Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America

by Frederick Douglass

  Puerto Rican immigration to New York was similarly fueled by poverty, unemployment, and hunger, but factors specific to the Puerto Rican context meant that Puerto Ricans formed tight-knit, distinctive communities in the city. The mass migration of Puerto Ricans to New York City began during World War I, when wartime restrictions on European migration caused labor shortages in the city and manufacturers and employers in the service industries recruited Puerto Ricans to meet their labor demands.2 The first Puerto Rican diaspora in New York City consisted of three hundred individuals who settled on the Lower West Side of Manhattan along Eighth Avenue between Fourteenth and Thirtieth Streets in 1910. The largest influx of Puerto Ricans to Harlem came directly from Puerto Rico after 1917, when the U.S. Congress passed a bill granting citizenship to all native-born Puerto Ricans. Three regiments of Puerto Rican soldiers settled in Harlem between 1918 and 1919, for instance, bringing their families with them.3 The Puerto Rican population of the United States swelled from 1,513 in 1910 to almost 53,000 in 1930. As the number of Puerto Ricans in East Harlem increased, the area gained the popular names “Spanish Harlem” and “El Barrio.” By 1935 the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York, consisting of three communities throughout the city, had swelled to approximately 75,000 people. Some 35,000 of them lived in Spanish Harlem. The others were in South Brooklyn, where 30,000 Puerto Ricans lived, and on the West Side between Broadway and Amsterdam in the vicinity of Columbia University, the home of the most elite immigrants: merchants, restaurant operators, and barbers.4 Although the number of African Puerto Ricans who migrated to New York is unknown, one historian argues that “black and brown Puerto Ricans were a significant and conspicuous presence” in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s.5

  RELATIONSHIPS FORGED THROUGH MUSIC AND FOOD

  According to one WPA report, African Americans and Latinos frequented the same social clubs, informal hangouts, theaters, and ballrooms during the 1930s. Some of these clubs included orchestras featuring Afro-Cuban artists fresh from the club scene in Havana. Such artists came to the United States because racism in Cuba hampered their careers artistically and financially, but they chose to settle in New York rather than Florida, where the racial climate drove a wedge between black and white Latin musicians.6 After Cubop began to catch on in 1947, it became even more common to see Latino and African Americans playing together in traditionally African American venues and afterward enjoying traditional southern and Caribbean food. Latin Americans, West Indians, and African Americans often frequented the same restaurants in Harlem and the Upper West Side.7

  Caribbean and African American artists developed relationships because they shared common interests: cutting-edge jazz and, to a lesser degree, good, inexpensive food. Language barriers did not prevent blacks and Latinos like the charismatic conga drummer and brilliant composer Afro-Cuban Chano Pozo and South Carolinian trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie from communicating. In the words of Dizzy, they spoke to each other in the universal language of music and the “bebop language.” The hip lingo of jazz artists bridged the customary gap between native English and Spanish speakers and allowed them to communicate with each other. “Most bebop language came about because some guy said something and it stuck. Another guy started using it, then another one, and before you knew it, we had a whole language,” writes Dizzy.8 An ethnic subgroup of crossover artists interested in combining the best of Latin and North American jazz emulated each other’s music, language, and food in urban New York. This subgroup was most comfortable at the jazz clubs and multiethnic eateries that were located primarily in Harlem and Spanish Harlem before the 1950s.

  THE 1950S AND THE 1960S

  MIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT PATTERNS IN THE SECOND WAVE

  A second wave of African American and Hispanic migrants arrived in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. The number of Hispanic migrants, particularly Puerto Ricans, far outweighed the number of African Americans from the South. This was in part because beginning in the late 1950s San Juan, Puerto Rico, served as the “international training ground” of the U.S. government’s Point Four Program, which promoted a U.S. capitalist model of development for the third world as an alternative to Communism. In order for the program to work, the Harry S Truman administration and the Puerto Rican colonial government under Luis Muñoz Marín negotiated the emptying out of the island’s poorest sectors during the late 1940s, encouraging these areas’ inhabitants, “many of them mulattos,” to migrate to urban centers in the United States, including New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The poor received reduced airfare between the island and the mainland. Some six hundred thousand “mostly rural unskilled” Puerto Ricans filled the demand for cheap labor in U.S. manufacturing. The migration of the poorest sector of the island permitted social mobility among those who remained, seemingly proving the government’s capitalist model of third world development superior to the Soviet Union’s socialist model.9

