Latinization, Race, and Cultural Identification in Puerto Rican Orlando

Latinization, Race, and Cultural Identification in Puerto RicanOrlando

Patricia Silver

Southern Cultures, Volume 19, Number 4, Winter 2013, pp. 55-75 (Article)

Published by The University of North Carolina PressDOI: 10.1353/scu.2013.0032

For additional information about this article

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55

E s s a y

Latinization, Race, and Cultural Identification in Puerto Rican Orlandoby Patricia Silver

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Florida and, specifically, the Central Florida region, has become the most frequent destination for Puerto Ricans

in the United States, and that is changing what Latinization means in Florida. Puerto Rican family at the

Miami airport, 1952, courtesy of Eva Pagán Hill, from the collection “Puerto Ricans in Central Florida from

1940s to 1980s: A History.”

56 sout hErn culturEs, Winter 2013 : Patricia Silver

The Latinization of the U.S. South has inspired a body of litera-ture examining economic, political, social, and cultural changes in the South in recent decades. Amidst discussions of migration, assimilation, and resistance, there is frequent reference to the South’s biracially coded past and its implications for what Ray-

mond Mohl has called the “Nuevo New South.” For Mohl and others, Hispanic im-migration to the U.S. South presents significant questions about how new forms of diaspora in new places challenge existing paradigms for reading social dynam-ics. In particular, the historical constructions of race as a black/white binary in the U.S. South leave both newcomers and longtime residents at a loss as to how to read their contemporary reality.1

An examination of the racialization of Orlando, Florida’s Puerto Rican popu-lation reveals one way this is playing out. In Racial Situations, anthropologist John Hartigan Jr. has argued for the importance of thinking about race in terms of “the local settings in which racial identities are actually articulated, reproduced, and contested, resisting the urge to draw abstract conclusions about whiteness and blackness.” Building on this, I argue here that the particularities of place, read from both the present and the past, are an important component of understand-ing how racial codes are being redrawn in the contemporary South. This article uses the questions that follow from Jamie Winders and Barbara Smith as guidance for examining Latinization and racialization in Orlando, Florida:

How do we make sense of these entanglements of a South contoured by a his-torical black/white binary, de- jure segregation and de- facto racism, and a South stretched into transnational flows of bodies, cultures, and capital? In the con-temporary South, who can invoke and be part of its past, and to what ends? How do and should the interpretations of southern history affect present ac-tions, and who can access these meanings to interpret and intervene in the present?2

At first look, the choice of Puerto Ricans in Orlando may seem an odd case study for exploring the impact of new Hispanic populations on the social and cultural formations of the U.S. South. Florida’s Spanish past combines with the decades- old Cuban presence there to suggest that the recent southern phenome-non of Latinization is not new at all. What’s more, neither Orlando nor Florida is referenced as “typically” southern, and Puerto Ricans are not often mentioned in the literature on Hispanics in the U.S. South.3

Of the top eighteen metropolitan destinations for Hispanics in the United States between 1980 and 2000, however, nearly two- thirds of these are in the South and four are in Florida. Of those four, Orlando easily takes the lead. Following the 2010 census, Florida gained two new congressional seats, due in large part to the growth of the Hispanic population. This growth is especially noticeable in Central

Puerto Rican Orlando 57

Florida, where Puerto Ricans make up by far the largest number of Hispanics, as demonstrated in the table in the following section. Indeed, Florida and, specifi-cally, the Central Florida region, has become the most frequent destination for Puerto Ricans in the United States, and that is changing what Latinization means in Florida.4

W E lc o m E t o t h E nE W o r la n d o

Since Disney World opened in 1971, the Central Florida economy has under-gone a dramatic shift from oranges and cattle to theme parks and tourism. This shift transformed Orlando from a biracial town into a multiracial city in the space of a few decades, as the area became a destination for visitors and migrants from around the globe. Examining faces on the street, it seems clear that the racial his-tory of a black/white binary has given way to a modern, and even postmodern, multiracial multiculturalism. How, I wonder, do the racial memories that Puerto Ricans have brought to Orlando engage with the racial memories of those already present?

I first arrived in Orlando from Puerto Rico in 2005 when I accepted a teaching position with the anthropology faculty at the University of Central Florida. As I made acquaintances in town and navigated the maze of Orlando highways to ar-rive on campus, I soon began to identify with James Cobb’s argument that:

For all the contemporary statistical data documenting regional convergence and the physical evidence afforded by skyscrapers, suburban sprawl, and grid-locked expressways, I have yet to encounter anyone who has moved into or out of the South and did not sense that, for better or for worse, living here was dif-ferent from living in other parts of the country.

The most striking markers of daily life in Orlando are indeed the “skyscrapers, suburban sprawl, and gridlocked expressways,” but there is for me a distinct sense of something different from the northern spaces where I have lived most of my life. Despite the seeming newness of Orlando and the ubiquitous reminder of its global tourist economy, I recognize in daily interactions the cultural markers as-sociated in the literature with southern social relations. It is there in the palpable presence of God in daily life, which is visible in the multitude of churches that dot the landscape and audible in the talk of people I meet. It is there also in the inter-mingling of intimacy and distance in personal interactions, in the way the clerk in the local 7- Eleven store always calls me “sweetie.” At first I was surprised to note how much this all reminded me of Puerto Rico, and I began to wonder what this might mean for Puerto Rican social relations and cultural identifications in Orlando.5

I began to study Florida history and found reflections of southern history from


the Civil War forward. Florida was one of the first states to join the Confederacy and to eventually impose Jim Crow laws, and the state contains an overrepresen-tation of U.S. military bases, a history of racial violence and civil rights struggles, conservative politics, and, most recently, a demographic shift from a biracial past to a multicultural present. I observed that the emergence of Orlando’s shiny new look covered a past that some seemed happy to forget. “Good riddance,” said a friend as we watched a 1960s- style shopping strip be torn down to make way for a New Urbanist–style row of storefronts.

