Tag: puerto ricans
Puerto Rico Needs Independence, Not Statehood
In 2017, as summer ends, when news anchors first mention the oncoming Hurricane Irma, the people go to the big-box store or the Econo supermarket just a few minutes from home. They try to stock up, but by the time they arrive, the lines are long and most of the shops are running low. They get what they can: some food, a few gallons of water, a portable gas-powered hot plate in case they lose power. They refill
Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?
New York in the summer is a noisy place, especially if you don’t have money. The rich run off to the Hamptons or Maine. The bourgeoisie are safely shielded by the hum of their central air, their petite cousins by the roar of their window units. But for the broke—the have-littles and have-nots—summer means an open window, through which the clatter of the city becomes the soundtrack to life: motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another
There’s No Such Thing as ‘the Latino Vote’
Latinos and their ancestors have lived in the Americas for 500 years, yet it feels like many Americans are perpetually in the act of discovering us—especially when elections are looming. We are instrumental to the emerging Democratic majority that Blue America longs for, that Red America fears, and that never quite seems to arrive.
The 2020 census showed
Casa Adela and the Dreams of Loisaida
The poet Tato Laviera once composed an ode to the tripe soup and pig’s feet at Casa Adela, a Puerto Rican restaurant on the Lower East Side: “we walked into adela’s five- / thirty morning mountain smell / of madrugada simmering concrete,” he wrote, in his poem “criollo story.” Casa Adela’s founder and namesake, Adelina (Adela) Fargas, moved to New York in the nineteen-seventies, when she was nearly forty. “I was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico,” she once told a