The Prophetic Burden for Philadelphia’S Catholic Puerto Ricans, 1950-1980

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THE PROPHETIC BURDEN FOR PHILADELPHIA’S CATHOLIC PUERTO RICANS, 1950-1980

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A Dissertation Submitted to The Temple University Graduate Board

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In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILSOPHY

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by Adán E. Stevens-Díaz May 2018

Examining Committee Members:

Dr. Terry Rey, Advisory Chair, Department of Religion Dr. Nyasha Junior, Department of Religion Dr. Zain Abdullah, Department of Religion Dr. Pablo Vila, Department of Sociology, Temple University

ABSTRACT

This dissertation focuses on lay Catholic ministry to Puerto Ricans in

Philadelphia when Frank Rizzo was mayor. Gramsci’s concept of “organic intellectuals” is employed to explain the praxis of the Philadelphia Young Lords, an organization formed in a Puerto Rican neighborhood during the confrontational politics of the 1970s. The dissertation advances previous scholarship on the Young Lords by offering reasons to consider these youthful leaders as lay Catholic advocates of social justice in Philadelphia and describes the role of faith convictions as they pursued social justice in the style of the biblical prophetic burden. Through interviews and textual analysis, the dissertation traces the evolution of lay volunteerism before the Second

Vatican Council as foundational to the Young Lords’ application of liberation theology.

The Young Lords in Philadelphia also followed the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party’s definition of the people’s multiracial identity and the Nationalists’ defense of Catholic principles. Their experiences are inserted into the general history of Philadelphia, a city which Quakers had founded as a cluster of urban villages, producing a distinctive pattern of ethnic enclaves of Philadelphia’s row house neighborhoods. The city’s

Catholicism had structured parish life upon the civic culture, and initially extended this model to its Puerto Rican ministry. However, racial polarization at a time of municipal crisis under Rizzo invited new pastoral strategies towards civil right and the Vietnam

War. Despite the Young Lords’ reliance on Marxist principles and the confrontational politics of the Black Panthers, local Catholic clergy supported many of their efforts. The dissertation explores the symbolic capital gained by the Young Lords which made them into a vanguard organization in the city’s fields of political and pastoral interaction.

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DEDICATION

I dedicate this dissertation

to the memory of my grandparents

whose Puerto Rican and Hungarian heritages have built within me a strong and personal multi-ethnic identity;

to my parents,

who not only have kept this heritage alive,

but, through example, teaching and dialogue,

have also instilled in me

a deep appreciation for the place of religion

both in my personal life

as well as in the development of a humanizing society;

and to my Puerto Rican and Latino community,

for the tenacity and hope they have always demonstrated

in their unceasing struggle for justice

and a better life for our people today

for their children

and for generations to come.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing a dissertation requires long lonely hours of research, thought and analysis. It can be an isolating experience. I wrote this dissertation “standing on the shoulders,” as it were, of the scholars who before me developed methodologies and theories for understanding the forces that impel the historical development of society. I have learned from the teachers in my life what to do and, at times, what not to do. At

Temple University, my mentor, Professor Terry Rey, encouraged me to employ the approaches of Antonio Gramsci as my main conceptual tools and sagaciously tempered my references to other theoretical methods that help explain religious influences on social struggles. His guidance was invaluable in my analysis of the role of the Young

Lords in the history of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia.

Sadly, Professor John Raines passed away before he could serve as a reader for this dissertation. He was an inspiration in the classroom before I embarked on this study, not only for his clarity as a teacher, but also for his example as an anti-war and civil rights’ activist. During the comprehensive examinations, his enthusiasm for my choice of topic for this dissertation greatly encouraged me. I wish to thank my other

Temple professors for the wisdom they shared in the classroom with me when I was a graduate student and still more to Temple University Professors Nyasha Junior and Zain

Abdullah of the Department of Religion and Professor Pablo Vila of the Department of

Sociology, who became the readers to review this dissertation.

I wish to acknowledge the generosity and sincerity of those I interviewed about

Philadelphia’s Catholicism and the Puerto Rican community. My sincere thanks go to

Monsignor Vincent Walsh, Reverend Roger Zepernick, Father David Ungerleider, Anna

Vázquez and Mari-Gloria Arroyo for sharing their insights about church structure in

Philadelphia and pastoral efforts at the local level. Their recollections helped outline the central importance to Puerto Rican community development from the Casa del

Carmen and its eventual Director, the late Father Tom Craven. From Puerto Rican leaders during the period under review, I wish to acknowledge the cooperation of Juan

Ramos, a Young Lord then and a Catholic Deacon now. As with my in-depth interviews with Izzy Colón and Wilfredo Rojas, their contributions helped color the bare outlines of the Puerto Rican participation in the history of the city of Philadelphia.

I also acknowledge the support of the Oral History Project of Hunter College’s

Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, where I was a field investigator during the summer of 2016. Thanks to this project, I was able to supplement my core interviews with insights from Judge Nelson Díaz, a distinguished leader of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community; Oscar Rosario, who was liaison to the community with Mayor Rizzo; Juan

González, a Young Lord and a reporter with the Philadelphia Daily News for many years; and Dr. Carmen Febo San Miguel of Taller Boricua. Taking a walk down memory lane is not always pleasant. but I hope this experience of remembering has been as helpful to them in better understanding and appreciating the events and the players as it has been for me.

I want to thank the Temple University Library and its staff for opening to me their archival collections on Puerto Ricans and pointing the way to additional sources. I am especially indebted to the staff at the Connelly Library of LaSalle University for providing me with archival collections of The Catholic Standard and Times.

Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the indispensable contribution of Paula Heeshen for her thorough editorial assistance in preparing the final manuscript. I was rewarded not only by the professionalism of her work, but also by her conversations about the struggles for social justice and her perspectives on Puerto Ricans and the history of

Philadelphia.

As always, thanks to Mom and Dad, who not only supported me but also urged me to continue on this scholarly path and bring this task to fruition. They have never ceased to inspire me with their own dedication to scholarship, their love for the acquisition of knowledge and their devotion to the wellbeing of the Puerto Rican and

Latino community in this country.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………………iii

DEDICATION ………………………………………………………………………....iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………….v

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………1

Endnotes to Chapter 1………………….………………………………………22

2. THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL CONSIDERATIONS …………………...26

Endnotes to Chapter 2……………….…………………………………………49

3. THE MAKING OF PHILADELPHIA IN CRISIS AND CELEBRATION ……...... 55

Endnotes to Chapter 3………………………………….………………………74

4. CONTENTMENT AND CORRUPTION IN TWENTIETH CENTURY PHILADELPHIA ……………………………..78

Endnotes to Chapter 4………….……………………………………………..113

5. PUERTO RICO’S BURDEN OF COLONIALISM ……………………………....120

Endnotes to Chapter 5………………………………………………………...162

6. PASTORAL MODELS IN PUERTO RICO AND PHILADELPHIA………….....173

Endnotes to Chapter 6………………………………………………………...218

7. MISSION AND MINISTRY TO PUERTO RICANS IN PHILADELPHIA…...... 228

Endnotes to Chapter 7………………………………………………………...279

8. THE PROPHETIC BURDEN OF THE YOUNG LORDS IN PHILADELPHIA ..289

Endnotes to Chapter 8………………………………………………………...347

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9. CONCLUSIONS ………………………………………………………………...... 357

Endnotes to Chapter 9………………………………………………………...374

BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………….…...376

APPENDICES

A. LIST OF INTERVIEWS…………………………………………………………..401

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The term “prophetic burden” evokes the message of the Hebrew prophets, who felt compelled by divine command to describe the consequences of living outside the law of God.1 Their prophecies did not offer clairvoyant pictures of the future, but rather described the inevitable moral consequences if social injustices went unaltered.2

Although defined by the particular circumstances of their times, these prophetic messages carry a general warning to all ages, especially when the people’s collective action is necessary to avert a society’s perceived downward moral spiral.3

I view the role assumed by the Philadelphia Young Lords, as they responded to the social justice needs of the Puerto Rican community during the decades of 1960 and

1970, as evocative of the role of the Hebrew prophets in their own time. The Young

Lords’ organization began as a gang of young Puerto Ricans in the streets of Chicago in

1960, but by 1967 had reorganized as a national civil and human rights movement, with branches in many cities throughout the United States and in Puerto Rico.4 In all those places, it was a secular organization that borrowed significantly from the tactics and the ideologies of the Black Panther Party and anti-Vietnam War movements. However, the

Philadelphia branch of the Young Lords, founded in 1972, was different from other chapters, in that its members exhibited a unique relationship to Catholicism. As an organization, the chapter lasted less than three years. During this time, however, its members conspicuously used institutional resources of the Catholic Church and incorporated elements of Catholic theology in their pursuit of social justice. Although

2 their time as an organization in Philadelphia was relatively short, the Young Lords exerted an influence as an active force for social justice that had lasting effects upon the work and trajectory of successor organizations.

This dissertation explores the reasons why the Philadelphia Young Lords exhibited a religious characteristic not found in other chapters. My research employs interviews with former Young Lords and church officials and other leaders of the

Puerto Rican community. Additionally, I drew upon archival material and published historical and sociological analyses. I describe several contextual factors that shed light on the actions of the Young Lords: the historical unfolding of Philadelphia as a city; the response of the Catholic Church to previous ethnic and racial communities; the history and culture of the Puerto Rican people; the type of ministry from the clergy to

Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community; and the social and political circumstances that confronted the Young Lords.

My major focus is upon the period from 1950 to 1980. Census figures indicate that 1950 was the year that significant numbers of Puerto Ricans began arriving in

Philadelphia. The Catholic Church played an important role in developing the people’s social identity and providing social services to those in need through the decade of the

1950s and into the first half of the 1960s. However, the pattern for this ministry was changed by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The Young Lords operated in

Philadelphia from 1972 until 1975, and I consider them to be part of post-Council

Catholicism. Their work established a link between social activism and religious commitment. Admittedly, in the socio-political area, the Young Lords produced neither revolutionary change nor even a major legislative initiative. In my estimation,

3 however, their actions did add a dimension of class interests to ministry among the

Philadelphia Puerto Rican community in ways that the Young Lords movement did not manage to do elsewhere. For this reason, their efforts in Philadelphia merit analysis.

It is important to underline that the Young Lords’ activism came on the heels of the Second Vatican Council. It is likewise important to underscore that in Latin

America, the effort to implement the Council’s mandates resulted in a new theology, tightly linked to a pursuit of social justice and equality. I explore ahead the degree to which the popular Latin American response to the Council resonated with the Young

Lords’ perception of their own pursuit of social justice for Puerto Ricans in

Philadelphia. The new theology from Latin America remained moored in Catholic social teachings, even as it broke from old theological patterns. I argue that, in a similar manner, that while the Young Lords’ actions were consonant with Catholic principles, they broke previous patterns of ministry to Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia.

I end my analysis in 1980 for several reasons. By that time, the goals of

Philadelphia chapter of the Young Lords had been effectively addressed by successor organizations. Philadelphia had also by then rejected the controversial mayor, Frank

Rizzo, and had chosen a new reform administration. Moreover, the installation of a

Polish pope, John Paul II, in 1979, and the election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States, in 1980, marked the beginning of a new conservative wave in the

Church and the nation.

Throughout this dissertation, I respect the difference between those called to the prophetic role in religious history and institutionalized religion, recognizing that while the prophets belonged to the institution, they did not control its decision-making. In

4 fact, the Young Lords challenged the priorities of the city’s mayor and the

Archdiocese’s Cardinal, much as their Hebrew counterparts had confronted the policies of kings and priests. The Hebrew prophets delivered a message focused on Jerusalem; these Puerto Ricans defined their actions by the needs of their people in Philadelphia.

The City and Power Relationships

Since the biblical prophetic burden addressed specific injustices of the prophets’ place and time, my study of the Young Lords in Philadelphia details the historical circumstances of the city where the Puerto Rican activists. The social injustices they attacked were embedded in the social structures that had developed over the centuries since Philadelphia’s founding.

Throughout classical and modern human history, cities have been loci for complex relationships of economic and cultural production, law, and science.5 As with the Roman empire, no system of social control was built in a day. The success or failure in adapting to circumstances made certain cities into models for history. For example, Thucydides, the historian of ancient Greece, wrote about the Peloponnesian

War (431–404 BCE) between maritime Athens and agricultural Sparta not simply as an armed conflict, but as a contest between two distinct cities, each representing a unique character and different worldview. Although his focus was on divergent cultural values rather than on divergent class interests, Thucydides produced a classic history about the clash of civilizations rather than a mere account of battlefield victories and defeats.

Thucydides’ distinction between Athens and Sparta finds echo in this dissertation. As I will explain further in the third chapter, by the middle of the

5 eighteenth-century Philadelphia was thought of as the “Athens of America, an epithet applied also to Boston in the early part of the nineteenth century. 6 If Philadelphians thought of their city in this way, it was because this reference to ancient history claimed a legacy of intellectual and cultural refinement. Philadelphians might thus have compared themselves to the Athenians in Ancient Greece in contrast to the ruthlessly pragmatic Spartans of New York. Implicit in this comparison, which dates to the mid- eighteenth century, was the premise that although New York was larger and possessed more material power than Philadelphia, it was not, on that account, superior in cultural and intellectual refinement. Certainly, other cities have compared themselves to Athens.

However, even if this identification with classical Athens was not unique, I believe it indicates Philadelphia’s desire to define its place in American history.7

Gaining a place in history is a significant achievement for any city; maintaining viability for posterity may be even more difficult, however.8 Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) became known as an advocate for modern city planning to preserve viability for residents. In a famous book, she examined how great American cities may prosper or decline because of policy decisions in urban design and improvement.9 Her vision for improved quality of life included not only urban development but also the repair of potholes in the streets, the rehabilitation of empty housing, the upkeep of electrical lines, the maintenance of sewer pipes and other such attentions infrastructural improvements. Jacob’s foil was Robert Moses (1888-1981), the “power broker” in mid- twentieth century New York, who for nearly fifty years determined the purposeful placement of bridges, roads, and parks to favor suburban development in New York

State.10 While these rivals often disagreed about the ultimate goals for urban planning,

6 they agreed that reconfiguration of the material reality of that city affected the quality of life for people living within it.

Efforts by former Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell (1992-2000) added an inspirational function to urban planning in Philadelphia. Entering office when the city was tottering on bankruptcy, he diverted funds to develop an Avenue of the Arts, instead of spending all the revenue to maintain existing infrastructure. Later in his career, he advocated financing the construction of a convention center and sports stadiums. He justified the redirection of funds to public facilities which were used only occasionally, because, he argued, they helped convince Philadelphians that their city had a future.11 I agree that despair about the city’s future was an important factor to social decline. I also note that the city improvements meant to inspire the populace often reflected class interests. Philadelphia’s mayors, before and after Ed Rendell, have not always acted in favor of the city’s Puerto Rican residents. Much as with New

York’s Robert Moses, Philadelphia’s urban planners often favored suburbs over city.

Based on these views of the urban reality, I do not present cities as merely geographic places in my dissertation. Instead, I define them as “localized networks of power relationships.”12 I submit that when Puerto Ricans came to Philadelphia in the middle of the twentieth century, they did not encounter merely a “place” or a “thing” but also a particularized array of power networks among people and institutions that determined and reinforced their social class in accord with the city’s economic system.

Often, in this regard, the allocation of economic resources to some neighborhoods and not to others followed the same patterns within the existing class structure. I recognize that urban planning can address the inequalities separating winners and losers in a city,

7 much as Jacobs and Moses had differing priorities. However, the power networks addressed by urban planners have largely controlled construction of housing and commercial buildings in Philadelphia, determining location and access to transportation.

Urban planning could even favor the size of families by regulating the size of homes and apartments. The city’s political decision-making could decide whether to transfer to public education the housing patterns that segregated elites from the working class or separated Blacks from Whites. The choice of judges and police policies could determine tendencies for the administration of justice. While urban planners, elected officials, police officers and judges acted within a distinct field of social interaction, in actual practice, they influenced each other.13 I add that Philadelphia’s Catholic Church was included in the city’s networks of power relationships. My main objective in this dissertation, therefore, is to explain the role of the Young Lords amid these various power relationships and how religion influenced their actions on behalf of social justice.

Finding a City’s Distinctiveness

The skills cultivated in one city for efficient living within its networks may differ considerably from those in other places. It is imperative to recognize that streets and homes, factories and markets, public and religious buildings do not spring up naturally like wild flowers or bushes. When humans living in a time and culture construct a city, they do so according to their particular vision of what a city “ought to be.” Subsequent generations inherit that space and its material configuration. The citizens living in a contemporary era may not know, understand or care about the ideology behind the original foundations for their city. Yet they are affected by the

8 city’s material and historical reality, because it sets a pattern for order, space, and the expected norms of behavior.

In this dissertation, I embrace the premise that Puerto Ricans have adapted differently to New York than Philadelphia because these cities function differently. I base this conclusion largely on my own life experience. In community work on behalf of those suffering from poverty, racism, and injustice in both New York and

Philadelphia, I have grappled with the same issues about housing, the role of religious faith, the resources of institutional churches, and ways to act in solidarity with the people. I have found that the same strategies do not always bring the same results in each city. Accordingly, I have endeavored to highlight in this study what is particular to the Puerto Rican experience within Philadelphia’s Catholicism.14

A city’s distinctiveness, however, needs to be balanced by an understanding of characteristics found in all cities. After all, particularity is knowable only by reference to the general, just as definition of a species follows upon the category of genus. I apply references to the general and the particular in my study of Philadelphia by using the terms “macro-” and “micro-history.” 15 In this dissertation, “macro-history” includes national and international trends found in many places, while “micro-history” refers to the particular forms of these trends in a specific locale.

I recognize that many Philadelphians today would be perplexed by eighteenth century references to their city as “Athens” and to New York as “Sparta.” They would be more likely to make distinctions based on support for their Eagles over the New

York Giants, and feel more comfortable with the name “hoagie,” rather than “sub,” for a favorite oversized sandwich. I consider a change to the micro-history from one era to

9 the next as part of an evolution in a city’s identity. The basic functions of a city remain the same, however, because they continue to express differences that characterize that city for all of its residents. I will show that even when these differences in the micro- history of Philadelphia seem trivial, they do color social interactions. Thus, unlike their cousins migrating to New York, who root for the Giants and order subs, Philadelphia’s

Puerto Ricans usually root for the Eagles and ask for hoagies. Similarly, one reason for the unique religious outlook of the Puerto Rican Young Lords in Philadelphia, I suggest, is that their city’s Catholicism had acquired a set of unique characteristics.

The Truth Claims of Faith

In my analysis, political, moral and religious motives are not treated as mutually exclusive. Certainly, the allocation of municipal resources to address urban material conditions is a political matter. However, such decisions also have a moral dimension.

It is in this ethical framework about the just allocation of resources that religion often also becomes part of social interactions. For believers today, as for the Hebrew prophets in antiquity, the secular and the religious are intermeshed in the common goals set for community improvement. The Young Lords in Philadelphia duplicated many of the demonstrations and occupation of facilities that had been undertaken in Chicago and

New York. However, because these Philadelphia Young Lords were also Catholic believers, faith played a salient role in mediating their actions. In fact, as the interviews I conducted reveal, they and those who came to value their enthusiasm and support their efforts cited Catholic theology in assessing the Young Lords struggles for social justice.

My understanding of the congruence of political and moral actions with religious motivation is influenced by my reading of Alain Badiou in his treatise on the

Apostle Paul.16 Badiou is a Marxist and atheist who called Jesus’ resurrection from the dead a “fable.” 17 Nonetheless, he recognized that through Paul’s epistles, the Christian faith produced a shared conviction among individuals about their truth claim.18 Badiou offered St. Paul as an historical example of how fealty to a universal truth claim has produced consequential action, even at high personal cost.19 Although Badiou’s intention was to argue against a postmodern definition of truth, his study suggested that the Christian faith mediated social change.20 Without ascribing Marxist class consciousness to St. Paul, Badiou nonetheless credited the apostle’s theology with a revolutionary effect in the Roman Empire. Badiou wrote that Christians helped destabilize and ultimately overthrow the Roman Empire, not because of overt political actions, but rather because ultimately their moral cohesiveness shaped social behavior more effectively than did Roman rule. Belief in the universal truth of Jesus’ resurrection infused Christian believers with communitarian strengths capable of confronting imperial might. For instance, where Roman culture celebrated violence and rewarded greed, Christians sought to be peacemakers and promoted generosity toward the poor. Ultimately, many Christians accepted death rather than renounce their faith, and in so doing, demonstrated the power of their truth claim. For Badiou, radical universality stands behind St. Paul’s statement that: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,”

(Galatians 3:28). Once believers internalized principles of love and equality, reasoned

Badiou, Christianity became a historical force more powerful than imperial Rome.21

While deteriorating social conditions within the Roman Empire provided the circumstances for the displacement of the imperial power, the Christians’ success also required the strength of their faith convictions.

When stating that religion has political effect, I consider it crucial to recognize that the counter-hegemonic message delivered in St. Paul’s epistles was couched in religious terms. St. Paul, it should be said, was a theologian, not a politician; but his theology had political effects. His message of religious and spiritual liberation was also a protest against an unjust economic and social order.22 Consequently, the reform of personal behavior articulated by St. Paul for Christian believers undermined the hold of

Roman law and custom over people in the ancient world.23 Evoking another Marxist,

Antonio Gramsci, religion under St. Paul can be said to have acquired a counter- hegemonic role against the political reality of the Roman Empire.24

Christianity since St. Paul has itself become identified with hegemony in much of the world. However, the utopian dimension of Christianity in Jesus’ words and St.

Paul’s epistles has been repeatedly invoked as a basis on which to criticize the status quo, even in those instances when the status quo is dominated by Christianity. There have been moments throughout the history of the Christian faith when the prophetic burden called the religion back to its original counter-hegemonic role. Reformers like

St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Ignatius Loyola ignited reform of both church and society.

In Protestant America, there were important religious awakenings that spurred political changes,25 and there were religious roots to the abolitionist movement that ended slavery. Viewed through the prism of Badiou’s universalizing truth claim, religious

12 belief in each of these circumstances induced political effects because it displaced weaker commitments to status quo politics.

Badiou’s explanation of faith as a truth claim, I believe, properly placed focus on the energy of the people for social change. From his perspective, Christian success rested on collective actions by believers that furthered their faith convictions. My approach to religious history, therefore, is not restricted to the pronouncements of authorities within ecclesiastical institutions. I consider the effectiveness of the institution to be yoked to the power of the people.

Among the collective actions guided by faith, I include commonly recited devotional prayers and traditional public rituals. These prayers and rituals, rather than theological abstractions, embody belief in the lived religion of non-elite classes.26 For example, in the interviews I conducted, Puerto Rican leaders placed importance on archdiocesan celebration of the feast day of St. John the Baptist. He is the patron saint of the City of San Juan in Puerto Rico, and organizing the celebration in Philadelphia demonstrated the continuity of the Puerto Ricans with the Catholic traditions of their homeland. The festival may be compared to events like the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in many United States’ cities, which are replete with symbols both patriotic and religious. When civil society welcomes these types of rituals in a parade or festival, it also welcomes the group that promotes such events.

There are instances, however, where religious celebrations challenge the social order. In the period under review, popular religious practices of Hispanics in the United

States sometimes functioned as symbolic protest against injustice in American society.

I offer as an example the 1966 march of Mexican-American farmworkers led by César

Chávez from Delano to Sacramento.27 A religious banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico and guarantor of Mexican racial equality, was proudly held by the leader of the demonstration. Had a procession with the same religious icon taken place in Mexico, it would have been a demonstration of religious solidarity with the

Mexican nation. In the United States, however, the image carried a counter-hegemonic message. The banner of the Mexican mestiza Madonna challenged the system that denied equality to non-White laborers in the United States. If God in Heaven had accepted a person of color to be His Mother, then how could God’s will be undone on earth? This became a truth claim founded in faith. In my view, the Delano march shows how a religious event can embody a counter-hegemonic political goal. As evidenced by his speeches, Chávez certainly recognized the power of religious solidarity to mobilize the people.28

From civil rights to urban planning, I conclude, an unjust policy is not only

“wrong” in political or ethical terms, but also “sinful” and, therefore, an offense to God.

Latino communities today have continued to transform religious traditions into community appeals for social justice.29 My intention here is to underscore that the

Philadelphia Young Lords’ protests against the social injustice in their city were also motivated by a religious faith that had acquired counter-hegemonic functions.

The Prophetic Burden and the Economic System

As stated in the opening lines of this introduction, the biblical prophetic burden was a warning not only about a particular person’s behavior but the consequences of social and economic injustices. The prophet Amos, for example, may be interpreted to

14 criticize not only the landowners of Israel but the institution of landowning itself.30 In

United States’ history, some religious movements have targeted the economic structure.

For instance, the abolitionist movement did not promote more compassionate treatment of slaves by their masters; the call was to outlaw slavery completely, thus ending an economic system of agricultural production that depended on forced labor. In fact, the split between Northern and Southern Baptists of the United States was partially determined by these economic consequences.31

There are several historical events of macro-history relevant to Puerto Ricans when religious appeal mediated political actions. Chief among these is the Spanish-

American War, which resulted in the annexation of the island of Puerto Rico as an

American colony in 1898. As with the war against Mexico in 1848, religion was invoked by the aggressors to justify the invasion of an island-territory that had been previously granted autonomy by Spain. The justification simply stated that the United

States had a divinely ordained Manifest Destiny to impose its Anglo-Saxon Protestant social and cultural norms in all matters -- including the economy, religion, language, governance, familial and communal traditions -- throughout the hemisphere.32

Conveniently, this interpretation of religion served economic class interests of the

United States by extending the imperial thrust into the Caribbean and across the Pacific

Ocean to the Philippines. Thus, the invasion of Puerto Rico was justified under what

Engels called “religious shibboleths,” which disguised raw economic interests by invoking religion.33 From a Puerto Rican perspective, however, religion was misused as the justification for war. There was nothing justifiably religious about making the island part of “Occupied America,” 34 wherein Puerto Ricans were treated as foreigners

15 with inferior language and customs, and thousands upon thousands were forced to leave their land in order to survive economic deprivation. Rather than reversing the inferiority imposed by military conquest, the migration of Puerto Ricans to the continental United States created an internal colonialism that continued to treat Puerto

Ricans as foreigners, despite their birth-right citizenship.35 The prophetic burden would demand reform of these injustices.

Reform takes many shapes. In my dissertation, I shall address two different types of reform. One seeks changes to law in order to prohibit certain practices. In this category, for instance, Prohibition outlawed the consumption of alcohol as a measure to prevent drunkenness in American society from 1920to 1933; at the end of the nineteenth century, efforts were made to place legal limits on bribery and patronage to end governmental corruption; in the 1950s, the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference, under the leadership of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., focused on repealing Jim Crow laws and the passage of measures protecting the rights of minorities. In each of these cases, the passage of legislative reform was the goal.

However, as history suggests, legislation alone does immediately resolve unjust social and economic problems. Alcoholism, drug addiction, corruption in government, and racial prejudice persist even when they have been declared illegal. I am not suggesting that reform by legal measures is unimportant, only that it is not always sufficient to end injustice after a reform movement is initially launched. A second group seeks reform through structural changes in society and the economic system. The Young Lords belonged in this second group. They aligned themselves with movements that viewed the United States’ capitalist system as a cause of social injustice. Their stance in

Philadelphia stood in the long shadow cast by macro-history’s more radical and revolutionary efforts.36

The socio-historical Background for the Period under Study

As stated above, I begin my analysis of the Puerto Rican community in the

1950s because it is during this decade that the highest number of Puerto Rican migrants moved from the island to the mainland as part as what has come to be known as the

Puerto Rican Great Migration. Even more relevant to my dissertation, this is the decade that Puerto Ricans began to settle in Philadelphia in numbers large enough to have a notable presence and impact upon the city. I end the analysis thirty years later because by 1980 the Puerto Rican community had become a permanent fixture in the life and character of Philadelphia. Furthermore, it is within this thirty-year period that the

Young Lords insert themselves in the struggles of the city’s Puerto Rican community.

Prior to this influx of Puerto Rican migrants to Philadelphia, the city and the nation had undergone major political, social and economic struggles, such as the Great

Depression, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, President Johnson’s War on

Poverty, immigration reforms and the Civil Rights Act. Though on the surface these struggles appear to be merely political in nature, religion was often invoked to explain what gave rise to them as well as to seek solutions to the many problems they presented.

The Catholic Church, for instance, cited papal encyclicals to advocate for New Deal reforms such as the formation of labor unions.37 In Philadelphia, Catholic parishes in ethnic neighborhoods, which had long been used as a powerful political instrument for organizing the communities of European immigrants, were engaged in support of the

Democratic Party. Although anti-Communism somewhat mitigated the enthusiasm for

Roosevelt’s liberalism, most of Philadelphia’s Catholics in the 1950s voted for

Democrat candidates. Certainly, Catholics in Philadelphia benefitted from the decade

(1945-1955) immediately after the end of the Second World War, which was said to have provided the highest level of prosperity the American populace had ever enjoyed.38

This economic prosperity also coincided with greater tolerance in American religion, largely transforming Protestants, Catholics and Jews into co-equal partners.39 Catholics then witnessed the culmination of their assimilation into American society with the election of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the United States in 1960.

Thus, Puerto Ricans arriving in Philadelphia after 1950 encountered city Catholics who had improved their economic status by assimilating into American society.

Greater integration of religious and ethnic groups and an economy that promised upward mobility were good reasons for optimism. Unfortunately, the prosperity delivered to the New Deal generation was accompanied by the maintenance of racial boundaries. For instance, the GI Bill, signed into law by President F.D. Roosevelt on

June 22, 1944, gave to White veterans the opportunities for a college education and better housing while denying Black GIs the same rights.40 Labor unions often excluded

African Americans.41 Thus, while there were positive economic and social results wrought by the New Deal, I hold that these reforms often functioned like a new feudalism with racial barriers.42

The New Deal under Roosevelt in the 1930s climaxed with the triumphant end of the Second World War. In contrast, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation of the 1960s was haunted by the looming defeat of United States forces in Vietnam. While

18 the 1930s witnessed expansion of U.S. military power, the 1960s witnessed the implosion of American omnipotence. These divergent experiences, I believe, account for marked differences between the generation of the 1930s and that of the 1960s.

President Johnson’s initiatives promoted community organizations specifically serving African-Americans, Puerto Ricans and other minority groups. As a targeted clientele, government funding required these socially underprivileged groups to be categorized as below the poverty line, with economic and legal disparity often included in the categorization.43 While these measures profited Puerto Ricans as whole, they also served to further set the Puerto Rican Catholic community apart from the general

Catholic community in Philadelphia. In sum, while both the New Deal and the legislation for the Great Society altered the fields of power in politics and the economy, the impact each effected was different. The New Deal resulted in swifter assimilation; the War on Poverty spurred the multiplication of ethnic and racial identities.

Puerto Ricans’ retention of the Spanish language, cultural norms and religious traditions were seen by some as stumbling blocks to assimilation. In the 1960s, however, this Puerto Rican cultural resistance found echo in the reforms implemented after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1966). The Council fostered new structures of participation for the Catholic laity; chief among these was the inclusion of the vernacular and popular forms of worship.44 The mandate to administer ritual in “the mother tongue” of the people permitted Spanish-speaking Catholics to adopt their language instead of English at church services.45 Nationwide, Hispanic Catholics organized a congress or Encuentro to develop a pastoral plan.46 Overall, such developments within Catholicism reinforced the disposition to maintain a non-

19 assimilated group identity as Puerto Ricans. Finally, opposition to the Vietnam War impacted the erstwhile virtually automatic admiration for the United States military during the twentieth century. Instead, criticism of involvement in foreign conflicts often cast these engagements as forms of imperialism. In what follows, I show that some Puerto Rican leaders linked the Vietnam War to the imperialism behind the

United States’ invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898.

In the 1930s with the New Deal and again in the 1970s with the War on Poverty, federal programs addressing social issues in the United States had different effects when implemented in Puerto Rico. For instance, the focus on aid to minority groups in large mainland cities under President Johnson’s legislation did not have the same impact on the island where Puerto Ricans were the majority of the population rather than a minority group. Bilingual education was another example where the goals of the program designed for the United States did not easily apply to issues on the island. In most of these cases, not only was the social distance between Puerto Rico and

Philadelphia significant, but there was also a difference between how the Puerto Rican islanders and the mainlanders experienced these governmental economic measures.

While the Puerto Rican Young Lords sought to bridge ethnic differences by joining with other movements in the United States, they also found that they had been distanced from the island society.

The changes experienced both in the nation and in Catholicism after 1960 made

Philadelphia’s generations in the 1970s notably different from the one that had come of age in the 1950s. I use the plural noun because the period under review in this dissertation does not represent a single generation’s experience, but rather the contest

20 between generations with competing truth claims about religion and politics. To make matters more complex for the Young Lords, they had to straddle between competing identities. There is no denying that they saw themselves as part of the transplanted

Puerto Rican community in Philadelphia. However, unlike their parents, who had been raised on the island, they were raised urban America, and would claim a Philadelphian identity in ways their parents would not. In addition, they belonged to a new cohort of

Catholics who came of age after the Second Vatican Council and who were inspired to action by the social teachings of the church and the new theology coming out of Latin

America, liberation theology.

It is to be expected that the social and political circumstances of the 1960s and

1970s would result in generational conflicts. These were not merely ideological, since they came while the city was suffering a dramatic loss of population and was facing insolvency. The results of the decline would impact the social and economic life of the city. Eventually, the decline would also impact not only the local faith communities but the entire Church, from the neighborhood churches to the Catholic Archdiocese, by forcing changes in the allocation of personnel and funding to parishes and specialized ministries. In sum, policy decisions would have material consequences. Amid such crises, the Young Lords felt a prophetic burden to address injustice.

Endnotes to Chapter 1

1 See .[מצא] :In the Old Testament the English word "burden" is translated from the Hebrew word massa Jer. 23:33: “And when this people, or the prophet, or a priest, shall ask thee, saying, What is the burden of the LORD? thou shalt then say unto them, What burden? I will even forsake you, saith the LORD.” See also Malachi 1.1: “The burden of the word of the LORD to Israel by Malachi,” and Zechariah 12:1: “The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD, (King James Version).

2 “Many of us, no doubt because that is what the word ‘prophet’ has come to mean in popular parlance, are inclined to think of them as foretellers of the future, men who with uncanny accuracy predicted coming events. And certainly there is truth in this. The prophets repeatedly announced the coming of events both in the near and the more distinct future; and it was doubtless in no small part because so many of their more important predictions actually came to pass that their words were so piously preserved. Yet to think of them merely as inspired predictors of the future is, to say the least, to view them one-sidedly and to do them grave injustice. Again, because the prophets attacked abuses in the social order, and because most of them were at loggerheads with ruling elements and with many of the major institutions of the society of their day, we are tempted to think of them as rebels against the existing order, champions of the oppressed classes, radical social reformers. Now the prophets certainly did attack social abuses; they championed the cause of the poor, and they called down the divine judgment upon those responsible for their mistreatment.” John Bright, introduction to Jeremiah, Anchor Bible, Volume 21 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1965), xv-xvi.

3 Bright, introduction, xxvi. “To this day men still read them – even men who are strangers to the household of faith – and find them worthwhile instruction, courage and inspiration to a better quality of living.”

4 Judson Jeffries, “From Gang-bangers to Urban Revolutionaries: The Young Lords of Chicago,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 96:3 (Autumn 2003): 288–304.

5 I am much indebted to members of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilization (ISCSC) for this overview of a most complex subject. As a participant in many of the ISCSC conferences dating back even to my childhood and especially when I was on the Executive Board of the society, there are so many ISCSC scholars who have formed my thinking on this subject, that I can here do little more than salute them all.

6 “Gilbert Stuart, speaking of Philadelphia at the time he lived there [circa 1792], called it the ‘Athens of America,’ but already in 1752 a young Englishman contrasting Philadelphia and New York had called them Athens and Sparta. It is certainly true that many such literary, scientific, musical and dramatic societies as were found Boston and New York only at the close of the century already existed in Philadelphia in 1750 or soon after.” Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), 12. The citation is from Van Wyck Brooks, Flowering of New England, published in New York in 1936. See also, Edgar P. Richardson, “The Athens of America,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, Russell F. Weigley, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 208-257. The reference to Boston as the “Athens of America,” is first found in a letter by William Tudor describing the city in 1819. See, “Athens of America Origin, in http://www.celebrateboston.com/culture/athens-of-america-origin.htm, accessed April 9, 2018.

7 Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1940, 214.

8 For a list of articles, case studies and books from diverse disciplines on this subject, confer the Google Scholar, accessed October 12, 2016, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=studies+on+cities&hl=en&as_sdt=0,39&as_vis=1.

9 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).

10 Moses entered his first planning role in government in 1922 and exited government in 1968. Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974). For a commentary on the controversy between Moses and Jacobs see a letter Moses send to Cerf Bennett, one of the founders of Random Publishing House, after Bennett sent Moses a courtesy copy of Jacob’s The Death and Life of American Cities. Moses wrote: “I am returning the book you sent me. Aside from the fact that it is intemperate and inaccurate, it is also libelous. I call your attention, for example, to page 131. Sell this junk to someone else.” Anthony Paletta, “Story of Cities #32: Jane Jacobs v Robert Moses, battle of New York’s urban titans,” in The Guardian, 28 (April 2016), accessed October 12, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/28/story-cities-32- new-york-jane-jacobs-robert-moses.

11 “In addition to getting the fiscal condition of the city in order, which was clearly job one, job two was giving the people reason to believe that city could be a special place again.” Ed Rendell, commenting in “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment,” History Making Productions: Philadelphia. (February 17, 2014), accessed March 14, 2016, http://www.historyofphilly.com/media/#http%3A%2F%2Fi.

12 I derive this working definition from my reading of Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume I. (Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell. 2000). Second edition.

13 The sense of “field of social interaction” is taken from Pierre Bourdieu. See Terry Rey, Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy (London: Equinox, 2007), 41-42, where he explains Bourdieu’s notion of “field” as follows: “a competitive arena of social relations wherein variously positioned agents and institutions struggle over the production, acquisition and control of forms of capitals particular to the field in question.”

14 A leading resource for religion and Puerto Ricans is the book, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), by Ana María Díaz-Stevens. Although this volume focused attention on New York City, Díaz-Stevens later produced Recognizing the Latino Religious Resurgence (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998) with Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo. This book adopts a national perspective in tracing the religious and political mobilization of Latinos and Latinas in the 1970s. Among the significant recent works that focus on Philadelphia, see From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001) by Carmen Whalen and her chapter, “Bridging Homeland Politics and Barrio Politics: The Young Lords in Philadelphia” prepared earlier for a 1998 edited volume, The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora, Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 107-23. Although direct information on religion in these sources is limited, there is valuable insight here about the mobilization of Puerto Ricans during the Rizzo years.

15 For an extended treatment of these ideas see Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961).

16 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 326 ftn. 5. See also Alain

Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford University Press: Redwood City, CA., 2003).

17 Badiou, St. Paul, 6: “It will be objected that, in the present case, for us ‘truth’ designates a mere fable. Granted, but what is important is the subjective gesture grasped in its founding power with respect to the generic conditions of universality.”

18 He favors the Epistle to the Romans; see Romans, 7 and 13.

19 “He [Paul] is the one who, assigning to the universal a specific connection of law and the subject, asks himself with the most extreme rigor what price is to be paid for this assignment, by the law as well as by the subject. This interrogation is precisely our own. Supposing we were able to re-found the connection between truth and the subject, then what consequences must we have the strength to hold fast to, on the side of truth (eventual and hazardous) as well as on the side of the subject (rare and heroic)?” Badiou, St. Paul, 7.