The decade that we saw being symbolically demolished in the shopping strip was, in Orlando as in other places in the South, the battleground decade when the legal statutes upholding Jim Crow segregation were finally removed from the books. The symbolic removal of Florida history in Orlando grows sharper when one considers that Orlando was geographically on the front lines of the fight over desegregation as the Yellow Dog Democrats of North Florida and the newcomers

Since Disney World opened in 1971, the Central Florida economy has undergone a dramatic shift from oranges

and cattle to theme parks and tourism. This shift transformed Orlando from a biracial town into a multiracial

city in the space of a few decades, as the area became a destination for visitors and migrants from around the globe.

Walt Disney with company at press conference, Orlando, 1965, courtesy of the State Archives of Florida, Florida

Memory, floridamemory.com.

In the Orlando Sentinel’s series “The New Orlando,” which focused on the changing demographics of

metropolitan Orlando, an 80- year- old African American man spoke about some of the changes he had seen: jobs

for African Americans beyond the citrus industry, and the end of required work passes for African Americans

crossing from the black to the white part of town after nightfall. A worker picking oranges at a contest in a grove,

1952, Orlando, State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, floridamemory.com.


in South Florida held a political showdown over the issue. At the heart of the struggle was the collision between the desire of most whites to maintain “tradi-tional race relations” and the social demands of the new economy, as Walt Disney refused to consider locating to an area riddled with racial conflict.6

Soon after my own introduction to Central Florida in 2005, the Orlando Sen-tinel ran an occasional series called “The New Orlando,” which focused on the changing demographics of metropolitan Orlando. The articles described the emerging multiethnic and multicultural community, mentioning in particular the growth in the Hispanic and black populations. In an article from January 1, 2006, an 80- year- old African American man spoke about some of the changes he had seen: jobs for African Americans beyond the citrus industry, and the end of required work passes for African Americans crossing from the black to the white part of town after nightfall. A month later, an article from February 5 focused on Puerto Ricans, projecting that, by 2020, one- third of Orlando residents will be Hispanic and describing current Puerto Rican efforts “to find their place between two cultures.”7

The table that follows (Figure 1) illustrates the population growth of Puerto Ricans and Hispanics between 1980 and 2010 in Orlando city, as well as its sur-rounding counties (Orange, Osceola, and Seminole). Demonstrating the Latin-ization of Orlando city with numbers is somewhat misleading because its geo-graphic dimensions have expanded over the years as it has annexed neighboring communities, but the increase in Puerto Rican and Hispanic percentages to the city’s total population over these decades is still noteworthy. A look at the counties surrounding Orlando is also useful in demonstrating the wider regional impact of this demographic shift. Since 1990, Puerto Ricans have made up nearly 50 percent of Hispanics in the region, and their growing presence there has challenged the assumed predominance of Cuban influence in Florida.8

Around the same time as the New Orlando series began to run in the Orlando Sentinel, the Ku Klux Klan staged a march through the historically black section of Orlando, protesting “crime and illegal immigration” for the protection of “white citizens in Orlando.” The Orlando Sentinel urged citizens to ignore the proposed march and stay home. The day after the march, the Sentinel reported that a group of about 500 residents did attend. Held back by 300 police officers, the counter- protesters’ shouts drowned out any message that the twenty- two marchers could have hoped to spread. Orlandoans were reportedly pleased that the day ended peacefully and the Klan had left. Echoing my friend’s expression in the case of the demolished shopping strip, “good riddance” seemed to be the collective response.9

Whether “good riddance” is uttered in a casual conversation between friends, or in the communal effort to silence the racialized echoes of a violent past, indi-vidual and collective memories play out in the dynamics of social relations and cultural meanings made in Orlando’s newly constructed, multicultural, and urban


Figure 1.

1980Total

PopulationHispanic

PopulationPuerto Rican Population

Hispanic Percent of Total

Puerto Rican Percent of

Total

Orlando city 128,291 5,024 1,493 3.92 1.16Orange Co. 471,016 19,726 6,682 4.19 1.42Osceola Co. 49,287 1,089 417 2.21 0.85Seminole Co. 179,752 5,157 2,079 2.87 1.16

1990Total

PopulationHispanic




Total

Orlando city 161,112 10,820 7,035 6.72 4.37Orange Co. 662,085 49,540 34,223 7.48 5.17Osceola Co. 104,836 9,974 8,122 9.51 7.75Seminole Co. 282,158 13,235 9,502 4.69 3.37

2000Total

PopulationHispanic




Total

Orlando city 185,951 32,510 17,029 17.48 9.16Orange Co. 896,344 168,361 86,583 18.78 9.66Osceola Co. 172,493 50,727 30,728 29.41 17.81Seminole Co. 365,196 40,731 19,609 11.15 5.37

2010Total

PopulationHispanic




Total

Orlando city 238,300 60,483 31,201 25.38 13.09Orange Co. 1,145,956 308,244 149,457 26.90 13.04Osceola Co. 268,685 122,146 72,986 45.46 27.16Seminole Co. 422,718 72,457 34,378 17.14 8.13

landscape. Orlando today is a fast- paced city that many remember as a place once dominated by orange groves. It is a Florida location where the Hispanic popula-tion is dominantly Puerto Rican rather than Cuban. This mix of traditional and modern, of typical and atypical, offers a particularly interesting site to examine how the past is used to construct the present, and how racial memories from dis-


tinctly different pasts become part of the negotiations and struggles to define social relations in the New Orlando.

