Book: Hispanic New York a sourcebook by Claudio Ivan Remeseira
HISPANIC NEW YORK
Hispanic New York es una antología de la presencia de los inmigrantes en la ciudad de New York, se hace evidente en las calles, los centros de trabajo, las escuelas y los barrios residenciales. Pero también se reflejan en la historia de la ciudad, cuya exhaustiva en los eventos de la vida diaria nos permite realizar una radiografía sociológica de la historia social, cultural, demográfica, como una de las ciudades con mayor diversidad étnica, cultural donde se hablan más de 170 idiomas, una ciudad que nunca duerme, la gran manzana, el Melting Pot, la ciudad de las diásporas, la ciudad por la lucha de los derechos civiles, la capital del Mundo.
El escritor Tom Wolfe dijo con respecto a la ciudad e hizo la referencia siguiente “la cultura parece simplemente estar en el aire, como parte del clima.” La inmigración siempre ha sido controversial en Estados Unidos. Hace más de dos siglos preocupaba de que muchos inmigrantes alemanes abrumaran la cultura predominantemente británica de Estados Unidos. A mediados del siglo XIX los inmigrantes irlandeses eran despreciados como borrachos y perezosos, sin mencionar a otros grupos católicos. A principios del siglo XX se creía que una ola de "nuevos inmigrantes"-polacos, italianos, rusos judíos-eran muy diferentes como para alguna vez ser asimilados en la vida norteamericana. Hoy en día, los mismos temores son esgrimidos contra los inmigrantes de Latinoamérica, Centro América, Caribe y Asia, pero los actuales críticos están equivocados, tal y como lo estuvieron sus contrapartes en épocas anteriores. La inmigración no está acabando con el experimento estadounidense, sino que es una parte integral de éste. Olas exitosas de inmigrantes han mantenido a la Gran Manzana demográficamente joven, han enriquecido nuestra cultura y han contribuido a la capacidad productiva de la ciudad, aumentando nuestra influencia en el mundo y ha hecho de la ciudad de New York la capital del mundo, una ciudad que nunca duerme donde fluyen las culturas.
Recopilando materiales, Claudio Iván Remeseira, presenta de manera convincente el caso de Nueva York como paradigma de la latinización del país. Su antología combina fuentes primarias con ensayos académicos y periodísticos sobre historia, demografía, estudios raciales y étnicos, música, arte, historia, literatura, lingüística y religión. La experiencia de Nueva York en particular y la experiencia de los Estados Unidos en general, tal como es reflejada y transformada por su componente multiétnico y la diversidad cultural de la ciudad de Nueva York. Este libro se convierte en una lectura que enriquece la vida de Nueva York en la Era de la Globalización del siglo XXI y constituye una guía bibliográfica moderna.
Jorge Yeshayahu Gonzales-Lara, Sociologist
La Diaspora Peruana
A Sourcebook
EDITED BY CLAUDIO IVÁN REMESEIRA
With a foreword by ANDREW DELBANCO
Over the past few decades, a huge wave of immigration turned New York into a microcosm of the Americas and enhanced its role as the crossroads of the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds.
Yet far from being an alien group within a “mainstream” and supposedly pure “Anglo” America, people referred to as Hispanics or Latinos have been part and parcel of New York since the beginning of the city’s history.
Along with Hispanics in the rest of the country, they represent what the quintessential American (and New Yorker) poet Walt Whitman once celebrated as “the Spanish element of our nationality…”
Hispanic New York presents for the first time a comprehensive view of that history. Combining primary sources with scholarly and journalistic essays on demography, race, ethnicity, art history, literature, music, linguistics, and religion, by authors ranging from historical figures such as Jose Martí, Bernardo Vega, and Walt Whitman, to contemporary writers such as Jack Agüeros, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Ed Morales, among others, the book highlights the main contributions made by people of Hispanic descent to New York’ multicultural heritage.
Hispanic New York is the first anthology to offer a sweeping account of that multifaceted heritage.
By offering a collection of texts that are required reading for any informed conversation on some of the most pressing social and political debates of our time, this unique volume speaks to the New York and the American experience, as reflected and transformed by its Latino components.