20 Badiou, St. Paul, 10-11.

21 Badiou, St. Paul, 9.

22 “Although himself a Roman citizen, and proud of it, Paul will never allow any legal categories to identify the Christian subject. Slaves, women, people of every profession and nationality will therefore be admitted without restriction or privilege. As for ideological generality, it is obviously represented by the philosophical and moral disclosure of the Greeks. Paul will establish a resolute distance to this discourse, which is for him the counterpoise to a conservative vision of Jewish law. Ultimately, it is a case of mobilizing a universal singularity both against the prevailing abstractions (legal then, economic now), and against communitarian or particular protest.” Ibid., 13.

23 The concepts “political field” and “religious field,” taken from Pierre Bourdieu will be more fully explained in throughout this manuscript. For a Bourdieu definition of “field,” see footnote 6, above. For an analysis of Badiou on politics, see Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

24 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 326 ftn. 5.

25 David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).

26 See Ana María Díaz-Stevens, “Analyzing Popular Religiosity for Socio-Religious Meaning,” in An Enduring Flame: Studies on Latino Popular Religiosity, Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo and Ana María Díaz- Stevens, eds. (New York: Bildner Center Books, 1994), 17-36.

27 Spencer Bennett, “Civil Religion in a New Context: The Mexican-American Faith of César Chávez,” in Religion and Political Power Religion and Political Power. Gustavo Benavides and M. W. Daly, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 151-166.

28 César E. Chávez, “The Mexican-American and the Church,” in Prophets Denied Honor: An Anthology on the Hispanic Church in the United States. Antonio M. Stevens-Arroyo, (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1980), 118-121.

29 Carlos Vargas Ramos and Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, eds. Blessing La Política: The Latino Religious Experience and Political Engagement in the United States (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012).

30 The prophet wrote: “Though you have built stone mansions, you will not live in them; though you have planted lush vineyards, you will not drink their wine” (Amos 5:11-12). The message delivered is that God will take away the benefits of owning property.

31 These relationships are examined by James Oliver Robertson, American Myth: American Reality (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980).

32 Robertson, American Myth: American Reality, 72-75; 123-124.

33 Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, trans. Moissaye J. Olgin (New York: International Publishers, 1926).

34 Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1972).

35 Ronald Bailey and Guillermo V. Flores, “Internal Colonialism and Racial Minorities,” in Frank Bonilla and Robert Girling, eds., Structures of Dependency (Palo Alto: Nairobi Press, 1973), 149-160.

36 For the source of the key points in this brief sketch of American history, see Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492-present (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

37 Chester Gillis, Roman Catholicism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 70-73. He notes that Msgr. John A. Ryan was addressed as “The Right Reverend New Deal.”

38 “The gross national product (GNP) rose from $212 billion in 1945 to $503 billion in 1960. Though the population grew from 140 million to 181 million in this period, the per capita GNP rose even faster…. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith captured the spirit of the era in the title of his 1958 book, The Affluent Society. While lamenting that much of Americans' new prosperity was going for private consumption rather than for society's common needs, Galbraith readily conceded the reality of that unprecedented prosperity.” Cayton, Mary Kupiec, et al. eds. “The Postwar Period Through the 1950s.” In Encyclopedia of American Social History, 1993 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993). Online edition of U.S. History in Context: accessed October 28, 2016, i.c. galegroup.com/ic/uhic/ReferenceDetailsPage/DocumentToolsPortletWindow?displayGroupName=Re ference&p=UHIC%3AWHIC&action=2&catId=&documentId=GALE%7CBT2313026907&zid=dbaf 8355e54c396b9af1f64d3a9cea8c&source=Bookmark&u=oldt1017&jsid=bf9e8ef3c2a0d6cad7ad345e 918a41ed.

39 Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955).

40 Ira Katznelson, When affirmative action was white: an untold history of racial inequality in twentieth- century America, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006); Hilary Herbold, “Never a Level Playing Field: Blacks and the GI Bill,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 6 (Winter 1994): 104–108.

41 Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Fernando Gapasin, Solidarity Divided (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

42 See Vladmir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, trans. Institute of Marxism-Leninism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.). He argues that colonialism adds another level of exploitation to workers in the oppressed class. The benefits of this “super-exploitation” discourage solidarity between the workers in imperialist nations and those in the colonized nations. The term, “labor aristocracy” seems to have been first employed by Fredrich Engels in a series of letters to Marx between 1850 and 1860. Cf. Jonathan Strauss, “Engels and the theory of the labour [sic] aristocracy,” International Journal of Socialist Renewal 25 (January-June 2004), accessed May 1, 2016, http://links.org.au/node/45.

43 Robert H. Haveman, ed. A Decade of Federal Antipoverty Programs: Achievements, Failures, and Lessons (New York: Academic Press, 1997), 282-283.

44 Ana María Díaz-Stevens and Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo thoroughly analyze the impact of the Second Vatican Council upon Latinos and Latinas in Recognizing the Latino Resurgence in Religion (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).

45 Sacrosanctum Concilium, Document of the Second Vatican Council, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, solemnly promulgated by His Holiness, Pope Paul VI, (December 4, 1963), 54: see also 36:3 and 63.

46 In my sources, the label “Hispanics” was used with considerable frequency. Derived from the vocabulary of the United States’ Census, this term refers to heritage and includes not only those from Latin America but also from Spain. I also found citations that rejected “Hispanic” and substituted “Latino” or “Latina” for men or women in the United States. This term refers to those born in the United States but of Latin American heritage. In the Hispanic or Latino community, however, there are those who prefer to use distinct nationality terms, such as, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican and the like. Among those born in the United States from such backgrounds, the hyphen is often used to designate “Cuban-American” or “Mexican-American.” Curiously, the term “Puerto Rican-American” has not gained traction. In this dissertation, I use both “Latino” and “Hispanic” to refer to people of Spanish and Latin American heritage. When citing sources that employ “Latino” or “Hispanic,” I

have felt compelled to adopt the term used in the original text. See Díaz-Stevens and Stevens- Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence, 9-14.

CHAPTER 2

THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL CONSIDERATIONS

In this chapter, I review theories and methodological concepts to be employed in my analysis of the Young Lords organization and their prophetic role among

Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican Catholics. As stated in the introduction, the Hebrew prophets denounced social injustice. Although they spoke from the perspective of religion, their message addressed objective situations that were engendered by economic and political factors. Of course, it is easier to say that such factors interact than to explain how they interact. I believe a methodological approach based on material dialectics provides a sound basis upon which to build an adequate explanation of the different influences affecting the Young Lords in their prophetic call in the modern world. For this purpose, I outline here key theoretical principles that shape the methodological approach employed in this dissertation. In particular, I will examine the works of Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu that best suit my interpretive tasks.

Additionally, despite his use of theoretical premises other than the ones I am employing, I have been able to import insights from E. Digby Baltzell’s study of the lasting effects of the Philadelphia’s Quaker origins.1 Russell F. Weigley’s anthology published for the city’s tricentennial has also been a reliable historical source.2

Theory and the Material Reality of Philadelphia

In the introduction, I pointed to the role of urban planning as a factor affecting the quality of life of city dwellers. The contested rivalry between Jane Jacobs and 27

Robert Moses about urban design centered on the question as to whether it should principally benefit city residents or suburban development. Similar issues about the purposes of urban planning arose in Philadelphia at the time of the Young Lords. In fact, the most significant actions of the Young Lords targeted material resources in

Philadelphia related to urban planning. They were concerned not only about the use of city spaces but also of funding priorities to construct or maintain them. In the spirit of the prophetic burden, the Young Lords urged a reversal of priorities established by City

Hall that they deemed detrimental to the quality of life of the Puerto Rican community.

The allocation of material resources in Philadelphia is a focus for this dissertation.

Although I recognize that agreement with principles of Marxist theory may not have been intended by city planners in Philadelphia, I have found that a Marxist approach helps to assess the purposes behind urban planning by exploring the connections to class. In this dissertation, I have adopted two major premises which are found in the works of Karl Marx: namely, that consciousness arises from material, i.e. objective reality, and that control over this reality reflects class interest.3 To the material and social class issues, I add a religious conviction which mediated the social engagement of the Young Lords in Philadelphia. The concept of “praxis” helps merge a Marxist understanding of collective action to religion. Praxis may be described as a form of critical thinking and comprises the combination of reflection and action.4

I understand that the materialist bent of class analysis renders study of religion somewhat problematic.5 Lamentably, Marx’s attitudes against religion are popularly reduced to his familiar line about religion being “the opiate of the people.” Marx’s statement, however, is not always remembered in its complete form. In fairness, he 28 granted that religion exercises dual roles when he wrote: “Religion is the cry of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the people.”6 Certainly, religion becomes “the opiate of the people” if it dulls their ability to address unjust situations and practices. However, when it becomes a cry against oppression, religion is imbued with the capacity to reveal “the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions.” Religion can thus become a formidable force against inequality and injustice.

The oppositional function of religion suggested by the Marxist critique shapes my own analytical approach in this dissertation. I do not assume that religion is consistently progressive in matters of social change, but neither do I believe that it always represents an obstacle to revolutionary praxis. Religion, in my view, is best considered as a conditioning factor, which mediates personal motivation to address injustice. Religion, likewise, strengthens the solidarity that binds individuals together for collective action. I will show that members of Philadelphia’s Young Lords had relationships with both Catholic institutions and the Church’s social teachings when they issued “a cry of the oppressed” against injustice. However, my analysis will also demonstrate that some of the actions of Catholic authorities in the Archdiocese of

Philadelphia invoked religion to quell protests, rather than to sustain them.

My examination of religion’s role among Philadelphia’s Young Lords necessarily includes a review of relevant social theology. I show in later chapters how opposing views of religious meaning vied with each other for legitimacy through theological debate about what constituted orthodox religious praxis. Thus, in accord with Marx’s dictum, faith, in this instance, was interpreted at times to support the status 29 quo, while at other times it adopted a counter-hegemonic message. Class analysis also helps connect theological conflicts to the social circumstances affecting all of society.

Dogma and the orthodoxy of the faith may be related to the efforts by believers to apply religion’s truth claims to historical circumstances, in other words

The Peasant Wars in Germany, written by Friedrich Engels and published in

1850, addresses the absorption of religious dissent into a struggle for social structural change. The book analyzes the sixteenth-century peasant antinomian religious leader,

Thomas Münzer (1489--1525). Engels credits Münzer with recognizing class antagonisms. Münzer failed to achieve lasting social change, however, because the material conditions for revolution were not present: “Not only the movement of his time, but the whole century, was not ripe for the realization of the ideas for which he

7 himself had only begun to grope.” I apply the same critique to the Young Lords in

Philadelphia. They too recognized class antagonisms but ultimately failed to bring revolutionary social change because conditions in Philadelphia, as those in Germany in the time of Münzer, were “not ripe for the realization of the ideas.” In sum, theoretical approaches grounded by regard for material reality serve to decipher a religious cry of the oppressed such as was delivered by the Young Lords in Philadelphia.

The Quaker Ethos and the Material Creation of Philadelphia

As stated in my introduction, a city may be defined by its localized networks of power relationships. In essence, those relationships connect legal authority to the control over material reality. Religion often legitimatizes the concession of such control to municipal leadership. In the case of Philadelphia, this ground has been 30 covered by Edward Digby Baltzell in his book, Puritan Boston and Quaker

Philadelphia, first published in 1979. Baltzell contrasts the religious origins of

Calvinist Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. Using a Weberian approach, Baltzell shows the logical connection of the tenets of Quaker beliefs to the legal and material organization of the City of Philadelphia. Reflecting on the radical antinomian streak in eighteenth-century Quakerism against established political authority, he suggests that such tolerance toward individual opinions was partnered with indifference toward politics and policing.8 Applying Badiou’s terminology to the Society of Friends described by Baltzell, I would say that the strength of their truth claims was strong enough to establish a distinctive ethos in colonial Philadelphia.

In the next chapter, I deal more directly with Baltzell’s hypothesis that the

Quaker religious ethos not only shaped colonial Philadelphia but had a lasting effect upon the city over time. I explore the influence of this ethos in the twentieth century when it impacted the city’s social institutions and shaped the mindset of the various social, ethnic and racial groups in the city. Among those affected was the Puerto Rican community from 1950 to 1980, for example, and more particularly, the leaders of the

Young Lords during the decade of 1970s.

Unfortunately, Baltzell’s work is not grounded by thorough analysis of political economy. By focusing too intently on White Protestant elites, who dominated

Philadelphia society through two and a half centuries, he ignores broader social- structural concerns.9 In fact, Baltzell’s examination of the hegemonic class is limited mostly to references about the prestige of private clubs and to the names listed on the registers of high society.10 However, the value of his work to my dissertation derives 31 precisely from this focus on elites. Since, as I describe below, the efforts of the Young

Lords on behalf of Puerto Ricans met opposition from the hegemonic class in

Philadelphia, knowledge about that class is helpful to the present analysis.

The classical sociological definition of ethos underscores the dominant assumptions that inform the fundamental spirit or character of a people as well as the sentiment that underlies their beliefs, customs, values or practices.11 At issue for integrating Baltzell’s work into this dissertation was connecting a Quaker-based ethos to nearly three centuries of the city’s history. Transmission of values is especially important since the Quakers lost much of their political power as early as the mid- eighteenth century, and adherence to the Quaker faith diminished during the emergence of a capitalist class structure in Philadelphia.12 How then, I ask, would the Quaker spirit, values and sentiments present at the city’s founding continue to influence Puerto

Ricans in the middle of the twentieth century? Baltzell helped clarify this issue by describing Quaker theology and praxis as a form of “social capital” that set the style for city governance.13 He offered statements from observers over more than two centuries to substantiate his contention that this Quaker-derived social capital survived even among non-Quakers. Later chapters of this dissertation take up Baltzell’s use of the concept of social capital and his contentions about its evolution in Philadelphia.

The allocation of material resources was no less important in Philadelphia’s early history than it is today. Then, as now, urban development can establish norms for social identity. As an example of this nexus between material constructs and municipal self-image, I reintroduce the eighteenth-century notion that Philadelphia was the Athens of America. In the first chapter, I argued that this choice of self-identity set 32

Philadelphia apart from New York. Besides solidifying Philadelphians’ identity and pride in their city, I wish to add here that there was a material result to the Athens analogy. This is shown in the city’s history at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The municipal government hired engineer Benjamin Latrobe to design and construct various municipal facilities, including a water-works.14 With official approval, Latrobe replaced the early Quaker “red city of brick” and favored a new style for public buildings that featured marble and Greek Ionic columns.15 He stated that his use of the classical style in material construction would foster the intellectual conviction that placed Philadelphia’s distinctiveness alongside ancient Athens’ fame.16

There is evidence, therefore, that the image of the city was materially expressed in its buildings. At the end of the nineteenth century, the preferred style would again change, this time reflecting a Parisian Hotel-de-Ville style in City Hall and the Champs-

Élysées style for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.17 In all of these historical moments, the material effects of urban style were used to communicate social identity. According to Baltzell, however, in spite of the many changes in architectural style and urban living in Philadelphia over time, there is a Quaker remnant at the core of the city’s identity.

Public monuments, statues, murals and other architectural and artistic displays often embody social identity. Quaker modesty eschewed the praise of individuals, so the plethora of statuary tributes in the city today contradicts its colonial legacy.18

Ironically, the huge statue of William Penn at the top of City Hall, which so honors the city’s founder, thus represents a departure from Quaker tradition.19 Nonetheless, such material representations evince public thinking about historical events and heroic personages. There may even be a monument to what Philadelphia native Owen Wister 33 described as the city’s deep “instinct for self-disparagement,”20 in as much as one of the most visited statue in the city today is likely the representation of a fictionalized Philly boxer named Rocky. It is a tribute in bronze that perhaps does not so much honor the cinematographic excellence of the film, but rather is popular because Rocky personifies the city’s view of itself as perennial underdog.

Statues or shrines dedicated to religious figures, such as the one to Bishop

Neumann on Fifth Street, are solid reminders of the struggles and virtues of those represented and can also stand as monuments that reflect elements of class consciousness. In some instances, public artefacts reveal a nostalgia for something that no longer exists or that has been left behind. For example, a visitor to the area Puerto

Ricans call “El Bloque de Oro” (The Block of Gold) will see steel palm trees sculptures on each side of North Fifth Street.21 These material reminders, recalling the tropical beauty of the island of Puerto Rico in the adopted home of Philadelphia, serve both to underscore the uniqueness of the Puerto Rican community and to stake the people’s claim to this space.

Religion, Class Conflict and Gramsci’s Organic Intellectuals

To ground my explanation of the Young Lords’ symbolic and practical achievements in Philadelphia, I employ the theoretical tools of the Italian Marxist

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). In “Two Revolutions,” published in Ordine Nuovo in

July of 1920, Gramsci argued that the relationship between economic structures and state power were so closely linked that change of one of them alone would not suffice to produce a revolution.22 Following this reasoning, Gramsci advocated a two-pronged 34 revolutionary effort that would address the people’s culture as well as the power of elites.23 He urged the Italian Communist Party to include popular culture as a tool in the class struggle. Recognizing that religion was a component of that national culture, he described ways that appeal to Italian Catholicism to aid the revolutionary task. This strategy, I add, was opposed by key party leaders, who viewed it as a contradiction of

Marx’s positions; they were certain that it was not the path that had been chosen by

Lenin in the Russian Revolution.24 Nonetheless, I consider Gramsci’s inclusion of popular culture an enrichment of Marxist theory that benefits my analysis of religion in this dissertation, particularly given the importance of Catholicism in both Italian and

Puerto Rican cultures.

I focus here on three key issues in Gramsci’s theory. The first is his approach to state coercion under the Mussolini dictatorship in Italy, which, rightly or wrongly, has been compared to the use of police power under Frank Rizzo in twentieth-century

Philadelphia.25 The second is his focus upon grass-roots leadership, which, for my purpose, encourages emphasis of lay pastoral ministry as decreed in the reforms of the

Second Vatican Council. Thirdly, as will be seen in the eighth chapter, some Puerto

Rican leaders in the 1970s were engaged in a debate about the direction of revolutionary effort, which bore some resemblance to Gramsci’s wrestling with the same issue in the

Italy of his time.

Religion had been a force for change during the Italian Risorgimento

(Resurgence) in the second third of the nineteenth century, culminating with the establishment of the Italian monarchy in 1861. Gramsci noted that Italian Catholicism had communicated with believers of different social classes by modifying religious 35 expressions for each. “There is one Catholicism for the peasants,” he wrote, “one for the petit-bourgeois and town workers, one for women, and one for intellectuals.”26

Gramsci recognized the vital bond of loyalty between the hierarchy and the Catholic laity and the unity of Catholicism based on trust between the classes. This trait helped

Catholicism “avoid splintering into national churches and social stratifications,” he wrote. 27 During the Risorgimento, furthermore, the Italian Catholic hierarchy28 successfully used believers’ trust in the authority of religion to turn Catholics against many measures of an anti-clerical liberalism that promoted the Italian Republic. This moment in Italian history represented to Gramsci an instance where religion was transformed into an instrument of opposition to hegemonic power. Gramsci concluded that this religious example from Italy’s past validated the capacity of leadership from organic intellectuals in social struggles.29

The fact that Gramsci was not a believer did not stop him from admiring

Catholicism when it invested behavior with moral purpose. Although he recognized the need for rationality, he considered passion and feeling to be highly valuable within social movements.30

The popular “feels” but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element “knows” but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel…. The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned…. One cannot make politics- history without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation.31

Gramsci suggested that counter-hegemonic thinking intensifies in times of economic crisis, or, as Max Weber suggested, when there was disenchantment with social organization.32 Instead of trusting a political party alone, even a vanguard one, to bring 36 revolution at a moment of opportunity, Gramsci welcomed grass-roots leadership from organic intellectuals.33

My focus in this dissertation is upon those Puerto Rican leaders who acted as organic intellectuals through the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Using the theoretical tools that I have just described, I explain how they employed Catholic praxis in confronting injustices suffered by Puerto Ricans in the city. Based in part on a reading of Ariel Arnau’s study of the same period in the history of Puerto Ricans in

Philadelphia, I recognize that not all Puerto Rican Catholic leaders merit classification as organic intellectuals.34 In fact, many of the more compliant leaders of the community rejected the counter-hegemonic advocacy from the Young Lords, preferring instead to work within the system. This dissertation thus explores the genesis and intellectual roots of the distinctive actions of the Young Lords on behalf of Philadelphia’s Puerto

Rican community.

Fields and Habitus in the Social Theory of Pierre Bourdieu

To more fully explore issues of Catholic theology and praxis, I will supplement

Gramsci’s theory with key concepts taken from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. I am encouraged by Terry Rey’s observation that Gramsci and Bourdieu share a common theoretical perspective for the analysis of religion’s role in “opposition to orthodoxy.”35

The most significant enrichment I derived from Bourdieu’s thought is his use of “field” to describe social interactions. While Gramsci referred to contestation in only two areas, the state and culture, Bourdieu allows for many more areas, including competition for religious leadership. 37

A concise definition of “field” that I find useful to this study is:

a competitive arena of social relations wherein variously positioned agents and institutions struggle over the production, acquisition and control of forms of capitals particular to the field in question.36

On the one hand, Bourdieu’s theory helps to treat politics and religion as separate fields, while, on the other, it allows us to see that competition for social influence takes place simultaneously across diverse fields and social institutions. The concept of field takes into account the different operational principles of engagement in politics and religion.

Even when the members belonging to these institutions and engaging in the competition are the same people, the fields of politics and religion retain their uniqueness.

Noting that the same logic is operative in each field, Bourdieu widens his description of interactive fields by introducing the notion of homology.37 Other commentators suggest an “isomorphic relation” between the social class structure and cultural choices.38 I understand homology this way: if you have influence in one field, not only do you have advantage over those who lack it, but your advantage in this one field may benefit you in other fields as well. The converse is also true: lose influence in one field, and you may run the risk of losing influence in another. As suggested in the opening of this chapter, religion may alternately support the political authority and deaden resistance, or it may adhere to counter-hegemonic forces and side with the oppressed.39 Although I do not consider religion by itself to be the revolutionary force to change social structures, it often makes an important contribution to political energies when it helps unify collective actions.

In Bourdieu’s scheme, individuals enter the fields of social interaction while harboring preconditioned responses that reflect their location in the social order. People 38 are engaged in social action with attitudes and practices that do not require “a conscious aiming at ends.”40 This is the role Bourdieu ascribes to his notion of habitus, which he developed “to incorporate the objective structures of society and the subjective role of agents within it.”41 I would compare the role of habitus to an athlete’s reliance on

“muscle memory” for actions while playing a game. The attention of the team player is on winning the game, while worries about rules and technique are in the back of his or her mind. Bourdieu’s habitus becomes a cultural structure that orders people’s behavior, beliefs and ways of thinking about their social roles.42 Rogers Brubaker applied Bourdieu’s description of the “habitus as embodied history” to urban working- class America, and this interpretation suits well my approach to class analysis,43 for I find that Bourdieu’s concept of habitus figures most prominently in my interviews where leaders recount their personal experiences of religion, of social engagement and of identification with Puerto Rican culture.

Bourdieu uses the term “doxa” to refer to the traits of individual habitus that are imposed by socialization into organizations. 44 Doxa describes values that have been learned and have become unconscious beliefs and self-evident universals for individual agents within a particular field. In the religious field, the doxa is akin to a form of orthodoxy imposed by institutionalized religion to which all believers are expected to adhere. I will use this term, doxa, below in drawing distinctions between the habitus, or embodied history, with which the Puerto Ricans came to Philadelphia and the directives issued by the ecclesial hierarchy to align Puerto Rican Catholics with the expectations for normative religious praxis in the city.

Symbolic and Other Forms of Capital

Winning in any of Bourdieu’s fields is measured by the production of social capital. Whether represented by tangible or intangible values, social capital is accrued though advantageous relationship to resources which possess significance to the social order. Bourdieu points to the multi-faceted nature of social capital, highlighting, however, that it can be divided into roughly two general areas: economic and social.

Much as economic capital represents influence over the means of material production, social capital engenders influence within networks of social interaction such as religion and culture. Thus, we may speak of religious capital, cultural capital or some other sort of social capital.

A common consideration for all types of social capital is the role of symbols.

Based on the interplay of symbols in society with the power derived from honor, prestige and recognition, Bourdieu developed the concept of symbolic capital.45 Though symbolic capital is most often connected to the state’s power to favor a privileged class,

I apply the notion to government action in favor of an underprivileged class.

It can be safely asserted that the Puerto Rican community in Philadelphia from the 1950s to the mid-1960s had minimal economic influence over local power brokers and held still less political capital. However, during the 1960s, anti-poverty legislation obliged the government to provide funding for community development among certain disadvantaged groups. These were generally classified as “minority groups.” Minority groups were made up of citizens who had suffered demonstrably from discrimination, and because Puerto Ricans -- whether born on the island or on the mainland -- have birthright United States citizenship, the fact that many of them were migrants did not 40 exclude them from this classification. This allowed Puerto Ricans claim to special attention in social services, employment, housing and education as disadvantaged

American citizens. Thus, social and economic disadvantages that previously had been obstacles to power were converted into potential assets for Puerto Ricans. Therefore, despite their poverty and lack of representation, events during the period under review afforded them enough symbolic capital to enhance their social position and to afford them a certain level of prestige. Being categorized as yet another minority group of

American citizens, rather than as immigrants, also gave Puerto Ricans and advantage over immigrant groups from Latin America.

Puerto Rican Catholics also derived symbolic capital from the Second Vatican

Council. Because one effect of the United States’ invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898 had been the drastic reduction of the number of clergy on the island, many ministerial tasks, such as catechesis, leading prayers, counseling, home and hospital visitations, had long been exercised by Puerto Rican lay persons. In mainland cities like Philadelphia, the need for Spanish-speakers in the ministry allowed many of these Puerto Rican migrants to exercise roles that among the English speakers in the same parish were generally restricted to clergy and female members of religious orders. The Council empowered lay persons to assume greater participation in ministries and encouraged formal training that previously had been reserved for priests and Catholic sisters.46 Puerto Rican

Catholic lay persons in ministry gained symbolic capital after the Council because they were considered to already be in compliance with the new mandates, placing them ahead of English-speaking parishioners who ordinarily had not been called to assume similar ministerial responsibilities previous to the Council.47 Additionally, by 41 mandating the “language of the people” in worship,48 the Council elevated Spanish to an equal status with English in United States Catholicism.

Later chapters describe the resistance in both city government and the Catholic archdiocese in Philadelphia against the full implementation of key political and liturgical measures. Nonetheless, the symbolic capital that these fields of religion and politics conferred at the national and international level of macro-history had its impact on the Young Lords of Philadelphia and their micro-history. Admittedly, there was a deceptive quality to this symbolic capital inasmuch as it was not controlled by the

Puerto Ricans themselves. It should be noted that Puerto Ricans, as all Hispanics in the

United States, as well, still lacked native representation at the highest level of ecclesiastical and governmental power structures. Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that when the new legislation out of Washington was coupled to the set of pastoral priorities

Catholic theology developed to conform with the mandates of the Second Vatican

Council, the new directions benefitted the Puerto Rican community in Philadelphia.

Moreover, I use Bourdieu’s terminology in characterizing many of the actions of the Young Lords as “symbolic triggers” that made social discontent “explicit and public” for Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community.49 Bourdieu’s theory bestows importance on these symbolic triggers and the subsequent symbolic actions that achieve a subversive effect.50 Rituals are among these symbolic actions. Later, in this dissertation, I detail how a candlelight procession in protest of a 1974 fire-bombing in

Philadelphia gave the Young Lords’ Catholicism a counter-hegemonic function in the civic sphere. Their appeal to traditional elements of Catholic faith reproduced the

“global validity of the ceremonial” and confirmed the premise that effective ritual 42 produces effective social results.51 The organization of public events such as the candlelight procession, and the mobilization of the people for participation in them, require leaders to educate the people about the importance of action. These public events, I submit, are part of a sustained effort to unite a community in solidarity and action with the intent to achieve lasting results.

Race, Racism and Religion in Philadelphia

In this dissertation, the issues of race and racism are paramount. Rather than treating race as an unchangeable social phenomenon, I place it on a sliding scale. It is my understanding that perceptions of racial boundaries vary according to factors such as culture and social position. Each society has had its own micro-history for the development of these general perceptions. As will be discussed in later chapters, when

Puerto Ricans first migrated to Philadelphia, they encountered notions of race that were different from those in Puerto Rico. Thus, Puerto Ricans were forced into recognizing that there were two different systems at work. In their own tradition, skin color was less important to social identity than culture: in the North American view, however, racial identity was primary. Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, therefore, had to develop new skills to navigate through these different cultural structures. Although the result was not exactly the same as for African Americans, this situation produced what W. E. B. Du

Bois called “double consciousness.” He remarked that African Americans wished it would “be possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American,” thus recognizing that they lived in a fractured society.52 The double consciousness of which Du Bois speaks becomes more complex when applied to Puerto Ricans. While Puerto Ricans, for 43 various reasons, may at times have identified and be identified as “people of color,” they may see themselves as Blacks, as Whites, or as Brown, that is, as people of mixed- race composition. They often also claim a Puerto Rican national ethnic identity, in addition to American citizenship. On the mainland, they have often identified themselves as “Boricuas” a poetic name based on the island’s original culture, while at other times, they have chosen identification as “Latinos/as” who belong to a larger Pan-

Latino/Hispanic reality. For these reasons, one could say that “consciousness” among the Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia represents a juggling act that involved not only moving but keeping equilibrium between these different identities. In sum, racial and ethnic identity for Puerto Rican Catholics in Philadelphia was no easy matter.

Although racism has cast a pall over many economic and religious reforms through much of the history of the United States,53 in the 1970s, racial and ethnic identity became sources of symbolic capital. As I described above, the legislation of the

War on Poverty and the pastoral reforms of the Second Vatican Council urged greater equality and promoted special attention to groups that had been disadvantaged. This dissertation examines how the benefits offered to Puerto Ricans as a minority group also brought opposition from within the Catholic Church and Philadelphia politics. To navigate through racial awareness as a positive value and racism as a negative one, I wish to introduce the definition of racism offered by Audrey Smedley:

Racism is the belief that members of a particular group defined as “race” possess characteristics – deemed inferior or superior – that are specific to that racial grouping, and the attendant behavior towards that “race” based on that belief.54

The essential defect of racism comes from its refusal to look at each individual as a person, imposing instead a blanket stereotype on all members of a particular group. The 44 racist mindset blames the victim while it excuses ill treatment of racial groups on the misguided premise that their inferiority makes them less deserving of respect. Poverty, thus, comes to be viewed falsely as the inescapable result of a supposedly innate racial inferiority. Moreover, upward social mobility is generally deemed impossible, because the entire group is prejudged as incapable of improvement. An exhaustive examination of racism and its effects is unnecessary here. I wish only to clarify that my analysis will examine the interaction of race and class to determine the effect these had on issues of identity for Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia.

The double consciousness of Puerto Ricans, as in the African American case, is a reaction to the pejorative treatment afforded them by general society. Though the existence of racism in the United States has been acknowledged above, it is my intention here to avoid labeling given individuals as “racists.” In other words, I will limit myself to advance certain observations about racial polarization in this city rather than claim to prove that any one person in the history of Philadelphia is, or has been, a racist.55 This is an important consideration when examining the political dynamics of the city when Frank Rizzo was mayor (1971-1979).56 While “racist” is a derogatory accusation, “racial polarization” is a quantifiable measure that is evidenced in the voting data from Rizzo’s elections.57 For instance, in his run as a Republican against

Democratic Mayor Wilson Goode in 1987, Rizzo obtained 82 per cent of the White vote but lost 97 per cent of the Black vote.58

The data from election results in Philadelphia also carry clear markers of social class. Just as one can identify wards by racial groupings using census data, they can be classified by income level. Winning 82 per cent of the White vote in the 1987 election 45 also means Frank Rizzo lost 18 per cent of the White vote. Chestnut Hill and Mount

Airy were predominantly White neighborhoods in 1987, just as were Fishtown and much of South Philadelphia. However, Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy had considerably higher household income than the other wards such as in Fishtown and in the Italian

Catholic sections of South Philadelphia where Rizzo enjoyed a majority of the votes.59

Since Rizzo’s totals were lower in the upper income areas, the data suggest social class factors split the White vote.60

I summarize these racialized voting patterns to Philadelphia to underscore the binary nature of the labels of White or Black and its problematics for Puerto Ricans. As pointed out above, mixed racial composition is frequent among Puerto Ricans. In

Puerto Rico, there are mixed-race phenotypes such as “trigueño” [literally, “wheat color”], which refer to the skin color of individuals. In fact, sometimes birth certificates for members of the same family have different racial classifications for each. Thus, while some Puerto Ricans may be officially and un-officially placed into the categories of White or Black, there are, in fact, many who defy any rigid racial labeling. This does not mean that there is no racism in Puerto Rico or among Puerto Ricans, but only that it follows social and historical forms particular to the island and Puerto Rican culture.

This will be taken up and described more fully in chapters five and six, where I show more extensively how racial categories in Puerto Rico have differed from those in the

United States.

I close this section on my use of electoral data with a note about religion.

Because religious identification is not a part of the census, reporting on a Catholic vote is less reliable than ethnic or racial population reports. Simply put, conclusions about 46 social behavior according to religious affiliation are derived from other types of sociological methods.61 I note that the distinction between White Catholics and

Hispanic Catholics is more an ethnic measure than a racial one. The term “White” is usually synonymous with ethnic origin in Europe. “Hispanic” is the term the census commonly uses to refer to people originating in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean or

Latin American and their U.S.-born offspring, but it may include immigrants from

Spain and their descendants born in the U.S. As European, Spaniards may be perceived as racially “White,” though Spain has had history of rich racial mixture. Thus, the term

“Hispanic,” when used as a racial category may prove problematic. In light of the limitations in census data, many surveys of Catholics in the United States have used attendance at a Mass celebrated in the Spanish language to measure the number of

Hispanic Catholics in a parish.62 While useful, data for assessing voting patterns of

White and Hispanic Catholics are not as precise as the measurements that utilize census reports. Therefore, while I recognize that White and Hispanic Catholics often have political differences, I am reluctant to imput exact percentages to their electoral choices.

Religion and Social Conflicts

As suggested by Gramsci, the Catholic Church often allows diversity of religious expression in ritual practices for different social classes while maintaining theological and creedal unity for all its members.63 Even when the day-to-day practices of Catholics may reflect cultural differences, they identify with each other as members of a church that adheres to one common set of beliefs. For the most part, Catholicism in the United States followed this pattern, often treating ethnic differences for ritual the 47 way Gramsci had viewed the treatment of Italy’s social classes. Certain parishes were designated to serve distinct language communities in the United States while reliance on doctrinal agreement helped avoid fragmentation into ethnically determined denominations.64 What doctrinal unity does not guarantee, however, is the absence of conflicts based on culture, race, ethnicity, political affiliation or social class. My focus on class issues in this dissertation inclines me to examine the racial, ethnic and political conflicts as manifestations of underlying class conflicts within the Catholic religion.

These conflicts became acute with the changes to Catholicism and to urban politics in the United States in the period under study. As stated by Sean McCloud:

Class does matter in American religion, whether one examines it historically through analysis of events and documents, sociologically through polls and interviews, or ethnographically through participant observation in a single congregation. But how class is relevant is not a simple matter. A resurrected study of class and religion must necessarily also be a transformed study, one that sheds some past assumptions and offers new conceptions and directions.65

Addressing the need for “new conceptions and directions,” José Casanova’s

1994 work shows how religion’s power over politics shifted in societies such as the

United States, especially in the last quarter of the twentieth century. He concludes that instead of seeking restoration of status as the virtual established religion, churches are mostly content to critique legislation and policies.66 One result of the shifting role for ecclesiastical power at the time of Casanova’s publication and still present with us today is the mobilization of Latino Catholics for political causes. I have taken previous analysis of popular religion’s capacity to function as a mobilizing cultural resource among Latinos in general,67 and examined these same processes in the case of

Philadelphia. 48

If the conflicts within Catholicism over theological interpretation for religious praxis are often linked to class, as suggested above, the question arises as to which of the class interests are those of the Church. This issue has been treated at length by Otto

Maduro in his important work Religion and Social Conflicts, which examines class interests within a religious institution in terms of “religious production,” a term consonant with Gramsci’s theory.68 Maduro offers that religious production provides definitions for praxis for each social group by creating moral categories, such as:

….the thinkable and the unthinkable, the desirable and the undesirable, the possible and the impossible, the useful and the harmful, the important and the secondary, the urgent and the nonurgent, the forbidden, the permitted, and the obligatory, the obvious and the dubious, the absolute and the relative.69

I examine below the “contradictory and conflictive functions” of religion, to shed light on the relationship of the Catholic Church of Philadelphia and the Puerto

Rican community in terms of this community’s religious production.70 The official newspaper of the Philadelphia Archdiocese, The Catholic Standard and Times, in this light, is a key source for understanding religious production by the controlling class’ interests, representing the “conditioning of collective behavior” for the city’s

Catholics.71 Employing this perspective, I review below the editorial choices of The

Catholic Standard and Times as a form of control over religious production.72 I also connect the control of thought by the “dominant class” in Philadelphia to Gramsci’s generalized treatment of hegemony vis à vis the subaltern class.73

Endnotes to Chapter 2

1 E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, Second Edition (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996).

2 Russell F. Weigley, ed., Philadelphia: A 300-Year History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982).

3 These premises are found throughout the production from Karl Marx. A specific citation for the first can be found in Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmandsworth: London / Penguin Books), 1976, 102-103. One of Marx’s statements on the disposition to use material contradictions to benefit a class can be found in Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya (New York: International Publishers, 1979), 11-12.

4 The term comes from Greek and was used in notable fashion by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics. Praxis can be viewed as a progression of cognitive and physical actions: taking the action, considering the impacts of the action, analyzing the results of the action by reflecting upon it, altering and revising conceptions and planning following reflection, and implementing these plans in further actions.

5 Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 41.

6 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” cited in Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels on Religion, with an introduction by Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 42.

7 Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, translated by Moissaye J. Olgin (New York: International Publishers, 1926), 79.

8 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 53-54.

9 “WASP” as acronym for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” was coined by Baltzell. For this and some critical observations, see Edith Kurzweil, “Changing of the Guard in Digby Baltzell's 'The Protestant Establishment,'” review of Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia by E. Digby Baltzell in The New York Sun, May 7, 2008.

10 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 457-497.

11 Social science has utilized the concept of ethos. I will use the definition of the concept offered by Clifford Geertz, who explains the function of religious beliefs and sacred symbols as that which “synthesize a people’s ethos – the tone, character and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood – and their world view, the pictures they have of the way things in sheer reality are, their most comprehensive idea of order. In religious beliefs and practice a group’s ethos is rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adopted to the actual state of affairs the world view describes, while the world view is rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a way of life.” Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Waukegan: Fontana Press, 1983), 90.

12 In fact, over time, many leading Philadelphia families abandoned Quaker frugality for the Anglican faith, where they felt more comfortable in enjoying the benefits of wealth. See Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 241, 450.

13 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 96.

14 Edgar P. Richardson, “The Athens of America,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 251-253.

15 Richardson, “The Athens of America,” 251-252.

16 In a speech delivered in 1811, he famously proclaimed, “the days of Greece may be revived in the woods of America and Philadelphia become the Athens of the Western World.” See Ken Finkel, “Philadelphia as Athens of America: More than Skin Deep” Philly History Blog, September 15, 2011, accessed June 6, 2017, https://www.phillyhistory.org/blog/index.php/2011/09/philadelphia-as-athens- of-america-more-than-skin-deep/.