t h E P u E rt o r i c a n i zat i o n o f o r la n d o a n d c E n t ra l f lo r i da

In a cab on the way to the Orlando airport in 2006, a conversation began when the driver asked where I was going and I answered “Puerto Rico.” As we passed though a particular neighborhood, the driver remarked that he remembered when “this whole area turned Puerto Rican overnight.” I asked him when that was, but he had trouble pinpointing it with any accuracy. Maybe some time in the 1980s, he thought. I knew about the census numbers that showed dramatic growth of the Puerto Rican population in Orlando beginning in the 1980s and most intensely in the 1990s. In fact, my position at the University of Central Florida was in part thanks to the 2000 census data, which confirmed Hispanics as the new majority minority in Orlando, and Puerto Ricans as by far the majority Hispanic popula-tion in Central Florida. My research in Puerto Rican schools between 1999 and 2001 was a plus to my application for an anthropology department located in a city that had “turned Puerto Rican overnight.”

Since 2006, I have conducted research on the formation of a Puerto Rican com-munity in Orlando, documenting and articulating the social and cultural transfor-mations that have accompanied the demographic shift. Much of the data presented in the following is drawn from a 2008–2009 collection of oral history interviews titled “Puerto Ricans in Central Florida from 1940s to 1980s: A History.” The oral history project, which I co- directed while at the University of Central Florida, sought to discover, acknowledge, and teach the depth of Puerto Rican history in the area. As the title suggests, the oral histories focused on the experiences of Puerto Ricans who had come to Central Florida from the 1940s into the 1980s. In all, about seventy- five people of Puerto Rican birth or heritage participated in the project. Other documentation of this history is sparse at best, and thus, we called the project “A History” to emphasize that it was a first attempt to collect narratives of a heretofore silent and neglected past.10

Initial participants responded to media announcements and grew in num-ber through snowball sampling as one participant often led the research team to another. The interviews were open- ended because we wanted the participants themselves to identify what was significant to Puerto Rican history and experi-ence in Orlando and the surrounding area. For this article, I have presented Afri-can American and white racial memories of Orlando and Florida using observa-tions from public hearings for redistricting, newspaper reports, and the 2005 book Crossing Division Street: An Oral History of the African- American Community in Orlando.11

The field of Puerto Rican Studies includes a dominant narrative about a largely


working- class migration from Puerto Rico to northern U.S. cities between the 1940s and 1960s, but we found repeated evidence of a cross- class group of indi-viduals who decided to “do something different” and head to Florida. We learned that Puerto Ricans have been present in Central Florida for at least sixty years as migrant agricultural workers, as military personnel or family of military person-nel, as real estate investors, as engineers recruited to the Kennedy Space Center, and as tourists or workers in the tourist industry. The following brief overview uses knowledge gained in the interviews to set a referential context for this article’s questions about how racial memories from distinctly different pasts have impacted emerging social relations and cultural identifications in the New Orlando.12

Well before Orlando caught the attention of Walt Disney, U.S. military instal-lations in Florida brought large numbers of U.S. troops, including Puerto Ricans, to the state during World War II, the Korean War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Puerto Rican- born Ernesto Peña Roque was one of those soldiers. He shared with us his memories of waking up on his first morning in Orlando in 1954, hearing the birds, and deciding then to live there permanently. He did so in 1973 and now has a large extended family in the Orlando area. This story is a common one. Other former Puerto Rican soldiers once stationed in Florida moved to the state perma-nently later in their lives, and as in Ernesto Peña Roque’s case, many of those who came were followed by other family members.

An incentive for Puerto Rican soldiers and civilians alike came in the form of the land speculation that preceded and accompanied the opening of Disney World. Beginning in the mid 1960s, developers in Central Florida actively mar-keted lots in Puerto Rico—and in New York, Chicago, and U.S. military bases around the world—where many Puerto Ricans were attracted to the idea of a warm climate. As Central Florida’s Spanish- speaking population grew, so did its demand for teachers, medical personnel, and others able to respond to the needs of the growing population. Puerto Ricans with U.S. citizenship have helped to provide a Spanish- speaking workforce free from worries about legal status.

As Puerto Ricans began to move in increasing numbers to Orlando during the 1970s, the area was still emerging from Jim Crow segregation. Although a multi-cultural Orlando was forming by the 1980s, the city’s division into white and black spaces is almost as clear now as it was in 1930. For many Puerto Ricans, encounter-ing a physical space and social world so clearly divided between black and white has been shocking and confusing.

rac i a l m E m o r i E s a n d c u lt u ra l i d E n t i f i c at i o n

The oral histories we collected in 2008 and 2009 raise questions about how indi-vidual Puerto Ricans have identified racially in the context of Orlando’s demo-graphic transformation and how their self identifications were or were not chal-


lenged. In Puerto Rico, racial classification was and is more complex than the black/white binary that is generally assumed to define race relations in Orlando and other parts of the U.S. South. Puerto Rican history shares the U.S. South’s broad outline of European invasion and decimation of the native population, fol-lowed by importation of African slaves. But Puerto Rican racial classifications have historically acknowledged a wide range of phenotypes that emerge from dif-ferent combinations of skin color, hair texture, and facial features. Jorge Duany, for instance, has identified nineteen distinct racial terms used in Puerto Rico.13

Several of the oral history participants who had been in Central Florida since before the 1960s were of a phenotype that apparently allowed assimilation into white society; they remembered being shocked by the racial segregation they

Monserrate Velez

(pictured here with

her husband, Modesto

Velez, on their

wedding day in 1948

in Sanford, Florida):

“At home [in Puerto

Rico] they did have

some of that—not as

much—but they did

have clubs that only

white people went to.