INTRODUCTION: “NEW YORK CITY AND THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW HEMISPHERIC IDENTITY”
In his 6000-word introductory essay, the author displays the rationale of this book and makes a compelling case for New York City as a paradigm for the country's Latinization. This essay also contains:
• A summary of the ALL statistical information available on Latinos and New York up to the 2010 Census;
• A chart of New York’s Hispanic population, by country of origin;
• A roadmap to the scholarly debates on Latino and pan-Latino issues;
• An in-depth discussion on national and hemispheric identity, or what it means to be American. (For excerpts from the introductory essay, please see attachment.)
THE SELECTIONS
This book is divided in two parts:
Part One (”PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES”) portrays the historical development of New York’s Hispanic population, alongside a discussion of key racial and ethnic issues. It consists of:
• Gabriel Haslip-Viera’s account of the successive immigration waves from Latin America and the Caribbean to the New York area from the early 19th century to the 1990s
• José Martí’s quintaessential “Our America” and “A Vindication of Cuba,” a spirited rebuttal of the racist attacks in the press of his time against Cubans – an essay that sounds eerily familiar today
• An excerpt from the memoirs of Puerto Rican labor union and political activist Bernardo Vega, one of the fundamental sources for the history of the social and political struggles of Puerto Ricans and other Latino communities at the turn of the 20th century
• Jack Agüeros’s “Halfway to Dick and Jane: A Puerto Rican Pilgrimage,” an autobiographical piece that expands Vega’s everyday-life depiction of East Harlem’s El Barrio into the 1940s, right before the Great Migration that turned Hispanic New York into a distinctively Puerto Rican city
• Roberto Suro’s “New York: Teetering on the Heights,” the widely-cited and controversial chronicle of the history of the Dominican enclave of Upper Manhattan
• Milagros Ricourt and Ruby Danta’s research on the interactions between recent immigrants from Mexico, Central America and South America and long-time Dominican and Puerto Rican residents in Queens—a model to understand the creation of a pan-Latino identity across the nation
• Clara Rodríguez’s analysis of the racialized status of Hispanics in the United States vis-a-vis Latin American racial classification systems, and of Latinos on the country’s white-black self-perception
• Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert’s presentation of the Afro-Caribbean religions, a crucial component of Latino cultural life
• Theodore S. Beardsley’s “The Hispanic Impact Upon the United States,” a timely reminder that the Hispanic presence in North America predated in more than a century the arrival of the first British colonists
• Virginia Sanchez Korrol’s reconstruction of the historical line connecting María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, Luisa Capetillo, and Antonia Pantoja, towering representatives of a centuries-long struggle of Latinas for social justice and education
• Walt Whitman’s “The Spanish Element in Our Nationality,” probably the most compelling argument ever made in defense of the Hispanic contribution to the American nationality
Part Two (“CULTURAL HYBIDAZATIONS”) is divided into two sections: Language and Literature: A Bilingual Tradition, and Music and Art: Latino, Latin American, American. The selections gathered there include:
• Dionisio Cañas’ essay on the history of Hispanic arts and letters in New York—the most complete and thorough survey of those issues published to date--, with an update on literary translation by Orlando José Hernández
• Carmen Dolores Hernández’s introduction to the history of Puerto Rican English-language and of the class, racial, and linguistic conflicts between the Puerto Rico’s cultural elite and the island’s Nuyorican offspring
• Ana Celia Zentella’s seminal article “Spanish in New York,” with the definitive clarification of the nature of Spanglish
• Antonio Muñoz Molina’s forceful description of the only-in-New-York-found diversity of Spanish-language dialects and accents
• Frank M. Figueroa’s overview of New York’s Latino musical scene during the first half of the 20th century, and Ed Morales’s report on Afro-Caribbean rhythms and the origins of Salsa
• Paul Berman’s analysis of the connections between Mexican music and the U.S. balad and on what this means for American identity
• Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s view on Jean-Michel Basquiat and the encounter between the transcultural, multiracial, and multilingual Afro-Caribbean heritage and the Western art world
• Luis Pérez-Oramas’s essay on the concept of Latin America and its representation in the arts, as well as of its place in U.S. mainstream art institutions
• And, finally, the editor’s own contributions to this volume: an essay on ARCHER MILTON HUNTINGTON, founder of the Hispanic Society of America, and of the role played by this institution in the cultural dialogue between U.S., Spain, and Latin America; and and an account of the New York sojourn of legendary Tango singer CARLOS GARDEL.
