Nuyorican Nostalgia Puerto Rico

Nuyorican Nostalgia in the Puerto Rican Diaspora

By the mid-1950s, Puerto Rican immigrants to NYC were sharing working-class and poor urban spaces with the generation of post-World War II African-American migrants from the Deep South and with what was becoming a steady stream of Afro-Caribbean immigrants from Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.

By
 / 22 April 2002

“Sweet kids in hunger slums / firecrackers break / and they cross / and they dust / and they skate / and the night comes …” – Laura Nyro, “New York Tendaberry”.

“The duality between apparent fixity and imminent relocation may account for the special appeal of casita design among the impoverished and disenfranchised [Puerto Ricans] of the South Bronx. Under the present conditions of inner-city life, they too, like their nomadic ancestors in Puerto Rico or at some earlier time in their own lives, face constant threat of removal or having to pick up and do it somewhere else.” – Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity

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