No blacks. Just the

rich and the white.”

Photo courtesy of

Monserrate Velez,

from the collection

“Puerto Ricans in

Central Florida

from 1940s to 1980s:

A History.”


found in Florida, but they did not remember experiencing it personally. Mon-serrate Velez moved to Sanford, just north of Orlando in Seminole County, in the late 1940s. Her sister was married to a soldier stationed in Sanford and she went to be with them. Although she does not recall racist acts directed toward her, Velez’s narrative about her work as a nurse in Sanford brings racial memories from Puerto Rico to bear on what she found in Central Florida.

At home [in Puerto Rico] they did have some of that—not as much—but they did have clubs that only white people went to. No blacks. Just the rich and the white. So to me that was not as bad as it was here because [in Florida] they had the fountains for white[s] and fountains for black[s] . . . And then the hospi-tals at home, they were not segregated—everybody was in the same room. But here they had big rooms for them, long rooms with about 6 or 8 beds in it, just for the blacks.

The reference to, “No blacks. Just the rich and the white,” draws on a racial classi-fication system in which class relations impact racial identification. Velez went on to talk about a black doctor in Sanford who always entered the hospital through the back door. Her racial memories from Puerto Rico found little to relate to that Central Florida experience.14

Significant to Puerto Rican racial perceptions is the historical development of an ideology of “racial democracy,” which also can be found in other parts of Latin America and is often upheld in contrast to the North American black/white bi-nary. In Puerto Rico, this ideology promotes the view that all Puerto Ricans are descended from three roots: Spanish, African, and Taino Indian. The three- roots paradigm developed as part of a mid- twentieth- century political and economic transformation of Puerto Rico. At that time, a new constitution declared Puerto Rico a commonwealth of the United States and an economic program known as Operation Bootstrap transformed Puerto Rico from an agricultural to an indus-trial society. At the same time, a cultural program known as Operation Serenity was designed to promote the social relations and cultural identifications perceived as important to the success of the newly formed Puerto Rican state and its emerg-ing industrial economy. Presenting Puerto Rico as a racial democracy was part of this social program.15

Despite the three- roots paradigm, however, Puerto Rican iconography that de-picts its agricultural past is often racialized as white. For example, driving through the mountains of Puerto Rico on the highway that links San Juan on the Atlan-tic coast to Ponce on the Caribbean, the traveler passes by a white stone statue in honor of the Puerto Rican jíbaro, a word used with both affection and derision to refer to Puerto Rican peasantry. The positioning of the statue is not insignificant, given that geographies of race in Puerto Rico place white people in the mountains and blacks on the coast. Indeed, the racial democracy ideology does not preclude


the preference for whiteness nor the association of whiteness with higher- class status in Puerto Rico.16

Such perceptions become part of the racial dynamics of Puerto Rican Orlando, especially because only about one- half of Puerto Ricans in the Orlando area have come directly from Puerto Rico. Many have come from northern diasporic com-munities and have very different racial memories. Puerto Rican immigrants in the United States have found geographies and social relations marked by perceptions of ethnicity and race that differ markedly from those in Puerto Rico. The history that has led to over one- half of Puerto Ricans living outside Puerto Rico by 2010 and the particularities of moving to Florida are also part of the story.

Parallel to Operations Bootstrap and Serenity, the Migration Division of the Puerto Rican Department of Labor worked collaboratively with U.S. employers in need of labor to take displaced agricultural workers from Puerto Rico to U.S. fields and factories. Despite a brief program in the Miami area, the Puerto Rican policy, as indicated by a 1956 report from the Puerto Rican Department of Labor, was to deny contracts to states with segregation laws and to send Puerto Rican workers to the U.S. North. However, the 1956 report references unauthorized re-cruitment practices on the part of U.S. businesses, who recruited directly via em-ployment agencies in the United States with ads in Puerto Rican newspapers for

Puerto Rican iconography that depicts

its agricultural past is often racialized

as white. For example, driving

through the mountains of Puerto Rico

on the highway that links San Juan

on the Atlantic coast to Ponce on the

Caribbean, the traveler passes by a

white stone statue in honor of the Puerto

Rican jíbaro, a word used with both

affection and derision to refer to Puerto

Rican peasantry. Monument to the

Puerto Rican jíbaro, 2004, courtesy

of Wikipedia.


jobs in the U.S. South. In particular, the report points to Florida’s advertising for farmworkers and domestic service workers.17

Policies from the Puerto Rican Migration Division indicate, at the very least, a recognition on the part of the Puerto Rican state that Puerto Rican workers would be racialized as non- white in the context of the U.S. South. A St. Petersburg Times article from 1962 discusses the dilemma that school officials faced in placing His-panic children in a segregated school system:

How do you classify a Mexican boy with Spanish and Indian blood in his veins? Or a Cuban girl whose family tree includes an Irishman and a Negro? Or a Puerto Rican who can trace his Caucasian ancestry back for centuries, but whose skin is darker than many native- born Florida Negroes?18

Given the wide range of phenotypes in Puerto Rico, the Migration Division policies raise questions about the racial features of those Puerto Rican workers who decided to come to Florida on private contracts apart from the Migration Division programs. There is little documented evidence to address this question, but one of the participants in the oral history project places her uncle among those migrant agricultural workers who moved to Florida, and remembers his light coloring: “He was tall and had green eyes and blond hair. He wasn’t your typical farmworker.”