17 Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davies. “The Iron Age: 1876-1905,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 506-511.

18 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, Baltzell, 104.

19 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 316; 325.

20 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, citing Owen Wister, 105.

21 This area, lying between Somerset Street and West Lehigh Avenue on North Fifth Street, is also often referred to as El Centro de Oro.

22 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1910-1920, ed. Quentin Hoare (New York: International Publishers, 1977).

23 Carl Boggs, The Two Revolutions: Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism (Bath: South End Press, 1999), 83-90.

24 Boggs, The Two Revolutions: Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism, 90-95.

25 This comparison to Mussolini was made by former Philadelphia mayor, Senator Joseph Clark. See Tom Tiede “Rizzo, Phillie 2 of a Kind,” Kingman Daily Miner, October 7, 1976.

26 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. and eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 420.

27 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 420.

28 Opposition was led by Pope Pius IX. Pius IX certainly exaggerated the advantages of the regime previous to 1848. However, he denounced the excesses and contradictions of secularity, liberalism and capitalist exploitation. In general, the church opposition to the liberal state was matched with a yearning for return to a monarchical government rather than to socialism. Mussolini utilized a

populist resentment against liberalism and capitalism to build fascism in opposition to socialism and communism, sometimes posturing as a defender of Catholic values. At the same time, socialists of many factions linked liberalism to capitalism in a negative fashion. Gramsci’s reflections while in prison led him to view the unfamiliarity of the communists with the religious presumptions among the public to be part of the explanation for fascist success and communist failure. He also noted that the Catholic teaching against the regime presented socialism with an opportunity to offer their alternative. See Antonio Gramsci, “The Lyons Theses,” January 1926. In Political Writings, II, 1921-1926 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), 346.

29 See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 126-129; 328-330.

30 “The most important element is undoubtedly one whose character is determined not by reason but by faith.” Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 339.

31 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 418. Gramsci uses hyphenated terms that are translated as “politics-nation” and “people-nation.”

32 The term, “disenchantment” is found in Weber’s lecture “Science as a Vocation,” at Munich University in 1917. See Max Weber, Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129-158. For the connection to Gramsci’s thought, see Boggs, The Two Revolutions, 179-186.

33 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 10.

34 Ariel Arnau. “The Evolution of Leadership within the Puerto Rican Community of Philadelphia, 1950s- 1970s,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 136:1 (2012): 53-81.

35 Terry Rey, Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy (London: Equinox, 2007), 58.

36 Rey, Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy, 41-42.

37 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (London: Polity Press, 1996), 18.

38 “Structural homology is the assumption that social class structure is linked to the structure of aesthetic preferences through a one-to-one correspondence, an isomorphic relation.” Philippe Coulangeon and Yannick Lemel. “The Homology Thesis: Distinction Revisited,” in Quantifying Theory: Pierre Bourdieu, eds. Karen Robson and Chris Sanders (Toronto: Springer Science + Business Media B.V., 2009), 47.

39 See Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National History (Princeton: Marcus Weiner Publishers, 1998), 371-375; 384-389.

40 [Habitus contains] “principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.” Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 53.

41 Pierre Bourdieu, “The politics of protest. An interview by Kevin Ovenden.” Socialist Review, 242 (2000), 19. See also his Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 1998), 25.

42 “Habitus are cultural structures that exist in people’s bodies and minds and shape a wide variety of their behaviours [sic], beliefs and thoughts.” Coulangeon and Lemel. “The Homology Thesis: Distinction Revisited,” 47.

43 Rogers Brubaker, “Rethinking Classical Theory: The Sociological Vision of Pierre Bourdieu.” in After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration, eds. David L. Swartz and Vera L. Zolberg (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluva Academic Publishers 2004), 47-48. See also Bourdieu’s own The Logic of Practice, 56.

44 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 164- 169.

45 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 47.

46 Lumen Gentium, Document of the Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution On the Church, solemnly promulgated by His Holiness Pope Paul VI, November 21, 1964.

47 Ana María Díaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

48 Sacrosanctum Concilium, Document of the Second Vatican Council, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, solemnly promulgated by His Holiness, Pope Paul VI, December 4, 1963.

49 “Even the most subversive symbolic actions, if they are not to condemn themselves to failure, must reckon with dispositions, and with the limitations these impose on innovative imagination and action. They can succeed only to the extent that – acting as symbolic triggers capable of legitimating and ratifying senses of unease and diffused discontents, socially instituted desires that are more or less confused, by making them explicit and public – they manage to reactivate dispositions which previous processes of inculcation have deposited in people’s bodies.” Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000), 234-35.

50 Rey, Bourdieu on Religion, 130.

51 François-André Isambert, Le Sens du sacré: Fête et religion populaire (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1982), 110.

52 “The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn't bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.” W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, Avenel, NJ: Gramercy Books; 1994. Reprint of the 1903 publication, Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903), 4.

53 “In the U.S., race has historically been a variable that trumped class in many cultural fields, including religion.” Jerry Park and Samuel Reisner, “Revisiting the Social Sciences of American Christianity, 1972-1998,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41 (2002), 742.

54 Audrey Smedley, “The History of the Idea of Race… And Why It Matters,” (paper presented at the conference “Race, Human Variation and Disease: Consensus and Frontiers,” sponsored by the American Anthropological Association Warrenton, Virginia, March 14-17, 2007), accessed October 28, 2016, http://www.understandingrace.org/resources/pdf/disease/smedley.pdf.

55 Thomas B. Edsall, “Rizzo a Catalyst for Philadelphia GOP,” Washington Post, September 6, 1987, accessed October 26, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/09/06/rizzo-a- catalyst-for-philadelphia-gop/e09e337a-96e9-42a9-bfd5-d755d1a2d0f4/

56 Stephanie G. Wolf, “The Bicentennial City: 1968-1982,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 722-725. The issue of racial polarization is discussed throughout the two major biographies of Rizzo. Salvatore A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Philadelphia: Camino Books, 1993) and Joseph R. Daughen, and Peter Binzen, The Cop Who Would Be King: The Honorable Frank Rizzo (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997).

57 Bob Warner, “For Mayor Frank Rizzo One Issue Has Been Enough” New York Times, August 8, 1979, accessed October 27, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/19/archives/for-mayor-frank-rizzo-one- issue-has-been-enough-safe-in-center-city.html,.

58 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 324.

59 The U.S. Department of Commerce and the Bureau of the Census revealed in the 1980 U.S. Census of Population and Housing that in Tract 250, Chestnut Hill, the mean family income was $21,139; in Tract 294, Kensington, the mean family income was $12,532; in Tract 322, Richmond/Fishtown, the mean family income was $11,500. The City Stats for Philadelphia City Planning Commission shows in the 1990s, a house in Chestnut Hill and Mt. Airy would cost approximately $115,500; in Richmond/Fishtown, with a White population of 90,640, a Black population of 960 and a Hispanic population of 3,004, houses were priced at $35,000; in Upper Kensington, with a White population of 13,244, a Black population of 64,336, and a Hispanic population of 33,740, houses were priced at $17,244. Philadelphia City Planning Commission, accessed November 2, 2016 https://archive.org/stream/1980censusofpo8022831unse#page/n575/mode/2up and http://www/phila.gov/pdfs/citystats.pdf.

60 Paul Lyons, The People of this Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 192.

61 Carlos Vargas Ramos and Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, eds. Blessing La Política: The Latino Religious Experience and Political Engagement in the United States (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012).

62 Ramos and Stevens-Arroyo, eds. Blessing La Política: The Latino Religious Experience and Political Engagement in the United States, 171-197.

63 “There is one Catholicism for the peasants, one for the petit-bourgeois and town workers, one for women, and one for intellectuals.” Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 420.

64 In this regard, it differs from Protestantism where, for instance, Lutherans started out as mostly Germans, and Presbyterians as mostly Scots. Likewise, Catholicism did not divide into separate denominations over Black slavery as did the Baptists in the United States.

65 Sean McCloud, Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2007), 30.

66 José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

67 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo and Ana María Díaz-Stevens. An Enduring Flame: Studies in Latino Popular Religiosity, vol. 1 of the PARAL Series (New York: Bildner Center Books, 1994). See also David A. Badillo, Latinos and the New Immigrant Church (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

68 Otto Maduro, Religion and Social Conflicts (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1982), 115.

69 Maduro, Religion and Social Conflicts, 116.

70 Maduro, Religion and Social Conflicts, 119.

71 Maduro, Religion and Social Conflicts, 120.

72 “At the very least, every dominant class will seek to obtain from the religious field that it not produce any practice or discourse favorable to the struggle of subordinate classes against the hegemony of the dominant classes.” Maduro, Religion and Social Conflicts, 123.

73 Mike Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000), 102.

CHAPTER 3

THE MAKING OF PHILADELPHIA IN CRISIS AND CELEBRATION

In the opening chapter, I defined a city as localized networks of power relationships. I highlighted urban planning in the modern era because it provides instances where the uneven distribution of material resources affects social interactions.

Historically, cities have differed from each other in the patterns used to integrate social forms of control within a basic economic framework. In this regard, I introduced a distinction between macro-history and micro-history to allow for comparisons between the general and the specific. I approached the functions of religious faith by adopting the concept of “truth claim” as articulated by Alain Badiou. The second chapter explored theoretical approaches to understand how class interests shape these networks of power relationships. I explored the issue of dominance by a hegemonic class, although I noted that factors of class interest should be understood as taking place on different fields of interaction, citing Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework. Finally, I focused on Antonio Gramsci’s notion of organic intellectuals because of its relevance to the counter-hegemonic actions of the Young Lords in twentieth-century Philadelphia.

In this chapter, I consider how the passage of time and the introduction of new technologies affected Philadelphia over the course of history until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the city hosted the American Centennial of 1876. My purpose is to contextualize the precedents set for the Puerto Rican community in light of the city’s long history of receiving immigrants. Religious perceptions of “the other” exercise a key role in this regard, and this is certainly the case in Philadelphia since the 56 moment when the religious vision of William Penn (1644-1718) shaped the planning for the city of Brotherly Love. Thus, I begin the analysis of relevant historical precedents in Philadelphia with the city’s seventeenth-century founding.

The Quaker Vision Translated into a City

The founder of Philadelphia planned its physical layout on a model based on a grid for the city’s streets. Mary Maples Dunn and Richard S. Dunn have observed that

Penn had lived through the London fire of 1666, when blocked streets sentenced thousands of scurrying residents to death. Drawing from this experience, Penn’s physical plan of the city was intended to avoid such consequences in Philadelphia.1

Subsequent design for buildings and other permanent installations, such as waterworks and sewers, included measures also meant to protect public safety and health in the city.

Facilities for commercial activities, such as the importing of raw materials or the packaging and shipment of products, were incorporated into the plan and placed in zones that would not disturb the residents.

The Quaker founder believed that less densely populated space would make the city a “Greene Country Towne,” avoiding the squalor, poverty and plague of England’s seventeenth-century cities.2 In this way, Penn thought the material reality of

Philadelphia would not only provide a healthy environment but also dispose residents to neighborliness in the model of the Quaker faith.3 To his chagrin, however, recalcitrant settlers soon disrespected the design for a cluster of urban villages. They repeatedly subdivided their purchased lots and produced unwanted crowding.4 However, Penn’s original vision had set a model for Philadelphia’s material development. Much as was 57 discussed in the previous chapter about comparisons of Philadelphia to Athens, the reference to “Greene County Towne” became a part of the city’s identity.

E. Digby Baltzell provides an extensive review of the religious intentions that influenced the city’s founding.5 He explains Quaker theology as awareness of an immanent Divine Presence which made itself known through an “Inner Light” to every individual. The Friends, as Quakers were formally called, bestowed radical equality for religious authority on each individual who became “convinced” in this belief, thus eliminating a need for ordained bishops or clergy.6 Quaker attitudes against hierarchical religious authority spilled over into the political realm, according to Baltzell. Rather than resort to state coercion, the Quakers appealed to religious conviction to correct behavior, because they believed the individual’s Inner Light was more reliable than human authority. Baltzell claims that distrust of all authority save God’s is the cornerstone for Quaker theology, making it essentially “antinomian religion.”7

The original city plan also offers physical evidence of Quaker distrust of authority. William Penn’s Philadelphia had no city hall and no cathedral. At the very center of the city’s grid, where North and South Broad streets now intersect with East and West Market Streets, there was to be an open square. Penn envisioned that area for community meetings. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that

Philadelphia finally finished building its City Hall on that space.

The plainness of Quaker houses of worship also reflected their beliefs. Baltzell opines that in contrast with the church steeples of Puritan New England that affirmed a transcendent God, the flat, unassuming style of the Quaker meetinghouse was silent witness to an immanent Creator.8 If, as previously stated, the construction of public 58 monuments, statues and murals are means of communicating social values in

Philadelphia, their absence is also relevant to understanding of the city’s identity. I maintain that while over time the original layout of Philadelphia was changed, and additions were made to the city’s structures, the founder’s original aspirations for the city endure, albeit in serially modified forms.9

Tolerance and Political Authority in Quaker Philadelphia

Quaker respect for individual conscience extends to persons of other religious beliefs. Among the earliest English colonists, Penn stands out as being relatively enlightened for his treatment of Native Americans, and he needed no walls around his city for protection against them,10 unlike colonial New York and Boston.

Pennsylvania’s coldness toward the established privileges of the Church of England also attracted religious dissenters, who found freedoms in Pennsylvania which had been denied them in other colonies.11 The same tolerance provided opportunities for various denominations, including those identified with non-English settlers. Many German

Free Churches, such as the Mennonites, and other independent sects, such as the

Moravians, were welcomed into the colony on equal footing with the Lutheran and

German Reformed Churches. Jews were also among the first religious groups to arrive in Pennsylvania, coming with William Penn in 1683, and they gradually acquired significant social status thereafter.12 The founder’s vision of tolerance included

Catholics, perhaps unwittingly. When they established Old St. Joseph’s Church in

1733, Pennsylvania became the only place under the British flag where Catholics could worship openly.13 In short, Pennsylvania’s colonial map soon included settlements 59 whose inhabitants did not worshipped in the Church of England and many of them spoke a language other than English.

Quaker tolerance for religious dissent also created a favorable climate in

Pennsylvania for free thinkers, scientists and artists. Boston-born Benjamin Franklin, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1723, was perhaps the most notable among them, but not the only one. In Baltzell’s opinion, these professionals contributed to Philadelphia’s reputation as the “Athens of America” because of, rather than in spite of, their outsider status. 14

German immigrants seeking religious freedom and better economic conditions accounted for a large percentage of the colony’s population growth. By 1740, people of

German origin outnumbered settlers from England and Wales in Pennsylvania. It is noteworthy that, although Pennsylvania was the last of the original thirteen colonies to be founded, Philadelphia was by 1765 the fourth largest city of the British Empire, exceeded in population by only London, Edinburgh and Dublin.15 The diverse ethnic enclaves or jurisdictions in Pennsylvania were allowed to conduct affairs, celebrate religious festivals, name places and erect buildings according to their distinctive cultures. I connect the early Quaker tolerance toward these enclaves in rural

Pennsylvania to the eventual emergence of distinctive neighborhoods in the City of

Philadelphia.16 Moreover, as will be shown in the next chapter, the traditional character for city neighborhoods would also later affect the Puerto Ricans who came to

Philadelphia in the twentieth century.

Colonial-era Quakers’ belief in the radical equality of fellow human beings led many of them to oppose slavery. Five blocks from where I live in Germantown today, a 60 marker designates the site of a 1688 Quaker inspired abolitionist declaration. Despite individual statements, however, Quakers as a group were ambivalent about slavery.17 It is interest to note, for example, that despite his pursuit of universal brotherhood, Penn owned slaves, and that when Benjamin Lay (1681-1759), a Quaker from Colchester, became passionately opposed to slavery after a trip to Barbados, he was expelled from the Quaker meetinghouse in 1738.18

Moreover, while there is much to be admired for early abolitionist proclamations, one should not lose sight of the fact that sobering economic realities conditioned this attitude. Slavery, in fact, was economically disadvantageous in

Pennsylvania because the growing season of 180 days was too short for profitable tobacco cultivation or for other crops which invited slave labor.19 In contrast with

Quakers in the Caribbean who owned plantations maintained by salve labor, there was little economic cost to abolitionist sentiments in Pennsylvania,

Despite the social benefits of Quaker tolerance, the antinomian distrust of civil and religious authority produced negative consequences for political governance.20

Observant Quakers relied on a single mode of punishing offending believers, ostracism, which they applied to civil law enforcement for the colony. In the colony’s first five years, policing was left to three “common peacemakers,” who were instructed to resolve all disputes in the same manner of dialogue as that exercised within a Quaker meetinghouse.21 The reluctance of constables to arrest wrong-doers or of magistrates to resolve disputes with legal penalties invited public chaos, a result which Baltzell characterized as “amiable anarchy.”22 William Penn’s remedy in 1688 was to give a non-Quaker from New England, Captain John Blackwell, complete authority to police 61 the colony.23 Quaker antinomianism chased Blackwell from his post in less than two years, however, not before the captain delivered a sad farewell to Pennsylvania:

I have to do with a people whom neither God nor man can prevayle [sic] with for they dispise [sic] all Dominion and dignity that is not in themselves…. Alas! Alas! Poore [sic] Governor of Pennsylvania.24

The founding Quaker elites, wrote Baltzell, disdained any civic roles requiring coercion because such an action ran counter to their faith. As a result, political careers became unattractive. Baltzell saw the survival of this mentality over centuries because later immigrant groups to the modern city of Philadelphia gained social capital by identifying themselves with the avoidance of politics as a profession that characterized the city’s founding elites.25 To prove his point, Baltzell compared the Irish-American

Catholics in Boston with their peers in Philadelphia, stating that while the former did as the English-American Puritan Bostonians had done and established political family dynasties; the Philadelphia Irish-Americans, on the other hand, followed the Quaker mode, preferring commercial careers over political ones.26 Certainly, although Irish

Catholics were the largest ethnic group in Philadelphia since the 1850s, they did not dominate the city’s politics as happened in Boston. In fact, Philadelphia waited until

1964 to elect the city’s first Irish Catholic mayor, James J. Tate. In the next chapter, I will treat expectations about city politics among Puerto Ricans and seek to analyze how an enduring Quaker influence on political attitudes may have come into play.

Evolution of Quaker Ideals

In accord with their pacifism, Quakers in colonial Philadelphia had been reluctant to support any kind of military action against either the French or the Indians. 62

The cause of independence from Great Britain, however, presented a new and more significant challenge. In response, John Dickinson (1732-1808) and Thomas Paine

(1737-1809) recast the Quaker faith so as to support freedom for the colonies.

In Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British

Colonies, Dickinson wrote that unjust taxation was violence against human liberty and a mark of tyranny. He concluded that any laws enforcing such abuses could justifiably be disobeyed.27 In Common Sense, Paine denounced Britain’s violation of the natural dignity within each individual and argued that the “common sense” of ordinary men impelled them to struggle against injustice.28 Although he wrote for a public audience,

Paine invoked “Quaker tenets, images, and messages” that drew upon on the theological principle of the Inner Light. Some have concluded that Paine “merely secularized his forefathers’ message for republican readers.”29 Yet, while both Dickinson and Paine framed a call to action in secular terms, a religious influence in their writings cannot be denied. In fact, when Philadelphia’s purist Quakers repudiated his patriotic arguments,

Paine added a theological refutation to the objectors when he published Common Sense the second time.30 This is evidence of the Quaker legacy behind his political thinking.

In my understanding, both Dickinson and Paine avoided citing specifically

Quaker religious beliefs or denominational language because they thought such usage might have divided the colonists instead of uniting them. Whereas the Quaker “Inner

Light” was a doctrine specifically upheld by the Society of Friends, “common sense” was a rational concept that appealed to everyone. Moreover, it is significant that the

Constitution for the new nation echoed William Penn’s guarantee of religious freedom by stating in the First Amendment that “Congress shall make no law respecting an 63 establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” These examples of religious influence upon the struggle for independence show that attitudes toward authority could change and yet retain the essential Quaker outlook. They can also be interpreted as examples of what Gramsci meant in speaking of the counter-hegemonic functions for religion.

The Roots of Philadelphia’s Neighborhoods

I highlighted above how tolerance toward diverse groups drew immigrants to

Pennsylvania during the colonial period. An ever-increasing number of immigrants could not find room in the original city Penn had founded, however. Thus, a series of ethnic enclaves spread beyond the city limits. First on the list of the new villages near

Philadelphia was Germantown, incorporated in 1689 and made famous by the skills of its linen weavers. As its name suggests, it was a fairly homogeneous ethnic concentration. Similar settlements continued to spring up for the next century and a half outside of the old city, many within Philadelphia county.

These outlying settlements in the county were vital to the city’s economy. Most featured a specialized production in textiles or artisanship, such as Germantown’s linen weavers and the carpet makers of Frankford.31 The urban villages often adopted the names of the home towns of the settlers: Kensington, Richmond, Bristol, Southwark and Oxford, for example; or native names for the site: Aramingo, Moyamensing,

Manyunk and Passyunk. Other names were geographical labels, such as West

Philadelphia. There could be aspirational expectations expressed for a place, such as

Northern Liberties. The names were often colorful, even if not always official. 64

“Fishtown” was the unofficial name for the area on the banks of the Delaware where

German fishers of shad lived; the name “Spring Garden” was derived from

Springettsbury, a manor named after Penn’s first wife, Gulielma Maria Springett. This nomenclature is seen today simply as a collection of names of diverse neighborhoods, but originally the names were meant to identify specific economic and cultural enclaves. It is important to recognize that by the time Puerto Ricans came to settle in the city in the mid-twentieth century, there was no new land to be claimed, the neighborhoods had already been named, and each of the groups the names represented had left an imprint in that locality.

By the nineteenth century, the distance from the original city and its surrounding towns in the county was not only spatial, it was also cultural. For example, Quakers lodged complaints against the “foreign” customs of carousing at Christmas, which was a German tradition.32 An 1808 law decreed that "masquerades" and "masquerade halls" were "common nuisances" and that anyone participating would be subject to a “fine and imprisonment.”33 But while proper Philadelphia would greet the New Year with restraint, it had no jurisdiction in neighborhoods like Moyamensing, where the New

Year’s Day revelers donned costumes in vulgar mimicking of the establishment.34

Philadelphia’s popular defiance of elite taste in the nineteenth-century towns has seemed to survive into the present. The reputation of the defiant “Philly boo birds,” who once threw snowballs at Santa Claus at a football game, I submit, has a pedigree earned in the city’s past.35 I would also argue that Frank Rizzo’s appeal was partially constructed on a related coarse hostility toward propriety. 65

However, even elite disdain for impolitic behavior was tinged with tolerance in

Philadelphia. In contrast to Puritanical Boston, where the restrictions were against the

“sin” itself, restrictions in Philadelphia generally aimed at maintaining public decorum.

As one example, Philadelphia’s so-called “blue laws,” regulated drinking “to excess in public,” not drinking “to excess.” 36

Cultural frictions, however, were dwarfed by larger economic concerns. Some twenty thousand workers staged a general strike in 1835 for a ten-hour workday and higher wages, for instance. This effort came at the end of nearly a decade of political organizing that resulted in the Working Men’s Party. That party had nominated candidates for public office in the elections from 1828 to 1831 on a platform of a

“universal free school system, abolition of imprisonment for debt, an end to mechanics’ lien law, and other measures to protect the status and dignity of skilled craftsmen and artisans.”37 The effect on Philadelphia’s politics of such working-class protests, however, was diluted because many of the workers lived in the surrounding towns and not in the city. As citizens of these other jurisdictions, they could not vote for

Philadelphia’s officials.

The settlement patterns of the immigrants that had been established in the first half of the nineteenth century created problems for Philadelphia’s growth and prosperity. In the economy’s movement toward industrialization, many of the neighborhood settlements outgrew previous boundaries and now competed with each other for space and resources. Unable to secure basic needs from city or state government, residents often took over the tasks themselves. Street patrols to contain crime and local fire companies sprang outside of Old City. But these citizen patrols 66 were often little more than street gangs that disguised their illicit intentions as protection of the citizens:

The Blood Tubs, the Schuylkill Rangers, the Neckers and the Snappers were ethnically defined which was often the same as religious affiliation. The Killers and the Bouncers were Irish Catholic; the Rats and the Shifflers were English-Scottish and Protestant: all White gangs attacked Blacks. The Tongs, another strictly ethnic gang, were isolated to the Chinatown section of Philadelphia and dealt in opium. The violence was often connected to rival fire companies, e.g. the Moyamensing Hose Company (Catholic) fought with the Shiffer Hose Company (Protestant and Know-Nothing).38

The initial response of the city’s elites to street crime was focused on the rehabilitation of criminals. In 1829, a regional prison was opened in the belief that “the criminals, exposed, in silence, to thoughts of their behavior and the ugliness of their crimes, would become genuinely penitent.” 39 The religious ideal of promoting self- reform, I note, is the reason that what became Eastern State Penitentiary was not called

“a prison.” No less a personage than Alexis de Tocqueville was sent to Philadelphia in

1831 to evaluate this experiment in criminal rehabilitation.40

The noble effort at rehabilitation mitigated, but did not stem, the rising tide of crime and social dislocation in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. The city’s social problems were largely rooted in oppressive economic conditions that pitted ethnic, racial and religious groups against one another. The result was decade-long sporadic mob violence which, among other things, spawned the murderous Kensington riots of

1844 between Irish Catholics and Protestant Americans. The spark was a letter from the Catholic Bishop of Philadelphia, Francis Kenrick, asking that the public schools not force Catholics to use the Protestant Bible. Pamphleteers twisted the bishop’s request into a supposed Catholic rejection of sacred scripture and fed the fire of a political 67 movement proposing to defend the traditional values of White Protestant in America.

The movement evolved into the Know-Nothing Party. While these conflicts appeared to be based solely on differing religious beliefs, an exploitative economic system also fomented the resentments of workers against each other. As Elizabeth Geffen wrote:

The period from 1841 to 1854 constituted a watershed in Philadelphia’s history. During these years the major problems of the industrial revolution had been confronted and solutions sought. A technological advance of unprecedented character had created productive capacity and great wealth, but it had also caused enormous social dislocation and misery. The physical and demographic expansion of the city, the influx of a new wave of immigrants, the misdistribution of wealth, the rising expectations of the masses – all presented problems of staggering magnitude.41

Crisis Leads to the Act of Consolidation

There is no denying that religious, cultural and racial differences shook

Philadelphia society to its core from day one, often putting the well-being of the people at risk. As the above quote suggests, however, social and economic inequality exacerbated the problem. To make matters even worse, Quaker tradition had not provided a strong central governance apparatus. Confusion over jurisdiction often meant that officers from one small section of the city had no authority in the neighboring one. As a result, the City of Philadelphia in the 1850s could not address crime in the towns within Philadelphia County. An obvious solution to the fragmented jurisdictions was to expand the city to the boundaries of present-day Philadelphia and incorporate the smaller neighborhoods into a modern urban municipality. Policing the gangs was not only a matter of law and order; ending the intimidation of shopkeepers as part of a protection racket was essential to stable and profitable commerce. Finally, the 68 city’s expansion also addressed public health because comprehensive policies could curb the spread of infectious disease.

There were also political interests at stake, to be sure. Most of the immigrants who had settled around Philadelphia regularly mirrored Jacksonian preferences and voted for Democrats, while Philadelphia’s bourgeoisie identified with the Whig Party.

The dominant Whig political establishment feared that including Democrats within the city limits would imperil their control. If we consider that in 1850 there were far more people in the county living outside the city (287,386) than within the city proper

(121,376),42 this fear was not ill-founded. Moreover, the growth rate for the city, 29.5 percent, then lagged behind areas such as Spring Garden (111.5 percent) and

Kensington (109.5 percent).43 Despite the eruption of even more ethnic riots from the smoldering ashes of the 1844 violence, the debate about this continued for another decade, most likely fueled by the stated fear that consolidation would make the city “an appendage to her own colonies.”44

Philadelphia needed both the authority and the resources to finance public works such as streets, transportation, sewerage and water supply, and consolidation would make this easier to attain. Most importantly, consolidation promised Philadelphia’s work force much-needed quick and easy transportation to travel to new and larger factories outside their residential neighborhoods. Only with consolidation could trains and the horse-drawn trolleys be networked into a city-wide system. The Act of

Consolidation of 1854 addressed these concerns. The city proper expanded the original two-square-mile city designed by Penn to its current size of almost 130 square miles.

The city map now included the area dotted with the towns of the formerly 69 unincorporated county.45 Out of respect for Penn’s original desire for a “Greene

Country Towne,” public space was created by designing Fairmount Park, the largest of its type for American cities at that time. Finally, the Act of Consolidation also made new and cheap land available for residential development.

Philadelphia and the Glorious Centennial Celebration of 1876

The Civil War helped unite the disparate segments of the city’s population in support of the Union cause. Philadelphia was solidly Republican in political affiliation, and would remain so until the middle of the twentieth century. The consolidation of the city, however, had enabled the creativity and inventiveness of the managerial class to increase industrial production:

Never a one or two-industry city, Philadelphia became known for its fine textiles and garments, boots and shoes, hats, iron and steel, metal items, machine tools and hardware, locomotives, saws, rugs, furniture, shipbuilding, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, glass, cutlery, jewelry, paints and varnishes, printing and publishing, medical instruments, and so much more.46

Unlike New York’s, Philadelphia’s manufacturers focused on “niche markets” rather than on mass produced items. Stetson fashioned hats for men, the factories of the

American Silk Company produced gloves and lingerie for women, and the Asher

Company made candy for children. Baldwin Locomotives in Spring Garden, Disston

Tools in Tacony, and Midvale Steel in Nicetown specialized in “made-to- specifications” products that characterized Philadelphia manufacturing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The demand for a skilled work force pushed wages higher in Philadelphia than in northeastern cities, drawing a large percentage of immigrants who had originally 70 entered through other ports.47 These skilled workers and artisans were also attracted by the plethora of private homes set in a row on city streets. Home ownership in

Philadelphia symbolized upward mobility for workers, who preferred living in their own homes to crowding into tenements in New York.

The absence of a building for Philadelphia’s city hall was finally addressed in

1874, when the construction of a twenty-story, all-stone-building was proposed in the space that William Penn had left empty for town meetings. The decision to build this imposing edifice was testimony to the changed conception of social authority in

Philadelphia; the city had acquired a center. A huge statue of Penn was placed atop the tallest tower to suggest that he still looked upon the changing city as his own creation.

Hidden from the public was the horrendous graft involved in the construction of city hall which was not completed until 1898.48 Nonetheless, the achievement was impressive; Philadelphia’s city hall was the tallest habitable building in the world until

1908, and the tallest structure permitted in Philadelphia until 1987. Even today, people who are miles away can survey the length of Broad Street in either direction and capture an inspiring glimpse of the Quaker founder of the city standing atop the tower.

Outpacing New York City in population was no longer a compelling motivation for Philadelphians; that drive had been replaced with the conviction that the city’s excellence derived from its more refined culture.49 The upper classes were complimented by the fine taste exhibited in new museums, theatres and restaurants exuding a Philadelphian distinctiveness, and manorial homes for the wealthy went up along the city line. Among the working class, the development of professional baseball and football teams for Philadelphia nurtured a populist identity. Local bands playing on 71

Sundays in the city’s many parks afforded cultural expression for the non-elite classes, while music halls and theaters with bawdy shows satisfied the prurient.

The physical beauty of post-Civil War Philadelphia, with its historical monuments, museums, parks and tree-lined streets, made it the logical choice to host the

Centennial Exposition of 1876. Philadelphia invited the nation to measure its progress by a return to the city where the Declaration of Independence had been signed. The graft and political kick-backs that studded Fairmount Park with sparkling new exhibition halls remained unseen, however. The beauty of the venue, on the other hand, matched the exposition’s inventiveness. New products on display included Alexander

Graham Bell's telephone; the Remington Typographic Machine (or typewriter); the

Wallace-Farmer Electric Dynamo, which demonstrated the potential of electric lighting; the Kudzu erosion control plant species; and, for good measure, Heinz Ketchup, from

Pittsburgh, and root beer, from a Philadelphian pharmacist, Charles Elmer Hires, who distributed his product for free to teetotalers. By the end of the year, ten million persons had visited the Centennial grounds. Positive reactions were worldwide:

“My God, it talks!” [Brazilian] Emperor Dom Pedro is supposed to have said [about Alexander Graham Bell’s new telephone]. Thomas Alva Edison exhibited the Quadruplex Telegraph, which transmitted several messages simultaneously. George Westinghouse exhibited the air brake, George Pullman the Pullman Palace Car…. American machine tools, the vital machines needed to make other machines, impressed British observers as surpassing Britain’s own—a possible portent of changing leadership in the industrial revolution. American machinery in general impressed the German commissioner…. as surpassing the machinery of the burgeoning German industrial revolution in the key quality of efficiency, so much so that [his book] was plea for Germans to emulate Americans in making efficiency and quality and not mass production alone the hallmarks of industry. Years later, in July 1941, while his armies where invading Russia, Adolf Hitler was to lecture his entourage on the Philadelphia fair as 72

an event that had turned German production from the bad and the cheap to the qualitatively superior.50

The Image of Philadelphia Revisited

Finally, in the matter of governmental authority, a measure of stability had been achieved with consolidation. Resonant with the Quaker ethos, which preferred diffused power to that invested in a single person, the mayor had fewer powers than the city’s legislature.

The Mayor was like some legendary hero, rarely seen and seldom mentioned, who suddenly appeared at the time of riot to give advice concerning the police. In short, he was little more than a chief of 51 police with the power of a sheriff and justice of the peace added.

Even though periodic reforms, such as the amendments in the City Charter of 1887, would strengthen the mayor’s office, the balance of power still resided in the two houses of Philadelphia’s legislature. Ward leaders, who belonged to the Republican political machine, controlled most city appointments and the funding for agencies and city services. This arrangement favored the power of local neighborhoods that had been preserved in the Act of Consolidation. As the city grew in population, the number of elected officials also grew. Although adding legislators was necessary to preserve power at the local level, it produced an unwieldly legislature. Before reforms in 1919, the Common Council had 149 members and the Select Council had 41, making this bicameral combination the United States’ largest municipal legislature. Ironically, control of the city machine came from Harrisburg because the various versions of these nineteenth-century legal reforms reserved most powers of the purse to the state legislature.52 Nonetheless, consolidation had overcome the worst gang conflicts of 73

Antebellum Philadelphia. The concentration of political powers had produced a solid infrastructure that transformed the scattered settlements in Philadelphia County into interconnected parts of a thriving and prosperous city. Governance still reflected the city’s early Quaker-based suspicion about the nature of centralized authority, but it had been adapted to new social and economic circumstances. Conflict and crisis certainly modified these fundamental traits, but they did not completely erase them. Philadelphia was poised to enter the twentieth century with enough general prosperity to outweigh the contradictions of its dependence on selfish ward leaders, who sought only to benefit themselves and the narrow circles of local interest. Moreover, it was in the twentieth century that Puerto Ricans began to come to Philadelphia without the legal classification as foreigners, since after the end of the Spanish-American of 1898, the island became a colonial possession of the United States. Thus, an understanding of how Puerto Ricans encountered Philadelphia’s networks of power relationships in the twentieth century required this chapter’s description of how deeply rooted those relationships had been in the city’s long history.

Endnotes to Chapter 3

1 Mary Maples Dunn and Richard S. Dunn, “The Founding: 1681-1701,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 8-9.

2 Dunn and Dunn, “The Founding: 1681-1701,” 6-10.

3 Dunn and Dunn, “The Founding: 1681-1701,” 1-2.

4 Dunn and Dunn, “The Founding: 1681-1701,” 14-15.

5 E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996).

6 The Quakers of the period did not practice baptism. One joined the Friends by a declaration of adherence and became a “Convinced Quaker.”

7 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 139.

8 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 132.

9 Dunn and Dunn, “The Founding: 1681-1701,” 32.

10 Dunn and Dunn, “The Founding: 1681-1701,” 1; Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), 242.

11 Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 157.

12 The first Jew to hold a judicial position in North America was Isaac Miranda (1727). Philadelphia’s Jewish congregation was founded in 1743. One of the earliest Jewish lawyers was Moses Levy, who was admitted to the bar in 1778. The first Ashkenazic synagogue established in the Western Hemisphere was opened in Philadelphia in 1795. Isaac Franks (1759-1822) was a Revolutionary War veteran who became prothonotary of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1819. Rebecca Gratz led an effort in 1838 to begin Hebrew “Sunday School.” In Philadelphia on December 4, 1864, a meeting was held which resulted in the establishment of the first Jewish theological seminary in America.

13 The once-Catholic colony of Maryland reverted to crown control and imposed restrictions on Catholics in 1692. See James Hennesey, SJ, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 40-42.

14 Ibid., 311-312. Other notable outsiders who came to Philadelphia include Thomas Paine, author of the revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense; scientists David Rittenhouse (1732-1796) in astronomy, and John and William Bartram (1699-1777) in botany and artists Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827), who founded the Museum of Natural History, and Thomas Sully (1783-1872).

15 Theodore Thayer. “Town into City: 1746-1765,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 79 ftn. 25.

16 Edwin B. Bronner, “Village into Town: 1701-1746,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 37-47.

17 “Quakers as a group were troubled about the propriety of chattel slavery in the late seventeenth century, but not troubled enough to do much about it. Led by Pastorius, the Germantown Friends objected strenuously ‘against the traffick [sic] of men-Body’ in 1688, as did the schismatic Friend George Keith in 1693: but the orthodox English Friends, in their Quarterly Meeting in Philadelphia, found the issue ‘a thing of too great a weight’ to determine.” Dunn and Dunn, “The Founding: 1681-1701,” 33- 67.

18 Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).

19 “Had Pennsylvania’s topography and weather been more conducive to tobacco cultivation, plantations maintained by African slaves might have dotted the colony’s landscape rather than family farms producing grains and raising livestock. Had that occurred, Penn and his fellow Quakers would have found themselves in a most vexing moral dilemma . . . [However,] family farms worked primarily by free labor prevailed in Pennsylvania, which meant a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth, especially compared to the Chesapeake and southern colonies.” John A. Moreta, William Penn and the Quaker Legacy. Library of American Biography, Mark C. Carnes, ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), 127-128.

20 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 247, 285, 450-56.

21 Dunn and Dunn, “The Founding,” 30.

22 “An amiable anarchy has always marked the lifestyle of mild Philadelphia in general and of the mild and polished Philadelphia Gentleman in particular.” Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 450-451.

23 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 126-131.

24 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 128, ftn. 19, citing Nicholas Biddle: the original spelling is repeated here.

25 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 94.

26 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 430-432.

27 Harry M. Tinkcom, “The Revolutionary City: 1765-1783,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 115-116.

28 Antonio Gramsci, “The Modern Prince,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans.and eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 190.

29 W. C. Kashaatus III, “Thomas Paine: A Quaker revolutionary,” Quaker History, LXXIV (1984) 2: 57- 60, as cited in Alexander Rose, Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring. (New York: Random House/Bantam Books, 2006/2014), 156 ftn. 86.

30 Rose, Washington’s Spies, 156-57.

31 Dunn and Dunn, “The Founding,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, 24-25.

32 Washington had used this cultural disposition when he crossed the Delaware to attack the Hessians at

Trenton during the War of Independence.

33 Charles E. Welch, Jr., “‘Oh, Dem Golden Slippers’: The Philadelphia Mummers Parade” Journal of American Folklore 79 (October–Dec 1966) 314: 523–536. See also Susan G Davis, “Making Night Hideous: Christmas Revelry and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,” American Quarterly 34 (Summer 1982) 2: 185–199.

