Among School Children (29 page)

Eduardo shared her admiration. His father was a true
jíbaro,
one of the last of a line of thoroughly self-sufficient islanders, who had lived by a strict, old-fashioned code. Eduardo claimed the title, too, but he was a
jíbaro
only by birth and not by practice anymore. It wasn't easy, for a Puerto Rican of Eduardo's generation and experience, straddling not just two cultures but something like two different centuries, to figure out exactly who he was.

According to the only full-fledged history of Holyoke, early Irish immigrants, fleeing the horrors of potato famines, brought pieces of Irish sod with them as keepsakes. In Chris's family, legend did not reach that far back. (The only vestige was a story Chris's mother told about one of her own grandmothers: someone told Chris's great-grandmother that she looked like Queen Victoria, and with some heat the elderly woman said, "Don't
ever
say I look like
her
") But Chris had read a little about the Irish immigration. She knew firsthand about homesickness. Immigration for her ancestors, she thought, must have resembled migration for Puerto Ricans.

In the quarter century following World War II, about 750,000 Puerto Ricans, nearly one-third of the population, left the island for the mainland, the majority going to New York City but enough to other places for the emigration to rank as a diaspora. The U.S. Marines had taken the island from Spain in 1898. They secured the ground for American corporations. The American-style colonization that supplanted the Spanish had everything to do with Puerto Ricans leaving home. The United States transformed the island, not exactly into an image of itself but, it seems fair to say, into a servant of mainland interests. American rule brought a declining death rate but also, in the long run, the sort of selective, capital-intensive development that destroyed small farming, to name just one important sector of the old economy. The population began to soar, and so did unemployment rates.

After World War II, both the federal and Puerto Rican governments encouraged people to leave the island. Chris's teacher friend Victor Guevara remembered jeeps with loudspeakers that advertised jobs on the mainland driving down the streets of his little coastal hometown when he was a boy. Of course, the advertisements didn't say that many islanders who followed the call would end up working for the minimum wage and living in tenements in places that have winters. For mainland employers, especially in agriculture and in the hotel and garment industries, Puerto Rico became a source of inexpensive, unorganized laborers, the more powerless because they were in a strange place and didn't speak the language. And the Puerto Rican government was only too glad to see depart a class of citizens who might otherwise have drained the island's resources and stirred things up politically.

A Puerto Rican who lived near Chris in Holyoke explained the migration to her this way: "We shoved out the people least equipped to deal with the hardships of immigration." Accounts of the Puerto Rican diaspora maintain that most emigrants were poor, had little schooling, and had not been trained for industrial jobs that paid decent wages.

At times of high unemployment on the mainland, significant numbers of Puerto Ricans have, at least in the past, gone back to the island. In Puerto Rico, poverty has not traditionally been regarded as a sin. The island doesn't suffer from a racism anywhere near as widespread or virulent as the mainland's. Emigration is easily reversible, because of numerous and inexpensive airplane flights to and from San Juan and because Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. Going back, however, doesn't look realistic or inviting to many of the children and grandchildren of immigrants.

Holyoke's first five Puerto Rican families came to town in 1958. The men had contracts to work on Connecticut River Valley tobacco farms. They lived together in the Flats. A fellow parishioner and friend of Chris's was a member of that tiny incipient community. She remembered her first years in Holyoke as very hard, at least as hard as Florida had been for Chris, but unlike Chris's short exile, hers was enduring. "It's awful when you come to a place for the first time," Chris's friend said. "For a week I was crying. 'Take me home.' I still find I'm not welcome here. You never feel like you're at home. Even people from South America, they can't understand our culture. It's something that you miss so much. People look at you and make a judgment about you. It's something you always have to fight and always have to lock inside you. And the children lose their identity. They don't know they're Puerto Rican, and they don't feel American."