Her description points out the Caucasian features of a particular Puerto Rican in Florida, and, in the claim that “he wasn’t your typical farmworker,” also refer-ences Puerto Rican racialization of farmworkers as non- white. Despite the nos-talgic image in Puerto Rico of the white jíbaro, popular imagination depicts the rural Puerto Ricans migrating to the States in the mid- twentieth century as dark- skinned; not necessarily black, but not white either.

The narrative of another oral history participant, who came to Orlando from Puerto Rico in the 1960s, provides further evidence of racial and class identifica-tions assigned in popular imagination to those who were leaving Puerto Rico dur-ing that era. The anecdote also points to distinctions in Puerto Rican and long-time Orlandoan perceptions of race and class. This participant was not a migrant farmworker; his occupation would label him “professional” in both Puerto Rico and Florida, then and now. He remembered the surprise from acquaintances in Florida as they learned where he was from.

Most of the time, you know, most of the Puerto Ricans that moved to the United States were the low strata. And many of them were black—so whenever we said that we were Puerto Rican, they didn’t believe us. “Because you’re white. How can you be Puerto Ricans?”

This man’s new acquaintances were surprised to learn that he was Puerto Rican, apparently because they assumed all Puerto Ricans to be dark- skinned. He, on the


other hand, collapsed race into social class to explain that he was different from “most of the Puerto Ricans that moved to the United States.” His narrative illu-minates how Puerto Ricans in Central Florida with different migration histories might view each other in terms of race and class, as well as how Central Floridians racialize Puerto Ricans in general as a non- white group.19

Racial memories differ significantly between Puerto Ricans who arrived di-rectly from Puerto Rico and those from Puerto Rican diasporic communities, no matter how much or little phenotypic variation either group may actually em-body. When asked to identify themselves racially, Puerto Ricans who have lived in U.S. diasporic communities are more likely to see themselves as non- white, while Puerto Ricans from the island often use the term “Nuyorican” as a disparaging racial and class marker for diasporic Puerto Ricans.20

m a k i n g rac E a n d f i n d i n g P lac E i n t h E nE W o r la n d o

To complicate matters, virtually all Puerto Ricans arriving in Orlando en-counter racial practices and relations that are foreign to their previous experi-ences. As the above might suggest, for some of those coming from a life lived mostly, if not completely, in Puerto Rico, it can be a shock to learn that, in their new home, they are marked as non- white. In a private interview on August 10, 2010, one woman who came to Florida in the 1980s described to me:

Here, they define for me what is black and what is white for the Floridian. And I believe I’m white because I’m white, of the white race, because there are no black people in my family. And where do I fit here? For the Floridian, all His-panics, all who speak Spanish, are a mix of black and white and of no use . . . It’s a very, very delicate position.

Things can be similarly confusing for Puerto Ricans from northern diasporic communities. Many have arrived in Orlando to find themselves the object of scorn from Floridians of all colors because they are considered to be northerners. Often-times, they are also scorned by other Puerto Ricans who define the descendents of those jíbaros who went to the U.S. North as “Nuyorican.” Puerto Ricans who have lived all or most of their lives in Puerto Rico often question the cultural authen-ticity of diasporic Puerto Ricans, who have lived all or most of their lives apart from the geographic “homeland,” and who may or may not speak Spanish.

All of this plays out as Puerto Ricans attempt to define their place in the racial-ized world of Orlando. Amidst ambiguities, long- term residents apply old cate-gories and definitions to new situations, and new residents in turn take up the local memories they encounter, using them to establish their place. The language of the earlier described Klan march used historical white supremacist discourse to target immigrant populations, folding them into an overarching rejection of the


Other. On the opposite side, a 2011 Florida legislative effort to impose strict new regulations on voter registration was widely understood as a means to limit mi-nority access to their right to vote. In response, the Democratic Party of Orange County used the collective memory of white supremacist practices and released a call to action with the lead- in, “Just Say NO to Voter Suppression and Jim Crow Laws in Florida!”21

For their part, African American memories of racial violence and struggle for racial justice in Orlando have not been razed as easily as the 1960s shopping cen-ter. Oral histories from Orlando’s African American community include stories of cross burnings, voter intimidation, lynchings, and other violence against blacks in Central Florida. In 2008, when then- candidate Barack Obama visited Orlando, the line to hear him speak began to form six hours ahead of his arrival. Despite this show of support, an African American security guard at the university saw the Obama sticker on my car and asked if I were not frightened to be driving around with it there. “I’ll vote for him,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have that on my car.”

How have Puerto Ricans identified, confronted, accommodated, and utilized the racial past of Orlando and

Florida as they have become the majority group of the new Hispanic majority in Central Florida? State of Florida,

Puerto Rican, and U.S. flags fly together along Colonial Drive in East Orlando, 2012, courtesy of the author.


During the 2012 elections, I heard similar sentiments from an African American woman who had proudly displayed her Obama sticker in 2008. Such memories also become part of the field that Puerto Ricans navigate in the New Orlando.

Building on the opening questions from Winders and Smith, the following ex-amines how Puerto Ricans have tried to make sense of the “entanglements” of the southern past and present, and to what degree they have been able to interpret his-tory as an intervention in the present. How have they identified, confronted, ac-commodated, and utilized Orlando’s racial past as they have become the majority group of Orlando’s new majority minority? Puerto Rican anthropologist Isar Go-dreau has assessed and articulated the ways in which Puerto Ricans “create and re- create classificatory grids of race as they engage in conversation to be strategically essentialist or ambiguous.” The following looks at ways in which Puerto Ricans have juggled strategic essentialism with ambiguity in their efforts to define their own situation in Orlando’s racialized social field.

