Atlantic Neighbors: Puerto Rican and Italian Intersecting Diasporas in 20th-Century New York

On the evening of October 16, 1938, one-hundred Puerto Rican and Italian-American youth battled with sticks, stones, and knives on East 107th Street between Park and Madison Avenues in the East Harlem section of Manhattan, apparently over “arguments about girls.” Expanding on the background and aftermath of the incident, this paper examines Puerto Rican-Italian relations in New York in a transnational perspective. What was at stake in the gang warfare that Puerto Rican and Italian youths waged until the end of the 1950s, when a decade of massive urban renewal, Puerto Rican migration, and Italian displacement ultimately changed the urban context in which it had emerged? Ethnic clashes reflected other tensions running deep in Puerto Rican and Italian communities, from competition for jobs and public aid to the articulation of racial identities. Puerto Rican-Italian conflicts and instances of cooperation affected the city and administration of social programs that New Deal liberalism had introduced. Between 1920-1960, Puerto Rican and Italian migrants to New York City largely constructed and redefined their racial, class, gender, political, and religious identities as people in diasporas by attrition of one with the other. The paper suggests that every area of the local interaction between Puerto Ricans and Italians was to a very large extent shaped by transnational and global processes centered in the Atlantic, from the formation of racially-inflected diasporic nationalisms, to the changing economy of the garment industry where most Puerto Rican and Italian women worked, to the developments of state liberalism. The paper engages historical literature on migration and diasporas across the Atlantic, urban histories in Atlantic perspective, and comparative migration history to the United States. Primary sources include Spanish- and Italian-language newspapers, oral histories, and a wide array of archival material.