The Most Comprehensive bibliography. In conjunction with the works cited at the end of each selection, the 30-page-long FURTHER READING list provides the most thorough bibliographical guide available today on the issues covered by this book.
A Full Inventory of Names and Subjects. The INDEX OF NAMES organizes the wealth of historical information contained in this volume by offering a sort of directory book of the city’s centuries-long Hispanic history. Similarly, a highly detailed INDEX OF SUBJECTS has been devised to optimize the search of concepts scattered throughout the different selections and to facilitate comparisons with other books.
For table of contents, click on http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14818-4/hispanic-new-york/tableOfContents
THE CONTRIBUTORS
Jack Agüeros is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, TV script writer, translator and community activist. From 1976 to 1986, he was director of El Museo del Barrio. His publications include the collection of short stories Dominoes and Other Stories, the book of poems Correspondence Between the Stonehaulers, and a translation of Julia de Burgos’ complete poetry.
Theodore S. Beardsley, Jr. was director of the Hispanic Society of America from 1965 to 1995 and member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language. He has published numerous articles on the Hispanic cultural heritage of the United States, literary criticism, linguistics and music. His most recent publication is a complete discography of Cuban composer and pianist Ernesto Lecuona, published by the Hispanic Society of America.
Paul Berman is a writer on politics and literature whose articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the New Republic (where he is a contributing editor), the New Yorker, Slate, the Village Voice, Dissent. Letras Libres, and various other publications. Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, his books include Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath.
Dionisio Cañas is a Spanish poet who lived in New York City from 1972 to 2005 and taught Hispanic Literature and Modern Spanish Poetry at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Poet and the City: New York and The Hispanic Writers and of several books of poetry, among them And he began not to speak, and The ballad of the man-woman. He currently resides in his natal town of Tomelloso in La Mancha, Spain.
Ruby Danta has served as coordinator of the Translation Service Program at Queens College and Director of the Latin American Cultural Center of Queens. She is the co-author of Hispanas de Queens: Latino Panethnicity in a New York City Neighborhood.
Margarite Fernández Olmos is Matthew J. Fantaci Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is the author of editor or co-editor of several books, among them (2001) and Creole Religions of the Caribbean (with Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, 2003) and the anthologies The Latino Reader: An American Literary Tradition from 1542 to the Present (1997) and U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers (2000, with Harold Augenbraum)
Frank M. Figueroa was a disc-jockey at several New York City radio stations during the late 1940s and early 1950s and led a 12-piece Latin band that played in some of New York’s most famous ballrooms. He then earned a Ph.D at Columbia University and worked for more than 30 years as a college professor of Spanish and Television. Among his books and articles are The Encyclopedia of Latin American Music in New York; Cancionero de Augustín Lara; Doña Pepa: My Puerto Rican Grandmother; Glossary of Afro-Caribbean Terms; Latin American Music Almanac; Machito and His Afro-Cubans; Noro Morales: Latin Piano Man; and The Unforgettable Tito Rodriguez.
Gabriel Haslip-Viera is Chair of the Department of Sociology, City College, City University of New York. He was director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (1997-2000) and Chair of the former Department of Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at City College (1993-1995 and 1985-1991). Editor of The Taíno Revival: Critical Perspectives on Puerto Rican Identity and Cultural Politics and co-editor of Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the making of New York City and Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition, among other books and articles.
Carmen Dolores Hernández is the author of several books, including a biography of anthropologist Ricardo Alegría and two in which she interviews Puerto Rican writers, both those who live in the United States, Puerto Rican Voices in English. Interviews with Writers, and those from the island: A viva voz: entrevistas a escritores puertorriqueños. Since 1981 she writes weekly book reviews and articles on culture for El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico’s largest newspaper . She has also the editor of the cultural magazines "Foro" and "Letras".