Those first five families had each other, at least. Felipe's father, Eduardo, when he finally decided to emigrate for good, was essentially alone. Traveling with his father to the Connecticut River Valley at the age of fourteen, Eduardo entered a mainland school in the old mill town of Westfield, not far from Holyoke. Bilingual programs didn't exist then, so Eduardo learned his English by the method now formally known as "immersion." That is, he had to teach himself. The first English word he learned was "hi." He remembered trying it out on a girl in a school hallway. She said "hi" back to him. "I was so happy. It worked!" He stayed behind with relatives when his family went back to Puerto Rico. At sixteen, he doctored his birth certificate and got a job in a bicycle factory in Westfield. Not long after that, Eduardo got laid off and went back to the island. On that return trip, he felt as if he saw his homeland clearly for the first time, both its splendor and the ironic fact that most of the people with the money to enjoy it were not Puerto Ricans. "I lived in a paradise, and it didn't mean anything to me," Eduardo said. "I went and lived in Westfield and came back, and I thought, 'How come these gringos have this, and I can't?' " When word came that he could have his job in Westfield back, he left home again. He did not imagine he was leaving the island forever.

Jíbaros
tell jokes that they would not like to hear from other mouths. One of Eduardo's favorites, a Puerto Rican version of a classic immigrant joke, went like this: A
jibaro
has heard that in New York City there is so much money that you find it lying on the ground everywhere, and you have to kick it out of your way. Sure enough, when he arrives at Kennedy Airport, at the Eastern Airlines terminal, this farmer of the hills sees a fifty-dollar bill lying on the ground right in front of him. "Already you're starting to bother me," he says. "Get out of my way." He kicks that fifty-dollar bill aside. "I got plenty of time for you." At the punch line, Eduardo would laugh and say, "He never sees a fifty-dollar bill again!"

Realism came to the
jíbaro
Eduardo on a lonesome New Year's Eve when he was in his early twenties and living alone in a small apartment above a hardware store in Westfield. He had some money in his pocket and no place to spend it. He was hungry, but he didn't have a car, and there wasn't an open restaurant or even a grocery store within walking distance. He stared out the window of his room at the snow in grimy piles on the street outside, and he thought of his father's farm and of the green bananas in the trees. If only he could have one now! "What am I doing here?" he asked himself then. "Why not go back to the island?" He remembered a period that followed, during which he asked himself again and again, "Who am I? I know this body. But who is Eduardo?" Immigrants, even such a hardy one as Eduardo, have to ask themselves questions that children ask. He told himself repeatedly, "You got to be realistic. If you want to dream, okay. If it comes true, it comes true. Beautiful. But tomorrow you got to go to work. That's reality."

He worked, and finished high school on the side. He picked tobacco. He learned to be a machinist, and, unhappy with the policies of his union local, he put himself up for president and won. He also worked as a disc jockey on a Spanish-language station in Hartford. Along the way, at a softball game in Chicopee, he met a lovely countrywoman who, as it happened, came from Cayey, too—he'd had to come to Massachusetts to meet her. He had settled down to raise a family.

The Puerto Rican community of the Flats was not, of course, a monolith. Eduardo divided the Puerto Ricans he knew into several groups. These days far fewer newcomers arrived directly from the island, but there were still a substantial number of people he called "old-fashioned," who didn't want to speak English and held tightly to old island customs and traditions. Some cosmopolitans—he counted himself one of those—spoke both languages and traveled in both worlds and might even eat in a fast food restaurant now and then. "And," he said, "there are a few rotten potatoes, who are involved with drugs and will rob your apartment and break into your car." He liked to point out, though, that he never locked his car in the Flats and had never yet been robbed.

Finally, there were the children. "They are going to be doctors and lawyers," he said. The high school dropout rate among Puerto Rican children was alarmingly high, but his own children did well in school. They would go to college, he hoped.

Speaking of the children and of the Puerto Rican community of Holyoke in general, Eduardo said, "We are here to stay." He guessed that statement applied to him, although he still dreamed of retiring to the island.