Patricia González Durocher’s oral history offers evidence of early strategies for intervening in Florida’s biracial codes. When González Durocher arrived in Orlando with her ex- serviceman husband in 1951, they moved into a house on the white side of town. Across the street lived a Lebanese family, and the two families became friends. Although González Durocher does not remember feeling racism directed at her, her daughter remembers that, as a young child, she did not iden-tify her mother to her friends as Puerto Rican, but as Spanish. Her daughter also wondered if the two families became friends because of a shared sense of being “foreign.”22

Other Puerto Rican Orlando oral histories reference efforts to reclaim Florida’s Spanish past as part of creating racial codes for the present. Referencing the his-tory of segregated neighborhoods in Orlando, one Puerto Rican man described his own insertion into a white space whose deeper past was Spanish, while he also pointed to a bond with black Orlandoans.

When the city was founded, the west side was for the African Americans and the east side was for the whites. Surprise. In the year 2008 how much it has changed. It hasn’t. The office we’re seeing today, which I bought in 1981, when I got the original title, the place, this area was called Rolando Estate because it was owned by an old Spanish owner who had founded it here many, many years before this became a cracker city. But it said that this property, when it was originally purchased in 1939, could only be sold to people of the Caucasian persuasion. Granted, when I bought in 1981, that did not apply, but I found it kind of interesting that this was a white area, restricted.

He went on to say that “the first group to come out and say ‘we will help you’ was not the white community but the African American community.” His narrative


incorporates his own Spanish background into Orlando history while it also dis-associates him from Orlando’s segregated past. In another portion of his story, he also identifies Reverend Judge, a well- known African American civil rights activist, as someone who reached out to help Puerto Ricans arriving in Orlando.23

The 2011 redistricting hearings by the Florida legislature in Orlando gave evi-dence of black- Hispanic cooperation. Several African American pastors with a history of civil rights activism in Florida gave testimony and expressed concerns that their hard- won gains were threatened by the redistricting process and voter suppression laws. Alongside their demand that the African American vote must not be diluted, several referenced testimony from the many Puerto Ricans present and told the legislature not to set “minority against minority.” They argued in strong terms that the population growth in Florida was due to blacks and His-panics, and that the new Congressional map needed to recognize that by giving a district to each. When the Orange County Redistricting Advisory Committee dismissed every public map proposal that aimed to maintain the African Ameri-can district and create a Hispanic one in that county, a black- Hispanic coalition quickly formed in protest. Under that pressure, the Committee reinstated a public map proposal drawn by an African American activist, which designated a majority Hispanic and a majority African American district in Orange County.

Despite periodic strategic alliances, however, Puerto Rican and African Ameri-can relations in Orlando and Central Florida have often been strained. Echoing the racial identifications expressed in several of the Puerto Rican oral histories, one African American woman said to an Orlando Sentinel reporter in 2001, “A lot of Hispanics . . . consider themselves white.” Blacks have expressed concern that this new “minority” population could threaten their hold on the gains made after decades of civil rights struggles. Indeed, the 2011 redistricting process for the City of Orlando made clear the very real possibility that Hispanics would gain a 52.7 percent district and the African American district would drop below 50 percent (to 42.7 percent) for the first time in thirty years.24 Yet, diasporic Puerto Ricans, especially those from New York, bring long memories of identification as a racial minority and deep participation in black- Hispanic alliances. They express their frustration when their efforts to build solidarity in Orlando have been rebuffed. “We grew up together in New York,” they say. “We were all poor.”

School integration in Orange County serves as a case study of how Puerto Ricans in Orlando may “invoke and be part of its past,” both by identifying racially in Central Florida and by creating a place for themselves in Orlando’s present. An Orlando Sentinel article from February 2009 returned to the issue of segregated schools, showing that 14 of 34 school districts in Florida still had open lawsuits against them over fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education. Orange County, where Orlando is located, was the largest. The news coverage brought to light


districts that seemed to have forgotten they had a lawsuit on the books, as well as to those who were simply ignoring the issue to avoid the trouble of tying up “legal loose ends.”25

Later in April, several Orlando Sentinel articles addressed the closing and opening of a number of schools and questioned whether a regulation dating from the era of desegregation had been followed. The regulation required that a biracial commit-tee made up of five white and five black members oversee decisions about school closings and construction. In one article, it was stated that the committee had only five members total and that one white member had been the sole attendee at the latest meeting. This one member had given the word to proceed with the closing of six schools and the creation of two in a low- income black neighborhood. In essence, this was a piece of history that had been forgotten, but the pressures of school closings in the economic downturn led to a process of “re- membering” the committee.26

Letters to the editor over the next few days and weeks questioned the point of a biracial committee in 2009, and quickly the discussion turned to whether the com-mittee should include Hispanic members. A district representative cited the 1964 court order that formed the biracial committee, explaining to Hispanics that in order to have representation on the committee, they would have to choose to be white or black. An activist group headed by Puerto Ricans began to advocate for Hispanic inclusion on the committee, while the president of the Orange County naacP argued that Hispanics had an advisory board and were not part of this his-torically rooted issue. The full issue of the lawsuits was not settled until August 2010, but along the way, in March, the judge dismissed Puerto Rican claims for in-clusion on the biracial committee, saying that that decision rested with the school district and not with the courts. As Puerto Ricans in 2011 advocated for inclusion in the redistricting process, and as Puerto Rican testimony was heard at every level of government, the memory of what is now simply called “the biracial issue” con-tributed to their interpretations of the past. These interpretations in turn became part of Puerto Rican efforts to intervene in and shape the present and future of Orlando and Central Florida.27