Orlando José Hernández is a poet, translator and critic who teaches at Hostos Community College, City University of New York. He is currently working on the recovery, compilation and publication of texts written in New York City by 19th-century Puerto Rican philosopher and educator Eugenio María de Hostos.
José Martí (1853-1895) was a poet, journalist, and leader in the movement for Cuban independence. He is a central figure in Latin American literary and political history. His writings in New York City, where he lived for fifteen years, offer profound insight into the Gilded Age in U.S. history.
Ed Morales is a Brooklyn-based journalist and poet whose work has been featured in numerous national newspapers and magazines. His writings include the books Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America and The Latin Beat: The Rhythms and Roots of Latin Music, from Bossa Nova to Salsa and Beyond.
Antonio Muñoz Molina is a prominent Spanish novelist and essayist, former director of of the New York branch of Instituto Cervantes, and a member of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. Margaret Sayers Peden’s English-language translation of Muñoz Molina’s novel Sepharad won PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 2004. He divides his time between Madrid and New York.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar. She is the author of Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (named 2004 Choice Outstanding Book), the editor of four academic books, including None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era, and director of the films Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican and For the Record: Guam and World War II. She is also a founding board member and past chair of NALIP, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. She currently teaches Latino and Caribbean literatures and cultures at Columbia University. In 2005 she was named one of Hispanic Business’s “100 Most Influential Latinos”.
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is a professor of Caribbean culture and literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Program in Africana Studies at Vassar College, where she holds the Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair. She is the author of Literatures of the Caribbean (2009), Creole Religions of the Caribbean (2003, with Margarite Fernández Olmos) and Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (1999), and co-editor of a number of collections of essays, most notably Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean (1997) and Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (2001). She is currently working on a biography of José Martí.
Luis Pérez-Oramas is The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where he has has organized, curated, and consulted on many exhibitions, including New Perspectives of Latin American Art: Selections from a Decade of Acquisitions (2007-2008); Armando Reverón (2007) with John Elderfield; and Transforming Chronologies: An Atlas of Drawings (2006). Outside exhibitions include Latin American and Caribbean Art: Selected Highlights from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (New York State Museum, 2008); and MoMA at El Museo: Latin American & Caribbean Art from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (El Museo del Barrio, 2004), co-organized with Gary Garrels and Deborah Cullen. In addition to teaching and writing several books of art history and criticism, Pérez-Oramas he has been a member of the board of directors at Venezuela’s National Art Gallery and curator of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection.
Milagros Ricourt is Chair of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York. She is the author of Dominicans in New York City: Power From the Margins and is co-author of Hispanas de Queens: Latino Panethnicity in a New York City Neighborhood.
Clara Rodríguez is a Professor of Sociology at Fordham University’s College at Lincoln Center. She is the author of ten books, including Heroes, Lovers and Others: The Story of Latinos in Hollywood (2004) and Changing Race: Latinos, The Census and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (2000). She has written over fifty articles on Latinos in the United States and most recently co-authored of The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (2007). She has also been a consultant to "Dora the Explorer" and "Sesame Street."
Virginia Sánchez Korrol is Puerto Rican and Latino Studies Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. In 2007 she received the New York Public Library Award for Best of Reference for Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, co-edited with Vicki L. Ruiz, professor at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Sánchez Korrol is currently working on a book on Puerto Rican and Cuban women in New York during the movement for Antillean independence.
Roberto Suro is a journalist who wrote for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time magazine and The Chicago Tribune, among other newspapers and magazines. He is the former director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a research organization in Washington D.C. which he founded in 2001 as a project of the Annenberg School for Communication. Currently he is a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.
Bernardo Vega (1885-1965) was a trade-union leader and political activist in New York’s Puerto Rican community during the first half of the twentieth century. His memoirs are a key source for the study of that period.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is arguably the greatest poet ever born in the United States. His Leaves of Grass cast its influence beyond languages and national boundaries.
