Matthew Dennis
2/13
Peopling of New York
Migration History
My family is ethnically Puerto Rican, so I am not sure if my family counts as “immigrating from abroad”. The furthest I can trace my family back is to my great great grandparents; on my mother’s side, some of them were actually from Spain and immigrated to Puerto Rico, though what I know about that is somewhat murky and unclear. My grandparents on both sides grew up and spent the early parts of their adulthood on Puerto Rico. According to her, my grandmother’s family there owned a farm, though they left that behind in the late 50s to come here in search of greater opportunity for her many brothers and sisters. Here in the city she met my grandfather, who came from a similar background, and had my mother. I can only imagine the difficulties such a sudden change in their surroundings must have caused for them, since I have only lived here my whole life. They say that they only had a cursory knowledge of English from what they learned in school in Puerto Rico, and so language must have certainly been a barrier for them. Even today, they mostly speak in Spanish around the family and to each other, sometimes to my generation’s detriment, as some of us were not raised to speak the language by our parents and as a result have trouble communicating with them. They also essentially had to start over, losing a lot of what they had to move here; there must have been some degree of shock resulting from the transition from a mostly rural living environment to a dense urban one. I know from my mom’s stories and theirs that it wasn’t the easiest for them to eke out a living. My grandfather worked a lot of different jobs before finally getting one as a doorman in Manhattan, which he held for many years until his retirement. My mother and her two siblings grew up and spent most of their formative years in public housing projects, generally in the South Bronx. Her experience was characterized by terrible public schools, which she tells me had much lower standards in the 70s. It was something an uphill climb for her; from a young age my grandparents taught her to be extremely independent, and she was helping pay the bills by the time she was a teenager. They also had a sort of cold attitude towards raising their children; I am not sure if this is just because my grandparents were that way specifically or whether it’s born out of cultural reasons. I feel that it could be their attempt at making her a harder person in a world that was still in the process of accepting them. This hard work ethic they instilled in her helped her to graduate from college and get a very solid job. However, she tells me that as a Hispanic, there were times when she felt very alone, especially in the college setting. In the end, though, she remained proud of her Puerto Rican heritage.
My dad’s side of the family, on the other hand, has a much murkier history. His father married his mother at a young age and they moved over here to the city for reasons that are only known to his father; the man disappeared one day and never came back when he was a child. He has five other siblings, as well, and since my grandmother did not have a very valuable skillset they found themselves relying on government-supplied aid (food-stamps and the like.) He, like my mother, grew up in the South Bronx, and as such experienced all the difficulties that came with it. His mother’s difficulties with supporting the family meant that once he graduated from high school he could not complete college; he had to find a job right away to try and help support her, which certainly did not help his long term prospects. But in the end I feel that he came away from his difficult childhood a tough man. He and my mother have provided my brother and I with a route towards upwards social mobility that they had to try and find on their own.
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