Eat the City(48)

Banks such as the National City Bank—later to become Citibank—helped finance the operations. The City Bank of New York had been conceived in 1812 by a group of men including Frederick Havemeyer, and prominent sugar traders and refiners—including Henry O. Havemeyer—served on the board for generations, offering credit for Caribbean sugar. In the 1930s, when sugar prices plummeted, National City almost went bust.

Change came even to isolated Aguas Buenas, where Jorge Torres’s great-grandparents’ generation watched pasture and underbrush suddenly sprout cane. In neighboring Caguas, Belgian investors built a new sugar mill, Central Santa Juana, where Jorge Torres’s sugar would one day be processed. The company lawyer drew up contracts with local farmers to produce cane. Yet the farmers began to realize that even when sugar prices soared on the New York market, the profits did not reach them. They raised funds to build their own, independent central, which they called La Defensa, hoping it would fend off foreign imperialism. Instead, La Defensa soon closed, and the Belgian mill eventually came into the possession of National City Bank, the New York–based, marble-colonnaded citadel of sugar power.

The old records of the Coffee and Sugar Exchange were destroyed in the collapse of the World Trade Center, and so now it is difficult to confirm exactly where Jorge Torres’s sugar was shipped when it left the port of San Juan—but it’s safe to say that some reached the gargantuan refinery on the Brooklyn waterfront.


SUGAR never really generated well-being for Puerto Ricans. From 1910 to 1934, the weight of the sugar produced in Puerto Rico more than tripled, but the number of people employed in the industry remained roughly the same. Sugar harvesting included a dead season each year, when there was no work, and more than 60 percent of the workers of Puerto Rico were unemployed either all or part of the year, said Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the governor of Puerto Rico and the son of the president. Many working people earned little; for decades, cane cutters’ wages stayed level, lower than elsewhere in the Caribbean. The average daily perperson food budget for the family of a cane cutter was only twelve cents—“four cents more than the food expense required for feeding a hog in the United States!” noted one reformer. Some 71,000 people left the island between 1909 and 1940, mostly to find work, many in New York.

They came at first by steamship, on vessels such as the Borin-quen, the Coamo, and the Marine Tiger, following the route established by the sugar executives and financiers and, of course, the raw sugar itself. The trip began in San Juan—passenger ships docked in the harbor beside cargo terminals, where workers loaded sugar, molasses, and rum. People planned and saved for years to pay the cost of a ticket. Men boarded the ships in their best suits and hats, women in heels with matching handbags, girls in frilly white dresses, and boys in creased short pants, as though already, on the sea, they were living the better life of Nueva York. Card games and Bible readings and formal dancing and canciones with drums and guitars—and seasickness—passed the hours on the choppy trip up the Atlantic.

In a previous era, Spanish Caribbean immigration to New York had two notable strains: sugar attachés and revolutionaries. Merchants sent their sons to study at Fordham University in the Bronx, known as the Colegio de San Juan. Political agitators against Spain established New York newspapers such as Patria and La Revolución. But that epoch was over—the newest arrivals just wanted work. They settled near cargo jobs at the waterfront and by factories and cigar workshops—the latter of which employed lectores to read novels aloud to the workers, just like in the Caribbean. They bought winter coats on credit from Old Man Markofsky and ate chuletas, or pork chops, at restaurants such as El Paraíso. They slurped shaved ice bathed in sweet tropical fruit syrups, just like in the town plazas back home. In underheated, tight-packed tenements, musicians composed plena songs of longing for the rural tropics, such as “Yo me vuelvo a mi bohío” (I’m Going Back to My Hut). It’s not clear whether that idyllic life still existed, even in Puerto Rico. Some of what passed for homesickness in New York was nostalgia for a previous version of the island, before the dollar economy, before sugar.

Newcomers kept coming. Salaries in Puerto Rico stayed roughly level for decades, while the salaries Puerto Ricans could earn on the mainland jumped dramatically, amplifying the rewards of departure. As city factories recruited workers, tens of thousands began arriving each year. Billboards in San Juan and Ponce advertised a “Job and Home in New York,” and Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor set up an office on East 116th Street in Manhattan to find jobs for the unemployed. By 1960, Puerto Ricans made up 8 percent of New York City residents.

Puerto Rican cane workers helped create migration by air. After World War II, former GI pilots bought battered army surplus planes from the War Assets Administration to fly unscheduled wildcat trips from San Juan to New York. Bare-headed laborers wearing short-sleeved work shirts sat on beach chairs on the windowless planes chartered by particular firms as though ready to leap straight to work in the field, which essentially is what they did. The trips could cost as little as thirty-five dollars a ticket, but they were subsidized by “employment agents” proffering sometimes nonexistent New York jobs and charging fees that could consume a cane worker’s life savings. The dubious charters were soon replaced by frequent, cheap airline flights on DC-4 planes collectively known as “la guagua aérea,” or the flying bus. Tens of thousands of Puerto Rican workers flew the 1,600 miles from San Juan to Idlewild Airport in Queens to harvest northeastern crops during sugarcane’s springtime dead season, then back to the island for the cane harvest. A night on the hot, slow, bumpy, unpressurized Thrift Flight from San Juan to Idlewild cost only $52.50, though English-speaking tourists who inquired were advised to spend the extra $11.50 and travel in comfort on a pressurized plane. Whereas in the 1930s, the annual rate of migration had been 1,800, by the 1950s, 43,000 people were leaving Puerto Rico for the United States mainland each year.