Ana Celia Zentella, a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, is an anthropologist and linguist and an authority U.S. Latino varieties of Spanish and English and bilingualism. Her book Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York won the 1998 Book Prize of the British Association of Applied Linguistics, and the 1999 Book Award of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists of the American Anthropology Association.
THE TRANSLATORS
Esther Allen is the co-director of PEN American Center’s World Voices Festival. Her translations include The Selected Writings of José Martí, Lands of Memory by Felisberto Hernández, Dark Back of Time by Javier Marías, The Tale of Rose, by Consuelo de Saint Exupèry, In her absence, by Antonio Muñoz Molina, and Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution.
Juan Flores is Professor in the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CUNY) and in the Sociology Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. One of the leading Latino intellectuals of the United States, Flores is the author of the seminal From Bomba to Hip Hop. Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity and of The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribbean Latino Tales of Learning and Turning, among many other books and publications.
Colman Hogan has a background on theater and translation, and is a lecturer in English at Ryerson University, Toronto. He has recently co-edited (with Marta Marín-Dòmine) The Camp: Narratives of Internment and Exclusion.
Dan Newland is an Ohio-born writer and translator who has lived in South America since 1973. Besides free-lancing for U.S. and British publications, he worked for thirteen years at the internationally award-winning Buenos Aires Herald, where, upon leaving, he was managing editor.
THE EDITOR
Claudio Iván Remeseira (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1960.) Writer and journalist. Director of the Hispanic New York Project of The American Studies Program, Columbia University. In 2005, he was the editor for the prototype of The New York Times’ international edition in Argentina. From 2004 to 2007, he wrote literary criticism and book reviews for Diario Rumbo (San Antonio, Texas); in the US, his journalistic and literary work has also appeared in Viva Magazine and Hora Hispana (Daily News) and El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico). From 1998 to 2005, contributor to La Nación, Argentina’s second largest-selling daily. He also held positions in the following Argentine media: Temas magazine, managing editor; Mercado Semanal, managing editor; Green Letter, environmental supplement of Apertura, Argentina’s leading business magazine, copy editor; Página/12, a mass-circulation daily, contributor; and Noticias magazine, contributor. Former Radio Continental correspondent in New York City (2001-2004) and anchor and producer for the radio talk show Aunque Usted No lo lea (1997-2001) and the TV cable show Alerta Verde (1994). B.A. (Licenciatura in Philosophy), University of Buenos Aires (1990); M.A. in Journalism, Columbia University (2002).From 2002 to 2005, adjunct professor of Composition and Rhetoric at The College of New Rochelle and Boricua College, New York City. From 1991 to 2001, assistant professor of Social and Political Theory at the School of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires. Distinctions and awards: Maria Moors Cabot Scholarship (2001-2002), Argentine Publishers Association Awards (First Prize in the Economic Journalism category, 2000; Second Prize in the Environmental Journalism category), Citibank Journalistic Excellence Award for Economic and Business Journalism (2000). He is the author of an unpublished book of short stories and is currently finishing his first novel and editing a book on the Hispanic cultural heritage of New York City.
A New York-based award-winning journalist, writer and cultural critic. Founder and Director of the Hispanic New York Project, an academic and public interest initiative hosted by Columbia University’s American Studies Program. Member of the Advisory Board of the Library & Archives of El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College, City University of New York, and member of the board of Pamar,Inc., the parent organization of the Latin American Cultural Week of New York. His critical and literary work has appeared in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Salmagundi, Primera Revista Latinoamericana de Libros, Diario Rumbo, Hora Hispana (Daily News), El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico), El País (Spain) and La Nación, Página/12 and Lilith magazine (Argentina), among other publications. He also publishes Hispanic New York, a blog on Latino & Latin American cultural and current events news (http://hispanicnewyorkproject.blogspot.com/)
HISPANIC NEW YORK edited by Claudio Iván Remeseira (576 pages) paper copies ISBN 978-0-231-14819-1 regular price $29.95, NOW $24.00. Cloth copies ISBN 978-0-231-14818-4 regular price $89.50, now $71.60. Regular shipping and handling costs apply.
