Heather Cox Richardson:
Hey folks, it’s Heather here. Just a heads up that we will be releasing next week’s episode on Wednesday, October 12th, rather than Tuesday, to accommodate the holiday. Thanks so much for your support of Now and Then. From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Now and Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.
Joanne Freeman:
And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today we’re going to be talking about Puerto Rico, which has been devastated by Hurricane Fiona, the latest hurricane to hit the island. Before Fiona even made landfall on September 18th, it had already knocked out the entire island’s electrical grid and we’re still getting reports about how hard Puerto Rico was hit by this storm. It’s still largely without power, there thousands of people who don’t have running water. And the fact of the matter is this hurricane hit as the island really was still recovering from 2017’s Hurricane Maria, which was the worst storm to strike the island in over 80 years, and the deadliest American based, US based natural disaster in a hundred years. It’s remarkable the amount of damage that has been done. It really deserves, I think, actually more of a place in the news than it is getting at the moment, particularly considering that Puerto Rico is part of the United States. Today, we want to talk about Puerto Rico and the United States, their relationship over time and how that’s evolved.
Heather Cox Richardson:
In addition to the Puerto Rican story being an American story and a fascinating American story about the economy and about culture and about race and about power, I actually want to briefly highlight something that we won’t probably talk more about in this episode, and that is that the American reaction to Hurricane Maria in 2017 was damaging enough both to the island and to the way that many Americans thought about Puerto Rico, that in his campaign then, Democratic nominee, Joe Biden actually made it a campaign promise that he would interact with Puerto Rico more productively than his predecessor had. And in fact, when it was clear that Puerto Rico was going to come under first threat and then the effects of hurricane Fiona, Biden was incredibly quick to get the Federal Emergency Management Agency in place before the storm.
He declared first an emergency declaration and then a major disaster declaration, which involves a different level of federal money and often direct payments to people to repair for the damages that a hurricane causes. It’s an important moment to say often Puerto Rico is not put in the center of the way people think about America. And the Biden administration is working really hard to make it central and to make sure it doesn’t get overlooked.
Joanne Freeman:
And to show what it looks like when a president is presiding over the entire United States.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Let’s go back in history, Joanne, and do something that used to be the norm before the New Deal government under which we live now. And that is, see if there are any ways in which people who would like to, can help.
Joanne Freeman:
Indeed, that is a good place for us to start, which is briefly to touch on how people can indeed help Puerto Rico. Luis Miranda was the president and founder of the Hispanic Federation. He’s the father of Lynn Manuel Miranda and the Hispanic Federation as an organization helped lead the recovery from Hurricane Maria and has continued to provide emergency assistance and invested more than $50 million in emergency assistance and agriculture and environmental sustainability and housing and renewable energy and any number of other things. One way that people can most certainly help Puerto Rico here and now is to learn more about the Hispanic Federation, go to their website, www.hispanicfederation.org and find out about the organization and even better donate to the organization because that money will go directly to Puerto Rico and to helping people and organizations in Puerto Rico.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And thank you for that, Joanne. The reason that we have any information and connections to that organization are because of Joanne’s affiliation with Hamilton the Musical, and Lynn Manuel Miranda and his father Luis, who helps the Hispanic Federation. When we started talking about doing an episode on Puerto Rico and it’s relation to American life and the economy, I will say that I started out by saying, “Well, I can’t do that because I don’t know anything about Puerto Rico.” And then when we actually got into the prep for this material, it turned out that we both discovered we knew quite a lot about Puerto Rico, but it had never, at least in my life, really been segregated out as Puerto Rico as opposed to American immigration history, economic history, settlement history, colonial history. And so separating it out has been actually really interesting for this episode.
Joanne Freeman:
It’s interesting and it’s interesting to consider why it was collapsed into American history, which on the one hand is good and on the other hand kind of erased it.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well erased it and marginalized it. I mean, one of the things that we were just talking about is that under the Trump administration, they did quite literally talk about Puerto Rico as if it were not part of America. And the point of where we’re going here is that the Puerto Rican story is very much the American story in really cool ways. The story of Puerto Rico begins with the Taino Indians who had a population of as many as 60,000 people on the island before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, who arrived in Puerto Rico on November 19th, 1493, the year after his initial voyage. This is his second voyage. The Taino’s greeted Columbus and they offered him gold nuggets that they had discovered in a river. And of course, his interpretation of what gold means is very different than what gold means to the Taino’s. Columbus leaves the island and in 1508, a member of his expedition who was the Spanish Explorer, Juan Ponce de León returned to the island because he was interested in finding yet more gold.