  Among these second-wave Puerto Rican migrants were Eddie Cruz and his family, who joined relatives in the United States and settled in a largely Puerto Rican, Spanish-speaking community. Born in 1941 in Yauco, Puerto Rico, Cruz arrived with his family in New York in 1947, settling in East Harlem around 107th Street. Cruz’s parents were just starting a family, and they wanted their children to have a better quality of life than was available to them in Puerto Rico. They moved to East Harlem because Eddie’s uncle lived there; he helped Eddie’s father find a factory job. The family lived at several different addresses in El Barrio before moving to the projects in Brooklyn in 1956. In the 1950s the “suburbs” of Brooklyn, to use Cruz’s term, were very diverse: “The projects were mixed back then, but I would say mostly Puerto Ricans and blacks.”10

  In the 1950s and 1960s Brooklyn was also a destination (sometimes a transfer station) for working-class African American migrants from the South, working-class Afro-Panamanians (from the Canal Zone region of Panama City), Afro-Cubans from Havana, and middle-class Cubans, most of them white, from provincial cities. “Just like in every other part of Latin America and many parts of the world, the dream was to come to the United States,” remembers Cuban migrant Francisco Corona.11 Corona was born in 1933 in Guayos, Las Villas Province (later renamed Sancti Spíritus), Cuba. During the military dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar (1952–1959), members of about six extended families in Guayos responded to the corruption and repression of Batista’s regime by immigrating to the Borough Hall section of Brooklyn.12 As life got tougher under the Batista dictatorship, Cuban expatriates from Guayos “began to sponsor friends and families who also wanted to come to New York,” Corona remembers.13

  “Shortly thereafter,” Corona says, “some of the families from Guayos started to relocate to Tarrytown.” The first Cuban to settle in Tarrytown was Angelo Hernandez, who had arrived in Brooklyn from Guayos around 1953.14 Hernandez and a Cuban named Aurelio Garcia went to Tarrytown to do a survey for a Puerto Rican–owned radio station in New York City whose management wanted to learn about the taste of the town’s Hispanic residents: what programs they listened to and what products they consumed. Hernandez asked the people he was surveying about job opportunities and learned of an opening at the upscale Tappan Hill Restaurant in Tarrytown. In the 1950s job opportunities, many of them at nurseries and factories, including General Motors (and later Union Carbide), were abundant in the Tarrytowns and the surrounding area. Hernandez took the job at Tappan Hill because it offered free room and board and a uniform, perks that significantly reduced his living expenses. The first Hispanic to work at the Tappan Hill had been the Ecuadorian Miguel Lopez, who was sent there by an employment agency in New York City around 1951. Lopez left Tappan Hill and was replaced by his brother. Then Cubans, following Hernandez, began to fill job openings at the restaurant. Hernandez secured jobs for Ralph Hernandez (no relation), Francisco Corona, and Oliverio Ojito Fardales, all from Guayos.

  One of the first Guayos-owned homes in Brooklyn on Harry Street became the receiving station where fresh arrivals got their
footing. New migrants to Tarrytown went to Harry Street “to get news about family members back home and to learn about job [opportunities],” among other things. Unlike earlier Afro-Cuban immigrants to New York City, the Guayos Cubans who immigrated to the Tarrytowns tended to be white and economically better off.15

  Panamanian immigrants to Brooklyn in the 1960s offer an interesting contrast to the Tarrytown Cubans. George Priestly, an Afro-Panamanian sociologist who conducted about sixty interviews with Panamanian immigrants to the United States, was born in 1941 and raised in a working-class community in Panama City, Panama. His father was a native-born Afro-Panamanian, and his mother was a second-generation Afro-Panamanian of Caribbean descent who was bilingual but preferred to speak English. Most Afro-Panamanians of Priestly’s generation were raised speaking English with at least one parent in the home while attending a Hispanic public school system. There were also English-language schools in Panama City that many Afro-Panamanian children attended in evenings or over summer vacation. On weekend nights, African American GIs frequented black bars in Panama City, and many Afro-Panamanians were exposed to aspects of American culture through them. “You would see black folks hanging out, some speaking English, some speaking Spanish, some speaking Spanglish,” Priestly recalled. His older brother operated the first black-owned men’s boutique in Panama in the 1950s in the working-class community of Panama City. “Eighty percent of his customers were African American GIs,” Priestly says. This meant that his family, like many other Panamanian immigrants, was “pre-sensitized to African American culture” before migrating to New York.16

