This essay examines Bernardo Vega's Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York as both a personal account and a political document. The paper explores Vega's observations of Puerto Rican immigrant life in early twentieth-century New York, focusing on the social structure of cigar factories, the community's ties to the Cuban revolutionary movement, the conditions that drove Puerto Rican migration during World War I, and the community's struggle for labor rights and social recognition. The essay also considers how Vega's work functions as an act of cultural preservation, recording a history that might otherwise be lost.
Memoirs of Bernardo Vega, subtitled A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York, is an autobiography spanning the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Although it is classified as an autobiography, it contains relatively little about Vega's personal life. It is instead a collection of observations he made about life in his corner of New York City. The book remains timely today because it offers detailed insight into the immigration system then in place, and many of the issues the city faced at that time closely resemble debates about immigration that continue today.
Vega himself was an immigrant who arrived in New York City in 1916 and began working in a cigar factory. At the time, factories employed readers — literate individuals who would read aloud to workers during their shifts. These readers occupied a higher social class than the factory workers by virtue of their literacy. The image Vega presents is reminiscent of the play Anna in the Tropics, in which a reader recites Anna Karenina to women working on a factory floor.
As Vega depicts them, these factories had a more complex social structure than an outsider might assume. The factory had a committee that raised funds to support the revolution in the Antilles, and a press representative whose job was to distribute workers' newspapers from different parts of the country. Workers held lengthy conversations about the pressing issues of their day, which centered primarily on the revolution in Cuba. Vega was particularly drawn to the life of one of the revolution's principal leaders, JosĂ© MartĂ, who raised considerable money in support of the cause.
Vega documents how the Puerto Rican population in the United States grew significantly during World War I. Puerto Rico's large population could find some relief if a substantial number of people emigrated, while those emigrants could find work in New York and elsewhere in the United States, where labor shortages created by the war had opened new opportunities. The reasons many Puerto Ricans came to the United States were similar in important ways to the reasons many Mexicans immigrate today: the search for economic opportunity when little existed in their homeland.
However, Puerto Ricans found themselves accorded only second-class status in their new home. Vega recognized the source of this marginalization and attempted to explain it to a teacher, noting how Puerto Ricans were following a path taken by other ethnic groups in the United States, though under distinct circumstances:
"I responded by pointing out that, unlike our Hungarian and German classmates, Puerto Ricans do not really have any citizenship. Outside of Puerto Rico our natural citizenship is not recognized. Without any citizenship to give up, it would seem pretty hard for us to become American." (Vega 27)
Puerto Ricans were not granted citizenship by law until 1917, and even then their status was precarious, subject to being rescinded at any time. Learn more about the history of Puerto Rican citizenship under the Jones Act, which formalized but also complicated that legal standing.
Cigar workers sought to make themselves heard first through their newspapers and then through strikes. As Vega explains:
"Struggles for legal status, equal wages, and social acceptance"
"Memoir as act of cultural preservation and political affirmation"
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