You’d probably remember him from fourth grade geography class because he led the first official European voyage to what is now Florida, theoretically with a search for the Fountain of youth. The reason that this is important is because what it really emphasizes is the degree to which the Caribbean and the Caribbean islands were the centerpiece of Spanish settlement and later Portuguese settlement in that region, and how deeply entwined they were with the American mainland. I always like to think about the Caribbean settlements not as being Europeans came here, Europeans came here, but rather this was a sort of spreading attempt to incorporate a number of native cultures and native languages into European dominated world. In this case centered around the Caribbean. Another place that the history of the island and of the Caribbean becomes central to what becomes United States history is that of course when the Europeans arrived on those islands, they brought disease and they brought a lot of disease.
And by as early as 1520, the Taino population of Puerto Rico had suffered hugely, primarily from smallpox, but from other diseases as well. And the Taino population had been reduced to about 4,000 people about 50 years after Columbus first made landfall on that island. One of the other things that is really going to undercut the Taino’s is that Christopher Columbus set up his son, Diego Columbus as governor of the West Indies in 1509. The younger Columbus “gave”, and that should be an air quotes to each Spaniard who was willing to settle in that region, 50 to a hundred of the Taino people. And the Taino people had to plant, had to search for gold, and essentially they were enslaved. When the Taino’s die and when there is a real push both for gold and for the agricultural products that the Spaniards and later on the Portuguese are going to want from the island, they’re going to have to replace them with another set of laborers.
And that’s going to mark the introduction of enslaved Africans to the islands and to Puerto Rico. The introduction in Puerto Rico is 1513 and institutional slavery is going to be part of Puerto Rican society until 1873. All right, so the Spanish colony is going to grow between the 1600s and the 1700s and a number of other countries are going to want the island, they’re going to attempt to invade it largely without success. Sir Francis Drake actually sails into San Juan Bay in 1595 with 27 vessels and 2,500 troops to try and take the island. A number of other countries, the Dutch and the English continually try to take over Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico’s colonial experience with Europe, with the Spanish, the Portuguese, the importation of enslaved Africans and the death of the Taino natives, creates its own sort of colonial history that obviously affects the makeup and the culture of the island itself. It’s not until the 1820s that the United States government begins to pay attention to the impact of Puerto Rico on American shipping and on America’s brand New Navy. At the same time that the Pacific is about to be starting to be important. And there is one crucial thing that the Caribbean islands and some of the Pacific Islands have. Sugar. Puerto Rico and Cuba and Hawaii, islands that can support the growth of sugar are going to be enormously important to United States history because they can produce something that’s very hard for Americans to produce.
Joanne Freeman:
The fact of the matter is at an early point, even while it was still a Spanish colony, Puerto Rico was on the so-called radar screen in age before there were radar screens. It existed as a space, I guess, in the imagination as well as in reality. And interestingly, it was an early locus of an experiment by Samuel Morris, who invented the telegraph. He chose the town of Arroyo, Puerto Rico as the site of his first telegraph in Latin America in March of 1859. And apparently there was a big ornate ceremony and there were Spanish flags and American flags and Morris praised Puerto Rico in words such as the following, which shows you again that that Puerto Rico is in the American imagination in some ways, even at this early point.
He said, “Puerto Rico, beautiful jewel, when you are linked with the other jewels of the Antilles or the necklace of the world’s telegraph, yours will not shine less brilliantly in the crown of your queen.” The general idea there is Puerto Rico is beautiful and he’s recognizing it even as he bestows it with what he considers to be the reward of the telegraph and connecting Puerto Rico with other parts of the world.