34 They called themselves “mummers,” a British homonym for “mimickers.”

35 Greg Calcaterra, “Yes, ‘they booed Santa Claus.’ Here’s why,” October 10, 2010, NBC Sports, accessed July 27, 2017, http://mlb.nbcsports.com/2010/10/21/yes-they-booed-santa-claus-heres-why/.

36 These are also defined as “Sunday Closing Laws.” “Some have speculated that the use of the word blue came from a connotation that suggested a rigidly moral position, akin to the term bluenose that refers to a prudish, moralistic person.” See: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Blue+Laws, accessed March 20, 2016.

37 Nicholas B. Wainwright. “The Age of Nicholas Biddle 1825-1841,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 279-280.

38 Peter J. Twist, “Identity and Empowerment: Gangs in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia,” Master’s Thesis, Temple University, 2013, accessed February 2, 2016, http://digital.library.temple.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/216561.

39 Eastern State Penitentiary Organization, “History of Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia,” accessed March 2, 2016, http://www.easternstate.org/learn/research-library/history.

40 Eastern State Penitentiary Organization, “History of Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia.”

41 Elizabeth M. Geffen, “Industrial Development and Social Crisis: 1841-1854,” in Philadelphia: A 300- Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 361-62.

42 Geffen, “Industrial Development,” 349.

43 Geffen, “Industrial Development,” 360.

44 Geffen, “Industrial Development,” 349.

45 As Andrew Heath observed, “When Philadelphians in the second half of the nineteenth century contrasted their city of row homes with the tenements of New York, they credited the expansion with eliminating the need for ‘vertical slums.’” Andrew Heath, “The Consolidation Act of 1854,” The Philadelphia Encyclopedia, accessed February 23, 2016, http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/consolidation-act-of-1854/.

46 Walter Licht, “Workshop of the World,” The Philadelphia Encyclopedia, accessed March 4, 2016, http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/workshop-of-the-world/.

47 Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davies. “The Iron Age: 1876-1905,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 483.

48 Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age,” 505-510.

49 Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age,” 470.

50 Dorothy Gondos Beers, “The Centennial City: 1865-1876,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 469.

51 Ward J. Childs, Newsletter of the Philadelphia City Archives, (March 1978), accessed, March 4, 2016, http://www.phila.gov/phils/Docs/otherinfo/newslet/law3.htm.

52 Edward Pease Allinson and Boies Penrose, Philadelphia 1681-1887: A History of Municipal Development (Philadelphia: Allen, Lane & Scott, 1887), 279-285.

CHAPTER 4

CONTENTMENT AND CORRUPTION IN TWENTIETH CENTURY PHILADELPHIA

In 1912, La Milagrosa Chapel opened its doors on Spring Garden in

Philadelphia to begin more than a century of pastoral care to Spanish-speaking

Catholics in the city.1 That same year of 1912 marked a less visible moment in the city’s history; Antonio Arroyo, a young Puerto Rican sailor assigned to play the trumpet in the marching band at the United States Navy base on Culebra Island in Puerto Rico, was transferred to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. He and his young wife, María Márquez

Laureano, would eventually rent a house off the naval base on Sixteenth Street near

Moyamensing Avenue in South Philadelphia. The first two of their seven children were born in Philadelphia while Antonio rose to the rank of Chief Petty Officer and

Bandmaster. Over the years, La Milagrosa chapel would be the site for Arroyo baptisms, First Communions, marriages and funerals. Family members attended social gatherings at the adjacent chapel hall, where they mingled with immigrants from Spain and Latin America. It was at a dance sponsored by La Milagrosa that one son, Antonio,

Jr., met his future wife, Adelina Guerra, whose family was from Monterey, Mexico. I know this family history well because Antonio Arroyo was my maternal great- grandfather.

The census of 1910 listed only 100 Puerto Ricans then residing in Philadelphia,2 which means that, in 1912, the Arroyos were one of the pioneering Puerto Rican families in the city. Their experiences foreshadowed the arrival of larger numbers of their compatriots after 1950. This chapter will examine some reasons that Puerto Rican 79 pioneers, such as the Arroyos, chose to live in Philadelphia. I will explore the dynamics of city life they encountered in those early years, which form the backdrop for the experiences of later generations of Puerto Ricans who would come to Philadelphia.

To fully appreciate the prophetic burden later shouldered by the Young Lords, this chapter will focus on some of the most salient aspects of life in early twentieth- century Philadelphia. My attention is on the city’s neighborhoods as the building blocks of cultural and racial cohesiveness. Two characteristics or by-products of early

Quaker values are important to note here: the indifference to politics and the tolerance for authoritarian governance. I will cite the turn-of-the-century integration experience of African Americans in Philadelphia to compare and contrast the Puerto Rican community’s eventual insertion into the city’s network of power relationships.

Although those power relationships were governed by a venal political machine, many

Philadelphians, regardless of their race, ethnic, or national origins, followed the tradition of the city’s indifference to politics and tolerated the wide-spread corruption. I will show how events at the macro-historical level, however, not only tested but eventually recast the powers of the local machine. Thus, the chapter will develop the civic context for Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia before the emergence of the Young

Lords in the 1970s.

The Row House and Bourgeois Aspirations

Home ownership in distinctive neighborhoods characterized turn-of-the-century

Philadelphia. Penn’s tightly contained “Greene Country Towne” had given way to the network of urban villages that resulted from the city’s consolidation in 1854: 80

By 1904 its [Philadelphia’s] 129 square miles supported some 300,000 families, many of them living in modestly comfortable small houses within walking distance of their work. It was more a collection of almost separate villages -- Kensington, Frankford, Manayunk -- than the consolidated metropolis it was officially and politically supposed to be. Each neighborhood jealously guarded its special character, ethnic coloration, political integrity. Each had its business district, the Italian street market and Jewish shops in South Philadelphia, the local commercial areas on Girard or Ridge or Columbia Avenue to the north. As the population expanded the physical detachment of most of these various neighborhoods tended to decrease (though local pride and xenophobia prevails to this day), and the city became one gigantic fabric woven together by extended streets and above all by improved transportation.3

The row houses tucked into these Philadelphia neighborhoods were not only affordable to the working class, they were also family-friendly. The Arroyos, for instance, chose

Philadelphia for their permanent home because they preferred a house in Philadelphia to a small apartment in bustling New York.

Antonio Arroyo may have been among the economically poor upon arrival, as newcomers tend to be. Before coming to the mainland, however, he had the advantage of an education provided from the estate of his father, who had been a public notary in the northern coastal city of Aguadilla. Discharged from the United States Navy after the First World War, Antonio enrolled in one of Philadelphia’s business schools to study bookkeeping. This led to a position as translator for Latin American operations at

Sharp and Dohme, one of Philadelphia’s premier pharmaceutical firms at the time.

Always devoted to music, he and fellow Puerto Ricans from the Navy bands would play danzas and other semi-classical pieces on Sunday family gatherings throughout the year. Thus, they kept their Puerto Rican heritage alive. Furthermore, Arroyo’s musical talents earned him a role in the annual concerts in Philadelphia conducted by the touring

John Philip Sousa Band. 81

In 1910, only two years before the arrival of the Arroyos in Philadelphia, an immigrant from Austria-Hungary, Istvan Cseltiz, left New York’s Ellis Island and made his way to Philadelphia. He rented an apartment near Germantown Avenue and

Jefferson, between Oxford and Master, near the Stetson Hat Factory, where many

Hungarians worked. Cseltiz had apprenticed as a custom tailor in Munich before moving to the United States. Educated in three languages, upon securing United States’ citizenship, he Anglicized both his name and became known as “Steven Stevens.” His skills earned him a job as a master tailor at Ermilio’s Clothier, a fashionable men’s custom clothing establishment at 1613 Walnut Street.

With a position that afforded him a middle-class income, the first Mr. Stevens purchased a new row house in Germantown near the Fisher Station of the Reading

Railroad for himself, his wife, Erzsebet, and son, Steven, Jr. The house still has solid oak floors with fashionably inserted dark wood trim; the passageways between the first- floor rooms are adorned with Grecian style cornices. In the dining room even now, there is an alcove under an arch canopy ceiling as a perfect fit for a china closet or

Queen Anne side board. I view these as hallmarks of early twentieth-century bourgeois aspirations. The Stevens’ home may be a hundred-year-old row house in a decaying

Germantown neighborhood today, but it retains some of its originally charm, bringing to mind the comment often used to refer to an elderly woman whose age cannot completely hide her regal bearing: “In her time, she must have been a beauty.” My observations are first-hand, because Istvan Cseltiz was my paternal great-grandfather, and as I write this dissertation, his home is now the house I rent from my grandmother,

Josefina Belén Arroyo, Steven, Jr.’s wife. 82

Thus, the notion that life in Philadelphia was made attractive by affordable its housing in quiet neighborhoods is not merely an academic postulate for me. These elements of my family history in Philadelphia have corroborated for me en carne propia what is found in important books about the city’s history.4 Although they came from worlds apart, becoming Philadelphians appealed to my two great-grandfathers. Despite their relative poverty upon arrival, they thought Philadelphia offered a better life. The benefits of education they had enjoyed in their homelands inclined them to imagine this city as a place where they could achieve their goals of upward social mobility. Since both raised their families, spent their most productive years and continued to live in

Philadelphia until their deaths, I suspect that they found contentment with the genteel pace of Philadelphia life, its refinement in the arts and the access to home ownership.

Matching Contentment and Corruption

An echo of the real-time preferences of my great-grandfathers, Istvan and

Antonio, can be found in the description of Philadelphia by historians Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davies:

Domestic bliss and material comfort, those ultimate goals of middle- class Victorians, from the miles of row houses to the craggy new castles along the Main Line -- this is what Philadelphia settled for. What it wanted, and what it got.5

Philadelphia’s attractiveness to “middle-class Victorians” is also reflected in the 1903 account of Lincoln Steffens, a reformist journalist.

Philadelphia has long enjoyed great and widely distributed prosperity: it is the city of homes: there is a dwelling house for every five persons, -- men, women and children, -- of the population: and the people give one a sense of more leisure and repose than any community I ever dwelt in.6 83

Steffens, however, saw a flaw in the laid-back attitudes in the city. He cited interviews where Philadelphians complained, “We are too busy to attend to public business;” they preferred instead to pursue “wealth and leisure.”7 Steffens labeled

Philadelphia’s tolerance as “going along,” and wrote that it allowed the rise of a political machine whose corruption permeated every aspect of institutional life in the city in the first decade of the twentieth century:

The heads of great educational and charity institutions “go along” as they say in Pennsylvania, in order to get appropriations for their institutions from the State and land from the city. They know what is going on, but they do not join reform movements. The provost of the University of Pennsylvania declined to join in a revolt because, he said, it might impair his usefulness to the University. And so it is with others, and with clergymen who have favorite charities; with Sabbath associations and City Beautiful clubs; with lawyers who want briefs; with real estate dealers who like to know in advance about public improvements, and real estate owners who appreciate light assessments; with shopkeepers who don’t want to be bothered with strict inspections.8

His trenchant verdict, “Philadelphia is simply the most corrupt and the most contented,” has gained traction in histories about the city.9 The tools of corruption were bribes with different names: graft, payola and shakedowns.10 Steffens identified public apathy as the culprit for the particular kind of corruption in Philadelphia, and added that citizens knew of the corruption of the political machine but excused it with the reaction, “At least you must admit that our machine is the best you have ever seen.”11

The Republican-controlled machine that Steffens described in 1903 was cunning enough to extend a portion of their patronage to Democrats. By delivering the opposition party a share in the graft, Republican bosses blunted their rival’s impulse to dismantle the machine. Steffens made this telling conclusion about the one-party nature 84 of Philadelphia politics: “In other words, having taken away their ballot, the bosses took away also the choice of parties.”12

During this period, machine bosses typically held offices not in the city but in

Harrisburg or Washington.13 The most notorious were the Vares, three South

Philadelphia brothers in the State Senate, who “derived such great profits from city contracts for their construction company” they were nicknamed, “the Dukes of

Philadelphia.”14 Among other brazenly bad city officials was Samuel Ashbridge, who had been elected mayor in 1899 with 84 percent of the vote. 15 He notoriously confided to a friend: “I want no other office when I am out of this one, and I shall get out of this office all there is in it for Samuel H. Ashbridge.”16 However, Philadelphia’s mayor was not the city’s political boss. While in other places, the mayor dictated to the ward leaders, in Philadelphia, the ward leaders dictated to the mayor. Their power, rather than declining, seemed to gain strength over time. In 1903, a half-century after the Act of Consolidation, Philadelphia’s ward leaders could: i) appoint the principal at the local school; ii) name candidates to the police academy; iii) determine the patrol routes for the police they had named; iv) hire the gas meter readers for their district; v) approve zoning and building permits; vi) register voters and vii) tally their votes.17 All of these functions, it needs be added, were performed at a price -- literally.

Steffens fiercely criticized a system that allowed ward leaders so much power to drown the common good in the flood of patronage which benefitted the singular needs of their districts. He noted:

The Philadelphia organization is upside down. It has its root in the air, or, rather, like the banyan tree, it sends its roots from the center out both up and down and all around.18

The political machine ran on the fuel provided by a nearly automatic exchange of political favors for votes. It controlled elections by instructing the ward leaders in city government to dictate electoral choices to their constituents. At times, wrote

Steffens, ballot-box stuffing in Philadelphia did not even require the presence of actual voters, much as in the Jim Crow South.19 In sum, the machine operated as a shadow government that decided issues before they came to actual votes. It allowed the political bosses to receive kickbacks for awarding city contracts and to make decisions about construction or maintenance of city facilities dictated by prospects for personal economic gain rather than by the needs of the people.

Sewerage disposal, water supply, road and street construction, paving and upkeep were all lamentable [sic] inadequate, and attempts at improvement turned into excuses for corrupt contracts and padded payrolls. No respectable person would drink the city water, which came from the polluted Schuylkill and everyone who could bought spring water from private companies. The typhoid fever death rate was the highest of the major cities, three times that of New York.20

In the end, corruption tainted virtually every social class in Philadelphia, both givers and takers, lending machine rule inescapable influence. Ward leaders lured immigrants into the network of their power relationships by offering targeted relief from appalling neighborhood conditions. The greedy Mayor Ashbridge’s announcement of the building of the Roosevelt Boulevard allowed his commercial cronies to benefit handsomely from real estate speculation, rigged construction bids and overly generous city contracts. Much like the ward leaders in local neighborhoods, the elites in City

Hall pretended that improvements such as a water purification plant in Torresdale and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway could not be built without tolerating corruption.21

Many Philadelphians accepted this reasoning, it seems, because they, too, came to 86 believe that the only road to needed services went through the shady deal-making embedded into the city’s operations. Under such circumstances, “going along” constituted rationalized behavior. In his journalistic description of the city, Steffens concluded that apathy was the logical result among ordinary citizens, and that since reform movements served only as “spasmodic efforts to punish bad rulers” rather than the political bosses, the only means to end machine corruption was “a revolution.”22

Burt and Davies suggest that the city in the Iron Age (1876-1905) was far from revolution and instead found itself “wallowing in contentment, conformity, and conservatism.”

Politics became a necessary nuisance, to be left to self-paid professionals, despite constant abortive and bothersome reforms. Arts and letters were to be pleasantly inoffensive decorations of opulence. Science, medicine, engineering, the more practical professions, were enormously respected and dominated the mind of the city. Imagination and innovation were suspect. Safe and sound, prosperous and potbellied, this was the image Philadelphia liked to represent, what Philadelphia now stood for. This period was the culmination of that particular sort of Philadelphianism….23

Although two hundred and fifty years had passed since the city’s founding, the

“Philadelphianism” described above in the twentieth century resonated with Baltzell’s assessment of the colonial city’s characteristics. Fifty years into the twentieth century, this “Philadelphianism,” though perhaps somewhat modified, was very much alive at the time of the Puerto Rican migration into the city.

Life in a City Run by a Political Machine

Instead of uniting people by promoting common interests, the patronage structure divided the working class against itself, making the machine the reconciler of 87 ethnic, religious and racial differences. In the end, political machinations in

Philadelphia resulted in a patchwork of ethnic and religiously homogenous neighborhoods, each looking to the bosses for favors. The constituencies received jobs and services, but this took place within a structure which imposed Caesar’s familiar

“divide and conquer” maxim. Much as in Marx’s description of France under Napoleon

III, Philadelphia’s neighborhoods had the unity of “a sack of potatoes,”24 with the political apparatus of the machine as the most salient source of civic cohesion.

While Steffens’ account is that of a reformist journalist, an 1896 study by W. E.

B. Du Bois offers a sociological account from the perspective of African Americans in the city.25 African Americans, at the time referred to as “Negroes,” were just about 3.76 percent of the total Philadelphia population.26 This fact is relevant to this dissertation because, as will be shown, this was virtually the same percentage of Latinos in

Philadelphia in 1970, and the majority of these were Puerto Ricans. The paths of accommodation and community development for Philadelphia’s African Americans in

Du Bois’ time, I submit, portend the routes a growing Puerto Rican community in

Philadelphia would later travel as they pursued a better life in the city.

Du Bois rejected the eugenic notion, popular at the time among the patrons of the study, that all African Americans were poor or inclined to crime.27 Instead, he invoked social class distance to explain the behavior of African Americans in

Philadelphia, contrasting the wave of former slaves arriving in the city after the Civil

War with Philadelphia’s earlier population of free Negroes.28 Cooperation among all the city’s African Americans would more effectively lift the people from poverty than the good intentions of the White reformers, he offered, stating that “the people of 88

Philadelphia,” if they truly wanted to uplift this segment of the city’s population, must first “recognize the existence of the better class of Negroes and must gain their active aid and co-operation by generous and polite conduct.”29 Elizabeth Geffen recognized

Du Bois’ “better class of Negroes” and called them “genteel Blacks.” According to her research, they owned real estate worth $531,804 in 1890 dollars, which translates into more than $13 million today.30

The central problem that African Americans and all Philadelphians faced was the “brazen dishonesty” of boss rule, which Du Bois deemed to be “unparalleled in the history of republican government.”31 Risking the chagrin of the reforming elite-class women who had supported his research, he did not fault African Americans for cooperating with Philadelphia’s machine politics. Instead, he explained that, under the circumstances African Americans faced, cooperating with machine politics was the only way those “better class Negroes” could advance. Noting that employment opportunities for African Americans were “greatly restricted” to jobs such as that of a porter which paid only “$6 or $8 a week,” Du Bois described the appeal of a patronage position under the Philadelphia political machine:

If he goes into “politics,” blindly votes for the candidate of the party boss, and by hard, steady and astute work persuades most of the colored voters in his precinct to do the same, he has the chance of being rewarded by a city clerkship, the social prestige of being in a position above menial labor, and an income of $60 or $75 a month. Such is the character of the grasp which the “machine” has on even intelligent Negro voters.32

Recruitment of African American voters to the cause of reform, concluded De Bois, faced considerable obstacles, not the least of which was the penalty of losing patronage jobs. He added a criticism of the reformers who “will not themselves work beside 89

Negroes, or admit them to positions in their stores or offices or lend them friendly aid in trouble.” The machine, he concluded, provided benefits to African Americans in

Philadelphia and had earned their trust:

Moreover, Negroes are proud of their councilmen and policemen. What if some of these positions of honor and respectability have been gained by shady “politics” -- shall they be nicer in these matters than the mass of the Whites? Shall they surrender these tangible evidences of the rise of their race to forward the good-hearted but hardly imperative demands of a crowd of women? Especially too, of women who did not apparently know there were any Negroes on earth until they wanted their votes? Such logic may be faulty, but it is convincing to the mass of Negro voters. And cause after cause may gain their respectful attention and even applause, but when election- day comes, the “machine” gets their votes.33

The twining of the Negroes’ ambition for self-improvement with the willingness to compromise with a corrupt Philadelphia political machine may have framed Du Bois’ later formulation of a Negro double consciousness.34

Du Bois concluded that “the Philadelphia Negro” was no more corrupt or given to crime than was the entire city population. Complacency toward corruption was, in fact, an imitation of the majority White population of “Philadelphians who for thirty years have surrendered their right of political leadership to thieves and tricksters and allowed such teachers to instruct this untutored race in whose hand lay an unfamiliar instrument of civilization.”35 Du Bois’ recommendations, I conclude, proposed structural change of the entire city apparatus and not simply a series of reform measures targeted to African Americans. In the meanwhile, he promoted an established class of

African Americans to assume leadership responsibility toward poorer and less prepared migrants from the South. 90

Similar to Du Bois’ description of two groups of African Americans, there was a more established generation of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia when a new and much larger migration wave from neighboring cities and the island made its way there in the

1950s. As pointed out by Victor Vázquez, for the first two decades of the twentieth century, Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican population had been aggregated within a Pan-

Latino population of Spaniards and Latin Americans.36 As city residents, they gradually identified with the home-owning class of middle-income Philadelphians. For example, the elder Antonio Arroyo had a white-collar job at Sharp and Dome, and the Puerto

Ricans in tobacco factories, such as Bayuk Brothers Cigar in Southwark, were also considered skilled workers.37

Unskilled agricultural workers from Puerto Rico appeared in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. Puerto Rican men were recruited on the island to work seasonally to harvest tomatoes for the Campbell Soup Factory in Camden, New Jersey.

Gradually, some of these migrant workers found their way into Philadelphia, where they eventually settled with their families,38 and they began the process of upward social mobility through education and the acquisition of language and work skills. By the

1950s, this earlier generation of Puerto Ricans had become city dwellers, who formed part of the urban work force. In light of the importance Du Bois had placed on cooperation between the two groups of African Americans in his time, in the research and interviews for this dissertation, I have sought to discover points of conflict and cooperation between the Young Lords and members of the older, more established

Puerto Rican community in the city. 91

By act of the Congress of the United States in 1917, Puerto Ricans were given birthright citizenship. Whether they were born on the island or the mainland, Puerto

Ricans were United States citizens, and their legal status was officially changed from

“immigrant” “migrant.” Their birthright citizenship placed Puerto Ricans in a category that contrasted greatly with most other Spanish-speaking immigrants because the Puerto

Ricans were not obliged to go through a naturalization process to become eligible to vote. Clearly, the influx of Puerto Ricans after 1950 was the major factor that quickly made Hispanics into a voting bloc in Philadelphia. When the Young Lords undertook the cause of the Puerto Rican community in the 1970s, therefore, the political options were similar to those which Du Bois and Steffens had described: abstention from the political arena; engagement with machine politics; participation in reformist movements; or efforts to revolutionize the social and political order. While the options may have been similar to those at the turn of the century, however, the state of

Philadelphia’s economy in 1950 was much different.

Urban Poverty and Segregation Through a Class Perspective

During the industrialization of the American economy after the Civil War,

Philadelphia’s manufacturing had benefitted by improving upon New York’s and

Detroit’s mass-production models. While New York and Detroit continued to outpace

Philadelphia’s manufacturing output, skilled workers in Philadelphia made profit for their employers by offering in quality what others produced in quantity. Some of

Philadelphia’s high-end manufacturers were mentioned in the previous chapter, and I clarified above that the early Puerto Rican labor force had contributed to this process 92 because their acquired skills as makers of high quality cigars.39 The vitality of all these industries meant that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Philadelphia’s economy continued to attract skilled workers; not incidentally, they felt that the city’s opportunities for home ownership complemented their middle class aspirations.

Undeniably, there was considerable poverty within the growing city population in the first decades of the twentieth century for workers at the bottom of the skill ladder.

This category included not only among African Americans migrants from the American south but also among newly arrived European immigrants.40 South Philadelphia had the city’s cheapest housing, which transformed the neighborhood into an enclave for poor immigrants, especially those from southern Italy and Sicily.41 Often these homes were the tiny three-story houses, known as Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) houses, with one room to a floor. Most lacked proper ventilation and sunlight, and were often shared with barnyard animals. Still, Philadelphians did not consider these to be slums.42

Not all social divisions were defined by wealth. Despite their common Catholic religion, Irish American Catholics and Italian American Catholics were divided by significant ethnic differences well into the 1950s. Ashkenazi Jews were divided into

German, Russian and Polish congregations. Protestants who were White were segregated from Protestants who were Black, no matter their economic status or denomination. The Arroyos became Puerto Rican newcomers to a Nicetown neighborhood which was largely populated by Irish and Polish persons. Though most

Puerto Ricans shared the same Catholic faith as their Irish and Polish neighbors, my grandmother related various incidents of conflict in which the Arroyo boys, her brothers, encountered prejudice for not belonging to either of these other groups. 93

Such class, ethnic, racial and religious fracturing was repeated in many institutions. The sixth chapter of this dissertation will examine Philadelphia

Catholicism’s role in ethnic and racial segregation, but the city already had an established pattern for local and secular working class social clubs which reflected particular ethnic and racial groupings. A notable example is found in the New Year’s

Mummers’ Day Parade in Philadelphia. Local social clubs, often with ethnic identities, provided marchers and music to welcome the New Year. The Sons of Italy, the Polish

American Club and the Irish Hibernians are examples of ethnic associations, which often also functioned more or less as drinking establishments for those seeking relief from Philadelphia’s notorious Blue Laws. African Americans were forced by segregation to form their own clubs such as the Knights of Pythias.43 Hispanics had La

Fraternal, a mutual aid society that also functioned as a social club.44

In recounting the experiences of the pioneering Puerto Rican families in

Philadelphia, I noted that in the first three decades of the twentieth century, they were too few to command a civic presence as a significant neighborhood. Only after a significant wave of migrants from the island arrived after 1950 would there be a visible claim of a Puerto Rican neighborhood. Like other groups that had been excluded from existing social and civic clubs, they often created their own as minorities in a particular neighborhood. As the Puerto Ricans carved out a place for themselves in a city where housing and other resources were deeply contested, they encountered conflicts with other groups over neighborhood turf. These conflicts ought to be understood in the context of Philadelphia’s long tradition of provincial and political cronyism. Much like

African Americans at a similar stage of their development, Puerto Ricans had to 94 negotiate between the political machine and the rival city reformers in order to successfully enter the city’s power relationships. Uniquely, however, they had to do this at a time when the influence of the political machine was eroding. This subject is taken up again in chapter eight, where I describe how the weakening of Philadelphia’s political machine over the course of the century affected the path to community power for Puerto Ricans. In the first half-century, however, two world wars and an economic depression between them provided a significant crises to the social and political order.

Economic Crisis and Macro-Historical Events

During the twentieth century, Philadelphia’s complacency in being “the most corrupt and the most contented” of cities was challenged by the macro-historical events to be described below. In every instance, the machine proved to be incapable of completely resolving the crisis and had to cede powers to outside institutions. Thus, by the 1950s, when Puerto Rican came in large numbers, the grip of corruption on

Philadelphia had begun to loosen.

The first significant crisis after the turn of the century came during President

Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure as President of the United States (1901-1909). He had unleashed the spirit of progressive reform against the corporate barons of the Gilded

Age. The movement entered Philadelphia during a long and bitter strike of workers of the privately-owned Philadelphia Rapid Transit (PRT). The political machine was incapable of satisfying both sides, and the decision to support the union-busting of the owners actually aggravated the crisis.45 In desperation over a stalled city economy, bankers and merchants supported the formation of a new Keystone Party to run against 95 the Republican machine. The victory by Rudolph Blankenburg, whose singlemindedness about reform earned him the nickname “Old Dutch Cleanser,” represented the single break in Republican Party dominance of Philadelphia from 1884 until 1951.46 While the Keystone Party soon disappeared, the spirit of reform did not.

During a war between bosses, a political assassination on the streets of the city in 1917 swayed public opinion toward the need for a new charter.47 Approved in 1919, the reforms eliminated the cumbersome two-house city legislature, replacing it with a single and smaller council.48 The practice of awarding contracts to private firms for city responsibilities, such as garbage and trash collection, was replaced by a city-owned authority. Finally, the finances of the police force and fire department were put under an elected city controller, lending professionalism to city finances and curtailing abuses by the ward leaders.49 The experience solidified in Philadelphia the role of a third political party as an instrument of reform in the electoral process. In fact, the third- party pattern would aid the rise of Frank Rizzo and impact the era of the Young Lords.

Prohibition brought about a second failure of the political machine. The illegal distribution and consumption of alcohol escalated the “usual” corruption in

Philadelphia. Despairing of the capacity of the existing police force to enforce

Prohibition, in January of 1924, Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick invited an outsider to do clean up the corruptive practices. Brigadier General Smedley Darlington Butler of the

United States Marine Corps was given a new post of law enforcement that outranked the Philadelphia police. Butler employed a tactic of sudden raids carried out by a select group of “untouchables,” who responded only to his command. Total independence 96 was necessary, according to Butler, because his earlier efforts had been thwarted when bootleggers were repeatedly tipped off, presumably by regular policemen on the take.

General Butler’s most successful raids were on saloons and speakeasies that served the working class.50 These were “low hanging fruit,” but resistance to his power grew when he went after bigger fish at a 1926 debutante party in the Ritz Carlton Hotel.

Butler was dismissed shortly afterward, but his final remarks echoed the sentiments about Philadelphia’s aversion to law from the ill-fated Captain Blackwell under William

Penn.51 When the Young Lords confronted municipal authority in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, the city had invoked the need for law and order to once again concentrate policing power in one man, Frank Rizzo.52

The third crisis to the Republican political machine came with the Great

Depression. Republican Mayor J. Hampton Moore voiced the national party’s insistence that economic collapse was the result of “thriftless and lazy people.”53 After the 1932 installation of the New Deal under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, a group of Philadelphia Democrats used federal largesse to gain political influence. For the next decade and a half, funding out of Washington for new construction enriched a set of Irish Catholic builders, notably John B. Kelly, Sr. and Matthew McCloskey.

They teamed up with banker Albert M. Greenfield and eventually were joined by John

McShain in energizing the lethargic city Democrats. They used the same resource as had the machine: dollars. I note here that the Democrats of the New Deal were not so much seeking to destroy the political machine as they were trying to replace it. As I will show below, before migration to the mainland United States, Puerto Ricans had favorable views of the New Deal, and were predisposed to vote for Democrats. 97

Organized crime was the fourth notable crisis that finally shook Philadelphia free from control by the Republican political machine. Crime families had gained power during Prohibition by bootlegging. However, they made adaptations to changing circumstances after repeal; by turning to syndication, they gained huge sums of money.

In this way, Philadelphia’s crime families began to operate beyond the control of local police. Their criminal operations went from “penny-ante” to “big-bucks.” In fact,

Philadelphia’s crime organizations grew big enough to rival the political machine in securing lucrative municipal contracts in garbage collection, transit repairs, city maintenance and new construction.

The ineptitude of the city to deal effectively with corruption and criminality allowed the rise to power of South Philadelphia’s Angelo Bruno, “the gentle don,” who some suspected was the model for Mario Puzo’s Don Corleone in The Godfather.54

Under the mantle of legitimate business, the type of enterprises Bruno and others like established largely avoided the disruptive notoriety of the earlier epoch when gangland murders in the streets were frequent and bloody.55 Philadelphia after 1950 saw organized crime figures in public, frequenting legitimate enterprises, such as Frank

Palumbo’s nightclubs and retired boxer Lew Tendler’s restaurant.56

However, Philadelphia’s vaunted paralysis for internal reform was attacked from

Washington with a new popular tool, the televised congressional hearing. Senator Estes

Kefauver visited Philadelphia with his committee to conduct an investigation into organized crime which later produced significant arrests.57 Moreover, his well- publicized hearings took place during a campaign in 1951 for a new city charter. Thus, 98 as with the previous national reform movement under Theodore Roosevelt, the

Kefauver crusade against organized crime had impact on Philadelphia’s politics.

Significantly, the political adjustments after the Second World War did not remedy an underlying economic crisis that would continually reduce Philadelphia’s population over a 60-year period. The exodus of manufacturing firms to low-tax, non- union venues at home and abroad was a significant factor in the city as it was in much of the United States. But the city had special problems that arose from its tightly drawn physical grid, which had placed most of Philadelphia’s factories along riverways or railroad tracks. In the 1950s, however, when the preferred method of freight transport was by truck, the city’s narrow streets and lack of high-speed thoroughfares hampered its competitiveness with suburban industrial parks. Much later, expressways on Vine

Street and along both the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers would address some of these problems.

No construction, however, could remedy the basic problem of Philadelphia’s economic decline, which was a change in consumer tastes.

Philadelphia did not lose manufacturing jobs because national corporations purchased and liquidated the facilities of local firms to undo competition; nor because financiers breezily bought, broke up and sold firms to make paper profits; nor because of foreign competition and the flight of businesses to low-wage areas in the U.S. and abroad -- as happened in other American cities and regions over the course of the twentieth century. Rather, Philadelphia’s manufactories closed their doors because of changes in consumerism. Synthetic fibers, for example, wiped out Philadelphia’s famed silk hosiery trade; parquet flooring and wall-to-wall shag carpeting decimated the city’s tapestry rug industry; men stopped wearing fine felt hats to the detriment of Stetson; and cheap hardware merchandized by Sears Roebuck and other mass distributors cut deeply into the sales of the magnificently crafted and durable saws of the Disston Saw Company.58

In Philadelphia’s economy, the number of high quality manufacturing jobs was disappearing, and home ownership in homogeneous neighborhoods no longer held the same promise for upward mobility. Consequently, when Puerto Ricans arrived in larger numbers in the 1950s, the situation they encountered differed greatly from what was experienced by previous groups that came to the city. Yet, as bleak as this mid-century picture may seem to us today, Philadelphia still attracted Puerto Rican migrants from the island and from neighboring cities. As Carmen Whalen has written, the Puerto

Ricans found in Philadelphia “a plethora of limited opportunities.”59 Thus, even with a shrinking manufacturing economy and high racial and ethnic tensions, from the 1950s on, Philadelphia experienced a steady influx of Puerto Rican newcomers.

The New City Charter of 1951 and Center City Renewal

The death-blow to the Republican Party’s political dominance came from the reforming efforts of Joseph S. Clark and Richardson Dilworth, co-founders in 1947 of the Philadelphia chapter of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Their reform efforts were greatly aided by the 1948 investigation of city finances by the

Committee of Fifteen. The Committee’s announcement that $40 million had been stolen by city officials prompted the suicides of several prominent Philadelphians, likely because they were unwilling to face conviction and inevitable imprisonment.60 Clark, a

Philadelphia patrician, was elected city controller in the 1949 municipal elections,61 while Dilworth, an outsider from Pittsburgh, became city treasurer.62 Clark and

Dilworth used their posts to campaign for a new city charter. Their efforts were boosted 100 by the Kefauver Hearings, which put the city’s corruption in the headlines, and the result was a successful popular vote for the new charter in April of 1951.

Proposed by a cadre of liberal reformers, the changes targeted the powers of the ward leaders, on the premise that eliminating their influence would undercut the political machine. Much as was the case in the 1919 reforms, the intent of the 1951 new charter was to strengthen the mayor’s powers. No longer were patrolmen and officers subjected to the whims of ward leaders or the political machine; instead, they served the mayor. Importantly, the police force was also placed under his jurisdiction so that civil authority would prevail.

Unlike previous reform movements which had generally mounted independent third parties, Clark and Dilworth successfully yoked the ADA’s liberal agenda to

Philadelphia’s Democratic Party. Months later, in the November 1951 elections, Clark was elected mayor of Philadelphia while Dilworth became the district attorney. The duo would dominate reform politics through the decade of the 1950s, when Puerto

Ricans became the majority of Philadelphia’s Latino population. Moreover, the election of a Democrat as mayor broke the 68-year hold of Republicans on

Philadelphia’s city hall, and notably, the Democrats have not lost the mayoralty since.

The 1951 City Charter put a dagger into the heart of ward-leader control of the political apparatus.63 A Civilian Police Review Board was instituted to investigate complaints from citizens about police brutality. Additionally, strict civil service requirements for city jobs replaced the whimsical patronage for party hacks, old cronies and family members. Most importantly, Clark and Dilworth promoted a use of social science to craft rational policies for public administration and city zoning, substituting 101 for the compromising favoritism that had long dominated city decision-making. Liberal issues, such as an end to segregation, were espoused, and Philadelphia welcomed national figures, such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who came to

Philadelphia in 1957 in support of demonstrations to integrate Girard College.64 Despite such promotion of liberal ideals, however, most of Philadelphia’s people had not cast off a long history of aversion to political conflict and of contentment with life in provincial-minded neighborhoods. Lifting the heavy weight of Philadelphia’s past proved to be a more difficult task than removing antiquated construction from the center of the city.

I have noted the importance of physical space in defining a city. For

Philadelphia, the major transformation was concentrated in the center of the city. In

1954, the Pennsylvania Railroad abandoned its Broad Street Station near City Hall.

Left unused was the brick conduit for trains from Thirtieth Street that divided Market

Street, north from south. This urban eyesore was known as “the Chinese Wall.” The reformers set about demolishing the wall to create a quasi-park and commercial asset initially named “Penn Center.” Instead of using this renewal to openly satisfy greed, as might have been done under the Republican machine, management of the renovation was put in the hands of reformist professionals in the Planning Commission. The goal was to avoid graft and favoritism in redesigning the city’s prime commercial real estate in accord with a modern capitalist economy.65 However, the priorities established by the liberals directing urban planning neglected the needs of city neighborhoods.

The aging row-house residential fabric held the city together socially and in terms of community life. It was declining at a rate that led people to abandon it, yet public housing or clearance to replace the worst areas did not capitalize on the old neighborhood stability 102

characteristic of the city, nor did it induce widespread conservation and reinvestment in older housing by working people themselves. In Society Hill, Queen Village, and Fairmount the results of such reinvestment for ambience was created. The same thing never happened for blue-collar families, and the result was that dozens of neighborhoods continued to decline. This condition altered the social character of the city more than all of the ambitious rebuilding projects of the post-World War II decades.66

To his credit, Dilworth’s efforts to revitalize the city included his personal example.

When he was elected mayor in 1955, Dilworth moved into one of the city’s oldest residential neighborhoods to prove that Philadelphia was a fine place to live.67 If not the actual start, his move to the city was an early presage of Philadelphia’s gentrification.

Removal of physical obstructions was only part of the task for developing the city’s physical space. For example, the area on West Market Street behind the Chinese

Wall was notorious for its shady establishments in the pleasure industries. Although the wall had come down, these commercial tenants remained a moral blight on the renovated space, impeding high-end economic development. Enforcing city ordinances was the clearest route to suppressing these tawdry establishments. However, this path would require eliminating the traditional payola to wayward police, which had become an ingrained habit for owners and officers alike. For the crackdown, District Attorney

Dilworth sought a cop he deemed incorruptible. In 1952, he chose Frank Rizzo to clean up crime in Center City, supposing that Rizzo’s Italian heritage would insulate him from favoritism toward either wayward Irish policemen or Jewish mobsters. 68 As police commander of the targeted district, Rizzo demanded the freedom to conduct raids without informing the mayor or police officials, much as had General Smedley Butler in his own time. But unlike the General, who had been forced to resign after less than three years in office, Rizzo had come to stay. 103

Frank Rizzo’s Rise to Power

As an Italian-American, Rizzo was an outsider to the brass in the Police

Department in the 1950s, which then was dominated by Irish American cops. As commander of the 19th district, Rizzo not only shut down illicit activities such as drinking on Sundays or gambling at card games, he adopted tactics which often destroyed property and sometimes physically injured people. The reputation for enforcing the law upon others and for skirting it himself was an essential part of the

Rizzo legacy. Two important biographies address Rizzo’s place in Philadelphia’s history.69 Sal Paolantonio presented Rizzo as an Italian who was steeped in his own culture and who was often misunderstood when critics used a non-Italian cultural filter.