  Afro-Panamanians began immigrating to the Bushwick section of Brooklyn in the early 1960s. Priestly moved there in 1961 at the age of twenty. The Panamanian community at the time was quite small. Most of the earliest arrivals were Afro-Panamanians of West Indian descent. Over time, Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn became the center of New York’s Panamanian community. In part because of Panamanians’ familiarity with English and their exposure to American culture, the members of this community tended to interact with African Americans to a considerable degree. “There were two or three Panamanian families in Bushwick who introduced me to their African American and Puerto Rican friends,” Priestly recalls. “They would take me to clubs in Bed-Stuy [Bedford-Stuyvesant] and Crown Heights. And the clubs that they used to take us to were largely African American clubs.”17

  In the 1960s some of the African Americans in Brooklyn were also newcomers to New York, just having arrived from the South. But there were many fewer black southern migrants to the North in the post–World War II period than in the period following World War I. In the 1950s and 1960s New York City’s and Westchester County’s African American population consisted largely of folks born in the South, as well as the children and grandchildren of southerners. Metropolitan New York’s Latino community included old-timers with very rudimentary English language skills who had arrived before the Second World War and their bilingual children and grandchildren born in the Big Apple and its surrounding suburbs, but it also included a much larger group of more recent migrants from the Caribbean basin who tended to speak only Spanish.

  SEPARATE AND SHARED AMUSEMENTS OF SECOND-WAVE IMMIGRANTS

  The first Cubans who came to Westchester County in the 1950s were all single men. They tended to keep to themselves or to eat, drink, and dance with Puerto Ricans, going to their bars, clubs, and ballrooms in the Tarrytowns and Manhattan.18 By 1977, however, there were about three thousand Cubans living in the Tarrytowns, along with “a scattering of Dominicans, Venezuelans, and Puerto Ricans,” in all enough Spanish-speaking migrants to support two cocktail lounges on Cortland Street, La Embajada and La Teresa, and a Venezuelan bar and disco called La Arriba at 11 Beekman Avenue.19 The Latin cocktail lounges on Cortland Street were a stone’s throw from three African American bar and grills: De Carlo’s, the Upper-Class Men, and the Wonderful Bar. Cubans also founded their own social club in uptown North Tarrytown on Beekman Avenue. As the nature of these institutions makes clear, Latino immigrants and African Americans remained socially segregated in the Tarrytowns. “You would not see Hispanics in these [black-owned] bars back then,” says Alice Conqueran, as “there were not that many of them, and they stuck together” in their own shops and restaurants.20

  The exception to this pattern of social segregation in the Tarrytowns occurred among GM workers, who belonged to a comfortable shared subgroup as fellow workers and union members. On the GM assembly line, there was a leveling of the language and ethnic divisions that segregated older Hispanics and African Americans in the villages. The auto union to which all blue-collar workers at the plant belonged created a multiethnic working-class solidarity between African American and Hispanics that made them feel comfortable together.21

  Just as Hispanics and African Americans tended to enjoy separate entertainment in the Tarrytowns (with the exception of GM workers in certain contexts), they also frequented separate eateries. There were no black-owned- and -operated restaurants or luncheonettes in the Tarrytowns. (In fact, there are none today.) The only African Americans eateries were the bar and grills in town: Club Six, the Upper Class Men, the Wonderful Bar, and De Carlo’s. In addition, for religious African Americans, the black churches in the villages served not only as spiritual filling stations but, to some extent, as eateries.22 In contrast, Latin Americans had their own eateries. In North Tarrytown, there were already Puerto Rican–run Bodegas on Cortland Street, which by the late 1950s had become the center of the Puerto Rican community. Hispanic bodegas were small shops where drinks and food were sold for consumption on or off the premises.23 In addition to Puerto Rican shops and restaurants, there were also other Latino immigrant–owned establishments. In the 1970s there was the Cuban-owned Corona’s Luncheonette (discussed below) and Renaldo Barrios’s Nite and Day Delicatessen. Both of these Cuban eateries were located on Beekman Avenue in North Tarrytown, not far from the GM plant. The Nite and Day sold inexpensive Latin soul food takeout such as Cuban fritas (Cuban-style hamburgers), Cuban empanadas (a pastry filled with ground beef seasoned with cumin, garlic, green peppers, and raisins), and a traditional Cuban sandwich (a wedge of ham, roast pork, and Swiss cheese dressed with a blend of butter, mayonnaise, and mustard and grilled until the bread is crusty). North Tarrytown had a Dominican restaurant at 109 Beekman Avenue called El Jaravi. Signature Dominican soul food include dishes like mangu (a dish reminiscent of mashed potatoes made from plantains and other ingredients), octopus salad, arroz con pollo (rice and chicken), and arroz con camarones (rice and shrimp characteristically seasoned with cilantro in addition to other herbs and spices).24