Heather Cox Richardson:
But there was a fly in the ointment there for 19th century Americans, the idea of spreading around the Caribbean. And it was twofold. The first was that of course, southern Americans from the American South, desperately wanted to take into the American polity what they called the golden circle. That’s how we have the knight of the Golden Circle. It’s all the areas around the Caribbean, because they wanted to turn them into slave holding states, which would enable them to have more power in the US Congress. The North doesn’t want them for that very reason. But then after the Civil War, there’s the real question of what is the relationship of the American government and of American culture to areas that are populated with people of color? And that question I think still goes on and becomes very important for the relationship that America develops with Puerto Rico.
Joanne Freeman:
It’s fascinating to me the ways in which realities and fantasies and the economy and nations just imposing themselves on other nations and really the rough edges and smoother edges of history are all in one way or another, grappling with Puerto Rico and what it means and how a given nation should relate with it.
Heather Cox Richardson:
The other reason I really like Caribbean and Puerto Rican history in the 19th century is because of this relationship of political power. You know me, political power, money, race and citizenship and nationality. I mean it’s all right there. So what happens is, and the reason I kept harping on sugar is because after the Civil War, a number of Americans want both Cuba and Puerto Rico, and they want them because of the beauty of the islands, the natural resources of the islands and the sugar. So President Grant actually tries to buy Cuba and Puerto Rico together in 1869, and he claims he’s doing it because he wants to end enslavement on the islands. It is certainly on his radar screen that black Americans might want to go to that island which would help relieve some of his pressure in the American South. But he is also very concerned about economic growth and he wants the foothold in the Caribbean that he thinks is going to help the American economy.
And at the same time, Americans in the late 19th century are also looking at Hawaii, which has sugar as well. And you have big agribusinesses if you will, or big planters who have industrial sugar productions on the islands. But in the late 19th century, those are not American. They’re controlled by foreign countries. In order to get into America, they have to pay tariffs, they have to pay money. You knew I was going to work the tariffs in here. And in 1890 there is a new tariff, the McKinley tariff put in place that significantly increases the tariffs on sugar. That’s not an accident because what comes out of that new problem of the sugar industrialists that they have to now pay to bring their sugar exports into the United States, is that they’re going to start to agitate for making those islands part of the United States.
If Hawaii or Cuba or Puerto Rico are American, they’re not going to have to pay tariffs after 1890. James G. Blaine is the Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison, and we’re actually quite lucky about James G. Blaine because he had a mental breakdown during his term. And what that meant was he left Washington and he put in writing a lot of what he was thinking when he wrote voluminous letters back to Benjamin Harrison.
Joanne Freeman:
Including a statement about what he was thinking about Hawaii and Cuba and Puerto Rico. He says it pretty bluntly. As a historian, you’re always very pleased when someone is this blunt in writing. Blaine wrote, “I think that there are only three places that are of value enough to be taken. One is Hawaii and the others are Cuba and Puerto Rico. Cuba and Puerto Rico are not imminent and will not be for a generation. Hawaii may come for decision at any unexpected hour, and I hope we shall be prepared to decide in the affirmative.” I want to point out though the phrasing there, which is easy to gloss over. He talks about three places that are “of value enough to be taken”, and that says a lot right there of the American point of view. He’s not talking about forming a relationship with, he’s not talking about incorporating, he’s talking about taking, He’s being very straightforward and precisely what he’s thinking about all three of those places at that moment from an American vantage point.
And that’s why I love this whole question because can you do that? Can America, which is theoretically supposed to be about self-determination, take other places? I mean certainly they’ve been doing it through the concept of manifest destiny. They have steamrolled over indigenous people and over Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and they have done that in the past. But these are places that have their own governments, that have their own cultures. Can you do that?
Joanne Freeman:
And if you think about over the long haul, when the United States incorporated Western areas, they very carefully went about setting up a process where first there would have to be a certain number of people living in the area and then they would have the chance to create a constitution. The United States first would put a governor there, then they could create their own constitution. It would have to be a small R Republican constitution. In other words, there was a set process by which this incorporation would happen within these Western areas in the United States. The question about what’s happening in Puerto Rico has its own constitution or its own people, it’s a different question entirely. And that’s a huge question. Can that happen? How does that happen? What does it mean?