It is in these dynamics that demographic and cultural Latinization is playing out in Orlando. In memories and in silences, Orlando’s racial history continues to shape the present responses to the racial and ethnic diversification of Orlando’s population. The black/white binary that marks the racial memories of longtime Floridians is part of the current social field that Puerto Ricans and other His-panics must navigate as they work to establish their place in the social, political, and economic worlds of Orlando. Despite the apparent newness of the Orlando landscape, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics must respond to the memory and actuality of historical discourses and social practices, and at times they choose to adopt these for their own purposes. It is what Cobb has called “not only the weight


but the complexity of the burden of southern history” that can help us to analyze the racialization of Puerto Ricans in Orlando and Central Florida, and from there, to open a space for deeper and place- specific analyses of Latinization, race, and cultural identifications in the U.S. South.28

n o t E s

An alternate version of this essay appeared as “Construir la raza y encontrar un lugar en el Orlando puertorriqueño,” in Op Cit.: Revista del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas 20 (2011–2012): 33–67. I am grateful to the following organizations for financial support: the Florida Humanities Council, the University of Central Florida, especially the Digital Ethnography Lab and CREATE, and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. In addition, I am most grate-ful to the following people whose insights on multiple drafts of this article have greatly improved it: Arlene Torres, Simone Delerme, Jorge Duany, and the anonymous reviewers for both Southern Cultures and Op. Cit: Revista del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas at the University of Puerto Rico.

1. Raymond A. Mohl, “Globalization, Latinization, and the Nuevo New South,” in Other Souths: Diversity and Difference in the U.S. South, Reconstruction to Present, ed. Pippa Holloway (Athens: Univer-sity of Georgia Press, 2008), 408–442. For representative literature on Hispanics in the U.S. South, see Mary E. Odem and Elaine Lacy, eds., Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); Heather A. Smith and Owen J. Furuseth, eds., Latinos in the New South: Transformations of Place (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006); and José María Mantero, Lati-nos and the U.S. South (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008). See also the 2012 special issue of Latino Studies vol. 10 (1–2). Preference for using Hispanic or Latino is the subject of much debate; although I prefer Latino because I think it more fully embraces the diverse peoples of Latin America who re-side in the U.S., the more common use in Florida is Hispanic, so I adopt that use for this article.

2. John Hartigan Jr., Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton: Prince-ton University Press, 1999), 4. Further emphasis on the importance of “locality and region” can be found in David L. Carlton, “Rethinking Southern History,” Southern Cultures 7, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 38–49. For a discussion of the contemporary South, see Carl L. Bankston, “New People in the New South: An Overview of Southern Immigration,” Southern Cultures 13, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 24–44; Eric Bates, “Beyond Black and White,” Southern Exposure 22 (1994): 10–15; and Jamie Winders, “Re- Placing Southern Geographies: The Role of Latino Migration in Transforming the South, Its Identities, and Its Study,” Southeastern Geographer 51, no. 2 (2011): 342–358. Questions from Winders and Smith are from: “New Pasts: Historicizing Immigration, Race, and Place in the South,” Southern Spaces (2010), http://www.southernspaces.org/2010/new- pasts- historicizing - immigration- race- and- place- south.

3. See, for instance, Mantero, Mohl, Odem and Lacy, Smith and Furuseth, and Latino Studies.4. Data for the top 18 metropolitan areas are from Roberto Suro and Audrey Singer, Latino

Growth in Metropolitan America: Changing Patterns, New Locations (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Insti-tution, 2002), as cited in Smith and Furuseth, 8. The largest five of these areas in terms of percent-age of Hispanics to total population include: Las Vegas (21%), Fort Worth (18%), Orlando (17%), Fort Lauderdale (17%), and West Palm Beach (12%).

5. James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 336–7; I reference cultural identification rather than cultural identity because “identi-fication” better accommodates the dynamism of cultural processes. See Rogers Brubaker and Fred-erick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 1–47. For further reading on


southern cultural history and identification, see Carlton; Cobb; Carl Degler, The Other South: South-ern Dissenters in the 19th Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); Larry J. Griffin, “The Promise of a Sociology of the South,” Southern Cultures 7, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 50–75; John Shelton Reed, One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). See also C. Vann Woodward and William E. Leuchtenburg, The Burden of Southern His-tory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), particularly Woodard, “The Search for Southern Identity,” 3–26.

6. For more on the impact of Walt Disney Productions on Florida’s desegregation policy, see David R. Colburn, From Yellow Dog Democrats to Red State Republicans: Florida and Its Politics since 1940 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 53.

7. Nin- Hai Tseng, “‘It’s very much a new Orlando’,” Orlando Sentinel, January 1, 2006, 3; Víctor Ramos, “The New Orlando—Between 2 worlds,” Orlando Sentinel, February 5, 2006, 17.

8. During this same period, the non- Hispanic white population of Orlando city dropped from 65 percent to 41 percent of the total population, while the non- Hispanic black population declined only slightly in relation to the total population, moving from just under 30 percent to about 27 percent. Data for population counts and percentages are from the U.S. Census Bureau; 1980 Cen-sus of the Population, Vol. 1, Characteristics of the Population, Census 1990 Summary Tape File 1, Census 2000 Summary File 1, and Census 2010 Summary File 1. Generated by Patricia Silver, using American FactFinder, http://factfinder.census.gov, January 28, 2011, and July 11, 2013.