Take for example Rizzo’s classic response to those who accused him of nepotism by naming his brother to head up the Philadelphia Fire Department: “If you can't help your own family, who can you help?” Paolantonio suggested that this view was consistent with Italian family values.70 Paolantonio added favoritism to Rizzo’s transgressions, noting that during Rizzo’s command over the 33rd district in South Philadelphia, Italian mobsters had been treated more gently than Jewish ones.71 Daugen and Binzen, on the other hand, evaluated Rizzo by referring to his personal traits rather than cultural patterns. They suggested he used an imposing physical presence (6’2” and 250 pounds) for intimidation and his bravado in making arrests was a raw example of bullying.

His raids earned him the opposition of Cecil B. Moore, an African American attorney and civic leader, who was among the first to warn that Rizzo’s zeal was motivated by racial prejudice.72 While Rizzo’s early pattern of destructive raids under 104 the cover of law and order was criticized by some, it certainly gained him headlines.

This was especially true of the events in 1952 at the Humoresque Coffee House at 20th and Samson Streets. Coffee houses of that time attracted the Beat Generation, which was a literary movement of dark pessimism about the human condition.73 The beatniks rejected established social norms in their artistic production and personal behavior.

According to Paolantonio, the report that homosexuals frequented the establishment spurred Rizzo’s raid on the Humoresque.74 The arrests were ordered, suggested the author, not because the criminal code had in fact been violated but because Rizzo viewed homosexuality itself as an offense against the public order. One did not have to do anything as a homosexual to merit attack from Rizzo; just being homosexual itself was the offense. Although reformers on the Civilian Review Board later saw the raid as excessively violent, the people in the neighborhood generally agreed with Rizzo’s ideas that good order was one without homosexuals and they testified in support of his attack.75 A month later, Rizzo was promoted to Police Inspector, cementing the link between his no-nonsense approach and his political capital in local neighborhoods.

The places where homosexuals gathered, such as the Humoresque, however, were only that -- places where they met. They certainly were less connected to crime than Frank Palumbo’s nightclubs or Lew Tendler’s restaurant, where Rizzo met on

Wednesday mornings with known gangsters and numbers racketeers. Dilworth, the same person who in 1952 had chosen Rizzo to rid Center City of crime, later confessed that he knew Rizzo was in on the corruption. “We tried to bug the place,” he said, “but he was too smart for us there. He uncovered the bugs.”76 Rizzo himself used clandestine surveillance throughout his career against his enemies.77 105

Dispelling any interpretation of Rizzo as a bumbler who only happened into power, or whose vulgarity was merely the result of a disadvantaged education, Frank

Donner wrote:

He [Rizzo] cultivated a tough, fearless image, and even after he had climbed the advancement ladder, strongly identified with the cop on the beat. Rizzo is the archetypal authoritarian personality. Like others of his breed -- J. Edgar Hoover is a familiar example -- he developed a virtuoso skill in the uses of power, an arbitrary style in the exercise of authority, deference to higher-ups, a demand for gratitude and loyalty from the beneficiaries of his favor, ethnocentricity and racism, savagery toward the vulnerable or powerless who crossed him, an ability to wait patiently for others “like a tiger in high grass,” to use his own metaphor, and pounce when the time was ripe. The secondary traits of the authoritarian personality are evidenced in his visceral hatred, a sort of tribal horror, a fanatical fastidiousness (three white shirts a day, a glistening shoeshine, sharply creased trousers, a fleckless car), and an obsession with toughness and masculinity.78

Throughout American history, class differences have been repeatedly worsened by race resentments,79 and Rizzo’s tactics in Philadelphia proved to be no exception to the rule. He peppered his public statements with working class vulgarities that resonated with the resentments in the city’s row house neighborhoods against establishment elites. Rizzo frequently ridiculed his detractors as the “Chestnut Hill crowd.” He turned higher education and respect for propriety into political liabilities for the professionals brought into city government after 1951. While reformers like

Dilworth argued that change was necessary to keep up with the demands of forces outside the city, Rizzo articulated a rebuttal in which his ideas of morality, patriotism and religion were more valuable than reform, modernity and secularity. He successfully cast liberal change as an imposition by outsiders upon the people of Philadelphia.

106

The Fragility of Liberal Reform

Reformer Richardson Dilworth’s dashing style gained him popularity as mayor of Philadelphia and garnered for him a national profile in politics.80 As an outsider, he also proved to be an agent for political reform in Philadelphia, but that same outsider status produced political gaffes. For example, in 1961, Mayor Dilworth announced a new policy to levy fines on cars parked in the median strip of broad city streets. This disrupted a traditional practice in South Philadelphia where many Italian Americans resided. When Dilworth came to the neighborhood to defend his policy, he was pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables. Dilworth complained to the press, who printed his characterization of the Italians of South Philadelphia as “greasers.” Paolantonio noted that this “was the first time his private ethnic hatred had slipped out.”81 The incident served to remind Philadelphia’s working class that their neighborhoods were being neglected in favor of Center City’s renewal, and that the neglect was far from benign.

The clash produced by Dilworth’s new policy on parking space in the median strip of city streets has not been forgotten. More than half a century later, the issue surfaced again when the Democratic Party held its Convention in Philadelphia in July of 2016.82

To repair the damage done by his prejudice against Italian Americans, Dilworth was compelled to cede even more public power to Rizzo, the popular native of South

Philadelphia, even though he was convinced that Rizzo was enmeshed in the city’s corruption. Moreover, Rizzo was given a national stage on which to perform when

Dilworth sent him to testify to a Washington congressional committee about the successes of the Philadelphia police in reforms. Rizzo’s star was ascending. 107

Dilworth was a self-proclaimed “doer” who was willing to compromise ideological purity to accomplish change. This led him to make concessions to the old- line Democrats by adding to the 1959 Democratic ticket an Irish Catholic ward leader,

James J. Tate for City Council President. When Dilworth resigned from City Hall in

1962 to run for Governor of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia elected its first Irish Catholic mayor. Tate, made mayor in 1962 by the city charter, won election on his own in 1963.

These events reflect the limitations of liberalism in Philadelphia. Clark and

Dilworth had been able to rewrite the city charter and win elections because they co- opted the party in the name of reform. But, while reformers at the top could win municipal elections, they could not run the city without reliance on the politicians of the

Philadelphia machine. Frank Rizzo, the Italian policeman, rose to prominence on the back of resentment toward the liberal changes to the city’s former way of doing things.

The unsettled competition on the city’s fields of interaction in these years complicated the political choices of a rising number of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia. In the 1960s, they could not be sure which side would be the winners and which the losers.

The Puerto Rican Search for a Place in 1950s Philadelphia

This review of Philadelphia during the first six decades of the twentieth century has been intended to provide context to understand the formation of the Puerto Rican community in Philadelphia after 1950. They experienced a city undergoing transition toward new forms of capitalist development in Center City and away from manufacturing. In a sense, Puerto Ricans faced a more difficult challenge in gaining a social foothold. Whereas European immigrants had moved into a growing economy, 108

Puerto Ricans came in response to the need for a cheap, stop-gap work force in a manufacturing sector that was disappearing. Moreover, the available housing was mostly in decaying neighborhoods.

As in the nation after 1950, the growth of Philadelphia’s suburbs in these two decades came at the expense of the city’s population. As residents moved out of a neighborhood, their homes became available to newcomers, such as the Puerto Ricans, whose swelling numbers translated into a desperate need for housing. However, those ward leaders who had remained in select Philadelphia neighborhoods often viewed any change in the ethnic or racial composition of their districts as a threat to their power.

Puerto Ricans entering Philadelphia’s older ethnic neighborhoods, therefore, did not immediately gain political representation proportionate to their numbers in Philadelphia.

In sum, because Puerto Ricans had no neighborhood to call their own in the 1950s, they had few local leaders from among their numbers to distribute patronage jobs and deliver municipal services with the efficiency of the fabled political machine.

In the hot weeks of July of 1953, the swelling Puerto Rican presence in

Philadelphia splashed onto the headlines of the daily papers: “7 Hurt in Fight of 300 at

15th and Mt. Vernon” read the July 18th Evening Bulletin.83 “7 Hurt as 1000 Clash in

Riot” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.84 The only number constant here was the “7” persons injured. Were there 300 or 1000 involved? Was it a “fight” or was it a “riot”?

The fact reported in both versions specified that the conflict was between Puerto Ricans and the residents of the Spring Garden neighborhood. The former were characterized as newcomers, while it was suggested that the neighborhood supposedly “belonged” to

White home owners. The continuing influx of Puerto Ricans desperate for affordable 109 housing had upset the neighborhood’s ethnic balance in the area of the original Baldwin

Locomotive factory.

Both newspaper articles admitted that the Puerto Ricans were reacting to longstanding verbal and physical harassment. The papers reported that the vicious attacks perpetrated on the Puerto Ricans were intended to drive them from the “White” neighborhood. Puerto Ricans fought back, however, meeting violence with violence.

In fact, there was already a Puerto Rican street gang, “the 20Gs,” which famously had defended their side of the street according to an informal understanding of boundaries.85

Since the assailants entered the home of one Puerto Rican man to beat him up,86 it is puzzling that the Philadelphia Inquirer would blame the “riots” on the Puerto Ricans.

Moreover, the biased way the Philadelphia police responded caused resentment among

Puerto Ricans, producing additional confrontations in the next few weeks.

The clashes in the summer of 1953 injected the Puerto Rican community into city’s life in a direct and visible way. Concern about future conflicts in other neighborhoods provoked serious questions about the overall treatment of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia. District Attorney Richardson Dilworth responded to the riots by authorizing a sociological study directed by scholars from Temple University.87

Published the next year as Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia: A Study of Their

Demographic Characteristics, Problems and Attitudes, the report became part of recommendations submitted to the mayor by the city’s Human Relations Commission.

The analysis bore certain similarities with the study realized by W. E. B. Du Bois for the African Americans in Philadelphia earlier in the twentieth century. However, Du

Bois had insisted that city conflicts were not caused because there was something 110

“wrong” with “the Negro” and “the Negro culture.” Instead, he blamed the city’s social political structures. The authors of the 1954 study, none of them Puerto Ricans or even

Latinos, meanwhile framed their research and recommendations with a fashionably liberal understanding of assimilation. Puerto Rican culture, they stated, was the cause of the “problems.” The study suggested that Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia should quickly adopt “American” ways, and the authors were puzzled that the people seemed reluctant to do so. The recommendations in this report will be more fully analyzed in my fifth chapter. However, there is no reason to doubt the headline of the Evening

Bulletin about Puerto Rican sentiment after this violence: “Puerto Ricans Here Consider

Philadelphians Unfriendly.”88 These problems notwithstanding, throughout the decade of the 1950s, Puerto Ricans reproduced some of the traditional ethnic group settlement patterns in the city. As with previous ethnic and racial groups, religion, especially

Catholicism, played a role in the Puerto Ricans’ process of adaptation. This will be the subject of chapter six.

Among the most visible results of the growing Puerto Rican population were small grocery stores, called “bodegas,” that supplied ethnic products like pasta de guayaba, bacalao, plátanos and gandules [guava jelly, codfish, plantains and pigeon peas]. Puerto Rican merchants catered to other consumer needs, and a shopping district sprang up along the North Fifth Street corridor in the Fairhill section of the city, which eventually came to be known as “El Centro” or “Bloque de Oro” (The Center or Golden

Block). In Northern Liberties, in Kensington and the Hunting Park neighborhoods,

Puerto Ricans opened clubs which were identified by the name of particular hometowns followed by the word “Ausentes.” These clubs were meant to provide social space for 111 migrants from the diverse island’s municipalities who rediscovered each other in

Philadelphia.89 Along with neighborhood merchant associations for the neighborhood, the clubs grew in membership as the Puerto Rican migrant population grew. The hometown clubs became a secure space for social gathering where transplanted Puerto

Ricans and their families people kept alive Puerto Rican cultural values based on kinship and regional island traditions. The clubs and local merchants cooperated with each other to sponsor sports teams and baseball leagues. The cultural and economic processes resulted in a consciousness among Puerto Ricans that they belonged to a city- wide community.

A palpable result of this socially unifying trend was the Council of Spanish

Speaking Organizations. Better known as “El Concilio,” this city-wide organization was incorporated in 1962. El Concilio sought to replace the Fiesta de San Juan Bautista as the public event marking the presence of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia. The Fiesta had been celebrated with a Mass at La Milagrosa on June 24th, the saint’s feast day, or on the weekend closest to that day. El Concilio felt that the Fiesta was too much of a

Catholic religious event and organized a secular Puerto Rican Day Parade in September

1964 as an alternative. The parade took place on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the traditional location for most of Philadelphia’s ethnic celebrations.90 In the model of such public events for Philadelphia, the parade chose annually a prominent citizen as

Grand Marshall and invited public dignitaries to participate as a sign of support for

Puerto Ricans. Support from the city establishment soon validated the September parade as the major civic expression for the Puerto Rican community, and it gradually eclipsed the religious celebration of San Juan Bautista. 112

When El Concilio was established, John F. Kennedy, a Catholic from

Massachusetts was the president of the United States. President Kennedy launched the

Alliance for Progress, an economic development plan for Latin America, and named a

Puerto Rican, Teodoro Moscoso, as its director. Within the Puerto Rican community, the appointment seemed to confirm Puerto Rico’s historic role in world history as a

“bridge between cultures.”91 If there had been no interference with the course set by

1962, perhaps Puerto Ricans might well have gone along with the ethnic assimilation model in Philadelphia, which included patronage from politicians in City Hall.

However, in 1963, an assassin’s bullets took President Kennedy’s life. For the next decade, the country would be rocked by challenges to racial equality, by sweeping political measures to address endemic poverty among racially-designated groups and by questioning of the legitimacy of military intervention against communism in Vietnam.

National events and the decline of the manufacturing economy shook Philadelphia’s pattern of “going along.” No longer could Philadelphians maintain the previous pattern of apathy in the face of the economic woes the city was now facing. The Puerto Rican community could not presume that the city’s traditional routes for assimilation were still operative in Philadelphia. Changes were urgently afoot.

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Endnotes for Chapter 4

1 For a history of Hispanics in Philadelphia in the early twentieth century, see the works of Victor Vásquez: “The Development of Pan-Latino Philadelphia, 1892-1945” (PhD diss. Department of History and Biography: Temple University, 2004); Víctor Vázquez, “The Development of Pan- Latino Philadelphia, 1892–1945,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 128 (2004): 367–84; Víctor Vázquez-Hernández, “From Pan-Latino Enclaves to a Community: Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, 1910–2000,” in The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives, eds. Carmen Teresa Whalen and Victor Vázquez-Hernández (Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 2005), 88- 105.

2 Vázquez-Hernández, “From Pan-Latino Enclaves,” 88. Note that Puerto Ricans were made United States citizens by congressional action in 1917, so that the 1920 census did not list them as “foreign- born” as in 1910.

3 Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davies, “The Iron Age: 1876-1905,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 483-84.

4 Literally, “in my own flesh,” meaning “in personal lived experience.”

5 Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age,” 471-474.

6 Lincoln Steffens, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented,” McClure’s Magazine, v. 21 (1903) May- October, 249.

7 Steffens, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented,” 249.

8 Steffens, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented,” 254.

9 Lloyd M. Abernathy, “Progressivism, 1905-1919,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 531, 539; E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 378-280.

10 Graft dictated that permits and applications would require an “under the table” award of cash to officials. Policemen were the special beneficiaries of the bribes in a regularized “payola” to “look the other way.” Worse yet, the payola offered by the patron was often eclipsed by the “shake down” initiated by the police officer. Since ward leaders maintained control over nominations of new officers and even the scheduling of their patrols, the police continued to be tied into the political machine. See Salvatore A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Philadelphia: Camino Books, 1993), 36-39; Russell F. Weigley, “The Border City in Civil War: 1854-1865,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 369-374.

11 Steffens, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented,” 250.

12 Steffens, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented,” 253.

13 Bois Penrose (1860-1921), who took over the machine in 1904, was in the United States Senate. His rival, and the Republican boss after Penrose’s death in 1921, was William Vare (1867-1934), who served in Harrisburg before election to the United States’ House of Representatives. Vare’s brothers, George (1859–1908) and Edwin (1862–1922) were State Senators.

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14 Between 1888 and 1921 the Vares collected $18 million from 58 street-cleaning contracts. In total, Vare interests received 341 public contracts worth more than $28 million. William Vare won the Republican primary for United States Senate in 1921 against Governor Gilford Pinchot, and then also won the general election. However, Governor Pinchot refused to certify the election to Washington. The United States Senate later acknowledged that Vare had won the election but refused to seat him nonetheless. Committee of Seventy, accessed February 3, 2016, https://www.seventy.org/who/our- history/deeper-history.

15 “Upon his departure from the mayor’s office, the newsletter of the Municipal League commented: ‘The four years of the Ashbridge administration have passed into history, leaving behind them a scar on the fame and reputation of our city which will be a long-time healing. Never before, and let us hope never again, will there be such brazen defiance of public opinion, such flagrant disregard of public interest, such abuse of powers and responsibilities for private ends. These are not generalizations, but each statement can be abundantly proved by numerous instances.’” Steffens, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented,” 256.

16 Steffens, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented,” 256.

17 Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age,” 498.

18 Steffens, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented,” 252.

19 “‘What is the use of voting?’ these stay-at-homes ask. A friend of mine told me he was on the lists in the three wards in which he had successively dwelt. He voted personally in none, but the leader of his present ward tells him how he has been voted.” Steffens, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented,” 250-52. See also Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 29-30.

20 Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age,” 496.

21 Abernathy, “Progressivism, 1905-1919,” 526. Philadelphia’s iconic public space includes the Benjamin Franklin Parkway built in 1917 and the Philadelphia Museum of Art constructed in 1928.

22 Steffens, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented,” 252.

23 Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age,”, 474.

24 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (International Publishers: New York, 1859/1972), 124.

25 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. 1986 reprint edition, with an introduction by Elijah Anderson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899/1986).

26 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 50.

27 Elijah Anderson’s introduction, The Philadelphia Negro, by W. E. B. Du Bois, xiv-xv, citing David Levering Lewis about links to eugenic movements and the role of Susan Wharton, heiress of a prominent Quaker family.

28 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 392-393.

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29 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 396.

30 Elizabeth M. Geffen, “Industrial Development and Social Crisis: 1841-1854,” in Philadelphia: A 300- Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 352.

31 “The social upheaval after the Civil War gave the political power to the Republicans and a new era of misrule commenced. Open disorder and crime were repressed, but in its place, came the rule of the boss, with its quiet manipulation and calculating embezzlement of public funds. To-day the government of both city and State is unparalleled in the history of republican government for brazen dishonesty and bare-faced defiance of public opinion.” Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 372.

32 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 380-81.

33 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 382-83.

34 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. (New York, Avenel, NJ: Gramercy Books, 1994. Reprint of the 1903 publication, Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903), 3-6. See also pages 46-47 and 50 in the second chapter of this dissertation, footnote 76.

35 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 384.

36 Vázquez, “The Development of Pan-Latino Philadelphia,” 368-69.

37 Vázquez, “The Development of Pan-Latino Philadelphia,” 372.

38 Vázquez, “The Development of Pan-Latino Philadelphia,” 383.

39 Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age,”481-483; Lorin Blodget, Census of Manufactures of Philadelphia: A Census of Industrial Establishments, and of Persons of Each Class Employed Therein, in the City of Philadelphia, for the Year 1882 (Dickson & Gilling, Printers and Publishers: Philadelphia, 1883), 1, 15.

40 Notable among these were the immigrants arriving from Italy and Central Europe.

41 “It might be expected that the sudden influx of immigrants would produce the same effect apparent in all other American big cities -- overcrowding, exploitation, slums, labor troubles, political corruption, and party realignments. All these things did indeed appear in Philadelphia, but curiously mitigated in some areas and curiously distorted in others . . . Perhaps the most important single factor in creating the differences remained architecture. That is, instead of being a city of jammed-together multifamily tenements packed with renters, Philadelphia was still a city of endlessly repeated small row houses, most of them one-family dwellings, many of them owner occupied.” Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age,” 494.

42 “These slums were not tenements but narrow alleys and dark courtyards of tiny three-story houses known as Trinity -- ‘Father, Son, and Holy Ghost’ – houses, one room to a floor. Jammed together, the houses had little light or air, lacked sewerage and adequate water supply, smelt of humanity and decay. Sweatshops occupied the upper floors of the Jewish neighborhoods; in the overcrowded Italian sections chickens were often kept in bedrooms and goats in the cellar. For all of this misery

116

Philadelphia still had less of a concentrated slum problem than other big cities. On the other hand, what was there was ignored by a complacent public.” Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age,” 495-96.

43 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 319-21.

44 Vázquez “The Development of Pan-Latino,” 367-68; 371. The full name of La Fraternal in English was: The Spanish-American Fraternal Benevolent Association.

45 Republican Mayor John Rayburn deputized more than 300 special policemen to break the union strike. Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age,” 548-560. A rift between the old-time boss, Boies Penrose and the upstart Vare brothers had also divided the Republican machine

46 Blankenburg was a German-born Quaker, city merchant, and husband of abolitionist and suffragette Lucretia Mott. The predecessor to the Keystone Party had been the Lincoln Party in 1907. Later would come the Washington Party (1913) and the Franklin Party (1915).

47 A violent clash between thugs hired by the Vares and the Penrose candidate for city council, James Carey, provided the spark for reform. Policeman George Eppley, guarding Carey, was shot and killed on September 19, 1917. The violence could not be ignored by the police. Disgust with status quo politics afforded the reformers a favorable climate. The murderer was later convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

48 One rationale for two councils was that under Commonwealth of Pennsylvania law, Philadelphia was not only a city, but also a county. It was a difference with no real importance except to create more opportunities for graft.

49 Abernathy, “Progressivism,” 563-65.

50 In the first two days after assuming command, Butler organized 900 raids, padlocking the establishments, when not simply destroying them.

51 “Law enforcement on an absolutely even basis has not had the support of the people of Philadelphia and does not have it now. When the people of Philadelphia or any other city stop playing the game of ‘Enforce the law against others but not against me,’ they will begin to win the fight against lawlessness.” Bulletin Almanac, 1926, 337; cited in Arthur P. Dudden, “The City Embraces ‘Normalcy’ 1919-1929,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 578 ftn. 41.

52 In what amounted to the Mayor Kendrick’s effort to save face after the dismissal of the incorruptible general, the city’s police were investigated by a Grand Jury for collusion with gangsters in South Philadelphia and, in 1928, 89 policemen were suspended, 18 were dismissed and 63 were arrested. The committee found $750,000 in the accounts of the guilty who offered poor excuses, some saying they had won the money at the race track. Dudden, “The City Embraces ‘Normalcy,’ 579-581.

53 Margaret B. Tinkcom, “Depression and War: 1929-1946,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 611, 621.

54 Michael Parenti, “Mafia and Me,” accessed April 2, 2016, http://www.michaelparenti.org/MafiaAndMe.html.

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55 Angelo Bruno was brutally murdered in his own car in 1980 in an apparent throw-back to the old style of mob violence. The assassin was Antonio Caponigro (aka Tony Bananas) who had been Bruno's consigliere. A few weeks later, Caponigro 's body was found stuffed in a body bag in the trunk of a car in New York City with dollar bills jammed in his mouth and anus, a Sicilian symbolic punishment for greed. See George Anastasia, “Antonio Caponigro, a.k.a. Tony Bananas,” Mob Video Vault, March 8, 2017, accessed April 13, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AObKfSdVJE.

56 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 47, 108, 114.

57 Under scrutiny were local mob figures: Harry Stromberg, alias Nig Rosen, with his henchman, William Weisberg, both of whom were connected to Meyer Lansky, along with Frank “Blinky” Palermo, who was notorious for fixing boxing matches such as the Jake LaMotta-Billy Fox fight in 1947. The hearings were held, October 13-14, 1950 and February 19-20, 1951.

58 Walter Licht, Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840-1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). This citation is taken from the website of the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, accessed March 3, 2016, http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/workshop-of-the-world/.

59 Carmen Theresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 137-182.

60 “With relative ease, the investigation uncovered almost $40 million in city funds that were unaccounted for and several major scandals would be exposed in the following months. Rather than face the public for such corruption, four city officials committed suicide.” Joseph S. Clark, Jr. and Dennis J. Clark, “Rally and Relapse: 1946-1968,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 652.

61 Clark was from a prominent Chestnut Hill Republican family and a Harvard graduate who had become a Democrat in 1928 in support of attention to working class needs. He began his political career after military service in the Second World War Army Air Forces, rising to the rank of Coronel. Clark was outspoken and steadfastly committed to causes such as desegregation, voting rights, and later, when in the United States Senate, opposition to the Vietnam War. He was mayor from 1951-1955 and was later elected to the Senate in 1956, a post he held until he was defeated in the 1968 election.

62 Yale-educated Richardson Dilworth had the uncommon distinction of being a veteran of both the First and Second World Wars, serving in both wars with distinction. In the style of Gatsby decadence, Dilworth had left his wife for another man’s wife; he had married her in Havana in 1935 before either one had secured a divorce. Dilworth also had a drinking problem. Nonetheless, he possessed excellent communication skills and was endowed with a bravado that crowned him with celebrity. Clark compared Dilworth to the hero of Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, calling him, “D’Artagnan in long pants and a double breasted suit.” Clark and Clark, “Rally and Relapse: 1946-1968,” 653. Dilworth was mayor from 1956 until 1962.

63 The city and county governments were merged into a single jurisdiction, and the mayor was given greater executive powers, including the right to veto Council legislation. The City Council was limited to 17 members, seven of whom were elected at large, thus weakening the ability of district representatives to impose special interest legislation. The minority party was assured of representation among the at-large council members.

118

64 The issue focused on the wording in the will of Stephen Girard, who had left his fortune in trust to provide a free education to the city “white orphans.” In 1961, the wording of the will was overturned in court to allow African Americans children to qualify for scholarships.

65 Conrad J. Weiler, Jr., Philadelphia: neighborhood, authority, and the urban crisis. Praeger special studies in U.S. economic, social, and political issues (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1974).

66 Clark and Clark, “Rally and Relapse,” 672.

67 Jason Fagone, “Searching for Richardson Dilworth.” Philadelphia Magazine online edition (November 24, 2008), accessed November 21, 2016, http://www.phillymag.com/articles/searching-for- richardson-dilworth/.

68 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 55-60.

69 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo; Joseph R. Daughen, and Peter Binzen, The Cop Who Would Be King: The Honorable Frank Rizzo (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997).

70 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 79-81; See Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 1974.

71 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 45-47. Moreover, there were suspicions that he had faked his high school graduation in order to be promoted according to the requirements of the civil service reform.

72 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 50-52.

73 The phrase "Beat Generation" was introduced in “This is the Beat Generation” by John Clellon Holmes (New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952). Holmes attributed the name to Jack Kerouac, a poet within the movement who had first used the term in 1948.

74 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 68-70.

75 Philadelphia Inquirer, February 23, 1958.

76 Joseph A. Doughen and Peter Binzen, The Cop Who Would Be King: The Honorable Frank Rizzo (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 72.

77 Doughen and Binzen, 108-110; 122-127. The first citation details Dilworth’s use of the practice; the second, Rizzo’s.

78 Frank Donner, Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 197-198.

79 Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. (New York: Viking, 2016).

80 In July 1956, with Dilworth and his wife as passengers, the Italian cruise ship Andrea Doria crashed with another ship. Half of the ship’s life boats were unusable. Dilworth’s take-charge attitude in evacuating passengers reportedly saved lives. See Fagone, “Searching for Richardson Dilworth.”

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81 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 68.

82 William Bender and Tricia L. Nadolny, “Will Philly finally get rid of the giant parking lot in the South Broad median?” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, 2016.

83 “7 Hurt in Fight of 300 at 15th and Mt. Vernon,” 18 July 1953: Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 3.

84 “7 Hurt as 1000 Clash in Riot,” 18 July 1953: Philadelphia Inquirer, 5.

85 Natalie Pompilio, “Gang protected Puerto Ricans for 50 years in Spring Garden,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 3, 1916.

86 “7 Hurt in Fight of 300 at 15th and Mt. Vernon” July 18, 1953: Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 3.; “7 Hurt as 1000 Clash in Riot” July 18, 1953: Philadelphia Inquirer, 5.

87 Arthur I. Siegel, Harold Orlans, and Loyal Greer, Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia: A Study of Their Demographic Characteristics, Problems and Attitudes (Philadelphia: Human Relations Commission, 1954).

88 “Puerto Ricans Here Consider Philadelphians Unfriendly,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, May 23, 1954.

89 Carmen Theresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 216-17. Interestingly, walking through the streets of San Juan, I observed a sign on a door that read, “Neoricans Ausentes.” Apparently, the hometown club tradition that had begun in New York, Philadelphia and other mainland cities with heavy concentrations of Puerto Ricans found its way to Puerto Rico as Puerto Rican migrants returned to the island during the revolving door migration beginning in the late 1960s.

90 Kathryn Wilson, “Building El Barrio: Latinos Transform Postwar Philadelphia.” Pennsylvania Legacies 3 (Nov. 2003): 17-21. Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 216, dated this first event to 1964.

91 Manuel Maldonado Denis, Puerto Rico: una interpretación histórico-social (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1969), 199-206. 120

CHAPTER 5

PUERTO RICO’S BURDEN OF COLONIALISM

The history of Puerto Rico has been told often and well.1 For this chapter, I would like to explain how the colonial experience of the island affected the islanders’ general attitudes toward religion, political authority and racial perceptions. Much as in the third chapter, where I traced current attitudes in Philadelphia to their Quaker origins, in this chapter, I will outline the historical origins for the most salient characteristics of the culture that Puerto Rican migrants brought to Philadelphia. The economic factors behind the mass migration to the United States after 1946 will receive special attention.

Additionally, I will explore Puerto Rican nationalism as promoted by Pedro Albizu

Campos, who advocated independence for the island and couched his message as a form of defense of Puerto Rico’s Catholic identity. I will explain his philosophical linkage of

Puerto Rican Catholic identity and the island’s independence which influenced the

Young Lords in Philadelphia during the 1970s.

The Early Spanish Colony

I begin this chapter by calling attention to the topography of the island of Puerto

Rico. Scarcely 110 miles long and 35 miles wide, it is the smallest of the islands of the

Greater Antilles, situated at the western reaches of the Caribbean Sea. The neighboring island of Cuba is 12 times larger, and Hispaniola, comprising Haiti and the Dominican

Republic, is eight times larger. Sixty percent of Puerto Rico’s 3,425 square miles land mass is mountains, less than 10 percent is coastal plain, and the remaining area consists of rolling hills.2 121

Juan Ponce de León (1460-1521) began the Spanish settlement of Puerto Rico in

1511. As with other American colonies, the entry of Europeans triggered a precipitous decline of the Native American population, due mainly to cruel treatment and smallpox.3 By 1550, the subjugation of Mexico and Peru had launched a profitable enterprise of gold and silver on the American continents, making those destinations more attractive to Spanish colonists than Puerto Rico. The shortage of settlers, however, did not mean that the island was ignored. Other European powers were interested in Puerto Rico mainly for its strategic location. The English, for example, attacked a weakly guarded garrison in Puerto Rico in 1595 and briefly occupied the fort in San Juan in 1598. Spain’s fear of losing control over the island to another European power provoked a major change of policy, bringing to close the initial period of colonization. The Spanish monarchy spent the next century building more extensive fortifications to protect the port city of San Juan.

The island’s second developmental phase begins with the expulsion of the

English invaders in 1598 and continues through the next 165 years, while Puerto Rico functioned primarily as a military outpost and naval installation defending Spain’s interests in the Caribbean. Continuing through the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) the second phase ran until 1781, when the English American colonies secured independence and the French Revolution was underway.4 During this time, the island’s economy was dependent mostly on subsistence farming and barter exchange among the populace. The chief source of currency was an annual royal subsidy for the military, called el situado.5 With limited currency available to the populace and under the smothering strictures of the Spanish mercantilist system, manufactured items often 122 entered Puerto Rico by way of smuggling. The decimation of the native Taíno population and the paucity of incoming migrants from Europe further stagnated economic growth. In 1640, nearly fifty years into this second period, the total population of Puerto Rico scarcely reached 10,000 people, with more than half residing in the city of San Juan. When this second phase ended, the 1770 census reported

44,883 island residents, representing a yearly growth rate of one-half of one percent.6

Some historians have opined that the second period served as the incubator of a nascent Puerto Rican cultural identity, suggesting that the relatively small population and low growth rates served to crystallize social behaviors.7 Two important primary sources on the island’s religion and culture are a detailed 1647 description of the island and its people prepared by a San Juan native, Diego Torres y Vargas (1615-1670), canon of the cathedral8 and a 1788 encyclopedic account of the island’s geography and its economy by Fray Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra (1745–1813), a Spanish Benedictine who served as secretary to the bishop of Puerto Rico during his tenure on the island from

1771 to 1778.9 Most of the cultural attitudes and the popular religious devotions that

Torres y Vargas and Abbad y Lasierra described remain prominent among Puerto Rican

Catholics today, even after more than one century of United States rule and social and economic intervention. Thus, I suggest that the core of Puerto Rican identity reflected within contemporary culture was formed during the seventeenth century and solidified by the end of the eighteenth century. This time frame allows for a comparison of the role of Quaker civic and religious tolerance in colonial Philadelphia and the functions of tolerance for racial mixture in Puerto Rico while under Spanish Catholic rule. In both cases, these attitudes arose from economic circumstances, persisted during the historical 123 evolution of both Philadelphia and Puerto Rico and remain influential in contemporary cultures.

My focus here is on the racial characteristics within early Puerto Rican society.

To be sure, Spain had experienced centuries of racial mixture before its encounter with the so-called New World. It can safely be said, however, that Spanish colonial officials in Puerto Rico confronted racial differences that were different from those in Spain.

Puerto Ricans could be descendants of White settlers from Europe, of Black workers from Africa, or of the Native Taíno peoples, and the combination of any two or of all these racial types was frequent. Racial identification as “African” by “one drop of black blood” was not used in colonial Puerto Rico. As in much of Spanish America, persons were classified racially by their physical appearances. For example, a negro

(Black) could be sibling to a person called trigueño (wheat-colored), and one of their parents could have been called blanco (White). A blanket category for the native-born population was “pardo,” which generally lacked a precise racial significance.10

In his 1647 narrative, Torres y Vargas used “negro” only for slaves, while employing the term “natural” for persons born on the island.11 However, Abad y

Lasierra, the clergyman introduced above, adopted the terminology most commonly used in Spanish colonialism, describing a person born in the Americas as “criollo,” regardless of racial characteristics. The European-born were placed in another classification, while slaves were in a third category, separate from both. Once slaves were freed, however, they entered the criollo category.12 Upon his return to Spain,

Abbad y Lasierra offered the following judgement about social identities in Puerto

Rico: 124

They give the name of criollo indistinctly to everyone born in the island, no matter what race or mixture he comes from. The Europeans are called Whites or, to use their own expression, men from the other band.13

The cleric’s testimony regarding what he had witnessed in his seven years in Puerto

Rico suggested that these were longstanding attitude toward interracial solidarity.

I am not claiming that Puerto Rico was free from all racism but, based on the accounts of Torres y Vargas and Abbad y Lasierra, I stress here that race and racial mixture in Puerto Rico were not perceived as they are in today’s United States. As will be shown below, Puerto Rican political nationalism in the twentieth century idealized the criollo experience and romanticized the early Spanish colonial period for its racial tolerance. I will show that when the Young Lords in twentieth-century Philadelphia promoted the interests of Puerto Ricans, they claimed interracial tolerance as a cultural trait. Moreover, this contention was noteworthy because it took place in a city where racial divisions had been exacerbated by the words and actions of Frank Rizzo. I submit that the interracial solidarity fostered by the Young Lords’ in Philadelphia was faithful to historical narratives and the nationalist interpretations of Puerto Rican identity.

Economic Development of Puerto Rico as a Spanish Colony

As reflected in the third chapter, the seven-year conflict known as the French and Indian War (1754-1763) resulted in the loss of some French possessions in North

America; and shortly thereafter, in 1776, the revolt of the English colonies permanently severed them from England’s control. Alarmed by these outcomes, the Spanish monarchy sought to reform its colonial policies, lest separatism tear apart Spanish 125

America.14 In the last decades of the eighteenth century, the monarchy’s initiative in

Puerto Rico allowed for the island’s men to be recruited into the royal Spanish forces for the first time. To pay for the increased military presence, however, new sources of revenue were required. With that intention, royal policy sought to develop a cash-crop economy of sugar, coffee and tobacco production in Puerto Rico. The economic pace quickened, and the population grew significantly in little more than one generation. By

1807, only 42 years after the census had reported 44,883 island residents, the population had more than quadrupled, swelling to 183,211, and the number of slaves had grown from approximately 5,000 to over 18,000.15 These initiatives characterized the third stage of the island’s economic and social development, from 1781 until the invasion by the United States in 1898.

In chapter three, I noted that in the eighteenth century the ecology of

Pennsylvania did not favor tobacco or cotton production. The obstacles to cultivation of these cash crops in Pennsylvania meant that successful agricultural production did not require slave labor. In Puerto Rico, ecology also played an important role in determining the relationship between cash crops and the racial composition of the island’s regions. Tobacco was an important part of the island’s agricultural output.

Another important crop was sugar. Yet, over the next hundred years, coffee would become the island’s prime export, mainly because of Puerto Rico’s topography. Coffee shrubs take approximately six to seven years to mature. Ordinarily reaching a height of height of nine to twelve feet, they do best on inclined surfaces under a canopy of taller trees. The central mountainous part of the island, or Cordillera Central, accounts for the largest percentage of the land mass, and it is here where subsistence farmers, known as 126 jíbaros,16 had settled during the colonial era. These persons would constitute the labor pool that coffee growers would employ for the seasonal harvesting of coffee. These jíbaros, mostly classified as White and sometimes as trigueño (wheat-colored), have been compared to the North American hillbillies, since both groups were subsistence farmers living in mountain regions, isolated from urban society.17

Sugar cane, unlike coffee, needs level land and direct sunlight. Also, unlike coffee, it begins to yield production in the same year it is planted and needs to be re- planted annually. This labor intensity needed for successful sugar output meant that plantations on the coastal regions were profitable only with an unpaid work force of

Africans and their offspring as slaves. Thus, in the nineteenth century, the Black population of the island would generally reside in the coastal regions, where African influences in the Puerto Rican vernacular, religious practices, art and musical forms took root and where they remain prominent to the present day.

Tobacco production created a buffer zone between the coastal and the mountainous regions, drawing workers from both geographic sectors. The cigar industry often became a meeting place for a more racially integrated force, and it generally escaped the sort of racial segregation found in workforce for sugar and coffee productions.18 Recall that in the previous chapter, I noted that Puerto Ricans found employment in Philadelphia in the early twentieth century in tobacco factories.19 These tobacco workers were welcomed in Philadelphia, because of the skills they had already acquired in Puerto Rico for cigar making. Moreover, along with such skills, they brought the tradition of racial integration of the island’s tobacco industry. Thus, there is a link between the historical development of Puerto Rico’s economy under the influence 127 of ecological factors with the emergence of the racial identities brought to Philadelphia in the twentieth century.

Puerto Rico and Spanish Politics in the Nineteenth Century

The economic growth during the third stage of Puerto Rico’s development under Spain was interrupted by events in Europe. Marching into Spain on a pretext of friendship, Napoleon Bonaparte instead placed his own brother, Joseph, on the Spanish throne in 1808. The French invasion and the claims of the usurper provoked a call to unity to all Spanish citizens, whether they were living on the peninsula or in the

Americas. Concretely, this resulted in the constitution of the Cortes Generales, or

General Parliament, whose purpose was to draft a constitution for a new government.