Heather Cox Richardson:
Once America has possession of these lands after the Spanish American War, what are they going to do with them? Is it possible for them to incorporate non-white peoples into the American polity? Should they have colonies? Should they make them independent? What on earth should they do? And there’s a lot of fighting about what America should do and a lot of letters back and forth from the people’s on those islands and American newspapers for example, where they’re saying, “Wait a minute here. We’re people here we should have a say in our own government.” And finally, all of this needs to be resolved again because of the issue of sugar and the issue of tariffs. And between 1901 and 1903, the US Supreme Court takes on a series of court cases known as the insular cases. And what they do is they split the baby under Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who always kind of… I kind of get secretly obsessed with him sometimes because he looks so much like Mark Twain, they get confused for each other. And he’s a fascinating justice because whatever he decides is pro big business.
That’s the bottom line. So what he and the court does is they come up with a new doctrine in America, and it’s the doctrine of unincorporated territories. And these are lands that America has control over, has annexed, but they are not fully part of the United States. In one of the insular cases, as I say, there’s a series of them, the court held that the newly annex territories were domestic territory, but they were not part of the United States. They were, according to the court, and this is one of my favorite lines in all of American history, foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.
Joanne Freeman:
That is an interesting statement.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Isn’t that great? Foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.
Joanne Freeman:
One of the justices that Heather just talked about, Justice Billings Brown came up with this statement in a majority opinion on one of those insular cases, judging these kinds of issues. He wrote, “If those possessions…” The ones that we are talking about now, “… Are inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs laws, methods of taxation and modes of thought, the administration of government and justice according to Anglo sex and principles may for a time be impossible.” Holy smoke. That’s quite a statement. “And the question once arises whether large concessions ought not to be made for a time that ultimately our own theories may be carried out and the blessings of a free government under the Constitution extended to them. We declined to hold that there is anything in the Constitution to forbid such action.”
The way in which that statement on the one hand just kind of sticks, taxation in the middle of this statement about broad cultural and intellectual ideas and the undercurrent of superiority and shall we give our blessings to these people? Kind of tone playing throughout that as well. It’s one of those statements that really captures deliberately and otherwise the sort of mood of the moment in regard to what the United States is thinking and reasoning as it’s trying to figure out to meld what it wants economically and financially versus the human reality of these islands and the people on them.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well of course, this is construction of the moment in which it was written by really finding the ability of the US Constitution to take territories without incorporating them or with somehow putting them in a second class status. And one of the reasons that I’m fascinated by the insular cases is because it is the construction in our legal code of areas that are not equal. And it’s interesting that almost everything that the Fuller Court did has been overturned either by later judicial decisions or by subsequent laws, except the insular cases. That did though raise the question of what about the people on those islands? The US, according to the Supreme Court, can have the land without having to incorporate it, but what about the people who live on the land?
Joanne Freeman:
President Theodore Roosevelt consistently encourages granting Puerto Ricans the rights of American citizenship, and he visits Puerto Rico in 1906. And after that visit, he’s very forceful about that belief, that Puerto Ricans should get the rights of American citizenship. He says in a message to both houses of Congress, “There is a matter to which I wish to call your special attention. And that is the desirability of conferring full American citizenship upon the people of Puerto Rico. I most earnestly hope that this will be done. I cannot see how any harm can possibly result from it. And it seems to me a matter of right and justice to the people of Puerto Rico. They are loyal, they’re glad to be under our flag. They are making rapid progress along the path of orderly liberty. Surely we should show our appreciation of them, our pride in what they have done and our pleasure in extending recognition for what has thus been done by granting them full American citizenship.”
But again, I find myself veering back and forth when reading these kinds of statements because of the sort of tone of superiority that weaves its way throughout it. On the one hand saying that the people of Puerto Rico deserve full citizenship and I really would like that to be done is great, but they are slowly learning the path of orderly liberty, those sorts of statements as the youngins say, a little cringe inducing, right?
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well, and he is responding to the other piece that the Fuller Court put in place, and that was the concept of non-citizen nationals established under Gonzalez versus Williams in 1904, two years before he spoke, in which the Supreme Court decided that people from Puerto Rico were welcome to come to America, but they were not citizens. They became non-citizen nationals. And the case was over a woman named Isabelle Gonzalez. And whether or not she was a Puerto Rican woman. When she first comes to Ellis Island, she is held as what was called at the time, an alien immigrant. She sued and the court unanimously held in January, 1904 that she could stay in the United States. And again, they were trying to establish the idea that the islands were part of the United States.
