazine makes a case for Sotomayor, Huffington Post says she is a favorite and her Facebook fans page is rapidly growing.
film poster by Saul Bass
The opening on Broadway of a revival of “West Side Story” generated more media coverage than the first Puerto Rican astronaut aboard the recent Discovery mission. Have Puerto Ricans come a long way or not?
Here’s Blanca Vazquez’s take on the musical. What’s yours?
West Side Story, Part 3
Blanca Vázquez
(condensed Spanish version published first by El Diario-La Prensa at http://tinyurl.com/d5pwrv)
I didn’t see the 1957 play but I saw the 1962 film version of West Side Story. The play was staged on every continent, from Australia to Germany to Japan to South Africa. West Side Story, Part 2, the movie, won the Oscar for best picture. Our own Rita Moreno won the best supporting actress Oscar. The film was a smash hit. It introduced Puerto Ricans to Middle America and to the planet. And therein lies its power.
“’Cause every Puerto Rican’s a lousy chicken…”
From the beginning, West Side Story was problematic for Puerto Ricans. The line in the film about letting Puerto Rico “sink back into the ocean” made us cringe. But it wasn’t really about the lyrics. What mattered was the context of 1950s and 60s New York City for Puerto Ricans.
Puerto Ricans came to New York after World War II because American capital’s control of the Island’s resources made us redundant in our own land. Challenged by the Nationalist Party and independentistas, U.S. and island policy makers encouraged migration to blow off political steam. And so the island’s unemployed working class came to New York. Suddenly, $45 one-way tickets to New York City were easy to get. In the 1950s as many as 50,000 Puerto Ricans a year arrived to these shores. Congress had made us citizens in 1917, but we were the wrong hue in pre-Civil Rights America — an interracial people in a black and white country, Dios mío.
As Pedro Pietri said in his epic poem “Puerto Rican Obituary,” Juan, Maria, Milagros and Olga worked hard, aspiring to the American dream and then to go back home again. But mass media sensationalism made us somehow responsible for all the city’s ills. A monolingual school system put many in classes for the “retarded,” as they called it back then, and dropped us out in large numbers.
West Side Story is set in this period. Images of savage Puerto Rican hoodlums were on the front pages of the City’s many daily newspapers. In 1959, headlines raged about “The Capeman,” Salvador Agron, who had killed two boys in a rumble in Hell’s Kitchen. At 16 he was the youngest prisoner to be sentenced to death, later commuted to life in prison. West Side Story echoed the already emerging public and media consensus that Puerto Ricans were a burden and a problem population.
Nothing more reflects Puerto Rican reactions to West Side Story than the song “America.” In the original play and in the current production, only the women sing the song. The “sink back in the ocean” line was not in the original play, but it is in the movie. But the film stages the relative benefits of migration as a call from the women for a level of freedom they didn’t have at home. The men respond with a critique of how racism and discrimination slam a people down. Sure, everything’s fine in America — “if you’re all white in América.” We appreciated that, but that authentic Puerto Rican perspective is taken away in the new production.
West Side Story remains both a headache and heartache. The play has real power in the way our music and dance are gloriously appropriated by composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins. The sets are gorgeous. That real Latinos play key roles is welcomed. But it also recycles the essential Puerto Rican image established by the movies of the 1940s and 50s. It’s all about ghetto dwelling gang-bangers and their sexy mamacitas. It’s not our story but it is our stereotype.
Ultimately, as a play, a film and in revival, West Side Story is not about us. I think Frances Negrón-Mutaner got it right. In her article “Feeling Pretty” she writes that West Side Story’s true forbidden love was the one lived by the gay and bisexual men who created it over 50 years ago. The gender-bending Anybodys character and sensitive Baby John, both representing the white ethnic Sharks gang, fit into that deeper analysis. Somewhere there is a place for that love and the time is really now — witness Iowa and Vermont.
Punto Final: We, the Puerto Ricans of the Diaspora, need to write our own stories, in every conceivable format. That’s the “someday” I’ve been longing for. We have so many compelling and richer stories to tell.
Blanca Vazquez teaches in the Film and Media Studies department at Hunter College, City University of New York.
I write several editorials a week for a daily newspaper and often get asked how I come up with something to write about each day. It’s simple — there’s almost something to get pissed about every day.
But I’m not trying to rant here. I’m trying to do what most bloggers should be doing — serving information, offering some thoughts and building conversation.
So here’s my first pitch to you…
The perception among Latinos I talk to is that women carry the weight for our community–especially when it comes to the well being of families and children.DO LATINO MEN NEED TO STEP UP? And how? What are the challenges?
Where is headway being made? For the guys holding it down (what does that even mean?), what are the frustrations?
We need to talk. Take a look at some of these stats and info:
• In New York State, Latinos are more than 28 percent of the inmate population. The vast majority are men.
• Among Latino groups in New York City, Puerto Rican and Dominicans have higher rates of households headed by single females.
• The Correctional Association of NY, citing official NYC reports, found that…
The neighborhoods with the highest rates of juvenile detention are University Heights, East Harlem, St. George, Harlem, Soundview, South Jamaica, South Bronx, East New York, Morris Heights, Bedford Stuyvesant, Far Rockaway, Bushwick, Queens Village/FLRL PK/Hollis, Brownsville, Washington Heights and Tremont.
• As of March 31, 2007, there were 2,610 children – 2,224 boys and 386 girls – incarcerated in NY state juvenile institutions. Most of these kids are African American and Latino. (Correctional Association citing the NYS Office of Children and Family Services)
