Speaking Spanish in the US. Janet M. Fuller
Ricans
Unlike Mexicans, Puerto Ricans are US citizens (as we discussed above), and thus they do not need visas to migrate to the US. This, together with the geographic proximity of Puerto Rico to the US, allows for the vaivén (‘back-and-forth’) cited by García et al. (2001). Not surprisingly, migration from Puerto Rico has been influenced by labor market forces in the US as well as conditions on the island. Push and pull factors converged at the turn of the 20th century when two hurricanes devastated Puerto Rico’s sugar industry; plantation owners recruited newly jobless Puerto Rican workers to Hawaii (then a US territory) as they sought to meet the new market demand for Hawaiian sugar (López, 2005). As a result, Puerto Ricans are the largest Latinx subgroup in Hawaii (ACS 2017 Five-year estimates).
According to Whalen (2005), Puerto Rican migration has followed a general pattern in which US occupation caused economic changes and displacement, Puerto Ricans were recruited as a cheap source of labor (but not always welcomed where they settled), and then the existence of Puerto Rican communities served to attract new migrants to those areas. For example, despite earning high profits, Puerto Rican sugar plantations cut wages, which together with high unemployment and the ensuing social and political unrest, pushed migrants to head for the US (Gonzalez, 2011). By the 1920s large Puerto Rican neighborhoods had been established in New York, and in the 1930s and 1940s communities were established elsewhere in the Northeast, including Philadelphia and Boston (Lipski, 2008). So too, Puerto Rican communities were established in Lorain, Ohio and Chicago, largely as a result of labor agencies recruiting workers in Puerto Rico and offering airfare and jobs on the mainland (Gonzalez, 2011). During the ‘Great Migration’ of the 1950s, approximately 470,000 Puerto Ricans (over one-fifth of the population) migrated to the US mainland (Culliton-Gonzalez, 2008). In the 1960s Puerto Ricans were recruited to work on farms in the Midwest, upstate New York and throughout the Northeast (Gonzalez, 2011), but New York has remained the cultural heart of mainland Puerto Ricans, with Nuyoricans maintaining a prominent symbolic position in the imaginary of the Puerto Rican diaspora (Lipski, 2008).
In the 21st century, long-standing economic problems were exacerbated by deindustrialization, austerity and changes to federal tax policy, as well as constraints on debt restructuring related to Puerto Rico’s status as a territory rather than a US state or an independent country. In Puerto Rico, 45% of the population live below the poverty line, more than twice the rate for Mississippi and almost three times the national average (ACS 2017 Five-year estimates). Given the difficult conditions, and an unemployment rate more than twice that of the mainland US, almost half a million people left Puerto Rico for the mainland between 2006 and 2014 (Mora et al., 2017). To make matters worse, in 2017 Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and left much of the island without electricity for months. In Maria’s wake, over 400,000 Puerto Ricans (approximately 6% of the island’s population) departed (Echenique & Melgar, 2018). Many headed to established Puerto Rican communities in the Northeast and Chicago, but over half went to Florida, especially the Orlando area. Political prognosticators have debated the potential impact of Puerto Rican voters on Florida elections, and this remains to be determined. Further, in 2018 as many as three-quarters of those fleeing Hurricane Maria had returned, although the infrastructure problems and financial situation were far from resolved (Echenique & Melgar, 2018). Updated information (in Spanish and English) on the political situation in Puerto Rico can be found on the Centro de Periodsmo Investigativo’s website at http://periodismoinvestigativo.com.
Cubans
The first Cuban settlements in the US date to the early 19th century, not only prior to the Spanish-American War (1898) but also before Spain ceded Florida to the US. In other words, Cubans began settling in Florida when both Cuba and Florida were both still under Spanish control. Immigration accelerated in the period leading up to and following the war, with 100,000 people, almost 10% of Cuba’s population, leaving for the US (Gonzalez, 2011). As we discussed earlier, at the end of the Spanish-American war in 1898, Spain ceded Cuba to the US. Although the US granted independence to Cuba in 1902, it remained involved in Cuban affairs and imposed several conditions, including permission to build several naval stations (the one at Guantanamo Bay is still in operation) and a permanent right to intervene in Cuba. US forces occupied Cuba from 1906 to 1909.