But by the same token, did they want to agree that people of color were citizens of the United States? Well, not so much. So they create this new category of non-citizen nationals. Again, writing into our fundamental law, the idea that some people are better than others. And Teddy Roosevelt, for all of his, and I’m just going to leave that blank there, he recognized that you couldn’t have it both ways. You could either not have the inclusion of those islands in the American system, or you could fully include them, but you sure shouldn’t go under the American constitution. You should either have them as citizens or not.
Joanne Freeman:
You’re dealing in this case, with questions of national identity, with questions of nationhood and with questions of citizenship and how those things should be negotiated. Who are citizens? Who aren’t citizens? When people aren’t citizens, but they are here, what does that mean? What should they have? What should they do? How do Americans feel about those people? How do those people feel about America? If you think about the episode that we just did about immigrants in the United States and Americans constantly trying to figure out how they wanted to separate “us from them”, that very, to me, fascinating category of non-citizen nationals captures the ways in which the United States is trying to draw lines where, as you just suggested, Heather lines can’t really be drawn.
Heather Cox Richardson:
This plays out, I think, with the way that American lawmakers conceive of the duties of citizens. Puerto Ricans actually do get American citizenship. They get American citizenship in 1917. Two months later, Woodrow Wilson imposes mandatory conscription on the Puerto Ricans. 18,000 of them fight in World War I. And that again, is not a coincidence that they become citizens. When the United States need soldiers before World War I. It’s like citizenship, they’re welcome when they’re needed, but not so much when they’re not.
Joanne Freeman:
And when they’re needed, the United States is forced to reckon with things that would rather not reckon with.
Heather Cox Richardson:
But now that we’re in the 20th century, now that we jump that hurdle, I think it is worth pointing out that shortly after World War I, people in Puerto Rico themselves made their wishes much more strongly known than they had been before. In 1922 in Puerto Rico, the Nationalist party is founded and it demands that Puerto Rico is independent from the United States. After World War II, the government then grants Puerto Rico the right to choose its own leader. And in 1950, President Truman signed to Puerto Rico Commonwealth Bill, which is designed to pave the way for a Puerto Rican constitution.
But nationalists supposed that law. And in November two, US-based Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate President Truman in Washington DC where he was living temporarily at the Blair House. Again, when we started talking about why we don’t know more about Puerto Rican history, it is interesting to me that you hear about the assassination attempts on Truman, usually only in a list of presidents who’ve had assassination attempts and not as part of a larger movement after World War II for so many places that were dominated by stronger powers to have a say in their own governance.
Joanne Freeman:
We’ve been focused in a variety of different ways on the economy, on the polity, on formal connections of one kind or another between Puerto Rico and the United States and how they’ve changed over times. But one thing that we haven’t really focused on as much is culture. And that’s very much worth focusing on because there’s a lot of really interesting cross-cultural influence between Puerto Rico and the United States. Again, over time, shifting in a variety of really interesting ways. One person who really stands out as an early figure that deserves mention here is Rafael Hernandez Marin, who was a really influential Puerto Rican band leader and composer. And he was born in Aguadilla Puerto Rico to Afro Puerto Rican tobacco workers, born in 1891, and his grandmother gave him music lessons in a lot of instruments. Cornet, trombone, bombardino, which is a kind of valved horn, guitar, violin piano.
Joanne Freeman:
Around 1914 and this is going to be a true example of cross-cultural relations, a Japanese circus called the Karamura Brothers visited Aguadilla and they were impressed by Hernandez Marin’s playing and invited him to tour Puerto Rico with them. And he ended up touring in North Carolina where he came onto the radar of a very famed black American band leader, James Reese Europe. And Hernandez Marin became a trombone in Europe’s United States army, Harlem Hellfighters musical band, and a lot of jazz historians credit the Harlem Hill Fighters with introducing jazz to Europe. Already we have a significant form of multi cross-cultural influence on the part of Puerto Rico. After the war, Hernandez, Marin spends a significant portion of his time in Harlem. He’s trying to make a living for himself with his music. In rough patches when he couldn’t do that, he was actually working in factories, manufacturing screws.