At home in Holyoke, Eduardo might say mockingly and affectionately to his wife, if she was acting shy, "Oh, you
jíbara.
" But on the surface, anyway, there was no shy farm-boy left in
him.
He had a ready smile, like Felipe, and he was quick and easy making friends. He had Puerto Rican friends, South American friends, white and black North American friends, and though he had no interest in being a boss of any sort and mainly kept company with working men, he could travel easily in most of the worlds of balkanized Holyoke, including that of the country club—he was a marvelous, mainly self-taught golfer. He could wear an oxford shirt and necktie and speak the local language, in every sense, and never act obsequious or look as though he felt out of place. And yet this upwardly mobile and versatile traveler—skilled in all ways of contending—still had Some
jibaro
in him. He had a good job, and so did his wife. He could afford to live elsewhere. He
chose
to live in the Flats. When puzzled friends asked him why, he said, "I want to know what's going on with my people." He could afford a telephone, of course, but he thought phones were a nuisance. It bothered him that his hometown in Puerto Rico seemed more Americanized each time he visited—in shorthand he'd explain that his hometown in Puerto Rico had
two
Burger Kings now, whereas Holyoke had only one. He thought the island ought to gain political independence, and he had no use for
independentistas
who took welfare. "Puerto Ricans between thirty and forty, we like to be Puerto Ricans when it's convenient for us," he once said to some North American friends. "I feel I am a Puerto Rican American, and I feel, really, I am an American. You people took me over.
You
made me American, not me." He didn't always hold his tongue when, for instance, white acquaintances told him they'd just met a nice Puerto Rican. "How come you act so surprised? You never met one before?" he'd say. But he had swallowed his share of dirty looks and slurs while learning how to get along on the mainland.

Old injuries welled up. Sometimes when he thought he could hear white people thinking, "Goddamn Puerto Rican, what's he doing here?" Eduardo would go back in his mind to his boyhood in Cayey, and tell himself those people knew nothing about him at all. Lying on his sofa, putting the
Transcript-Telegram
aside to climb in his mind back to the old farm, he'd feel his eyes getting misty. He'd remember the taste of the green bananas and of the oranges in his father's groves—he'd never found an orange anywhere as sweet as those. But even at those moments he would recall that it is possible to feel homesick for two places. He'd remember how on short trips back to the island, a few days would go by and he would find himself thinking, "It might be nice to see a little snow."

Just before April vacation, another child had left Chris's class for parts unknown. His name was Alejandro. He had come into her room at midyear from Victor's bilingual class, the only boy "mainstreamed" from that room so far. Mary Ann had arranged for Chris to get Alejandro. He was a gift—small and black-haired and glittering, with a movie star's clarity about his looks, and on top of that, very bright and very interested. Alejandro had just begun to get command of English. Unlike most of the children, he actually seemed to enjoy the basal reader's workbooks. He liked any chance to strut his stuff. Chris often found excuses to put Alejandro in bear hugs.

But his father was taking him back to live in Puerto Rico. Alejandro said he felt scared. "Changing schools, that's the worst thing for me. You know the first day, when you go to school and they always stare at you? You don't know nobody, and when you go outside, there's nobody to play wit' you. That's the worst thing, the feeling you have. You all hot inside, and everybody lookin' at you like who's that new kid, I never seen him before." He couldn't do his homework lately, Alejandro said. "I
want
to do it, but something happens to me. I get dizzy, and I fall asleep."

Chris thought, "I never experienced that myself. I always lived in the same place." She got Victor to try to talk the father into letting Alejandro finish the year with her, but the boy's father said they had to leave town. She spent a long time bucking up Alejandro on the days before he left. On his last day she kissed him goodbye and told him he'd do fine. She thought he probably would; he had so many gifts. But when she wondered what it meant for a child to be transplanted to Puerto Rico, she couldn't conjure up any pictures at all.

Now she was going there herself. Now, she thought, she'd have
some
idea.

A year ago, a Holyoke teacher named Efrain Martinez had arranged a tour of his native island for other teachers over April vacation. Efrain had figured that many of the faculty would want to go, since nearly half their students these days were Puerto Rican. The school department had given its blessing; the superintendent of schools had gone on the first trip. But teachers had to pay their own way, and the ones who had the most to learn didn't want to. Several white colleagues had told Efrain to his face, "I wouldn't go to Puerto Rico if you paid
me.
"