  DOMINICAN MANGU

  (for six servings)

  3 large green plantains

  1½ oz. salt

  1 cup reserved plantain boiling liquid

  6 oz. sliced onion (white)

  6 oz sliced Cuban or Anaheim peppers

  2 oz. olive oil

  Wash the plantains then boil for about twenty minutes, depending on their size and age. Be sure they are fully cooked. Let cool, remove pulp from skins, and place in a bowl with the salt. Mash with the indicated amount of boiling liquid. Sauté onions and peppers in the olive oil. Put the mash in a serving dish and top with the sautéed onions and peppers, including the oil. Typically served with bacon and cheese.

  In Tarrytown, Guayos Cubans Jorge Pozas and Juan González ran bodegas on Main Street, while Pozas and Orestes Suarez operated the Lucky Seven Grocery at 31 Main Street. In addition to their bodegas, both Pozas and González operated restaurants. González ran the La Via, a bar and restaurant on Orchard Street, and Pozas (and later Orestes Suarez) ran the Lucky Seven, a luncheonette next door to his bodega.25 Cuban men milled around the Lucky Seven smoking, sipping café pico (a traditional Cuban coffee), eating plantain soup, yellow rice, black beans, and ropa vieja (shredded beef), and “discussing in Spanish the burning issues of the day.” Orestes Suarez explains, “This is the way of life in the ol
d country. . . . When work is done it is the custom to gather around and talk.”26

  As in the bars and social clubs, the language barrier in most of the area eateries inhibited the formation of friendships between Spanish-speaking immigrants and English-speaking African Americans. But African Americans did acquire a taste for Latin soul food and become regular takeout customers. The exception to this rule was Corona’s Luncheonette on Beekman Avenue, one block from the GM plant in North Tarrytown. Corona’s became an important space where five or more days a week blacks and Hispanics socialized over a good Cuban lunch. The owner, Francisco Corona, worked at GM for a brief period before opening his luncheonette. Corona’s became a designated restaurant for GM plant workers and the only eatery in the two villages where African American and Hispanic coworkers mingled. But, again, the customers at Corona’s shared a multiethnic class identity as unionized auto workers at the local GM plant. “I had customers from all parts of the world, Cubans, Venezuelans, all kinds of Hispanics” and “a lot of African Americans,” Corona recalls. He estimates that he had more African American customers than Hispanics because perhaps twice as many of them worked at the plant in the 1960s. The African American workers, recalls Francisco Corona, “really like our kind of food.”27

  FIGURE 8.1 1950 map of the streets occupied by blacks and Latinos in the Tarrytowns. Courtesy Tarrytown Historical Society.

  A fascinating contrast to the situation in the Tarrytowns is the relationships that developed between African Americans and Afro-Panamanians at informal eateries in Brooklyn. In the 1960s family dinners were a “big deal” in Brooklyn, recalls George Priestly. But there were also African American and Afro-Panamanian women who would cook out of their own homes, throwing “paid parties” to earn rent money. Priestly says that, as newcomers to New York, Afro-Panamanian emigrants loved paid parties because they “enlarged [their] contact with other folk” who showed them the ropes. The concept of going from one house to another eating and partying was “something we learned from African Americans,” Priestly remembers. He used to attend paid parties with an Afro-Panamanian friend nicknamed Charlie Boogaloo, who knew all the best spots and all the people that ran them. “When you went with Charlie, you could go in and eat or drink and then split,” Priestly says. “He would know about seven different places and we would just go from house to house paying a couple of dollars, eating, and then go back to our party or stay there.”28 Different house parties had different kinds of food. African American homes usually served up southern food. At an Afro-Panamanian home, there would be West Indian meat patties and rice and peas, chicken, fried plantains, potato salad, and Central American tamales.