He’s getting by as he can. But in 1928, he ends up being deeply saddened with the passing of Hurricane San Felipe. Destroyed more than 250,000 houses, caused more than 300 deaths. And in partial response, he wrote Lamento Borincano or Puerto Rican lament in 1930. And it tells the story of a quote peasant trying to make ends meet in Puerto Rico, and it becomes a kind of unofficial national anthem. And this is the way that Hernandez Marin himself tells that story.
“I found myself together with a group of friends in a Harlem restaurant. All of us were artists in the same boat. It was a December cold, such as can only exist in New York, a day in which you’re broke and it’s raining a lot outside. One of our companions had a bottle of Puerto Rican rum. While we were passing the bottle, the memories of our little island rushed in and our minds flew to the sunny beaches of the far away land, the palm trees and all the beautiful things there appeared to us that day. Like the image of paradise, the nostalgia of that cold, sad, and melancholy afternoon, drew my fingers to the almost falling apart piano in the corner. And I began to play the melody of Lamento Borincano. It emerged spontaneously.
Heather Cox Richardson:
I love this. This man lives from 1891 through World War I of the Harlem Hellfighters, and you know that extraordinary band of fighters who are decorated all over France. And now he’s in New York in the winter during the Depression. And just think of what was in that guy’s head.
Joanne Freeman:
What was in his head, and how being in that community of people in that moment inspired him to bring that out of himself and commit it to music. And he went on to compose a number of other Puerto Rican and pan Latin anthems. Now here I’m going to make a transition, which only historical coincidences of sorts can do. Hernandez Marin ends up at a White House performance in 1961. He ends up being assigned a seat next to Leonard Bernstein, whose musical West Side Story had recently become a major success on Broadway. And West Side Story tells the story of a Puerto Rican woman and an American man who fall in love and people point to the Capulet’s and the Montague’s and Romeo and Juliet, but really in one way or another West Side story is a kind of anti-racist play that takes place in New York with gangs that are opposing each other and Maria and Tony being the sort of “star cross lovers” at the heart of it.
Now, the 1957 Broadway musical West Side story, and its 1961 film adaptation, have long been a way in which cultural conversation about Puerto Rico representation has centered on. There’s now a 2021 film adaptation that just came out that takes this conversation further. The musical was the brainchild of Composer Leonard Bernstein, director and script writer, Arthur Laurents, choreographer Jerome Robbins and lyricist Steven Sondheim, which is like an amazing dream team of people. Robbins initially thought of a project based on East Side Story, a 1949 play that included a love story between a Jewish girl and a Catholic boy. And he brought in the Romeo Juliet angle. He proposed setting the play during the Easter and Passover holiday, which is really quite something. Bernstein later explained how the musical changed from that into including Puerto Rican characters. And supposedly according to Bernstein, it came to him while they were at a pool in Beverly Hills.
Another one of these things that happens in quite an interesting location. Basically he thinks to himself there’s an growing discussion and the existence of more and more Puerto Ricans coming to the mainland United States. It’s an issue, it’s something that people are talking about. And so that together with their original idea of the shape of what they wanted the play to take leads them to say actually West Side Story, this story involving Puerto Ricans, this is a story that we want to tell. So the story of West Side story, it really is centered on the love story between Maria, who is Puerto Rican and Tony who is not. And the play center on their love affair, and the fact that it is unfolding and happening in the midst of gang warfare between a Puerto Rican gang and a white gang. The two of them fall instantly and deeply in love and as portrayed in the musical, it’s a true love, a lot of beautiful music comes out of their love, but they’re pretty much unable to have that affair because their families, their friends are telling them that it’s not possible or trying to pull them apart.
And one of the really show stopping tunes and ultimately controversial tunes from West Side Story, and that’s true of the musical, and the movie is titled America and sung by Anita. Now Maria has a brother named Bernardo who’s an active member of this Puerto Rican gang. And Bernardo is dating Anita, who kind of acts like an older sister to Maria. And the song is a kind of satirical comparison between Puerto Rico and New York. And in it, Anita discourages her Puerto Rican friends from feeling nostalgic or homesick for Puerto Rico. The lyric is full of really negative things in one way or another about Puerto Rico. It’s an ugly island, it’s an island of tropic diseases, always the population growing. I know people want me to sing always the population growing and the money owing and the babies crying and the bullets flying.
