Eat the City(41)
Sugar was the industry that elevated old New York, helping transform it into a cosmopolitan, powerful financial center in the 1700s. By the mid-nineteenth century, refineries on the Brooklyn waterfront were processing most of the sugar in the country. New York sugar fortunes were invested in gaslight, cable lines, railroads, and distant colonial empires. Local banks—including one that would become Citibank—emerged to support the new wealth. All of this prosperity depended on plants grown and harvested far away, first by slaves, then by their underpaid descendants. Eventually, New York’s sugar lust helped reshape islands including Puerto Rico, and the failures of the sugar crop helped drive those islanders to New York, following the path that sugar had laid for them.
THERE’S a standard way to organize a Puerto Rican community garden in New York. Build a small wooden brightly painted house—a casita—suitable for members to gather with friends, play dominoes, drink beers, and eat arroz con gandules. Out in front, place layers of carpets to form walkways so the feet don’t muddy in the swept and raked front yard. Keep a few chickens, for eggs, maybe some ducks and rabbits, or, very rarely, a goat. Hang a poster-size map of the island and many Puerto Rican flags. Play music. One thing you will not do—nowhere, no way, according to gardeners throughout the city—is plant sugarcane. Except in Jorge Torres’s community garden off 179th Street in the Bronx.
Watering his cane plant from a plastic Mountain Dew bottle filled with rainwater, Jorge wears a navy blue shirt with PUERTO RICO across the front, white sports socks, black wingtips, and dark nylon dress pants. He is only about five-two, but has a handsome face with chiseled features, mahogany skin, and large amber eyes. He works so fluently that at first I don’t notice that his left hand is missing three fingers—a construction accident, he says. He is valued in the garden, where he serves as coordinator. Once there was a different coordinator, but she was accused of graft—selling off soil and flowers that came free from the Parks Department. It turned ugly. Acrimonious meetings were held until Jorge took her place and worked to gain people’s trust. “Mr. Torres,” the local community planning board wrote, “has the overwhelming support and cooperation of the majority of his neighbors.” He is similarly committed to his family—after raising their children, he and his wife, Margo, adopted more young relatives whose parents “had vices,” as Jorge delicately puts it. His granddaughter stops by to hand off her own child for babysitting, and Jorge nuzzles his baby great-grandson cheek to cheek.
On party days in the garden, he arrives at six a.m. to line up a row of pig shoulders on a spit. As people appear, he fills plastic cups and circulates a tray of chips, popcorn, and Cheez Doodles. He cranks up the generator-powered bachata, salsa, merengue, bomba and plena loud enough to project a block away refrains about the enchantments of a bygone Puerto Rico. In the casita, his friend Socky, a grandmother in a silky purple halter and black kitten heels, twirls and waves her black skirt as she dances.
No one pays much attention to a blue plastic pot of seedlings that Jorge carefully tends, but each spring he plants a piece of sugarcane in the garden among the squash plants. When it’s tall enough, he cuts it to eat, and plants another bit. The sugar waxes and wanes, a lone stalk of cane in the South Bronx.
Sugarcane is grown from cuttings from another cane plant—in Jorge’s case, a piece his daughter brought home from a visit to Puerto Rico. She expected her father to eat it and taste the island. Instead, he stuck it in a planter in his three-bedroom apartment, propped it up on the windowsill, and hoped that glass-deflected light and lukewarm tap water would mimic the hot sun and rain of the tropics.
His friends and relatives were skeptical—New York City’s climate is far from optimal for cane, which requires up to eighteen months to grow and cannot survive a sudden drop in temperature. The average winter temperature in the Bronx is near freezing, unlike the average of 80 degrees in Puerto Rico. But the cane quickly grew tall and strong enough for Jorge to take cuttings for new plants. “We would get annoyed—there was so much cane growing on the windowsill, we couldn’t see outside,” said his daughter Nydia.
The party guests in the garden understand Jorge’s attachment to cane. They are people from Puerto Rico’s sugar world—Glory, originally from the steaming southern coastal city of Guayama, so perfectly suited to growing cane that most of it was subsumed into a giant plantation; María, from the western city of San Germán, where her father’s first job was to steer the oxen that pulled the sugar carts; Sylvia, from southern Salinas, where her brother knocked his teeth out while working in a cane field. Jorge himself comes from the northeastern coffee and tobacco highlands of Aguas Buenas, an area that converted to more profitable sugarcane before he was born. Sugar veterans like them turn up all over the city—Haitians in Crown Heights, Dominicans in Washington Heights, Jamaicans in the North Bronx come to escape the hardships of labor in the cane fields and cane-based economies that produced less and less cane and provided less and less sustenance.
“Es un orgullo,” says María Torres, Jorge’s friend, admiring his sugar plant—it’s a point of pride. “We had sugar all over our island. And all that sugar came here,” she says, with a sweeping gesture that reaches far beyond the nearby cabbages and pigeon peas, beyond the neighborhood of six-story buildings repeating themselves block after block, to take in all of New York.