While many other Spanish colonies declined the invitation and declared independence instead, Puerto Rico delegated a native son, Ramón Power y Giralt, to attend the Cortes.

He was elected Vice-President of the assembly and played a major role in drafting a provision which, had it been implemented, would have removed racial tests for Spanish citizenship.20 Upon restoration of the monarchy in 1814, however, King Fernando VII of Spain abolished the constitution and vainly attempted to remove republicanism from the national memory. The results were decades of unstable government, which became the era of “la España boba,” or “silly Spain.”21

Of lasting importance to Puerto Rico, however, was the economic reform under

Spain of the Cédula de Gracias, or Decree of Concessions, issued by the monarch in

1815. It worked like a homestead act, awarding land and franchises to European colonists who would help develop trans-Atlantic commerce. Spaniards migrating under 128 the provisions of this decree brought well-honed skills in artisanal production to the work force in Puerto Rico, and they also enhanced commerce with entrepreneurial initiatives, while providing the island with trained professionals in such fields as law, pharmacy and accounting. These skilled newcomers to the colony were rewarded with substantial economic and social privileges and often held civic and administrative offices. By such measures, the Spanish monarchy hoped to ensure a significant migration flow from the Iberian Peninsula to the island and, in this way, not only benefit the island’s cash-producing economy but also dampen the social power of the criollos.22 After all, the criollos had been the vanguard of revolution and republicanism on the American continents, and the king wanted to prevent revolt in Puerto Rico by thwarting the rise of local elites. Native-born Puerto Ricans were thus legally denied any of the economic incentives and were systematically excluded from civil service positions. Favoritism for newcomers, however, ultimately suffocated local entrepreneurship and free markets.23

Because the Decree of Concessions promoted sugar production it also stimulated the importation of slaves. Increased slavery, moreover, entailed increased brutality.

The infamous Bando Negro [Black Ban] of 1848 established harsher penalties for

Blacks than for Whites in the criminal code.24 Still, it is important to note that slaves in the entire Puerto Rican population in 1830 accounted for only 10 percent.25 In striking contrast, Cuba at that time had more Black slaves than White inhabitants. Adding the free Blacks to these slaves, 58 percent of Cuba’s entire population in 1841 was of

African origin.26 Because it had proportionately far fewer Black slaves than its island neighbor, Puerto Rico’s racial divisions were not as stark as in Cuba. During the next 129 two decades leading up to an armed revolt in 1868, elimination of racist laws and eventual abolition of slavery nurtured political yearnings for separation from Spain and for an independent Puerto Rican republic.27

The mountain jíbaros may not have been Black slaves, but Spain obliged them to forced labor in order to resolve the island’s shortage of workers. In 1838, a decree by

Spanish Governor Miguel López de Baños mandated obligatory employment of the mountain peasants on public works without compensation and denounced those refusing this forced labor as vagrants, subjecting them to fines and imprisonment.28 To enforce this unpopular law, in 1849, his successor, Juan González de la Pezuela y Ceballos, required freemen to wear a register around their necks; called a libreta, this register gave an account of their employment. Officials were ordered to stop persons and examine the libretas and punish those avoiding public service labor. Not surprisingly, many people burned their libretas in public protests.29 Madrid eventually repealed the hated provision, but the lasting effects of this practice would increase tensions between social classes, sharpen the boundaries of Puerto Rican cultural identity, and undermine public acceptance of state authority.30

Popular Religion in Puerto Rico

Throughout the Spanish colonial history of the island, religion played a significant social role. The Catholic Church gathered most of the population into a fold united by a common faith. Catholicism provided rituals and religious ceremonies where people from different walks of life and races could meet and interact. In fact, the

Catholic character of racial mixture in Puerto Rico is most clearly identifiable in the 130 lived religious experiences of the people, particularly in popular celebrations of local patron saints, family and communal rituals celebrating rites of passages, island-wide celebrations such as the Feast of the Epiphany, and in Marian devotions such as wearing scapulars and reciting the rosary.31

Devotions that originated among Puerto Rico’s Black Catholics appeared at an early date. Puerto Rico had been made a legal sanctuary for runaway slaves from the

British Caribbean islands. As long as they accepted the Catholic religion and professed loyalty to the Spanish king, former slaves were freed upon arrival in Puerto Rico.32 This was the historical context for the founding of the town of Loiza Aldea by former slaves.

Their unique Catholic celebration of the Feast of Santiago Apóstol (St. James, the

Apostle) incorporated African cultural traits.33 An even earlier example of religious devotion in the service of racial tolerance come from the mountain town of

Hormigueros, where seventeenth-century Puerto Ricans built a sanctuary to Our Lady of Monserrate, one of the so-called Black Madonnas that acquired racial relevance in the Americas.34 There has always been special devotion to the Three Wise Men, who, in Puerto Rican iconography, were made to represent the island’s three primary races,

White, Red and Black.35 In more recent time, Puerto Rican religion has developed

African religious expressions that conflict with Catholic practices.36 However, the

African-origin religious manifestations recorded above were characterized as harmonious with, rather than antagonistic to, popular Catholicism. Symbols of Puerto

Rico’s integrated racial identity were relevant to the Young Lords and continue to have impact today in murals for Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, which depict persons of different races as one people with a common culture.37 131

Though not all criollos were people of mixed blood, Spanish prejudice against criollos in the nineteenth century saw them as such, claiming that mixed racial people were inferior to White Europeans. As suggested by Fray Íñigo, the criollos in Puerto

Rico turned the insult on its head and made criollismo into a proud identity. Advocacy for Puerto Rico’s cultural uniqueness can be found in El gíbaro (1845),38 written by

Puerto Rican student Manuel Alonso during the last of his six years of studies in medicine in Barcelona. The book consists of a series of escenas, or scenarios, that represented typical life in Puerto Rico for the jíbaros or mountain peasants. Alonso wrote in Spanish with spelling that reproduced a pronunciation characteristic among

Puerto Rican mountain peasants:

“Escuche, compaire Pepe,” for “Escuche, compadre Pepe” “Lo que le boy á contal,” for “Lo que le voy a contar” “Que á aqueya maidita fiesta,” for “Que a aquella maldita fiesta” “Había sio combiao,” for “Había sido convidado”39

The author described local customs, town festivals, a cock fight, a marriage reception, and the most popular dances in what he called “the spirit of provincialism.” Woven throughout were references to the popular Catholic religion in the hinterland. The model of these escenas was taken from similar Romantic age literary descriptions of other regional folkloric customs within the rural regions of nineteenth century Spain.

Alonso’s book can be celebrated for successfully replicating a contemporary genre, the romanticized picture of folklore, and for framing a historical memoir of nineteenth- century Puerto Rico. Strikingly, this 1845 description of Puerto Rico’s language, dances, religious devotions and general attitudes of provincialism continued to be an accurate description of the island’s jíbaros or mountain dwellers as late as the 1950s.40 132

First published as a picturesque representation of folkloric practices in Puerto

Rico, by the time it was reissued in 1882, Alonso’s book had become a political weapon for a nascent Puerto Rican political class to press its case for recognition.41 Puerto

Rican leaders argued that the vital cultural idiosyncrasy depicted in books such as this proved that the island’s people were different from, but not inferior to, Spaniards. Just as the folklore of Spanish peasants had produced distinctive expressions in regions like

Catalonia, the Puerto Rican jíbaros were said to possess a form of Spanish folk identity, but one located in the New World. The comparison of Puerto Rican culture and identity to Spain’s had a political consequence, as we will now see.

Revolution in Spain and Emergent Nationalisms

The 1868 Puerto Rican revolt against Spain, known as the El Grito de Lares

(The Lares Outcry), collapsed within a week, but the uprising had been coupled with a similar and more successful war for independence in Cuba. Unrest in the colonies had a major impact on Spanish politics. The same year as El Grito de Lares, a Glorious

Revolution in Spain sent Queen Isabela II into exile in France,42 leaving the decision over who would govern in the hands of divided political groups. Reluctantly, they settled on a limited monarchy. Madrid was hardly stable, however. The next three decades would witness the political assassination of the head of the government in

1870; the importation of a new monarch, King Amadeo I from Sardinia, who subsequently quit in 1873; a short-lived Socialist Republic; and finally, government by self-interested political bosses, one of whom, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, was assassinated in 1897 while vacationing at a beach resort.43 The unstable government in 133

Spain eroded the confidence of many Puerto Ricans that Madrid could resolve the island’s economic, social and political problems.

The political force in Madrid most sympathetic to Puerto Rico’s needs came from the Spanish socialists, who had held power in 1873 under the short-lived First

Spanish Republic. The leader of the Republican Federal Party, Francisco Pi y Margall

(1824-1901), argued that national sovereignty resided in the provinces, adding that the will of the people would be best expressed in workers’ councils in each of the culturally distinct regions. The central government in Madrid, he stated, existed only to implement the decisions made in each province.44 The federal union was to be weaker than the regions, but it would serve the interests of cooperative union of diverse regions.45 As will be explored below, the federalism promoted by Pi y Margall would have allowed Puerto Rico and Cuba to achieve a measure of constitutional equality with other regions of Spain in the nineteenth century. Importantly, the islands of Puerto Rico and Cuba were to be considered nations, not just regions, and would have been placed on an even footing with the medieval realms of Catalonia, Castile and Aragon.46

Hispaniola did not entered into these negotiations, since Haiti, the western portion of the island, had gained its independence from France in 1804, and Santo Domingo had declared its independence from Spain in 1821 before succumbing to rule by Haiti.

Although Spain’s Glorious Revolution of 1868 resulted in parliamentary voting rights for Puerto Rico and Cuba, the political establishment in Madrid still insisted that only the political parties in Spain could nominate the island’s representatives, all of whom had to have been born in Spain. The measure was not well received by Puerto

Ricans and Cubans. If they were not allowed to choose their own officials to represent 134 them in Madrid, what purpose did voting serve? Worse yet, the patronage practices of

Spain’s corrupt machine politics made voting unrepresentative of the people’s interests, even in Spain.47 A farcical measure known as el partido de turno, whereby a confidential mutual agreement, rather than electoral results, would be the determining factor, was adopted to select the Spanish prime minister. As the name suggests, the parties took turns enforcing the same policies to preserve their power over patronage and preserved the structure of graft and governmental corruption, dividing the spoils between two party bosses.48 It was an eerie echo of the Republican machine in faraway

Philadelphia that in those same years awarded a share in patronage to the opposition’s

Democratic Party.

In 1886, Puerto Ricans formed the Puerto Rican Autonomist Party on the premise that it would nominate its own representatives and would not cast the six Puerto

Rican votes in the Spanish parliament for any prime minister who refused to recognize

Puerto Rican rights to equality.49 To strengthen that political demand, the Puerto Rican

Autonomist Party declared an economic boycott of Spanish imports. In reaction, the

Spanish Governor of the island implemented a plan of repression, the compontes.50

Rather than destroy the Puerto Rican Autonomist Party, however, as well might have been predicted by Gramsci, external coercion strengthened the party’s cohesion and its resistance to outside force. Finally, with Cuba in armed revolt, Spain agreed to meet the

Puerto Ricans’ demands, granting autonomist status to Puerto Rico in 1897. With considerable political skill and favored by circumstances, Puerto Rican leaders had finally secured from Spain comparable political representation with the mainland

Spanish provinces. The powers for the island government were negotiated by Luis 135

Muñoz Rivera (1859-1916) and included: i) home rule with elected officials; ii) common currency with Spain; iii) integrated defense with Spain’s army and navy; iv) common citizenship, allowing unimpeded migration between the countries; and v) allegiance to the same monarch.51 Lamentably, these newly acquired rights and privileges would be short-lived. The Spanish-Cuban War would shortly morph into the

Spanish-American War, with Puerto Rico and the Philippines becoming political casualties.

Catholicism and Nineteenth Century Spanish Politics

During the last third of the eighteenth century, religion had been conspicuously absent from politics, as both liberals and socialists in Spain and Puerto Rico were generally secular, when not also anti-clerical. Some entertained benign tolerance toward religion, as counseled by François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, who had argued in his Génie du christianisme (1802) that Napoleon’s lessening of the restrictions on religion had restored balance between rationalism and tradition, thus achieving social peace. Although some ecclesiastics advocated the traditionalist agenda of Pope Pius IX (pontiff from 1846 to 1878), few politicians of the time heeded the papal admonition to avoid any concessions to “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”52

There was, however, a strain of political progressiveness that was reconciled to the Catholic faith. At mid-century, the Catalan cleric, Jaime Balmes (1810-1848), had partnered with a renascent Catalan nationalism and presented Catholicism as a guide for modernization and as an “alternative to the suffocating centralization of the Spanish 136 state.”53 Balmes had suggested, for instance, that Catholic gremios, or guilds, were precursors of both socialism and democracy, because they had set a precedent for worker control over production with guarantees of decent wages along with education and medical care for their families.54 Balmes’ took his definitions of state authority from the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. His application to modern governments anticipated what has since become the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity.55 This principle states that power flows from the people to government only in the measure that they are willing to grant those powers to centralized authority.56 While in a contemporary

American political setting, this would resemble a conservative support for states’ rights, in Balmes’ Spain, it coincided with socialist opposition to liberalism in an effort to restore the local autonomy once enjoyed by Iberia’s medieval nations.

Balmes’ sudden death in 1848 came before Europe’s nationalist revolts and the

Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx. His advocacy for progressive Catholicism went generally unheeded in Spain. However, it had stronger echoes with theologians in

France, where he had met with Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (1802-

1861), and in Belgium, where he had spoken with the papal nuncio Gioacchino Pecci, who was later elected Pope Leo XIII and served as pontiff from 1878 to 1903. In

Puerto Rico, Balmes’ relevance came from his refutation of Protestantism’s claims to be the Christian basis for progress and liberal civic freedoms as found in his most famous work, El Protestantismo comparado con el catolicismo en sus relaciones con la civilización europea.

El Protestantismo was written as a rebuttal to the French Huguenot François

Guizot (1787-1874), who had stated that not only was Protestantism the highest form of 137

Christianity, but that liberal Protestantism was the guarantor of Western civilization because it had stimulated the entrepreneurial economic system of capitalism in Europe, established free systems of public education and promoted individual liberty as the foundation of democracy.57 Balmes attacked this reasoning by citing the poverty caused by capitalism and the erosion of family values which accompanied individualism. He countered the claim of inherent democracy within Protestantism by stating that Great

Britain’s imperial grip on Ireland was based on a denial of freedom to the conquered people. With this and other arguments, Balmes attacked Guizot’s claims about

Protestant superiority. Because Balmes also legitimized Catholic Ireland’s frequent rebellions against Protestant British imperialism under the theory of the just war, he was popular among Irish revolutionaries well into the twentieth century.58 American

Catholics also invoked Balmes’ reasoning to undercut Protestant claims of superiority over Catholicism.59 Importantly, Balmes was one of the first Neo-Thomists of his era and precursor of such twentieth-century thinkers as Jacques Maritain (1882-1973).60

Thus, this body of thought derived from Balmes’ philosophy placed limits on liberalism, capitalism and imperialism, in ways that complemented the concerns of

Puerto Rican leaders who opposed American imperialist rule.61

While recognizing its complexity, I consider this intellectual history important to understanding the thinking of the Young Lords. I argue that the political ideologies reflected in the writings and pronouncements of such Puerto Rican Catholic leaders José de Diego (1866-1918), and especially Pedro Albizu Campos (1891-1965) were adopted by the Young Lords. They benefitted from a notably sophisticated thinking about the benefits of socialism and nationalist autonomy. Spain would undergo a bitter civil war 138 and a dictatorship before achieving the federalist ideal. However, the aspirations of Pi y

Margall were vindicated by the current Spanish constitution and membership in the

European Union.62 In Puerto Rico, however, the Spanish socialist concept of an autonomous nation stayed constant, even after the United States’ invasion of the island in 1898. When Puerto Rican leaders sought the same level of freedom under the United

States that the island had achieved under Spain, they pursued that goal as an alliance between two equal and sovereign nations.63 Rather than assimilation of the island as another State of the American union, what these Puerto Rican leaders sought more closely resembled today’s European Union.

Before concluding this analysis of political authority in nineteenth-century

Puerto Rico, I wish to stress that, throughout the century, there was negligible participation in political battles by the ordinary people, and, most particularly, by the jíbaros. The policies and the patronage concessions were reserved for land-holders and professionals. When given a chance to vote in local elections, workers often sold their ballot in accord with the desires of their local patrón, and often for just enough money to buy a bottle of rum.64 When the U.S. took over the island, the peasants treated the new politics introduced by Americans with the same skepticism they had regarded much of Spanish governance before 1897.

Rather than a demonstration of ignorance about the political process, however, I consider such behavior from the jíbaros to have been a Gramscian good sense reaction to a colonial situation that denied them self-determination. The rural farm workers and freed slaves had legitimate reasons to remain skeptical of any benefit from politics, even when Puerto Rico’s upper-class elites or Americans substituted themselves for 139

Spaniards. The island’s elites, however, had acquired a new tool in the cultural icon of the jíbaro and would learn under the United States’ regime to cast their agenda for self- government as a struggle in the name of “the people.” The Young Lords would invoke this concept and imagery when they undertook collective actions in Philadelphia.

The United States Makes Puerto Rico its Colony

When, on July 25, 1898, the United States landed troops on Puerto Rico’s southern coast, 65 the invading force refused to recognize that Puerto Rico was not at war with Spain. It also denied the legitimacy of the island’s functioning autonomist government. Martial law was proclaimed, and Puerto Rico’s autonomous government was replaced by a military dictatorship. Legislation favorable to United States corporations was quickly enacted unilaterally by Washington, D.C. The rights to citizenship and self-governance, which had been won over the course of half a century of political struggles with Spain, were eliminated by the signing of the Organic Act of

1900. The island governor was not elected, but appointed by Washington. Only three native Puerto Ricans were allowed into the seven-member cabinet governing the island.

There was also an elected House of Deputies, but it had no legislative power to write legislation or pass laws, rendering it little more than a debating society.

In a concession to partisan criticism, an amendment was made to the Organic

Act of 1900, allowing for a Puerto Rican Resident Commissioner in Washington, D.C.

This commissioner would be elected by Puerto Ricans.66 The Resident Commissioner, however, had no vote in Congress and could not speak without asking permission. The first Puerto Rican to occupy this post was Luis Muñoz Rivera, who had previously 140 negotiated the original autonomist pact with Spain in 1897. Frustrated by the need to repeat this arduous process with the United States, he compared himself to the Greek mythical figure Sisyphus, who had rolled a huge stone to the top of a mountain only to have it roll down again.67

With all important policy made by fiat from Washington’s appointees, the

Puerto Rican House of Deputies had been intended by the United States to serve as a puppet government. However, island politicians successfully employed the skills gained in the struggle with Spain to register opposition at virtually every turn.68

Cultural warfare against Americanization provided political capital to Puerto Rican leaders. They issued a combative battle cry to protect 400 years of the Spanish language and culture against extinction by American overlords. In colorful imagery and elegant Spanish, a generation of poets and authors offered telling indictments against

U.S. rule over the island.69 This politically potent literature utilized themes such as

Puerto Rico’s legacy of chivalric honor, the ability to make “No!” into a political weapon, the natural beauty of the island as underappreciated by the new masters, and the wisdom of the jíbaro whose non-committal response to the machinations of politicians was a simple “Njú.”70 This patriotic literature began to include African culture as a third leg of Puerto Rican identity, along with the Spanish and the Native

Taíno. As Alonso had done in replicating the jíbaro’s pronunciation of Spanish, some

Puerto Rican writers would do the same for Afro-Puerto Ricans.71 The cultural resistance to imperialism that had begun against Spain resurfaced in opposition to

Americanization. 141

In 1912, when the Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected president, he set about revising the Republican Party’s colonial policies. The outcome of the first decades under the Republicans had been economically disastrous for Puerto Rico. By

1915, 85 percent of Puerto Rico’s arable land had passed into the ownership of six

American sugar corporations.72 Although the occupying force claimed otherwise, the

American invasion and the introduction of its rigorous capitalist system had impoverished the island and its people. While the Wilsonian reforms did not dislodge the capitalist exploitation of the island, United States citizenship was extended to Puerto

Ricans in 1917. On the legal premise that Puerto Rico was a colony and not a state, citizenship did not allow the islanders the right to vote for either the President of the

United States or their own governor. Only when Puerto Ricans left their island for the

United States could they gain electoral equality with other citizens. This became an important right for the Young Lords.

Despite Wilson’s political reforms, educational policies that had been instituted in 1900 continued. Even though public schools were funded by taxes placed on Puerto

Ricans, school administration was determined by a commissioner of education, the first of whom was Dr. M. G. Braumbaugh, later a governor of Pennsylvania (1915-1919).

The commissioner of education answered only to the Congress of the United States.

For half a century, Puerto Ricans would be denied any decision-making in the appointment of these commissioners; and up until 1921, all appointees would be non-

Puerto Ricans. Worse yet, English was instituted as the language of instruction, with

Spanish treated as an elective subject, a measure which lasted until 1948, when Spanish was restored as the island’s official language. The public-school curriculum imitated 142 lesson plans and used text books imported from the United States. Children in Puerto

Rico often dropped out of school, not because they rejected learning, but because they did not understand the teacher’s language and were uninterested in the subject matter.73

Moreover, private and religious-based schools used English to teach United States history and American culture, promoting Americanization as a source of social prestige.

There was an anti-Catholic and anti-Puerto Rican undercurrent in the rules set by the North American education establishment. For instance, public school teachers were ordered to hold classes on Three Kings Day, even though that day, January 6, rather than Christmas day, December 25, was the day that children received their holiday gifts in the Puerto Rican Catholic tradition. This stricture was intended not only to erode a cultural and traditional Puerto Rican Catholic practice, but to make Puerto

Ricans conform to the American practice of treating the Catholic Feast of the Epiphany as any other day in the secular calendar.

The systematic impoverishment of the island to benefit corporate profits was accompanied, therefore, by institutionalized attacks on culture, on Catholic religious identity and on traditional social institutions. Puerto Rican scholars, such as Aida

Negrón de Montilla, equated Americanization with an attempt to eliminate Puerto Rican identity.74 In many ways, the colonial status under Washington was worse than what had been endured under Spain. In essence, Puerto Ricans had no sovereignty and could not determine their own future. They were trapped in a colonial status, in which no matter how Puerto Ricans voted, all decision-making rested with the United States’

Congress alone. Later in the century, university scholar Antonio S. Pedreira would introduce his concept of “insularismo,” making the ominous prediction that Puerto 143

Rican vital culture would be displaced by a pragmatic “modernity” that ignored traditional values.75

The woes in Puerto Rico caused by United States rule are listed here because they explain why the Young Lords’ Party coupled their efforts to bring social justice to

Puerto Ricans living outside the island to the call for independence to end colonialism.

Much as Black Power theories in the 1960s attributed discrimination to the legacy of slavery, Puerto Rican independentistas viewed American imperialism as the cause of the injustices they suffered, whether on the island or on the mainland. Colonialism in

Puerto Rico had a counterpart in the internal colonialism for those considered to be people of color in the United States.76 As described below under the leadership of Pedro

Albizu Campos, the Young Lords in Philadelphia added faithfulness to Catholic principles to the cause of independence and social justice. This will be reflected in the interviews in the seventh and eighth chapters.

Pedro Albizu Campos and the Nationalist Party

The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party was founded in 1922, contemporaneous with many of the world’s nationalist movements.77 Not unexpectedly, it shares some common themes with its counterparts, including certain nationalist expressions that were manifest in European fascism.78 However, the relationship of the Puerto Rican movement to Catholicism and its denunciations of racial discrimination in the United

States are distinctive characteristics of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.

To better understand the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, I believe it necessary to focus on Pedro Albizu Campos (1891-1963), its president after 1930. Don Pedro, as he 144 is commonly referred to among Puerto Ricans, was born in 1891 out of an extra- matrimonial liaison between a White merchant and his Black mistress in Ponce, Puerto

Rico. In the legal system and Catholic traditions of the island, his birth and mixed-race heritage did not represent the same social impediment it would have represented had he been born in the United States.79 In 1913, he was awarded a scholarship from the

Masonic Lodge of his home city to pursue a college degree in engineering at the

University of Vermont. However, he switched schools and careers, enrolling as an undergraduate at Harvard and later securing his law degree there in 1922.

While pursuing his graduate studies in Cambridge, Albizu Campos was elected

President of Harvard’s prestigious Cosmopolitan Club, a post previously held by the future journalist of the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, the celebrated John Reed

(1887-1920). During Albizu Campos’ tenure as president, revolutionary leaders from around the world spoke at the Club’s meetings, including Éamon de Valera, who had escaped from the Lincoln Jail in Ireland, and Rabindranath Tagore, who was a spokesperson for Indian nationalism. These figures promoted resistance to imperialism, and that commitment became a prime component of Albizu Campos’ thought.

Relevant to the impact on the Young Lords, Albizu Campos re-embraced

Catholicism while a student at Harvard. A letter to Boston’s Cardinal from Father John

Ryan, the pastor of St. Paul’s Catholic Church, explained the success of the Spanish-

American Society in Cambridge to attract university students to Catholicism.80 Ryan had warm words for the founder of the society, Father Luis Rodes, a Spanish Jesuit priest and graduate student, who had befriended Albizu Campos and introduced him to the writings of Jaime Balmes.81 Juan Antonio Corretger (1908-1985), Albizu Campos’ 145 colleague in the Nationalist Party and his first biographer, stated the return to the

Church was not just a personal matter but a conversion that helped shape his political philosophy.82 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo has produced a transcript bearing Albizu

Campos’ name on a list of Third Degree Knights of Columbus of the Cambridge

Council. He presented evidence that support of those Knights of Columbus for the Irish

Rising against Great Britain in 1916 persuaded Don Pedro that Catholicism might play a similar role in support for a rebellion in Puerto Rico.83

Albizu Campos applied the concept of Catholic civilization to Puerto Rico’s colonial status, much as Balmes had done with Ireland’s subjugation by Protestant

Great Britain.84 However, Albizu Campos added racism to the list of reasons that

Puerto Rico could never be part of a Protestant empire. Citing decrees and concessions from Spanish history that recognized the practice of racial intermarriage, he contrasted the Catholic ideal with the harsh treatment of African Americans in the segregationist southern states. Don Pedro’s opinion that the two civilizations were incompatible was supported by the Mexican philosopher and Pan-Americanist José Vasconcelos (1882-

1959), who toured Puerto Rico in 1926 and praised Albizu Campos’ promotion of

Puerto Rico’s Catholic identity.85 A review of Don Pedro’s speeches and writings offer evidence that religion became a guiding force for his view of Puerto Rico’s liberation struggle. The influence of Balmes’ El Protestantismo on Don Pedro was augmented by

Dutch Dominican friars who provided Thomistic reasoning for contemporary issues of social justice.86

The vitality of this progressive strain of Catholicism resulted in the unity within the Nationalist Party of left-wing communists and Hispanophile right-wing Catholics. 146

It was a remarkable achievement that benefitted from the disenchantment of the 1930s with Puerto Rico’s stale political parties, while demonstrating the originality of Albizu

Campos’ political philosophy. 87 He unified factions by choosing issues that appealed to all of them. A prime example is the issue of birth control. Margaret Sanger’s (1879-

1966) arguments for sterilization as cornerstone for birth control had been urged on

Puerto Rico as early as 1922 and had been promoted as the means to eliminate poverty among the island’s mixed-race population.88 Opposition to sterilization certainly appealed to the Hispanophile right-wing Catholics in the party, who viewed it as sinful.

In fact, the issue of Catholic opposition to all forms of birth control would resurface in the 1960 elections, both in Puerto Rico and the United States.89 When it came to birth control on the island, the leftist faction of Nationalists was not mobilized by a Catholic concept against sin, but rather by opposition to genocide represented in the promotion of birth control and sterilization as eugenic measures.

The issue of genocide decisively vaulted the Nationalist Party and Albizu

Campos into public awareness when they unearthed a scandal by the Rockefeller

Foundation. In 1932, Doctor Cornelius Packard Rhoads, a researcher at the

Presbyterian Hospital in San Juan, wrote a personal letter to his friend, “Ferdie.” The letter indicated that the doctor enjoyed his work and, to further the project, had injected

Puerto Rican subjects with carcinogens and then denied them treatment in order to study the results. To make matters worse, he boasted in racially offensive words that eight subjects had died at his hand.90 Left uncovered on the doctor’s desk, the letter fell into the hands of a nationalist patriot working at the hospital, who forwarded a copy to

Albizu Campos. In turn, Don Pedro made the contents of the letter known to the 147

Vatican, League of Nations, Pan American Union, American Civil Liberties Union and the island’s press. When the governor hastily ordered Rhoads to leave the island, the public credited the Nationalists for having denounced what seemed a genocidal strategy against Puerto Ricans.91 The Tuskegee experiment on African American subjects who were injected with syphilis began that same year, underscoring the pervasiveness of racism in the United States in 1932.

In Puerto Rico, this sequence of events gave impetus to the candidacy of Albizu

Campos for that year’s elections for the House of Deputies. However, the island’s

American governor interfered by denying the transmission of the party’s message by radio and a prohibiting the use of a Puerto Rican flag as the logo to guide any voter in the choice of party. The disappointing results convinced the Nationalists to operate ever afterwards outside electoral politics.92

Catholic Rebellion in Arms

In 1934, the Nationalists supported a strike against the corporation controlling

Puerto Rico’s electricity, while in 1935, they supported striking sugar cane workers.

The party members donned black-shirted uniforms for some of its public events and adopted elements of a para-military organization. There were echoes in the actions of the Nationalists of the preparations by the Irish Republic Army for the rebellion of

1916. 93 Like their Irish counterparts, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party issued war bonds in the name of the expected republic.94 Albizu Campos not only saw armed rebellion against a Protestant invader as legitimate and justified for a mostly Catholic nation, but noted how the revolt had been timed for Britain’s engagement in the First 148

World War.95 He intended an armed uprising in Puerto Rico to coincide with the

Second World War and thus force concessions from the United States, much as the First

World War had done in Ireland when Great Britain feared dividing its military attentions on two fronts.96

The rising visibility of the Nationalists and public admiration toward their tough line against North American imperialism sounded alarm bells in Washington. On orders from J. Edgar Hoover, a corps of G-Men under the command of Francis Riggs was sent to Puerto Rico to dismantle the Nationalist Party.97 Assassinations and violent reprisals on both sides ensued, resulting in the arrest of Albizu Campos and associates in 1937. Albizu Campos was eventually found guilty of sedition in what many viewed as a rigged trial.98 In an appeal to the public against the sentence, Nationalist Party leaders secured permission from the municipality of Ponce for a rally to be held outside the cathedral after Palm Sunday Mass, on March 21, 1937. However, the island governor, Blanton Winship, abruptly annulled the permit and lined the street with a contingent of police, who shockingly fired on the crowd, killing 19 Nationalists. This event is known is in the history of the island as “The Ponce Massacre.” Garfield Hayes, of the American Civil Liberties Union, led an independent investigation of the event that held the governor culpable. Neither this finding nor the public’s outcry, however, could overturn Albizu Campos’s conviction of sedition. Together with the key leaders of the party, he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, lasting until 1948.

The frontal attack on the Nationalists illustrates Gramsci’s principle that state coercion is a sign of a weakened hegemony.99 In Puerto Rico, the Nationalist Party’s message had undermined the regime’s control of public opinion by defending Puerto 149

Rican rights and assuming the defiant public posture of a sovereign nation that had been unjustly invaded. Finally, they mounted para-military capabilities that resonated with the preparations the Irish patriots had taken. The response to growing public sentiment against colonial control over Puerto Rican society was a deadly application of force against the Nationalists. In the end, despite defeat Don Pedro was transformed into a political icon, with symbolic influence that transcended the historical events. The

Young Lords would later interpret the confrontation by Albizu Campos and the

Nationalists as examples of patriotic heroism in the face of imperialist oppression.

Puerto Rico’s Partido Popular and the New Deal

The New Deal and political autonomy came to Puerto Rico with the political rise of Luis Muñoz Marín (1898-1980). As a young man, he had forged close links to the Fabian Society, a British socialist organization whose purpose was to advance the principles of democratic socialism through a gradual and reformist effort in democracies. Muñoz Marín ultimately found his way into the good graces of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal Administration. In the aftermath of the

Ponce Massacre, the White House sought a more moderate Puerto Rican leader who could calm the popular demands for independence, and Muñoz Marín’s friends brought him to the Washington’s attention. It is my belief that if Albizu Campos and his followers had not threatened revolution, Muñoz Marín would not have so readily gained this political opportunity.100

Muñoz Marín brought the New Deal to Puerto Rico in the form of relief supplies and free food.101 In the process, he built his own political base upon the foundations left 150 by his father, Luis Muñoz Rivera, the Autonomist Party leader under Spain who had become Puerto Rico’s first Resident Commissioner in the United States Congress. In

1938, the young Muñoz Marín formed his own party, Partido Popular Democrático

(Popular Democratic Party), often referred to as the “populares.” As the new party’s logo, he chose the profile in red of the jíbaro, encircled with the slogan “Pan, Tierra y

Libertad” (Bread, Land and Freedom). From his seat in the legislature, he advocated seizure of the land held by the United States sugar corporations and its redistribution to the peasants.102

His socialist tendencies evaporated during the post-war economic boom in the

United States. Muñoz Marín promoted instead a capitalist investment strategy for

Puerto Rico known as Fomento, or “Operation Bootstrap” in English. In effect, it was a modernized version of the nineteenth-century Decree of Concessions under Spain which had offered economic benefits to Spaniards who would create industries in

Puerto Rico. Because Puerto Rico was now a United States colony, there were no tariffs imposed on Puerto Rican products exported to the United States. Further, wages were lower on the island than on the mainland, and the government volunteered to construct infrastructure to accommodate island investments. Thus, manufacturers who produced their goods in Puerto Rico could lower production. As with the Decree of

Concession under Spain, however, these benefits were not extended to native-born investors. In the final analysis, Operation Bootstrap increased control over Puerto Rico from outside corporations, benefitting Puerto Ricans only by trickle-down economics.103

Lamentably, features of Operation Bootstrap have ever since been incorporated into a 151 neo-colonial model for globalization, while most of the manufacturing enterprises have left the island.

Political equality was yet another issue Muñoz Marín addressed. In 1950, he secured permission from Congress to convoke a constitutional assembly in the island to install self-government. He cast his efforts under American rule as a fulfillment of the autonomist status that Puerto Rico had briefly enjoyed with Spain through his father’s efforts. Hawaii submitted a petition for statehood to Congress in that same year of

1950, meanwhile arguing that geographical contiguity with the other 48 states was not required for incorporation into the union. Fearing that autonomy would eventually become statehood, a newly pardoned Albizu Campos organized an armed insurrection in the mountain town of Jayuya on October 30, 1950 to forestall further assimilation.104

The insurrection was quickly squashed, and Don Pedro was reincarcerated, but not before two Puerto Rican Nationalists attempted to assassinate American President Harry

Truman. By discrediting the Nationalists and rejecting the cause of Puerto Rican independence in favor of the half-way measure of self-government, Muñoz Marín assured himself of Washington’s support.105 On July 25, 1952, exactly 54 years to the day after the United States invaded the island, Puerto Rico became the Estado Libre

Asociado (Free Asssociated State).106 The Nationalists were relentless in their opposition, however. The new status was not even two years old when, on March 1,

1954, four Nationalists fired thirty pistol shots in the House of Representatives, proclaiming that they acted for the freedom of the Puerto Rican people.107 The four were captured and imprisoned. The actions of resistance may be considered prophetic 152 since neither the new status nor the economic program ended colonialism. Rather, these measures resulted in a subtler, yet more suffocating form.108

In 1954, while in prison, Albizu Campos suffered a stroke. Though he was greatly admired by Puerto Ricans in general, imprisonment and poor health took a toll on his role as a political figure. He died in 1965. Six years before, in 1959, the struggles lead by Fidel Castro in Cuba had resulted in the successful installation of a revolutionary Cuban government. These events had an impact on the independence movement in Puerto Rico. In effect, the movement shifted away from the Nationalist model in defense of Catholic civilization and identified itself with a Communist revolution. As suggested above, however, Don Pedro remained a political icon to the advocates of independence and self-determination of the island, even though his party lost the viability and visibility of earlier times. In the mainland, Albizu Campos’s legacy was kept alive, particularly among young Puerto Rican professionals and students in high school and universities. The Young Lords in Philadelphia would be asked to choose between the model of Catholic nationalism of Pedro Albizu Campos and the Communist Revolution espoused by the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.

The Great Puerto Rican Migration

The term, “Great Puerto Rican Migration” first appears in 1982 in an article on

Puerto Rican migration by Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo and Ana María Díaz-

Ramírez.109 They examined official Puerto Rican data from 1940 to 1970 for the recorded net migration to the United States, that is, the total number of Puerto Ricans moving from the island to the mainland minus those returning to the island during the 153 same period. They noted a dramatic rise in those leaving Puerto Rico that began in

1946 and continued until 1964, when the numbers of migrants from the island returned to the same level as the starting point in 1946. They noted that Puerto Rican migration for those eighteen years formed a nearly perfect Bell Curve, a sociological term used to describe a pattern of symmetrical expansion and then retraction.110 Previous analysis of out-migration in only ten-year cycles had hidden the dynamics of the eighteen-year period. In other words, by lumping the war years, 1940 until 1945 with the post-war period, 1945 until 1950, the ten-year reports partially hid the dramatic increase. The same was partially true for the period 1960 until 1964 which had higher totals than the rest of the decade of the 1960s.

Puerto Ricans had come to the United States before 1946, of course, and

Stevens-Arroyo and Díaz-Ramírez named this migration flow the “Pioneer Migration,” noting that Puerto Rican immigrants of that period were funneled into a Pan-Hispanic experience. They gave the name of “Revolving Door Migration” to the constant movement between island and mainland that followed immediately after the Great

Puerto Rican migration and that mostly responded to the volatile economic conditions of the late 1960s and 1970s.

The Great Puerto Rican Migration, however, had unique characteristics. In that period, 40 percent of the entire population of Puerto Rico migrated to the United

States.111 The only precedent for such a massive immigration in two decades was the

Irish experience in the nineteenth century. In Puerto Rico, however, it was not famine, but planned industrialization that displaced the population. Because the government’s economic plan, Fomento, did not attract new factory jobs fast enough to meet the 154 numbers of jíbaros abandoning agriculture for industry, the result was a mass of

“redundant workers.”112 Simultaneously, there was a shortage of factory workers in the post-war United States after 1946, when GIs returning from the war sought better and higher paying jobs than those that their parents had occupied. Thus, the economic changes in East Coast cities that chased a largely White population to the suburbs, attracted an influx of displaced workers from Puerto Rico.

The conditions for the Great Migration drew to an end in 1964 when Muñoz

Marín served the last year of his consecutive terms as governor. Puerto Ricans in

Philadelphia could no longer rely on their familiarity with the populares and their political machine. Simultaneously, their identification with mainland policies was intensified by the opportunities offered by the 1964 federal legislation of the War on

Poverty, which helped create new opportunities for advancement among Puerto Ricans residing in the United States. The next year, the Immigration and Naturalization Act removed the previous quota system and permitted large numbers of immigrants from

Latin America. This Latin American immigration influx diluted the demographic prominence that Puerto Ricans had held as a Hispanic group, particularly in the northeastern part of the country. However, on account of the large numbers produced by the Great Migration, Puerto Ricans maintained greater visibility as the oldest and most acculturated segment of the Hispanic population in many eastern cities.