When the musical comes out, Bernstein gets an angry call from a Puerto Rican newspaper in New York, La Prensa, demanding the removal of the stereotypical lines about Puerto Rico. And Bernstein argued that the inclusion of criticism against mainland Americans made the song balanced. He says, “Oh no, but people say bad things about the United States as well.” This was his explanation of it. Opening night in Washington, we had a telephone message from the princess saying that they’d heard about this song and we would be picketed when we came to New York, unless we omitted or changed the song. They made particular reference to Island of Tropic diseases telling us, everyone knows Puerto Rico is free of disease.
And it wasn’t just that line they objected to. We were insulting not only Puerto Rico, but the Puerto Ricans and all immigrants. And then Bernstein goes on to say, “They didn’t hear nobody goes in America. Puerto Rico’s in America.” They didn’t hear supposedly according to Bernstein, the negative things that were said about America in the song. But Bernstein says they didn’t change the lyrics, they didn’t change a syllable, they weren’t picketed. But when the film version came out, the creators reworked the lyrics to have the character of Bernardo more aggressively criticize America.
Now, what’s interesting is the most recent version of the movie, that 2021 version, which I’ve watched, I have to confess a lot of times because I’m a huge musical theater fan. In the 2021 version, Tony Kushner wrote the screenplay working with Steven Sondheim, but still he wrote the screenplay. And he thought about this very issue and this very song and what he was going to do about it in modern times, in today’s moment, how was he going to address some of what was happening there? And in an interview, this is how he explained his thinking about Puerto Rico, about the song, and about what needed to be said or not said.
He said, “First I think the conversation around works of art like West Side Story are enormously important and that the criticism leveled at it when it’s very specific and scrupulous is incredibly important. I think it’s absolutely, as all art is a product of its time. There were certain kinds of articulations unavailable to the four gay Jews that wrote the thing originally, and there are mistakes that they made. Absolutely when they were writing America, for example, it’s very clear that the mistake they made was equating the relationship of Puerto Ricans in New York to the island of Puerto Rico with the relationship of Jews to the places they had come from, namely Poland and Russia, about which no Jew who immigrated from had anything good to say. They left a place of absolute horror where they were being murdered. And all they could say was, as in the song, let it sink back in the ocean. What they really should have done when they were looking for something analogous among the newer arrivals to the continental United States was to think about the Irish and their relationship to Ireland. There was a great agony about having had to leave Ireland a great love and attachment, but the writers didn’t do that. They made an assumption that somebody who really wanted to come here and make a life for themselves like Anita, would have nothing good to say about Puerto Rico at all.”
Which is I think really insightful. And indeed in the film, in the final film, they do tweak the lyrics somewhat and there’s a lot more ambiguity and there’s many more strong statements both about Puerto Rico, but particularly about the America that Puerto Ricans are meeting when they come to the United States. What’s interesting about this all to me is that between the musical and the first movie and the second movie, you’re watching people try and manipulate songs and music to reflect on the one hand, human relationships and on the other hand, to adapt to and reflect the awareness of a moment in time. Nowadays, you shouldn’t be able to get away with some of what existed in that song originally when the musical came out.
But it makes perfect sense that when redoing West Side Story for 2021, you would want to think through a little further, what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. And all of this is just a wonderful way of showing how culture shows the complexity and the nuance and the subtlety and the struggle of how peoples mingle with each other and bounce off against each other and struggle against each other, and sometimes join with each other to create something new and wonderful. Here we are and we’re in a moment when, for any number of reasons, once again, we are thinking about Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico’s thinking about the American government. We’re trying to figure out the best way to cooperate, the best way to interact. Some Americans, once again, are grappling with what they think Puerto Rico is or what they want it to be or what they don’t want it to be. We’re at another moment of reckoning because of a crisis, and it will be interesting to see, and hopefully part of what happens in a moment like this where Puerto Rico comes powerfully into the American mindset, is that there’ll be more understanding and more cooperation and a wider recognition of the simple fact that folks Puerto Rico is part of the United States.