9. For coverage of the march, see Jim Stratton, “Neo- nazi challenge rules for march; police want the group to pass through metal detectors before next week’s Orlando rally,” Orlando Sentinel, February 17, 2006, B2; “Don’t fall for it; our position: The best way to deal with a neo- nazi march is to stay away,” Orlando Sentinel, February 24, 2006, A18; April Hunt, “Neo- nazis retreat early, swamped by critics, police,” Orlando Sentinel, February 26, 2006, B1. For more on Orlando’s segre-gation history, see Benjamin D. Brotemarkle, Crossing Division Street: An Oral History of the African- American Community in Orlando (Cocoa: Florida Historical Society Press, 2005); Colburn; Gary R. Mormino, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 315.

10. Project funding came from the Florida Humanities Council and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies and was conducted in affiliation with the university’s Digital Ethnography Laboratory and CREATE. Project co- director was Dr. Natalie Underberg, founder and director of the Digi-tal Ethnography Lab. The digital recordings and other documents from the project are housed at both the Orange County Regional History Center in Orlando and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in New York.

11. Brotemarkle.12. For further explanation, see Jorge Duany and Patricia Silver, “The ‘Puerto Ricanization’ of

Florida: Historical Background and Current Status,” CENTRO Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 22, no. 1 (2010): 4–31. In the same issue of CENTRO Journal, see also Patricia Silver, “‘Cul-ture is More than Bingo and Salsa’: Making Puertorriqueñidad in Central Florida,” 56–83. When names are used in the quotations that follow, these are the real names of the project participants as they requested.

13. Duany, “Neither White nor Black: The Representation of Racial Identity among Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the U.S. Mainland,” in Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 236–260. For further discussion, see H. Hoetink, “Race and Color in the Caribbean,” in Caribbean Con-tours, Sydney Mintz and Sally Price, eds. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Thomas E. Skidmore, “Bi- Racial U.S.A. vs. Multi- Racial Brazil: Is the Contrast Still Valid?”


Journal of Latin American Studies 25, no. 2 (1993): 373–386; Carlos Vargas Ramos, “Black, Trigueño, White . . . ? Shifting Racial Identifications among Puerto Ricans,” Du Bois Review 2, no. 2 (2005): 267–285; Isar Godreau, “Slippery Semantics: Race Talk and Everyday Uses of Racial Terminology in Puerto Rico,” CENTRO Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 20, no. 2 (2008): 5–33.

14. The interview with Monserrate Velez is in the collection, “Puerto Ricans in Central Florida 1940s to 1980s: A History,” 2008–2009, completed Feb. 28, 2009. The collection is available in New York at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in Hunter College and at the Orange County Regional History Center in Orlando. Unless otherwise indicated as a private interview, all citations in this article are from this collection.

15. For discussion of racial democracy in Puerto Rico, see footnote 13. For further discussion of Latin America, see for instance, Lourdes Martinez- Echazabal, “Mestizaje and the Discourse of National/Cultural Identity in Latin America, 1845–1959,” Latin American Perspectives 25(3) (1998): 21–42; Helen I. Safa, “Introduction: Race and National Identity in the Americas,” Latin American Perspectives 25, no. 3 (1998): 3–20.

16. See for instance, William A. Darity, Jason Dietrich, and Darrick Hamilton, “Bleach in the Rainbow: Latin Ethnicity and Preference for Whiteness,” Transforming Anthropology 13, no. 2 (2005): 103–109; Duany, “Neither White nor Black,” 237.

17. Petroamérica Pagán de Colón, Programa de trabajadortes migratorios de Puerto Rico a los Estados Unidos (Departamento del Trabajo, Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, 1956); Division of Re-ports and Analysis, Puerto Rican Farm Workers in Florida: Highlights of a Study (U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Employment Security, 1953).

18. Jack Alexander and Dan Sider, “A slight case of color- blindness: Maintaining segregation isn’t a simple matter of black and white, but a great, confusing dilemma for Manatee County’s schools,” St. Petersburg Times, December 2, 1962, 5.

19. “Puerto Ricans in Central Florida 1940s to 1980s: A History.”20. For a more detailed discussion of distinctions of racial perceptions between New York

Puerto Ricans and island Puerto Ricans, see especially, Eileen J. Findlay, “Slipping and Sliding: The Many Meanings of Race in Life Histories of New York Puerto Rican Return Migrants in San Juan,” CENTRO Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 24, no. 1 (2012): 20–43.

21. For an analysis of how Hispanic migration and immigration is changing U.S. racial percep-tions, see Wendy D. Roth, Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

22. As U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans are of course not foreign. González Durocher’s daughter used this term and incorporated her family’s experience with that of the Lebanese family in order to reference the degree to which they were seen as Other, even though on the white side of town.

23. “Puerto Ricans in Central Florida 1940s to 1980s: A History.”24. Jeff Kunerth and Sheri Owens, “Hispanics reshape civil- rights agenda,” Orlando Sentinel,

July 1, 2001: 1; Mark Schlueb, “Hispanics gain on Orlando’s east side; blacks may lose majority dis-trict,” Orlando Sentinel, October 3, 2011.

25. Dave Weber, “Vestiges of segregation?: After 50 years, lawsuits over the integration of Florida’s public schools still linger,” Orlando Sentinel, February 15, 2009, B1.

26. Erika Hobbs, “Orange botched school closures,” Orlando Sentinel, April 8, 2009, A1.27. Victor Manuel Ramos, “To join biracial panel, choose a race, Orange tells Hispanics,”

Orlando Sentinel, April 24, 2009, A1; Hobbs, “Judge: I need more facts before deciding school- desegregation case,” Orlando Sentinel, March 2, 2010, A1.

28. Cobb, 336.

Latinization, Race, and Cultural Identification in Puerto Rican Orlando

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Transcript of Latinization, Race, and Cultural Identification in Puerto Rican Orlando