Additionally, their citizenship afforded them rights that Latin American immigrants could not enjoy.113 Finally, the Voting Rights Act in the same year of 1965 removed the language barrier against Puerto Rican participation in mainland politics by requiring that ballots be printed in Spanish. The measure facilitated greater Puerto Rican 155 participation in the electoral process and thrust them into local politics as a potentially partisan voting bloc.

In sum, I treat the Great Puerto Rican Migration as a turning event in the island’s colonial history. It created a diaspora of the island’s people, much as the Great

Famine had for the Irish in the nineteenth century. Ireland, of course, secured its independence, while Puerto Rico has remained without sovereign powers to set its own destiny. As seems to be the case with the families of the Young Lords I interviewed, these events are indelibly printed upon my own family history. I can place the Arroyo part of my family that settled in Philadelphia within the Pioneer Migration that came in the early decades of the twentieth century and worshiped at La Milagrosa Chapel with other Hispanics. The Great Puerto Rican Migration, meanwhile, was the experience of the Díaz-Ramírez, my mother’s family. The first four members to arrive from my mother’s side came from 1946 to 1948 and were joined by the remaining six members during the peak month and year of migration, May of 1953.114 Some of my cousins who were born and educated in Puerto Rico between the decades of 1970 to 2000 became part of the Revolving Door Migration, which has been a form of “Brain Drain.” The island simply does not offer the kind and number of working opportunities needed to satisfy this better educated segment of the population, compelling them to seek employment not only in the northeastern states but in other places, such as Florida,

Oregon and Washington State.115 In each of these episodes of migrations, there are

“human faces” hidden behind the numbers; thus, consideration of the personal dimensions enriches analysis of religion’s role for Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia.116

156

The Great Puerto Rican Migration and Philadelphia

Philadelphia experienced the Great Puerto Rican Migration but with its own significant local characteristics. For instance, the migration that began in 1946 had no appreciable impact on Philadelphia until after 1950. That year’s census registered only

1,910 Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia. Those numbers increased by 13.6 percent in 1951, by another 20 percent in 1952 and by 37.7 percent in 1953. In raw numbers, this resulted in a total of 7,300 Puerto Ricans in the city when, following the turbulent incidents in the Spring Garden area described in the previous chapter, the Human

Relations Commission undertook its study of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia.117 The numbers in Philadelphia paled in comparison with those in the Greater New York

Metropolitan, where 455,000 Puerto Ricans resided at the same time. Philadelphia’s numbers were considerably behind Chicago also, which was then home to an estimated

20,000 Puerto Ricans.118

The authors of the 1954 report offered a prediction for Puerto Rican demographic growth in Philadelphia for 1960 based on three different projection models: low growth, which they thought would result in only 8,900 Puerto Ricans; middle growth, with a projection of 15,400; and high rapid growth, reaching 25,800.119

These estimates cannot be tested for accuracy because the 1960 census did not include an item on either Puerto Rican or Hispanic origin. We know, however, that the Puerto

Rican population in the Spring Garden neighborhood grew from 1.2 percent in 1950 to

25.6 percent of the total local residents in 1960.120 By 1970, some six years after the end of the Great Puerto Rican Migration, the total number of Puerto Ricans in

Philadelphia had reached 45,796, which nearly doubled the “high” growth estimate for 157

1960 which had been made by the Human Relations Commission in 1954. Even with the downturn during the Revolving Door Migration, by 1980 the Puerto Rican population of Philadelphia had grown 29 percent, to 63,570, and at a faster rate than that in New York.121

In their 1954 report, the Human Relations Commission listed Puerto Rican electoral participation in Philadelphia at 32.5 percent of the total Puerto Rican population of voting age in the city. This percentage is significantly lower than the typical 85 percent or more of those reported to have voted in island elections in Puerto

Rico for the same period. Obviously, Puerto Rican voter participation in Philadelphia was closer but still lower than the voter participation of the general population in the

United States, which commonly hovers around only 50 percent. Since Puerto Ricans are United States citizens, when they reside in the mainland, they have the right to vote without undergoing any naturalization process. But if Puerto Ricans traditionally have a higher voting participation record in the island, why did their electoral participation in

Philadelphia drop by 50 percent in 1954? I challenge the suggestion that the cause for low voter patterns in 1954 year was a cultural lack of political maturity among Puerto

Ricans. A more sensible way to interpret the 1954 report about a lack of political engagement, I think, is to put the onus on the city’s system of electoral politics. If

Philadelphia’s political machine had been more powerful in 1954, it might have brought more Puerto Ricans to the polls. It might also have produced some Puerto Rican ward leaders to squeeze benefits for the community from patronage. This, after all, was what

Du Bois had reported as the advantages offered by the city machine to African

Americans and what had brought a larger percentage of them to participate in the 158 electoral process at the turn of the century.122 The Puerto Ricans of the Great Migration, however, arrived in Philadelphia after the charter reform of 1951, when the political machine was not as potent as it had been during the first half of the century.

The Human Relations’ Commission lamented that half of the Puerto Ricans did not speak English well or at all.123 The authors thought an inability to speak English explained not only the low voting participation but also the low access rates to city services and inferior educational performance. Language was also presented as the key to educational effectiveness. The report recommended the recruitment of bilingual teachers and aides for Philadelphia public school classrooms. That reasonable measure, however, was paired with a suggestion that the island culture had negatively impacted

Puerto Ricans’ attitudes toward education. This opinion was based on the report’s finding that 46.6 percent of Philadelphia’s adult Puerto Ricans had only a fifth-grade education, or less, when they arrived.124 Supposedly, the parents’ lack of education inclined them to undervalue education for their children. In other words, the claim was that the lack of educational achievement among Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia was rooted in deficient cultural values that the parents passed on to their children.

The supposition that Puerto Ricans generally undervalue education is questionable. I note that English, and not Spanish, was the official language of instruction in all classrooms on the island. This language preference was foisted on the public schools even though, before 1950, over 90 percent of the Puerto Rican island population did not speak English. 125 Rather than fault Puerto Ricans for lack of interest in education, Aida Negrón de Montilla blames low educational attainments on the pedagogical blunder of attempting to teach Puerto Rican students in a language that was 159 not their own.126 Noting that Americans controlled the Puerto Rican educational system

-- including the hiring of teachers, the appointment of the administrators, the choice of books and other teaching tools, the language for instruction, and the curriculum -- she concluded that desertion from these linguistically alien schools represented resistance to the American imperialism.127

Racial Perceptions of Puerto Ricans in the 1950s

The 1954 Report of the Human Relations Commission examined how

Philadelphians viewed Puerto Ricans racially. A third of the non-Puerto Rican respondents considered Puerto Ricans to be “Colored,” while another third considered them to be “some White and some Colored.” One quarter of the Philadelphia respondents considered Puerto Ricans “to have their own color.” Only 7 percent of these non-Puerto Ricans considered Puerto Ricans to be White, while the rest, 1.4 percent, “did not know.”128 Interestingly, while only 7 percent of the non-Puerto Rican

Philadelphians interviewed identified Puerto Ricans as White, 84.5 percent of the field staff conducting the face-to-face interviews reported Philadelphia’s Puerto Ricans were

White.129 Based on this data, one may wonder what made the interviewees see Puerto

Rican mostly as Colored, when the interviewers saw them as White.

As already explained, race and ethnicity were closely tied in Philadelphia to residential patterns in the row-house neighborhoods. Whalen’s interview with 1940s

Puerto Rican migrants to Philadelphia reflected such racial issues. One woman reported:

Housing was very scarce. There wasn’t housing because it was all White, it was White, all of the streets White, the houses. They were White with blue eyes. They didn’t want to rent houses to others. So, even me, I didn’t get an apartment. I had to take a -- a Black woman 160

had a house and she rented rooms -- so she rented me a room …. “No, no, no, no, we don’t want no children.” It was not the children like they said, it was more the color.130

The likelihood of African-Americans’ willingness to rent to Puerto Ricans reflected in this quote is corroborated by the findings of the 1954 report. The research shows that, within the existing racial borders at that time, African Americans were the group of

Philadelphians most likely to accept Puerto Ricans into their neighborhoods.131

The religious and ethnic homogeneity in many of Philadelphia neighborhoods’ sometimes placed barriers against new or different groups taking up residence alongside an entrenched population. As remarked in the previous chapter, although the Arroyos were light-skinned Puerto Ricans, they experienced conflicts when living in Nicetown because they belonged neither to the Irish or Polish communities already established there. These negative attitudes toward Puerto Ricans are further reflected in a 1958 report from the Friends Neighborhood Guild, as cited by Whalen:

The Puerto Ricans just do not want to work in many cases and they really need the jobs. The excuses they invent as to why they didn’t need that particular job all cover up the underlying fact that they are very lazy and would prefer to think of ways to collect relief money not doing anything than look for jobs …. It all has to do with the greatest factor of all we must cope with in dealing with the Puerto Rican, the Latin mentality and the Latin tradition which is against work and which sees fit to have the women of the lower class bring in the pay while the man sits home.132

The negative attitudes reflected here are reminiscent of those espoused by Puerto Rico’s

Spanish colonial governors who had waged war on supposed vagrancy in the colonial era.

In sum, the Puerto Ricans who came to Philadelphia in the 1950s confronted a city population with growing racial awareness, but one that demonstrated confusion 161 when it came to the racial classification of Puerto Ricans. Racial prejudice generally prevented Puerto Ricans from obtaining housing in certain neighborhoods, while also affected the delivery of services they needed from some city agencies and from the public school system. Measures taken to address these issues met with varying degrees of success but were never sufficient to eradicate the problems. The next chapter will examine the response from Catholics to minister, spiritually and socially, to Puerto

Ricans in Philadelphia amid these circumstances.

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Endnotes to Chapter 5

1 Most Puerto Rican history books are written in Spanish. They fall into two types: general and comprehensive histories, which are often text books, and topical examinations of industries like coffee or sugar, often within a given historical period. Of the first type in Spanish: Blanca G. Silvestrini and María Dolores Luque de Sánchez. Historia de Puerto Rico: trayectoria de un pueblo (San Juan: Editorial Cultural Puertorriqueña, 1987), and Francisco Scarano. Puerto Rico: Cinco siglos de historia (New York: McGraw-Hill,1993). Two texts in English are useful and will be cited below: Loida Figueroa, History of Puerto Rico (New York: Anaya Press, 1972), and Arturo Morales Carrión, Puerto Rico: A Political and Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton,1983). Topical works with relevance to popular Catholicism, include those by Fernando Picó, SJ: Libertad y servidumbre en el Puerto Rico del siglo XIX (Rio Piedras: Ediciones Huracán, 1981), Amargo café: los pequeños y medianos caficultores de Utuado en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX (Río Piedras: Ediciones Huracán, 1981), and Al filo del poder: subalternos y dominantes en Puerto Rico, 1739-1910 (Río Piedras: Colección Caribeña, Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993). The Commonwealth status and its politics are examined from a North American point of view by Henry Wells, The Modernization of Puerto Rico: A Political Study of Changing Values and Institutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), and from a class perspective by Manuel Maldonado Denis, Puerto Rico: una interpretación histórico-social (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno,1969). Translated as Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, (New York: Vintage Books, 1972). On the history of institutional religion, the works of Samuel Silva Gotay are indispensable: Protestantismo y política en Puerto Rico: 1898-1930 (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1997), and Catolicismo y política en Puerto Rico: bajo España y Estados Unidos, Siglos XIX y XX (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2005).

2 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 16-25.

3 See Figueroa, History of Puerto Rico, 70-75.

4 For a detailed analysis of the general literature on Puerto Rico’s stages of economic development, see James L. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

5 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 142. In 1586, it was designated as payment from Mexico. For the size of the subsidy in various years, see Chart 6.1, 143.

6 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 102-104.

7 Figueroa, History of Puerto Rico, 137-143.

8 Torres y Vargas, Don Diego. Report on the Island and Diocese of Puerto Rico (1647) Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo and Ana María Díaz-Stevens, eds., trans. Jaime R. Vidal. (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2010).

9 Fray Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra, Historia geográfica, civil y natural de la isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico (San Juan: Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1959). The original manuscript of 1782 was published in 1788 in Madrid.

10 In Puerto Rico, the term more frequently employed in colonial historical documents was “pardo,” rather than “mestizo.” See Figueroa, History of Puerto Rico, 137-143.

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11 Torres y Vargas, Report on the Island and Diocese of Puerto Rico (1647), 106-107, 170-171, 187-189, 218-219.

12 Torres y Vargas, Report on the Island and Diocese of Puerto Rico (1647), 92-93; Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 175-180.

13 “Dan el nombre de criollos indistintamente a todos los nacidos en la Isla de cualquiera casta o mezcla de que provengan. A los europeos llaman blancos, o usando de su misma expresión, hombres de la otra banda.” Abbad y Lasierra, Historia geográfica, 181.

14 Ana María Díaz-Stevens and Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo. “Religion in Spanish Colonial America in 1790,” in The Cambridge History of Religions in America. Volume I: Pre-Columbian Times to 1790, ed. Stephen J. Stein (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 634-660.

15 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 200-205.

16 The word gíbaro or jíbaro is of uncertain derivation, possibly from a corruption of a term from the indigenous Taíno language for “mountain.” See Cayetano Coll y Toste, Prehistoria de Puerto Rico (Bilbao: Editorial Vasco Americano, 1897), 234.

17 Both developed a culture with unique characteristics. I consider “hillbilly” to be a better equivalent for jíbaro than the term, “redneck.” The isolation in the mountains of Puerto Rico meant that the jíbaro did not measure status in comparison with Blacks as was done by White agricultural workers in the American deep south. The term “redneck” od derogatory today, but the word, used to designate White workers whose necks turned red as they worked perhaps in the same fields worked by former slaves, can also be claimed as proof of membership in a presumed superior race. See Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. (New York: Viking, 2016).

18 This general topographical description of the racial composition of workers in Puerto Rico is not meant to assert that all workers in the coffee industry were “White” or jíbaros, or those in the sugar industry were “Black,” but that they were so in the majority.

19 See Chapter 4 of this dissertation.

20 Figueroa, History of Puerto Rico, 137-139; Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 224-231.

21 For the application of the term “la España boba” to Spain from 1803 to 1831, see Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National History (Princeton: Marcus Weiner Publishers, 1998), 117-123.

22 This term ought not be translated as “creole,” since the term in English usually denotes a person of mixed race. Criollo in Spanish is generally used for persons of the White race who were born in Spanish America. “Historical Research on Race Relations in Latin America During the National Period,” in Race and Class in Latin America, ed. Magnus Mörner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 204-05 ftn. 11.

23 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 192-195.

24 The Bando Negro edict was issued by Governor Juan Prim y Prats in 1848 to combat possible insurrection. See Figueroa, History of Puerto Rico, 225-230.

164

25 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 243-251.

26 Fernando Portuondo, Historia de Cuba, 1492-1898. (Havana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 1965) 345.

27 The Puerto Rican uprising began in the mountain town of Lares on September 23, 1868. It was suppressed within days, however, both because the Spanish operated an effective spy system, and because the rebels proclaiming a republic were unable to hide from the army that hunted them down in the Puerto Rican countryside. In contrast, the larger island of Cuba was able to carry on armed insurrection for ten years after October 11, 1868 because rebel troops could hide in the densely wooded mountainous region in southeastern Cuba. This strategy was successfully repeated in the war for Cuban independence that began in 1895 and, later on, in the 1959 Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro. It is to be noted that slavery officially ended in Puerto Rico in March 22, 1873, four and half years after the Lares uprising and eight years after it ended in the United States.

28 The 1841 decree from Governor Miguel López de Baños (1838-1841) was entitled “Bando de Policía y Buen Gobierno.” It was intended to install liberalizing measures for the labor force on this island to combat vagrancy. See Figueroa, History of Puerto Rico, 203-208 and Morales Carrion, Puerto Rico: A Political and Cultural History, 105-06.

29 Figueroa, History of Puerto Rico, 230-235.

30 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 258-279.

31 Abbad y Lasierra, Historia geográfica, civil y natural, 181.

32 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 251-256.

33 Samiri Hernández Hiraldo, Black Puerto Rican Identity and Religious Experience (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006).

34 Devotion to Monserrate originated in Catalonia, Spain, where she is known as Monserrat. I recognize that the devotion to this Madonna and eighteenth-century Puerto Rican celebrations did not achieve the universal prominence of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, where Mary, imaged as an Indian- and-Spanish mestiza Madonna, personified racial harmony and Mexican nationalism. Nonetheless, Puerto Rican Catholicism professed religious symbols favorable to interracial solidarity in the island. For the importance of Our Lady of Guadalupe among Mexican people, see Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); David A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

35 Adán Stevens-Díaz, “The Racialization of Images of Mary in Baroque Latin America.” Paper presented at the Annual Spring Meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association, Princeton University, March 13, 2010. See also, Mervyn C. Alleyne, The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World. (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2002), 116-128.

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36 Adán Stevens-Díaz, “Caribbean Religious Culture and Influence,” in Encyclopedia of Religion in America, eds. Charles Lippy and Peter Williams (Newbury Park, CA: CQ Press, Sage Publications, 2010) Vol. 1, 404-411.

37 Frederick F. Wherry, The Philadelphia Barrio: The Arts, Branding and Neighborhood Transformation, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 33-47.

38 Manuel A. Alonso, El gíbaro: cuadro de costumbres de la isla de Puerto Rico (Barcelona: D. Juan Oliveres, 1849). Facsimile edition: (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1967). A more common spelling today is “jíbaro,” although the word would be pronounced the same.

39 Alonso, El gíbaro, 122-23.

40 This is the opinion of Ana María Díaz-Stevens in Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 39-59, citing among others, Picó, Libertad y servidumbre, 144ff.

41 El gíbaro projects a romantic view of a peasant in the tradition of the noble savage taken from Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, had developed the concept from Rousseau’s philosophy and was influential in supporting a positive view of Puerto Rican culture. Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 275-279.

42 Joseph August Brandt, Toward the New Spain: The Spanish Revolution of 1868 and the First Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933; Reprint, Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1976), 84-111.

43 Brandt, Toward the New Spain, 147-253. The first government leader assassinated was Juan Prim y Prats, who had been the Governor of Puerto Rico in 1848 and was author of the infamous Black Ban.

44 Brandt, Toward the New Spain, 119-125. In 1854, the Catalan leader, published his book in Barcelona, five years before Proudhon advanced his theory.

45 Since there was no republican constitution that had yet been written, the post Pi y Margall held was not officially that of the presidency. Although there were similarities, the Spanish Republican Federalists’ principles of cooperation differed from the proposals of the French anarchist, Pierre- Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865). Proudhon intended the revolutionary workers’ councils to govern in place of other institutions. See also, Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955), 1, 22.

46 “The organization most adequate to the disposition of our country, a nation formed of provinces which were, in another time, independent kingdoms and which are even today separated by that which removes one city from all other cities, law and custom. This nation presents in all the great crises through which it has passed in this century the special phenomenon of its provinces making haste to seek their salvation and their force within themselves, without having compromised or lost the view of the unity of the fatherland.” Francisco Pi y Margall, Las nacionalidades (3rd edition, Madrid, 1882), 113. Cited in Brandt, Toward the New Spain, 120 ftn. 14.

47 Brandt, Toward the New Spain, 29-28.

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48 José Ramón Milán García, “La revolución entra en palacio. El liberalismo dinástico de Sagasta (1875- 1903)” Logroño: Dialnet Berceo (139:2000) 93-122, accessed August 22, 2016, https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=61948.

49 Lidio Cruz Monclova, Historia del Año de 1887 (Río Piedras: Editorial Universitaria, 1958).

50 Puerto Rican journalists and labor leaders were imprisoned on trumped up charges; students and other patriots were kidnapped from their homes, taken to remote areas where they were tortured, and eventually had their bodies --some dead, some alive-- dumped on city streets by clandestine agents of the Spanish government. See Cruz Monclova, Historia del Año de 1887, 43-99.

51 The island was also given control over its own educational system, customs house and post office. Home rule also meant that it could pass its own laws and collect taxes for imported and exported products.

52 Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura (December 8, 1864), commonly referred to as “Syllabus of Errors,” 80. See Brandt, Toward the New Spain, 126-135.

53 Jaime Luciano Antonio Balmes y Urpià, El Protestantismo comparado con el catolicismo y sus Relaciones con la Civilización Europea. Edición moderna, Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1968. Originally printed in Barcelona: Imprenta de José Tauló, 1842. Balmes’ work coincided with the socio-cultural movement of the Renaixença, which was launched with the publication of a poem, “La Patria.” written by Bonaventura Carles Aribau, (1789-1862). It was fostered by Lo Gayter del Llobregat (1818-1899), writing under the pseudonym, Joaquim Rubió I Ors. See Genís Barnosell, “'Libertad, Igualdad, Humanidad'. La construcción de la democracia en Cataluña (1839-1843),” in La redención del pueblo. La cultura progresista en la España liberal, Manuel Suárez Cortina, ed. (Santander, Universidad de Cantabria, 2006), 145-182; Florencia Peyrou, El republicanismo popular en España, 1840-1843 (Cádiz, Universidad de Cádiz, 2004).

54 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, “Theologies of Civilization: Jaime Balmes vs. François Guizot,” (paper presented at the Annual meeting of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilization, École de Hautes Études, Paris, France: July 2006).

55 Subsidiarity has been defined as: “The organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest and least centralized competent authority.” Erin M. Brigham, See, Judge, Act: Catholic Social Teaching and Service Learning, (Winona: Anselm Academic Press, 2013), 120. It is attributed to the 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, of Pope Leo XIII. For its application in the United States, see the 1986 pastoral letter of the USCCB, “Economic Justice for All,” 99-101; see ftn. 53, which cites Rerum Novarum (#62). For elaboration of this principle, see Pope Leo XIII, Quadrogesimo Anno, May 15, 1931, #79.

56 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, “Jaime Balmes Redux: Catholicism as Civilization in the Political Philosophy of Pedro Albizu Campos,” in Bridging the Atlantic: Iberian and Latin American Thought in Historical Perspective, ed. Marina Pérez de Mendiola (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 131-132.

57 François Guizot, Collection des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France (Paris: J.-L. Brière, 1825) and Histoire Générale de la civilisation en Europe, (Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1828).

58 Stevens-Arroyo, “Jaime Balmes Redux,” 136-138.

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59 Balmes’ arguments gained relevance across the Atlantic when El Protestantismo was translated into English and published in 1864 in the United States by the son of Orestes Brownson, a leading nineteenth century Catholic apologist. See Stevens-Arroyo, “Theologies of Civilization.”

60 William M. Halsey, The Survival of American Innocence: Catholicism in the Era of Disillusionment, 1920-1940 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1980), 16-18. Maritain’s approach to natural law as a touchstone of universal moral authority led to his participation in the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the United Nations.

61 Ramón Emeterio Betances y Alacán (1827-1898), Ramón Baldorioty de Castro (1822–1889), Eugenio María de Hostos (1839-1903) and Luis Muñoz Rivera (1859-1916) all promoted political status for Puerto Rico that included either total independence or nationalist autonomy.

62 Even as President of the Spanish Republic, Pi y Margall did not advocate total independence for the regions. The independence of the regions as nations within a federation rose again in the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

63 The first article of the current constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico reads: “The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is hereby constituted. Its political power emanates from the people and shall be exercised in accordance with their will, within the terms of the compact agreed upon between the people of Puerto Rico and the United States of America.”

64 Under Governor Miguel de la Torre’s administration (1822 -1837), the ruse of “Baile, Baraja y Botella” (literally, Dance, Dice and Drink) was first employed as a bread and circuses approach to quash public unrest. See Figueroa, History of Puerto Rico, 170-180.

65 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 379-400; Maldonado Denis, Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, 53-76. These works provide the details summarized in this paragraph.

66 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 398-399.

67 Francisco Manrique Cabrera, Historia de la literatura puertorriqueña (Río Piedras: Editorial Cultural, 1969), 211-212 ftn. 92.

68 Morales Carrión, Puerto Rico: A Political and Cultural History, 166-170.

69 Manrique Cabrera, Historia de la literatura puertorriqueña, 212-255.

70 Manrique Cabrera, Historia de la literatura puertorriqueña, 212-255; Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 472-478.

71 Manrique Cabrera, Historia de la literatura puertorriqueña, 256-261. The recreation of the Taíno or Native American identity of Puerto Ricans would intensify later in the 1980s. See Gabriel Haslip- Viera, ed., Taíno Revival: Critical Perspectives on Puerto Rican Identity and Cultural Politics (Second edition, Princeton: Marcus Weiner, 2001). For the employment of African imagery and cadence in Puerto Rican poetry, see the works of Luis Palés Matos, particularly his Tuntún de pasa y grifería (Río Piedras: Editorial Universitaria, 2000).

72 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico,440-445; Maldonado Denis, Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, 73-76; 102-110.

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73 This practice was ridiculed by Puerto Rican author Abelardo Díaz Alfaro in in his short story, “Peyo Mercé enseña inglés,” accessed December 22, 2016, https://www.scribd.com/doc/30867036/Peyo- Merce-ensena-ingles. Pedro Juan Soto provided an English translation, accessed January 18, 2017, http://www.slideshare.net/jrgutierrez316/peyo-merc-english-teacher.

74 Aida Negrón Montilla, Americanization in Puerto Rico and the public school system, 1900-1930 (Río Piedras: Editorial Edil, 1970).

75 Antonio S. Pedreira, Insularismo, vol. III of Obras Completas (Rio Piedras: Editorial Edil, 1934-1968).

76 Ronald Bailey and Flores, Guillermo V. "Internal Colonialism and Racial Minorities," in Structures of Dependency, Frank Bonilla and Robert Girling, eds., (Palo Alto: Nairobi Press, 1973), 149-160.

77 Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillian Co., 1944). See pages 329-376 for a historical description of the twentieth century movements. Confer also, Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, a Borzoi Book, 2004).

78 Luis Angel Ferrao, Pedro Albizu Campos y el nacionalismo puertorriqueño: 1930-1939 (San Juan: Editorial Cultural, 1990).

79 In Puerto Rico, children born out of wedlock are not classified as “illegitimate” but as “natural,” when the father does not come forward or “reconocido,” when the father recognizes his paternity. Pedro Albizu Campos became a “hijo reconocido” when his father legally admitted his paternity. See Marisa Rosado, Pedro Albizu Campos: Las llamas de la aurora, Un acercamiento a su biografia (San Juan: n.p., 1991), 18-20.

80 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo. “El Rebelde Catolicismo: La fe católica y la liberación nacional en el pensamiento político de don Pedro Albizu Campos,” Conferencia Magistral de la Séptima Edición del Simposio Iglesia, Estado y Sociedad, Centro de Estudios, Universidad de Bayamón, Puerto Rico, 20 octubre 2010.

81 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo. “The Catholic Worldview in the Political Philosophy of Pedro Albizu Campos: The Death Knell of Puerto Rican Insularity” U.S. Catholic Historian 20:4 (Fall 2002): 65- 66.

82 Juan Antonio Corretger, Albizu Campos (Montevideo: El Siglo Ilustrado, 1969), 44-46.

83 Stevens-Arroyo, “El Rebelde Catolicismo;” see also his “The Catholic Worldview,” 65-68.

84 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, “Jaime Balmes Redux: Catholicism as Civilization in the Political Philosophy of Pedro Albizu Campos,” in Bridging the Atlantic, 129-151.

85 “In Ponce, we were welcomed by the Nationalists. The local head, Pedro Albizu Campos, won me over immediately and has continued to impress me. He has a solid background. I don't know how many years at Harvard! That is why he understands the rival culture from top to bottom and no one else can expose its secret weaknesses and clever machinations as he. Few persons have taught me so much in only one day as has Albizu Campos. I am sure that someday this ungrateful America of ours will know of him and salute him as one of its heroes. He lives in defense of the poor, which is to say, that he scarcely lives. Every day he confronts temptations in the form of commissions and cases that he

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rejects because it runs counter to his stance on collaboration with the invaders. The harshest demand of North American power in Puerto Rico is the forced imposition of American citizenship on all Puerto Ricans. They cannot continue to be Spanish, the right to be Puerto Ricans is not recognized and they have to accept the yanqui passport to enter or leave the Island, to enter or to leave their very own home.” José Vasconcelos, Indologia: Una interpretación de la cultura iberoamericana (Barcelona: Agencia Mundial de Librerías, 1927), xxiv-xxvi. Cited in Stevens-Arroyo, “The Catholic Worldview,” 53-54: ftn 1:

86 The Dutch Province of the Order of Preachers, or Dominicans, came to Puerto Rico in 1904, six years after the United States had taken over the island from Spain. Thomists in philosophy and theology, these Dominicans were neither Spaniards nor Americans. Their publication, El Piloto, promoted the logic of Puerto Rican independence as the safest route to preserve Catholic principles at the root of social justice reforms.

87 Ferrao, Pedro Albizu Campos y el nacionalismo puertorriqueño, 171-188; 255-291. Some of the communists had left the Socialist Party when its head, Santiago Iglesias Patín, formed an alliance in 1924 with the right-wing Republican Party advocating Statehood in order to gain the elected post of Resident Commissioner. See Henry Wells, The Modernization of Puerto Rico, 102-108.

88 “The Wickedness of Creating Large Families,” written in 1920 by Sanger, was cited as basis for birth control in Puerto Rico by Muñoz Marín. See Annette B. Ramírez de Arellano, and Conrad Seipp, Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception: A History of Birth Control in Puerto Rico, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 16-23. See also Peter C. Engelman, A History of the Birth Control Movement in America (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011), 135. The words, “There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles," is found in Sanger’s The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s, 1922) at the beginning of Chapter 5, but it is a quotation from Hubert Spencer rather than her own words.

89 Adán Stevens-Díaz, “The Puerto Rican Gubernatorial Election of 1960: A Battleground between Politics and Religion,” MA Thesis for Christian Social Ethics and Modern Church History, New York: Union Theological Seminary, 2008.

90 “I can get a damn fine job here and am tempted to take it. It would be ideal except for the Porto Ricans. They are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them. They are even lower than Italians. What the island needs is not public health work but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. It might then be livable. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8 and transplanting cancer into several more . . . The matter of consideration for the patients’ welfare plays no role here -- in fact all physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.” Pedro I. Aponte Vázquez, Crónica de un encubrimiento: Albizu Campos y el caso Rhoads (San Juan: Publicaciones René, 1992), 17-19.

91 Aponte Vázquez, Crónica de un encubrimiento.

92 Federico Ribes Tovar, Albizu Campos: Puerto Rican Revolutionary (New York: Plus Ultra, 1971), 44- 51.

93 Stevens-Arroyo, "The Catholic Worldview,” 53-73.

94 Ribes Tovar, Albizu Campos: Puerto Rican Revolutionary, 48.

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95 “England’s misfortune is Ireland’s opportunity,” was the principle the Irish followed.

96 Ribes Tovar, Albizu Campos: Puerto Rican Revolutionary, 68 ftn. 67. Albizu Campos is quoted as saying: “Si me dejan séis meses más en la calle hubiera hecho la república” [If they had left me on the street for six more months, I would have achieved the republic].

97 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 490-491.

98 The first trial resulted in a hung jury. The jury for the second trial was composed of ten Americans living in Puerto Rico and two local employees of American banks. Ribes Tovar, Albizu Campos: Puerto Rican Revolutionary, 63-67.

99 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 239; 263.

100 Adán Stevens-Díaz, “The Ethical Implications in the Political Philosophies of Malcolm X and Pedro Albizu Campos” Master Thesis for the Theology of Christian Ethics, New York: Union Theological Seminary, 2007.

101 Silvestrini and Luque de Sánchez, Historia de Puerto Rico, 491-498.

102 Wells, The Modernization, 121-131.

103 Maldonado Denis, Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, 151-186.

104 The Nationalist Party had effectively been silenced by a law, passed in 1948, that is commonly known in Puerto Rico as La Ley de la Mordaza, or Gag Law. It closely resembles the anti-communist Smith Law. In effect, the nationalist revolt was protest against a rigged system.

105 He was governor until 1964, and then became member of the island Senate until 1970.

106 Literally translated, Puerto Rico was the “Free Associated State,” but this name in Spanish has been rendered as “Commonwealth” in English.

107 Vasconcelos in Mexico wrote a letter of support for the Nationalists to the United Nations. For the text, see Ribes Tovar, Albizu Campos, 144-150.

108 Maldonado Denis, Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, 198-209; 251-54.

109 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo and Ana María Díaz-Ramírez, “Puerto Ricans in the United States” in The Minority Report, eds A. G. Dworkin and R. Dworkin (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 2nd edition, 1982), 196-232. Note that Ana María Díaz-Ramírez is also known as Ana María Díaz- Stevens and that all other works by this author will be listed under the latter name.

110 Ibid., 200-202. See also, Díaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism, 13-21.

111 “Sterilization has become the single most important contraceptive measure for Puerto Rican women:” Ramírez de Arellano, and Seipp, Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception, 1983), 176. During the Great Puerto Rican Migration, there was also on the island a concerted to reduce the population by

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sterilization of Puerto Rican women and other birth control methods. This claim was bolstered when Bishop Antulio Parrilla, a protégé of Albizu Campos, spoke from within the Catholic hierarchy to denounce these programs as Neo-Malthusianism promoted by imperialism. Thus, although the names of the leaders changed, and the political parties were realigned, many of the issues of exploitation and colonialism in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico had carried over to the next century. See Stevens-Díaz, “The Puerto Rican Gubernatorial Election of 1960: A Battleground between Politics and Religion;” Wells, The Modernization of Puerto Rico, 252-273. For description of Bishop Parrilla Bonilla, see selections 27 and 28 in Antonio M. Stevens-Arroyo, ed., Prophets Denied Honor: An Anthology on the Hispanic Church in the United States (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1980), 8994; and Elisa Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church in Colonial Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras: Editorial Edil, 1982), 247-256.

112 This term, “redundant workers,” is found in Frank Bonilla and Ricardo Campos. “A Wealth of Poor: Puerto Ricans in the New Economic Order,” Daedalus 110:2 (Spring 1981): 133-176.

113 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, Review of: Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States by Jorge Duany, Centro Journal XXIV:1 (Fall 2012): 19- 22.

114 Díaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism, 1-6.

115 Puerto Rico has continued to suffer out-migration. In fact, there are more Puerto Ricans resident in the fifty states today than on the island. See Jens Manuel Krogstad, “Puerto Ricans leave in record numbers for mainland U.S.” Pew Research Center, 2015.

116 “The migration from Puerto Rico did not cause the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty or the changes in the immigration law. Rather, these events shaped the migration and dictated its development. It was only by interpreting demographic statistics through the prism of cultural and historical research that the Great Puerto Rican Migration became an event with a human face, resulting from interaction of significant cultural changes, political currents, community movements and an altered socio-economic scenario.” Stevens-Arroyo, Review of: Blurred Borders, 22.

117 Arthur I. Siegel, Harold Orlans, and Loyal Greer, Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia: A Study of Their Demographic Characteristics, Problems and Attitudes (Philadelphia: Human Relations Commission, 1954), 17.

118 Siegel, et al., Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, 5.

119 Siegel, et al., Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, 19.

120 Carmen Theresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 186, table 6.1.

121 United States Bureau of the Census, “Pennsylvania: Race and Hispanic Origin for Selected Large Cities and Other Places: Earliest Census to 1990,” Table 39, accessed April 2, 2016, http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0076/PAtab.pdf.

122 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. 1986 reprint edition, with an introduction by Elijah Anderson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899/1986), 382-83.

123 Siegel et al., Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, 40-43; 77-78, items 36-42.

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124 Siegel, et al., Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, 96, item 105.

125 Negrón de Montilla, Americanization in Puerto Rico, 35-51, et passim.

126 The use of the English language issue in Puerto Rico’s educational system until 1930 is analyzed by Aida, Americanization in Puerto Rico. President Truman changed the law to allow Spanish and English after 1950, but this change came too late to affect the migrants already in Philadelphia. See Maldonado Denis, Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, 210-219.

127 Negrón de Montilla, Americanization in Puerto Rico, 103-114. Negrón de Montilla ties the school desertion on the island to the use of the English language in the Puerto Rican classrooms. Rather than attribute the low rates of formal educational achievement among Philadelphia’s incoming Puerto Rican students to their parents undervaluing education, I believe that language and other social and economic factors continue to be factors that need to be considered. Further, the problems of adjustment to Philadelphia’s educational system, I sustain, were mischaracterized in the 1954 Human Relations Commission Report as a Puerto Rican cultural defect. This is especially troublesome when the report, itself, indicated that a quarter of respondents wanted their children to be doctors or lawyers.

128 Siegel, et al., Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, 51-52; item B-38, 110.

129 Siegel, et al., Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, 96, item 107.

130 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 190.

131 Siegel et al., Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, 52.

132 Cited in Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 101.

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CHAPTER 6

CATHOLIC PASTORAL MODELS IN PHILADELPHIA AND PUERTO RICO

The response of the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia and its clergy to the increasing needs of Puerto Ricans after 1950 did not appear out of thin air. An already established historical process provided a formula for pastoral care for Catholic newcomers to the city. Thus, I begin this chapter with an exploration of nineteenth- century precedents in Philadelphia’s Catholic ministry for non-English speakers.

Pastoral approaches of that time paid attention to race, language and ethnicity. My purpose here is to show that these provided a backdrop for the pastoral choices made after 1950.

As a result of the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico was annexed to the

United States and, beginning in 1917, all Puerto Ricans enjoyed birthright citizenship.

As such, in legal terms, they were not immigrants from a foreign country. If they were perceived as non-Whites, Puerto Ricans arriving in Philadelphia and other mainland cities were given a social standing equivalent to that of African Americans, who also enjoyed birthright citizenship. However, the Spanish language and the traditional

Catholic roots of Puerto Rican culture were salient and distinguishing characteristics of these migrants from the island. In what follows, I will review the models for linguistic ministry to immigrants and how they were initially applied to Puerto Rican Catholics rather than the racial model which had been used for African American Catholics in the city. This chapter reviews both the similarities and the striking differences that Puerto

Ricans had with previous ethnic and racial groups in Pennsylvania and, most particularly, in Philadelphia, where the majority of them settled. 174

The Ethnic Character of Antebellum Catholic Philadelphia

Quaker tolerance made the Pennsylvania colony the most attractive destination in English America for religious dissidents, and among those not from England,

German religious dissidents were the most numerous. Germantown, near Philadelphia, attracted most of the earliest German immigrants, who arrived in 1683. This first group of Quakers and Mennonites from the Krefeld region of the Rhineland were financed through the Frankfurt Company and can be credited as the first recorded German settlement in the English colonies.1

However, as immigration continued, the farmlands of central and northern Pennsylvania began to attract larger numbers of Germans. In time, the German population in the heartland of Antebellum Pennsylvania made significant contributions to agriculture and growing prosperity of the colony. Many maintained the German language and traditions. In general, the early preservation of German bilingualism and biculturalism produced social institutions to perpetuate a successful balance between assimilation and cultural diversity in the colony and early republic.

German agriculture in rural Pennsylvania was integral to Philadelphia’s commercial importance. In 1795, the first paved road in the new republic linked this productive agricultural region to the port city of Philadelphia and boosted economic prosperity. Running from what is now Girard Avenue in Philadelphia westward for some 70 miles to Lancaster, the tar and asphalt composite used to pave the turnpike was the recent invention of John Loudon McAdam (1756–1836). Nineteenth-century

Lancaster was not a backwater town, but rather the commercial hub for the German- 175 speaking Amish and Lutheran farmers, whose production was essential to

Pennsylvania’s economy. Lancaster also became a cultural center for German

Americans. It was the home of Franklin College, where arts and sciences were promoted in the German language, thus cultivating bilingualism among professionals in the early republic.2 Notably, the city became the state capitol of Pennsylvania in 1799 and kept that status until 1812.

