by J.L. Torres
My second book of short fiction, Migrations, is a thematic collection focusing on selected moments in Puerto Rican history and their impact on everyday people. Searching for a strong epigraph that could convey the historical essence of the collection, I stumbled across the opening sentence in an essay found in Victor Hernández Cruz’s Red Beans: “Migration is the story of my body.” With these seven words, Hernández Cruz, a Puerto Rican poet whom Life Magazine named one of America’s greatest poets in 1981, not only epitomized the thematic thread running through my collection, but he aptly described the lives of so many Puerto Ricans, including me.
Most people would not readily associate the migration out of Puerto Rico as a diaspora. The word is mostly connected to the Jewish diaspora, although the movement of human beings from one region of the globe to another is a constant in world history. Puerto Ricans leaving the archipelago known as their homeland has been primarily a twentieth-century phenomenon, with the biggest waves coming after World War II. Our migratory history began earlier than that, though. Migration is literally the story of our DNA. Our ancestors had origins in Spain, other European countries, Western Africa, and even the indigenous Tainos were descendants of tribes from the Orinoco region. The earliest recorded number of Puerto Ricans in the United States was 196 in Lousiana, 1860, but most of our migratory history until the twentieth century was static, our lives quite insular.
The Spanish-American War dramatically changed all of that. After the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898 and colonized it—and later forced citizenship on its inhabitants in 1917 to fight in World War I—the migratory flow out of the islands increased exponentially. At first, the expensive cost of sea travel to the mainland stifled any desire to migrate. With the advent of affordable air travel in the forties and fifties, the number of Puerto Ricans leaving the islands grew. Between 1940 and 1970, over 835 thousand Puerto Ricans packed their bags and ventured to a new life in the States. I was one of them. Our arrival at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) on that cold, rainy April day in 1960, was such a powerful memory that decades later I would write a poem about it. For a five-year-old traveling in an airplane for the first time, hearing the foreign sounds of English, absorbing the strange sights, the only thought in my mind was the adventure waiting for me in this new land. In my innocence, I could not have imagined that my mother was trying to reconcile with my father, and that the trip would be their last futile attempt at salvaging a failing relationship. In that way, our departure was different from many other Puerto Ricans who came before and would come later. My mother was fortunate to hold a job working at one of many emerging 936 factories on the main island. Later she would tell me that it was not just my father who motivated her to leave the security of that job. It was a wanderlust that I probably inherited. Other Puerto Ricans did not have such options.
The main force behind the diaspora has always been the economic instability that creates chronic unemployment and poverty. Meanwhile, factories in the United States, along with agribusinesses, have actively recruited Puerto Ricans. This typical push-pull effect was the primal reason for major waves in our migration. But disasters have also played a major role. In 1898, Hurricane San Ciriaco devastated the sugar industry and forced many sugarcane workers to migrate to Hawaii, an event that serves as the basis for one of the stories in my collection. More recently Hurricane Maria and a series of earthquakes, along with nagging debt and imposed austerity measures, have sparked a new wave in migration, most of which has settled in Florida. Today, there are more Puerto Ricans in the States than in Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans reside in all fifty states, something that makes me wonder what the life of a Caribbean person in Alaska must be like. Surely, there is a story there.
In fact, every Puerto Rican’s migration is a story. The title of my collection, Migrations, operates as a metonymy for “stories.” Those stories include experiencing the migratory process as a brutal assault on our bodies. I still recall my mother coming home from a day at the factory, flecks of cloth covering her hair, as she hastened to cook dinner. Or her hunched over a sewing machine in our South Bronx apartment, surrounded by dozens of sacks of piecework. Or my stepfather losing three fingers trying to clean a faulty snowblower. Like any writer, I am always searching for story ideas. Recently, a colleague emailed me a scholarly article on Puerto Rican adolescents shipped off to the Carlisle Industrial School, the “crown jewel” among residential schools designed to “kill the Indian and save the man.” My ignorance of this incident in Puerto Rican history appalled me. I realized that if these historical events were buried, they needed to be excavated and put to paper. This new awareness compelled me to write a story about those young people at Carlisle, and to research other similar stories for a collection embedded in Puerto Rican history. The result of that effort is Migrations.
As a writer of Puerto Rican descent, I have always felt a responsibility to serve as a voice for my people. To serve in that capacity requires understanding that our bodies and minds represent the consequences of continuous disruptions suffered under our colonial condition. It means accepting that we are all the Diasporican in Mariposa Fernández’s poem. That our diaspora is not only about dispersion and displacement. It is also about our shared psychological, physical, and historic trauma; and for me, it is what fuels the imaginary that drives my writing.
J.L. Torres was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico, a town in the center of the island, and grew up in the South Bronx. After his formal education he returned to the island to find roots and material for his writing. Now he lives in New York and teaches literature and creative writing at SUNY. His work focuses on the Puerto Rican “diasporica”: living in in-betweeness. He is exploring what it means to live a life yearning for belonging when you’re told nation and home are empty concepts, and you have no historical memory of what they ever meant. His latest book features a cast of characters estranged from their loved ones, family, culture, and collective history. It is the inaugural winner of the Tomas Rivera Prize from the L.A. Review of Books.