Student finds Puerto Rican contributions to region

NEW HAVEN — A mix of newspaper clippings, correspondence and photos of activism by Yale Puerto Rican student group Despierta Boricua in the 1970s have taken Amanda Rivera's research from New Haven to Bridgeport to Puerto Rico and back, including her own family history.

Rivera discovered the items in cardboard boxes pulled from storage in Yale's La Casa Cultural Julia de Burgos, inspiring her to learn more about her fellow Puerto Ricans who now call Connecticut home and their contributions. She is documenting Puerto Ricans' local history and influence through an oral history project as part of her doctoral dissertation at Yale University.

Rivera, whose great-grandmother migrated to New York to work as a seamstress in the Garment District's sweatshops, found herself questioning how her people got here and why their relationship with the country is “so complicated and fractured and messy,” she said.

“Puerto Ricans have citizenship, but we are second-class citizens,” she said.

There were 22,000 Puerto Ricans living in New Haven in 2021, which was more than half of the city's Hispanic/Latino population. But greater than numbers are their contributions to education, nonprofits and culture. There's even a direct flight between New Haven and San Juan, Puerto Rico, making both heritage trips and tourism possible, as of November.

“What does it mean for the United States to not even call Puerto Rico a colony, even though it is a colony,” she said, “and what does it mean for Puerto Ricans to resist and define themselves on their own terms?”

From the archives, Rivera learned about the Yale students who protested the university for a Puerto Rican student center, now the Latinx student center La Casa, and she found their proposed course syllabi for a Puerto Rican studies major. The archive is currently in Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, but Rivera plans to make her project publicly available on Connecticut Digital Archive.

Some Puerto Ricans were recruited from the island to work agriculture or manufacturing jobs after World War II. Others migrated to join relatives who were already in the area.

Rivera has done about 20 oral history interviews in Bridgeport and New Haven since beginning last June, including a Puerto Rican man who helped create a bilingual education system in Bridgeport, and New Haven's first Latina superintendent of schools, Madeline Negrón.

Negrón is closing out her first year as superintendent of a district that is 48 percent Hispanic/ Latino, and she recently won a diversity, equity and inclusion award from the University of Connecticut, her alma mater.

Negrón's father was one such labor recruit, and the family moved from Puerto Rico to Willimantic when she was 10. She recalls an education system that was difficult to navigate and educators who wrote her off.

“It was almost like saying, ‘I'm not wasting my time on you, because you have no potential,' because all they saw was the fact that I was limited in my ability to speak English,” Negrón said.

The district has two dual-language schools — Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration and John C. Daniels School of International Communication — which bring together an equal mix of Spanish and English speakers starting in kindergarten, so students leave the program bilingual and bicultural.

It also has eight schools with programs for multilingual learners, which provides services in Spanish while the student learns English.

Puerto Ricans had the highest rate of “those without a high school education” and the lowest attainment rate of higher education when compared to New Haven's “Hispanic/Latinos” and “overall population” in 2021, according to a report by the University of Connecticut's Puerto Rican Studies Initiative. All three groups had comparable rates of high school education.

Negrón said her core values are equity and access, because of her experience being a Puerto Rican child in a mostly white environment.

“I don't want children to encounter educators like the ones I encountered when I was a child,” she said.

She also gives accolades to other Puerto Rican leaders in the local community: Juan Candelaria, D-New Haven, who has represented the city since 2002 and is the first Latino Deputy Speaker of the General Assembly; Daniel Diaz, co-founder and chairman of Latino youth art organization ARTE; and Joe Rodriguez, president and cofounder of the nonprofit Puerto Ricans United.

Rodriguez helped revive the Puerto Rican Festival which takes place annually on the New Haven Green. It began in the '80s as parades in various cities, but went dormant from 2009 to 2015.

He and others relaunched the festival “as a way to preserve our culture,” Rodriguez said. In the eight years since, the event has grown from 5,000 to 12,000 people — both locals and out-ofstate visitors.

“As Puerto Ricans, New Haven's story is our story, and our story is New Haven's story,” Rodriguez said.