In the early 20th century, at the same time as a romanticized version of the Southwest’s Spanish past was being marketed to tourists and newcomers (as we discussed earlier), Florida also promoted an exotic tropical version of its Spanish history and architecture (Lynch, 2018). US tourists saw Miami almost as an extension of Havana and they regularly visited both cities on the same trip (Lynch, 2018), while elite Cubans came to the US for vacations, medical treatment and to attend college (Gonzalez, 2011). But things were less sunny for regular Cubans, who endured inequality, corruption and increasingly repressive governments, such as the 1950s dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Batista, who had earlier served as elected president, returned to power through a military coup with the support of the US. The corruption and violence of the Batista regime led another 63,000 Cubans to emigrate; like their predecessors they settled primarily in Florida (Lipski, 2008).
In 1959 the Cuban Revolution toppled the Batista regime and brought Fidel Castro and his communist party to power. This led to an even greater exodus, as the revolutionary government nationalized land, housing and businesses, and violently cracked down on dissent. Despite the restrictions on emigration imposed by Castro’s regime, in the 1960s almost half a million people left Cuba for the US, settling primarily in the Miami area. Miami’s Calle Ocho became the symbolic center of Cubans in the US and is still considered an obligatory stop for national as well as local politicians trying to garner their support. Roughly three-quarters of Cubans and Cuban Americans live in Florida, but there are also significant Cuban communities in New York and New Jersey (Batalova & Zong, 2017).
People who left Cuba in the wake of the revolution tended to be wealthier, Whiter, more educated and to have more technical skills than the general Cuban population as well as in comparison to other Latin American immigrants (Alfaraz, 2014; Gonzalez, 2011). Their affluence and ethnoracial identity gave them a leg up upon arrival in the US, as did the preferential treatment they received from the US government as a result of their status as refugees from communism. Specifically, until the mid-1990s, Cubans who reached US waters were allowed to stay in the US and were put through an expedited process that gave them permanent residency after just a year, as well as other kinds of assistance (Batalova & Zong, 2017). Thanks to the socio-economic advantages they brought with them from Cuba, combined with the support they received once in the US, as a group Cubans achieved greater prosperity than other Latinx groups (Gonzalez, 2011).
Like other communist regimes, the Castro government sharply restricted emigration. Nonetheless, in 1980 approximately 125,00 people seeking political freedom and economic opportunities were allowed to leave. Because they left Cuba in a boatlift from Mariel Harbor, they are commonly referred to as Marielitos. As a group, the Marielitos were poorer and darker skinned than earlier Cuban arrivals and as a result they faced class and race prejudice from both Cubans and Americans. In addition, whereas earlier Cuban migrants had arrived at the height of the Cold War and were warmly welcomed as political refugees, the Marielitos arrived at a time of increasing nativism, making their experience more like that of other Latinx immigrant groups (Gonzalez, 2011). This was also the case for the balseros (‘raft people’) who began arriving in large numbers in the 1990s. Under President Clinton, the US stopped allowing Cubans intercepted at sea to come to the US but continued giving those who reached US soil a chance to stay, a policy known as ‘Wet Foot, Dry Foot.’ As part of a move toward normalizing US–Cuba relations, President Obama ended the Wet Foot, Dry Foot policy in 2017. When President Trump took office that year, some restrictions on travel and investment in Cuba were reinstated.
Salvadorans
Although Cubans have long been the third largest Latinx national origin group in the US, since the 21st century there are almost as many Salvadorans. The almost 1.4 million immigrants from El Salvador are equivalent to one-fifth the population in El Salvador (Menjívar & Gómez Cervantes, 2018). Salvadorans are concentrated around Los Angeles and the Washington, DC metropolitan area (which includes Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland). Within the DC area’s diverse Latinx community, Salvadorans