German immigration also brought a significant number of Catholics to

Pennsylvania, such that as much as 25 percent of the total German population in

Antebellum Philadelphia was Catholic. Notably, until mass immigration from Ireland during potato famine of the 1840s, German-speaking Catholics outnumbered the

English-speaking faithful in the diocese, which at the time comprised the entire state.3

The parish was the center for ethnic pastoral care, where, despite the use of Latin in all sacramental rituals, sermons were preached in the native language of the congregants, while familiar hymns in the native tongue with recognizable musical styles animated the local congregations. The use of the immigrants’ vernacular was also key for what today is known as the Sacrament of Reconciliation, since confession of sins needed dialog between priest and penitent. Likewise, religious instructions from a catechism for children was best taught in the language spoken at home. In short, effective pastoral care required proficiency in the immigrants’ vernacular. Clergy paired the language of the people in church rituals with the continuation of pious traditions from the homeland.

This, in turn, fostered the faith of the Catholic German immigrant to America.

The first German-language Catholic parish in the new republic was Holy Trinity

Parish, opened in 1783 at Sixth and Spruce Streets in Philadelphia. However, within a 176 generation, it was clear that Holy Trinity by itself could not accommodate the rapidly increasing German population. New parishes and German-speaking clergy were needed to minister to this community. Thus, in 1833, the Pennsylvania Catholic Diocese welcomed German-speaking Redemptorist missionaries from Vienna. By 1843, a growing German Catholic population induced the Redemptorists to begin the construction of St. Peter the Apostle Church, at Fifth and Girard Avenue, which at that time was in Northern Liberties, outside the city proper.

That same year, Rome created another Catholic diocese in Pennsylvania. As a result, approximately half of the territory in the state was placed under the auspices of the new Diocese of Pittsburgh, led by Bishop Michael O’Connor, a native of Ireland, while the more populous eastern part of the state remained as the Diocese of

Philadelphia. Given the importance of the ethnic ministry to the many German

Catholics in eastern and central Pennsylvania, it is not surprising that in 1852 the Holy

See named John Nepomucene Neumann (1811-1860) as Bishop of Philadelphia.

Neumann was not only the superior of the Redemptorists in America but a native of

Bohemia who spoke German fluently.4

E. Digby Baltzell notes that the German parishes were delighted with the appointment of Neumann, whose pastoral sympathies afforded the German language a greater role than it had under the first three Irish-born bishops of Philadelphia.5 The future saint, meanwhile, demonstrated an appreciation of popular religion among different ethnic groups in Philadelphia besides the Germans. For instance, in 1852, the first year he took office, he founded the Parish of St. Mary Magdalene Pazzi for Italian- speakers in Philadelphia.6 Until his death in 1860, Bishop Neumann’s episcopacy was 177 marked by its pastoral attention to Catholic cultural diversity, and his virtue was recognized by the Vatican upon his elevation to sainthood in 1977.

Before and during Neumann’s episcopacy there were already Spanish-speaking

Catholics in Philadelphia. Although some merited recognition for their contributions,7 their numbers were too few to compel special pastoral attention. As shown below, a ministry particularly geared toward Hispanics in Philadelphia would have to wait until the twentieth century. Yet, I consider the origins of Philadelphia’s ethnic ministry in the nineteenth century important to this dissertation because the archdiocesan pastoral model for ministry toward Puerto Ricans would borrow heavily from the one first established for German Catholics, which was later extended to other ethnic, language and racial groups. In other words, when Puerto Rican Catholics came in large numbers to Philadelphia, they encountered an archdiocese with a history of pastoral outreach respecting the particular languages and the religious customs of newcomers.

The numerical prominence of the Irish in Philadelphia’s Catholic Church started slowly. As with the earliest German immigrants, the first Irish settlers in colonial times were Protestants. Most of these Scotch-Irish farmers settled in central Pennsylvania and were more numerous than the urban Irish Catholics in Philadelphia. Even after independence, Philadelphia’s most prominent Irish Catholics sought careers in the military and in commerce. The initial immigration could be roughly classified in two groups: the “Irish Wild Geese” with military standing, as in the case of Commodore

John Barry (1745-1803); and the merchant class, as in the case of the Meade family, whose son gained fame as the victorious Union general in the Battle of Gettysburg.8 178

However, the famines that began in Ireland in the 1840s drastically changed the class identity of Irish immigrants in this country. Irish Catholic peasants immigrated in mass numbers to United States cities at a rate that would not be approximated until the

Great Puerto Rican Migration described in the previous chapter.9 Elizabeth Geffen cited the 1850 census numbers that show how rapidly Irish immigration after 1845 had overtaken the German population in the urban area of Philadelphia. Of the 121,699 foreign-born persons living in Philadelphia County in 1850, a total of 72,312 were from

Ireland. That was more than three times greater than the city’s German population of

22,750. Significantly, although German Catholics continued to outnumber Irish

Catholics in the rural areas of the Diocese of Philadelphia, overall, immigration from

Ireland had by the mid-nineteenth century outpaced the German influx to the city.10

Like the Poles, Slovaks, Germans and Hungarians, the Irish were immigrant members of an ethnic group, but occupation of their homeland by Great Britain over centuries gave them familiarity with the English language and Anglo-Saxon norms.11

Thus, unlike the other Catholic immigrant groups in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, the Irish Catholics did not require any language other than English for ministry.

Moreover, familiarity with language and customs allowed for swifter upward mobility in commerce and politics.

Not surprising in a city known for its distinctive neighborhoods, many ethnic parishes within nineteenth-century Philadelphia functioned like enclaves akin to what historian Jay Dolan called “the ethnic village.”12 This character for diverse parishes continued even when the Irish became the majority of the city’s Catholics. Local churches for Germans, Italians, Poles and others sought to maintain the pattern of 179 linguistic and cultural diversity established by Bishop Neumann. Moreover, because these parishes generally had the same boundaries as political districts, political leaders who did not understand the homeland language or culture of immigrants in the enclave were likely to consider the parish priest as a key conduit to the people.13 I note that for the period under study, the Spanish clergy at La Milagrosa as well as priests appointed to parishes with Puerto Rican majorities were expected to assume this role of conduit between political leaders and their parishioners, even if the priest themselves were not

Puerto Rican themselves.

The Catholic Church in Philadelphia and African Americans

In this retrospective analysis of nineteenth-century attitude toward race and ethnicity in Philadelphia, I wish to note that terminology employed during more than one hundred and fifty years has been fluid. For instance, the Know-Nothings called themselves “Native Americans,” and professed to belong to the “Anglo Saxon race,” using terminology that would be confusing today.14 The Irish and Jews have also been confusingly labeled as “races.”15 Only blackness has remained as a constant for the racial categorization since colonial times.

In early Pennsylvania, most African Americans were members of Protestant denominations, including some small numbers of Quakers. Baptismal records of people originating from the western part of Hispaniola are found in documents from

Old St. Joseph Church, indicating a Catholic welcome to members of refugee families who likely came as a result of the Haitian Revolution.16 Even when these families were added to the total African American population, however, Black Catholics in 180

Philadelphia in the middle of the nineteenth century numbered only 5 percent. Using the 1850 census, I put the mid-century total number of Black Catholics in Philadelphia at fewer than 1,000.17

Despite their small numbers, African American Catholics were afforded special pastoral care by Neumann. As a parish priest in Baltimore, the future bishop had advocated for the Oblate Sisters of Providence’s ministry to slaves and their families.

This religious congregation had been founded specifically for women of African descent.18 When he became Bishop of Philadelphia, Neumann oversaw the opening of a school for Black Catholic children on Lombard, near Fourth Street, founded by Father

Thomas Lilly of Old St. Joseph’s. In 1863, Blessed Peter Claver School for Black

Catholic Children began to operate under the care of members of the same Oblate

Sisters of Providence that Neumann had defended.

As laudable as the Catholic Church’s attention to African Americans may have been in Antebellum Philadelphia, however, it is important to note that these efforts reproduced society’s segregation of Blacks from Whites. Even when under the same church roof, African American Catholic worshipers sat apart from White Catholics through most of the nineteenth century.19 Not only did the Antebellum Church follow segregationist rules, Catholicism in the United States was a reluctant recruit to the cause of abolition. In 1852, the First Plenary Council of Baltimore avoided mention of slavery, despite the war clouds gathering over that crucial issue.20 In short, the ministry to African American Catholics in the Antebellum city, and in the nation, was constrained by the segregationist rules of the general society. 181

I view the ambiguity of Antebellum Catholicism in Philadelphia toward the abolition of slavery through the prism of class interest. Most of the Catholics in

Philadelphia were Irish immigrants, who felt threatened by competition for jobs from working class African Americans.21 The Catholic Church bent toward the economic interests of the Irish, since they comprised the largest Catholic group in the city. It was left to Quaker assemblies and Protestant churches among the better-off in Philadelphia to organize the clandestine passage of slaves to freedom.22

I note here that segregation laws are integral to structural racism. Segregation has been used in history, wrote Franz Fanon (1925-1961), as protection of the supposedly superior race from “pollution” by inferior human beings.23 Fanon stated that the historical purpose behind the segregation of Black peoples has been to protect white supremacy,24 which he linked to the subjugation of colonial subjects by European and

United States’ imperialisms in Africa and America.25 I consider Pedro Albizu Campos’ effort to preserve Catholic civilization in Puerto Rico and his condemnation of the treatment of Black people in the United States to be consonant with Fanon’s linkage of racism to imperialism. Thus, attitudes toward African Americans are essential for assessing the Puerto Rican situation in Philadelphia, because when Puerto Ricans in

Philadelphia protested racial discrimination in the city, they were also challenging the

White supremacy that simultaneously undergirded their homeland’s colonial status.

In this dissertation, I have recognized that racial attitudes as well as pastoral models were set in Philadelphia long before the arrival of Puerto Ricans. Nonetheless, I also want to point out that the Puerto Rican presence in the city presented a new challenge to the discussion of race, ethnicity and pastoral care. This is because Puerto 182

Ricans do not easily fit into previously established categories. In addition to birthright citizenship, they straddled ethnic and racial boundaries; in the United States, some

Puerto Ricans were often seen as “White,” others as “Black,” and still others as outside both categories. This was noted in the previous chapter’s review of the Report of the

Human Relations Commission.

Stephen Steinburg observes that in the United States ethnic differences will disappear in the “melting pot,” but racial differences are unmeltable.26 Whether this assertion is debatable or not, it seems that the Young Lords’ identity as Puerto Ricans was racialized in the 1970s, when Frank Rizzo was mayor. They became, in today’s labeling, “people of color.” The choice to accept this definition as non-White had consequences, since the majority of the city’s Catholics at that time were Whites, who sometimes believed the that advancement of African Americans came at the expense of

White Catholics. The importance of the interracial definition for Puerto Ricans will be explored in the interviews discussed in the next two chapters.

Class Interests and Pastoral Models for Philadelphia

Bishop Neumann died in 1860. His successor, James Frederick Bryan Wood

(1813-1883), opened a new phase of Philadelphia’s Catholic history. Just as

Philadelphia’s City Hall came to symbolize how the 1854 Consolidation Act had imposed control over the sprawling urban villages around the original City of

Philadelphia, the completion of the construction of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and

Paul in 1864 symbolized greater episcopal supervision of the diocese. This supervision 183 would be most keenly felt in financial matters for construction and maintenance of parishes and parish schools.27

In Postbellum Philadelphia, second-generation Catholics had begun to grow faster than the number of immigrants. Upward social mobility and greater acceptance of second generation Catholics as being fully American were reflected in the persona of the new bishop. Thomas Eakin’s portrait of a seated Wood shows him with a nearly regal presence befitting a representative of the higher social status that some of the city’s Catholics had achieved. Wood’s Protestant parents, from Wales, had sent him back to England for his education. Upon return to the United States, he worked as a bookkeeper and cashier at the Franklin Bank of Cincinnati. In 1836, he converted to

Catholicism, deciding a year later to become a priest. He studied for the priesthood in

Rome, where he was ordained in 1844 and became the fifth Bishop of Philadelphia in

1857. By institutional church standards, this was a rapid ascendency. Moreover, with the creation of new dioceses in Pennsylvania in 1868, Philadelphia became the archdiocese and Wood became the first Archbishop of Philadelphia.28

Archbishop Wood’s upper-class status seems to have played a part in his intervention into conflicts at St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi in Philadelphia between the

Northern Italians and the incoming wave of immigrants from southern Italy and Sicily.

The newcomers celebrated religious saints’ days in public celebrations, feasting and dancing to Italian music in the city streets. To their carnivalesque events, they added secular gaming.29 The established generation of Italian American Catholics of the

1870s, however, considered that their status within Philadelphia society was damaged by association with such popular Italian traditions that clashed with the staid Protestant 184 mores of Philadelphia. Richard Juliani concluded that Archbishop Wood sided with the

Italian upwardly mobile class view of proper behavior. Both the Archbishop and the

Northern Italian parishioners wanted Catholicism to foster assimilation into American society.30 As noted in the third chapter, the same sort of complaint had been registered by the city’s Quaker elites against German Christmas customs and the New Year’s Day mummery of English settlers in Moyamensing.31 I suggest that Catholics of

Philadelphia after the Civil War were experiencing the cultural and class tensions others had undergone at an earlier time.

The conflicts in Philadelphia’s Italian parish were not the only intra-church clashes produced by different class aspirations. These conflicts and clashes would become more complex, as was the case with Archbishop Wood and Irish miners in

1877. Wood was one of the Catholic prelates who condemned the unionizing movement among Irish miners led by the Molly Maguires and the Ancient Order of

Hibernians in northeastern Pennsylvania’s coal regions, denouncing the violence of

1877 and 1879 that had accompanied the unionizing efforts, Archbishop Wood excommunicated all members of both groups as “terrorists.” It might not have been his intention, but his excommunication edict was read in court as justification for the penalty of death by hanging for 22 Irish miners. Because the archbishop’s edict against violence served to paralyze the union struggle, some Irish Catholics denounced Wood for his support of the mine owners and accused him of having become a traitor to the

Irish working class.32 The opposition of the Catholic hierarchy the use of violence to advance a cause popular among the Irish surfaced in the twentieth century, when

Catholics and clergy advocated independence for Ireland. I cite the incident because 185 the issue of violence surfaced again in Catholic responses to the 1914 Easter Rising in

Ireland and the 1950 revolt by the Puerto Rican Nationalists. Both causes drew upon the theology of Jaime Balmes to justify revolutionary violence against ruling elites.33

Opposition from the Catholic hierarchy to national liberation movements, therefore, was not unique to the case of the Philadelphia Young Lords, who later encountered a similar response to their brand of nationalism.

While important, opposition from the hierarchy to Irish and Puerto Rican independence movements did not characterize ethnic relations for most Catholics in

Philadelphia. The upwardly mobile aspirations of the city’s ethnic Catholics generally fostered assimilation in the model of the city’s earlier Quaker and Protestant elites. The success of the assimilation model had an impact on the growth of African American

Catholicism. In his study, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that in the 1890s “400 or 500

Negroes regularly attend Catholic churches in various parts of the city.” He praised

Catholic pastoral attention to African Americans:

The Catholic church has in the last decade made great progress in its work among Negroes and is determined to do much in the future. Its chief hold upon the colored people is its comparative lack of discrimination.34

Since ethnic Catholics had been victims of discrimination, Du Bois reasoned, they were sympathetic to the prejudice heaped on African Americans:

The Catholic church can do more than any other agency in humanizing the intense prejudice of many of the working class against the Negro, and signs of this influence are manifest in some quarters.35

A driving force for Catholic pastoral care for African Americans came from the

Philadelphia-born saint, Mother Katherine Drexel (1858-1955), who was canonized in 186

2000. Heiress to a family fortune, in a wealthy family in Philadelphia’s elites, in 1886

Katherine and her sisters helped members of the St. Peter Claver Union purchase property on Ninth and Pine for a school with a rectory and chapel. This organization had developed from the earlier initiative of the Jesuits and St. John Neumann. When elevated to canonical rank as a parish, St. Peter Claver Church later moved to Twelfth and Lombard and became the city’s first parish for African American Catholics officially opening in 1892.36 In fact, Catholicism’s growth among Philadelphia’s

African American population after the Civil War was in part responsible for the city to be chosen as the host for the Black Catholic Congress in January 1892,37 an effort which anticipated a similar meeting for Hispanic Catholics in the 1970s. Yet, despite these efforts and Du Bois’ positive outlook regarding ministry to Black Catholics, strong resistance toward racial and ethnic acceptance persisted from the last part of the nineteenth century into the twentieth.

The Catholic Church and Ethnic Assimilation

Conflicts over the models for pastoral care of immigrants to the United States produced the crisis of the Lucerne Memorial in 1891. Count Peter Cahensly was a leading financial contributor to St. Raphaelsverein, a mission society dedicated to preserving the faith of German immigrants in the United States.38 He had been convinced by his American visits that effective pastoral care for national parishes was being thwarted by policies of bishops who did not understand the importance of maintaining the German language and traditions. There was also resentment over 187 episcopal demands to control all the finances for ethnic parishes, a tendency derisively labeled as “Mammona iniquitatis.”39

Many bishops in the United States viewed non-English language ministry as nothing more than a temporary concession to immigrants, much as Archbishop Wood had professed when attempting to end special language ministry for Philadelphia’s

Italians. In pursuit of this goal later in the century, some bishops obliged Poles, Italians,

Germans and Slavs to use English in their ethnic parochial schools. The prelates argued that fidelity to homeland traditions impeded prosperity.40 Such orders were resented because the ethnic group financed their schools with no aid from the bishop, who, nonetheless, acted as the schools’ owner. These resentments carried over into the political sphere of some American major cities, such as New York, Philadelphia,

Chicago and Baltimore, where machine politics were run by an Irish political boss who shared the same prejudices against other ethnic groups as the Irish Catholic bishop. In such cases, grievances against church policies found no relief from government because both political and ecclesiastical leadership were shaped by the same perspectives on what would benefit Catholic interests.41

The impotence of the non-Irish Catholics was especially acute in the Church.

Since canonical procedures allowed current bishops to nominate their own protégées to the episcopacy, the Irish prelates of the time frequently used this power on behalf of other Irish and Irish-American priests. German and other ethnic Catholics in the United

States resented a situation where the higher ranks of the ecclesiastical structure would likely continue to be dominated by Irish and Irish-American bishops. Worse yet, their 188 homeland traditions would be replaced by a hybrid one grounded on Irish culture and tradition and the English language. 42

Under such circumstances, Cahensly had come to believe that only intervention from the Vatican could challenge the pattern for pastoral care that was prejudiced against German Catholics and other ethnic groups in the United States. Cahensly was not alone in this thinking; one critic urged him to tell Pope Leo XII “that the Irish are not the only Americans, that the other immigrants are also Americans and that it would be a sin against justice to deliver the Church of the United States to only one race.”43 In summary, Cahensly’s principal complaint was that Irish and Irish American bishops’ interference with the model of pastoral care to other Catholic ethnic groups was causing people from those groups to leave the Catholic Church.44 Threats of schism among ethnic Catholics were thus seen on the horizon.

Cahensly appealed for drastic reform in pastoral outreach to non-English speaking Catholics in America and organized a conference on the issue in Switzerland in 1891. This meeting produced a set of resolutions known as the Lucerne Memorial, which was later presented to the progressive Pope Leo XIII.45 The petition’s main request was for the naming of ethnic bishops for new vicariates composed of ethnic parishes. The territorial jurisdiction of existing dioceses would remain, but persons living within their boundaries would belong to a vicariate created only for individuals of a particular language or ethnic group. Thus, in a city like Philadelphia, there would have been a German-speaking bishop in a vicariate of German Catholics, a separate

Polish vicariate for Poles, an Italian one for Italians, and so forth.46 The Lucerne

Memorial aimed to radically reduced the power Irish American prelates held over 189

Catholic immigrant groups in the United States because personnel and financial decisions for the vicariate would be removed from their direct control.

The Lucerne recommendation for ethnic bishops was not well received by many in the Irish-dominated hierarchy. Even worse, when the Lucerne Memorial became public, the American press railed against a perceived refusal by Catholics to speak the

English language or adopt the majority culture. The negative reaction can be understood in the historical context of the United States a generation after the Civil

War. If the pro-slavery culture of the American South had been a threat to national unity, were not foreign cultures also dangerous? The ugliness of nativist resentment had resurfaced. The extent of their own power being threatened and alarmed about the resurrection of nativist resentment against Catholics, most bishops not only opposed the

Lucerne Memorial but lobbied Vatican officials against its resolutions. 47

Differences between an Irish-dominant ecclesiastical bureaucracy and a multi- ethnic laity continued into the twentieth century and resulted in serious conflicts to church unity. Thankfully, though Philadelphia’s Catholicism experienced a share of these problems, the situation was not as toxic as it became in places like Chicago,

Buffalo and Scranton. To offer one example, later disagreements between the Irish-

American bishop of Scranton and a Polish pastor went unresolved and resulted in a schismatic Polish National Catholic Church founded in 1897.48 Had the petition for naming ethnic bishops been granted, perhaps this unfortunate event might have been avoided.

Although the pope rejected the Lucerne Memorial, subsequent events made him painfully aware of conflicts within the American Catholic Church. Missionaries 190 working among immigrants to America had conveyed to him that the rejection of immigrant ethnic identity in favor of assimilation came dangerously close to repudiating

Catholic identity in favor of Protestant social values.49 Thus, in 1899, eight years after the Lucerne Memorial, Pope Leo expressed this concern in Testem benevolentiae nostrae, a letter to Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore; in it, the pope denounced an

“Americanist heresy.”50 Despite the letter’s cautioning against too-aggressive a promotion of American culture, it was not powerful enough to change course for the

Catholic Church in the United States. The defeat of the Lucerne Memorial allowed an assimilation model to hold sway as Catholicism entered the twentieth century. That attitude also colored response to the Spanish-American War, which made the island of

Puerto Rico a colonial possession of the United States.

Pious Colonialism

When the United States went to war against Spain in 1898, the press raised the specter that American Catholics would be untrustworthy soldiers who would side with

Spain out of religious loyalties. These allegations of potential disloyalty echoed charges Catholics faced during the 1848 war against Mexico.51 Feeling compelled to prove that Catholics were able to separate papal authority from patriotism towards the

United States, the United States bishops formed the “Catholic War Council” to support the invasion of Spain’s colonies, including Puerto Rico. Although Catholicism had been invoked to defy Great Britain’s invasion of Ireland and Poland’s Catholic opposition to a communist regime installed by the Soviet Union,52 imperialism by the

United States against a conquered Puerto Rico was judged differently. Under the 191 mantle of piety, the Church urged Catholics to submit to the invading imperial power.

This constituted the United States’ Catholic embrace of an ecclesiastical Manifest

Destiny, which has been branded a “Pious Colonialism.”53

I found evidence of Pious Colonialism in the Philadelphia’s archdiocesan newspaper, The Catholic Standard and Times. Its editorials clearly convey a favorable position regarding the imperialist acquisition of Puerto Rico, viewing it as providential, much as had the Protestant-inspired Manifest Destiny of the 1848 war against Mexico:

[It] has been said.... that Puerto Rico is a Catholic country without a religion. Talleyrand located that virtue in the female temperament; and this cynicism of the French author could have some validity in countries like Puerto Rico, where conditions of climate and circumstance exert an influence in religious practice, although religion is not all practice…. Perhaps it was fitting that Puerto Rico should come into contact with our robust American environment at a time least expected, thus placing her in our area of defense.54

This characterization of Puerto Ricans and their religion as exhibiting a “female temperament,” and suffering from “climate and circumstance,” not only inferiorizes

Puerto Ricans and their beliefs, but in my judgment, it starkly reveals the editor’s unabashed sense of superiority and flagrant prejudices. Notice that Puerto Rico is deemed valuable only because it has been placed “in our area of defense.” Despite the pope’s condemnation in 1899 of a Catholic claim to American exceptionalism,55 the archdiocesan newspaper represented annexation by the United States as beneficial to

Catholicism because of a “robust American environment” that simultaneously bestowed upon the conquered people the superior values of the invading nation.

The presumptions of Pious Colonialism ignored that Puerto Rican Catholics were heirs to a four-century Catholic tradition dating back to 1513, when San Juan became the site for the first officially established Catholic diocese in the New World. 192

Rome, however, was aware of Catholic history, and sought to place provisions in the peace treaty between Spain and the United States that would protect a national and

Catholic identity for Puerto Rico.56 This included the naming of a native Puerto Rican to be bishop. That intention died, however, when the bishops of the United States argued that since Puerto Rico was a colonial possession its ecclesiastical jurisdiction should conform to the political reality of North American rule.57

Bavarian-born James Humbert Blenk (1856-1917) thus became Bishop of San

Juan to satisfy the American bishops’ claim. He did no delay in demonstrating that his thinking regarding the Church in Puerto Rio was in sync with his North American brother bishops. Seeking to ingratiate Catholicism with the new military rulers of the island, he quickly prohibited the traditional celebration of Misa del Gallo at midnight on

Christmas because its “exuberance” was threatening to “public safety.”58 Rather than show gratitude for the bishop’s nod to American sensibilities, however, the military regime on the island sought to confiscate all Catholic Church property. Anti-Catholic voices argued that since the church buildings, rectories, convents, hospitals, and even cemeteries had used government funds under Spanish rule, they were now all property of the United States’ government. The case would reach the Supreme Court of the

United States, where in 1908 Chief Justice Melvin Fuller upheld the decision of the

Puerto Rican courts to preserve Catholic property rights to church buildings as well as rectories and convents.59 Lost to ecclesiastical control, however, were cemeteries, which had provided a steady stream of income by the sale of burial lots.60

Threats to the institutional assets of Catholicism continued under the American regime. In order to preserve their Catholic affiliation, religious orders and 193 congregations of women running hospitals in Puerto Rico were compelled to adopt the

United States’ model of incorporation so that the hospitals were the property of the sisters. Nonetheless, some zealous Protestant ministers were so displeased at the survival of this Catholic ministry in Puerto Rico that they sought to prohibit the religious sisters from wearing habits within their own hospitals, alleging that the wearing of religious garb in public violated the separation of church and state as established in the United States’ Constitution.61

There was also an anti-Catholic undercurrent in the rules set for public education. For instance, school teachers were ordered to hold classes on Three Kings

Day, even though that day, January 6, rather than Christmas Day, December 25, was the day that children received their gifts in Puerto Rican Catholic tradition. The stricture was specifically intended not only to erode a cultural and traditional Puerto Rican

Catholic practice, but to make Puerto Ricans conform to the American practice of treating the Catholic Feast of the Epiphany as just any other day in the secular calendar.62 As noted in the previous chapter, all Puerto Rican public schools were required to teach only in English. This measure became one of many adopted to foster

Protestantism. For instance, recruitment of English-speaking teachers for the island was conducted exclusively among Protestant-affiliated colleges in the United States.63

Moreover, American administrators often hired the wife of the Protestant minister, when not also the minister himself, to serve as the teacher for a given town’s public school.64 School officials in Puerto Rico did little to disguise the underlying goal of taking Catholics away from the faith.65 194

In sum, annexation abolished Catholicism’s privileges as the state religion of

Puerto Rico; as a consequence, all governmental financial support for priests and nuns on the island was summarily suspended. Moreover, with the change of political allegiance, Spanish nationals were ordered out of the country unless they renounced

Spanish citizenship. Given the nature of religious vows, the clergy and the sisters in

Puerto Rico who belonged to a Spanish religious order had thus to leave Puerto Rico.

As a result, the number of Catholic clergy dropped by 50 percent in a matter of months, leaving only 29 Puerto Rico-born priests in the island and about 90 Spanish priests, who remained as diocesan clergy.66 Since the Catholic population of Puerto Rico was more than two million, this sudden uprooting of clergy from their parishes greatly weakened

Catholicism in Puerto Rico.67

To staff the island’s parishes, Bishop Blenk subsequently invited religious orders from the United States to work as missionaries in Puerto Rico. Conspicuous among the early responders, the Redemptorist priests set a pattern of Americanization for local parishes.68 Other missionaries fell into the same pattern. 69 Only the Dutch

Dominicans, who came to Puerto Rico in 1904, represented a notable exception. As neither Spanish nor American, they demonstrated considerable objectivity about colonialism and would later support Pedro Albizu Campos in his promotion of an independent Puerto Rico.70

Puerto Rican Catholic Resistance to Colonialism

Clergy is only one component of Catholic membership. As described by Ana

María Díaz-Stevens, myriad attacks on institutional Catholicism in Puerto Rico after 195

1898 stirred popular Catholic piety among lay persons. During Spanish colonialism, the jíbaros had created a Catholicism that functioned without clergy in the rugged mountainous hinterlands, where travel was difficult. Deprived of clergy and lacking support from a new bishop, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Puerto Ricans relied again on their traditional practices of piety to sustain the faith. The era produced the traveling band of auto-didactic believers, named “Los Hermanos Cheos” (The Joe

Brothers), who preached in Spanish when refuting Protestant revivalists in town squares in rural Puerto Rico.71

Bishop William Ambrose Jones (1865-1921), who had replaced Blenk in 1907, did not hold Los Hermanos Cheos in high regard. In fact, he viewed them as pawns of

Puerto Rican independence. He demonstrated little appreciation for the revival of

Puerto Rican popular Catholicism or maintenance of long-held island traditions.72 Thus, rather than building upon these, Bishop Jones spent his tenure in dismantling the remaining structures of 400 years of Puerto Rican Catholicism. His efforts climaxed in an island synod in 1917, which overtly imposed a North American model of church.

For instance, the synod decreed that baptisms, announced masses, marriages, funerals and the like would require payment of a set amount. Bishop Jones ignored warnings that most Puerto Ricans would see the stipend rule as simony; that is, charging fees in exchange for pastoral care.73

Catholic education was also part of the Americanizing project. In imitation of the strategies employed in the United States to Americanize immigrants, Catholic schools in Puerto Rico taught classes in English, not Spanish. Moreover, many Catholic educational institutions, particularly the high schools, became “internados,” akin to elite 196 prep schools for men or finishing schools for women in the United States, and not the parochial schools serving mostly children of the working calss. The education of

Catholic leaders in Puerto Rico has thus generally included cultivating a decidedly

North American social behavior.74

A respite from the mission of Americanizing Puerto Ricans came under the leadership of Malta-born Jorge Caruana (1881-1951), who was appointed Bishop of

Puerto Rico in 1921. During his service in the Vatican’s diplomatic corps in the

Philippines, Caruana had met Pennsylvania-born Dennis Dougherty, the missionary

Bishop of Nueva Segovia in the aftermath of the United States’ annexation of the

Philippines. Caruana accompanied Dougherty back to the United States as his secretary, before being himself elevated to the episcopacy.

As Bishop of Puerto Rico, Caruana encouraged Puerto Rican Catholic opposition to North American Protestant missionaries. Stating that it was incongruous for a Catholic bishop to be blessed by a Protestant, he famously rejected participation in a civic event in Puerto Rico.75 His defense of Puerto Rican Catholicism matched a growing realization among the first wave of missionaries imported from the United

States that Puerto Rican popular Catholicism ought not be squelched.76 In consonance with José Vasconcelos’ description of the nature of Puerto Rican Catholicism as defender of a genuine Puerto Rican identity and as a bastion against outside forces,

Caruana’s defiance of Protestantization served to reinforce Catholic resistance to the regime and influenced Pedro Albizu Campos upon his return to Puerto Rico. The popularity of Caruana among Puerto Rican Catholics, after the Americanizing by

Bishops Blenk and Jones, bolstered Puerto Rican Catholics’ claim that they would be 197 better served if a native Puerto Rican bishop were named to head the Church on the island. In the 1920s, as in the negotiations for the peace treaty at the end of the 1898 war, however, that proposal was not well received in the United States. It is fair to surmise that native Puerto Rican bishops seemed too close to the Lucerne Memorial’s recommendations in 1892.77

Philadelphia’s Connections to Puerto Rican Catholicism

When it became apparent that one diocese could not serve well the needs of the entire Catholic population, church officials in the U.S. established a new diocese in the southern town of Ponce. Thus, in 1925, the Diocese of Puerto Rico became the

“Diocese of San Juan,” while the new Diocese of Ponce served the southern and northwestern parts of the island, dividing the island diagonally in two halves. Caruana, assumed the episcopacy of San Juan, and Edwin Byrne (1891-1963), another of

Dougherty’s protégés, was named to the new diocese. Byrne was a Philadelphia native and graduate of Roman Catholic High School who had served as chaplain in the United

States Navy during the First World War. Dougherty had previously recommended

Byrne as bishop’s secretary to the Diocese of Jaro in the Philippines. When the need for a new diocese in Puerto Rico arose, Dougherty advanced Byrne’s candidacy. Byrne learned the importance of making his presence felt in the many celebrations of the island’s religious traditions, while carefully avoiding local politics entanglements. This made him popular to the members of his flock. Upon Caruana’s departure in 1929,

Byrne succeeded him at the See of San Juan and served there until he was named 198

Archbishop of Santa Fe in 1943.78 Aloysius J. Willinger, a Redemptorist from

Baltimore, meanwhile, was named as bishop of the Ponce Diocese.

As Archbishop of Philadelphia after 1918, Dennis Cardinal Dougherty (1865-

1951) was not only interested in naming bishops for Puerto Rico;79 he also lent significant support for the pastoral vision of Father Thomas Judge (1868-1933). This

Vincentian priest adapted the heroic work of St. Vincent de Paul among the poor of seventeenth-century France to early twentieth-century America. Founded in 1909 in

Brooklyn, New York, the Community Cenacle Apostolate, initially comprising lay women, was meant to nurture the spiritual development of its members and to foster the

Catholic faith among immigrant communities and the urban poor.80 Though their mission to serve the poor was consonant with more established religious congregations, the members of the Cenacle provided an alternative model to traditional convent life.

Upon Judge’s transfer to Alabama, he took the Cenacle idea with him. However, by

1919, he had become convinced that the group of women under his spiritual care should be allowed to band together as a religious congregation under vows, and he founded the

Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity, commonly known as “Trinitarians.”81

Fifteen years later, in 1934, the sisters were invited to Puerto Rico after Father Judge had visited the small town of Loiza on the northeastern coast of the island at the request of Philadelphia-born Bishop Byrne. Unlike most other North American women missionaries going to the island at the time, the Trinitarians were not asked to teach in parish schools. True to their mission statement, they served the poor with a ministry of social work, addressing the material needs in the day-to-day lives of the people. They were highly respected for adopting the secular clothes of the time and for their 199 involvement in the social problems of the communities they served. Eventually, the

Trinitarian Sisters became the most successful congregation from the United States to recruit native Puerto Rican vocations, as was also the case with a Trinitarian branch of men in the same apostolate.82

Cardinal Dougherty’s support for the innovative missionary approach of Father

Judge and the Trinitarians among Puerto Ricans differed from what he had viewed proper for Philadelphia’s ethnic parishes. His experiences as a missionary bishop in the

Philippines may provide an explanation of this apparent contradiction.83 Filipino

Catholics had resisted the imposition of a North American church model after the

United States’ conquest in the Spanish-American War and annexation. A schismatic church led by a Filipino priest, Gregorio Aglipay, was established after 1902 and commanded the loyalties of many Catholics whose distaste for the invaders’ political regime spilled over into rejection of the foreign-born prelates who had been imposed upon them. As the missionary bishop appointed in 1903, Dougherty adopted a policy of protecting aspects of Filipino popular religion, such as traditional processions and local

Holy Week customs. In this way, he demonstrated pastoral respect for the traditions within Filipino Catholicism.

I suggest that Dougherty’s positive experience of Filipino popular Catholicism may have inclined him to appreciate Father Judge’s apostolic undertaking in Puerto

Rico. He understood that conflicts between the institutional church and the people could lead to schism, as had happened in 1902 in the Philippines with Gregorio Aglipay and his followers, just as it had earlier in 1897 in Pennsylvania when Polish Catholics’ dissent resulted in the establishment of the Polish National Catholic Church near 200

Dougherty’s birthplace in Ashland, Pennsylvania. It would not be far-fetched to think that eradicating even the mere possibility of a schismatic national church on the island was Dougherty’s intention. The Trinitarians showed their appreciation for the

Archdiocese’s support by choosing Philadelphia for their headquarters. Years later, they would take pride in an archdiocesan high school named after Father Judge.

Dougherty passed away in 1951, too early to experience migration of Puerto

Ricans to Philadelphia in such impressive numbers. Upon his death, however, he left a legacy of a well-organized and prosperous Catholic Church in Philadelphia, with many priestly and religious vocations, thriving parishes and an extensive Catholic school system that directed a stream of students to local Catholic colleges and universities.

Cardinal Dougherty referred to himself as “God’s bricklayer,” equating his episcopal mission with the material expansion of parish churches and schools.84 He used his control over resources to foster the work among African American Catholics directed by Mother Katherine Drexel. He also founded an apostolate for Chinese Catholics, also administered by the Trinitarians, which in 1941 became Holy Redeemer Parish, located in Philadelphia’s Chinatown district.85 Dougherty certainly ruled his clergy with an iron fist, and he also opposed the permanent creation of a Washington-based office for the

United States episcopacy, stating that compliance with a majority of fellow bishops based on the principle of democracy was an intrusion on the God-given powers in his own diocese.86 However his authoritarian style of governance of Philadelphia for 33 years might be judged, his administration of pastoral care was highly productive.

The combination of an authoritarian bent and great pastoral success was not unique to Dougherty or to Philadelphia. Cultural historian William Halsey has analyzed 201 the remarkable Catholic theological unity from the end of the First World War to the eve of the Second Vatican Council in 1962.87 Catholic thinkers, he wrote, had managed to address modern adaptations of Church theology while still preserving “the scent of tradition.” This enabled Catholics “to defend them [new ideas] without fear of appearing to be revolutionaries.”88 Serendipitously, Dougherty’s episcopacy, extending from 1918 to 1951, falls within this period. Thus, while many of Dougherty’s successes relied upon his pragmatic decisions to find the best person for each job, he was also fortunate that his long tenure escaped any major theological disputes which might have divided Catholicism into opposing camps.

Styles of Episcopal Leadership in Philadelphia

Dougherty’s successor, John Cardinal O’Hara (1888-1960), had prior been

President of Notre Dame University (1934-1945). O’Hara was collegial rather than authoritarian. It is reported that he personally answered the door bell at his residence instead of leaving that to attendants. He explained: “How else can I meet the poor?”89

His style of episcopal administration contrasted with the authoritarian ways of

Dougherty and was more attuned to the liberalism of mayors Joseph Clark and

Richardson Dilworth. Cardinal O’Hara’s gave close attention to the ministry of Puerto

Ricans in Philadelphia. His endeavors in this regard will be detailed in the next chapter.

John Krol (1910-1996) succeeded Cardinal O’Hara and was the youngest archbishop in the country when he was consecrated for Philadelphia in 1961. Not only would he oversee the Philadelphia Archdiocese during the Second Vatican Council

(1962-65), he also would serve as President of the United States Conference of Catholic 202

Bishops (1971-1974). He would also witness the United States Bicentennial (1975-

1976), the Eucharistic Congress held in Philadelphia (1976), and both the First (1972) and Second (1977) Hispanic Pastoral Encuentros held in Washington, D.C.

The new prelate’s style provided a return to greater rigidity and conservatism.

Cardinal Krol’s obituary in the New York Times stated: “He was an outspoken defender of traditional theology, hierarchical authority and strict church discipline.”90 This does not mean, however, that he lacked appreciation for popular Catholicism. In fact, Krol demonstrated his admiration for a people’s popular religious devotion by fostering the creation of a National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown,

Pennsylvania. This devotion to the Polish “Black Madonna” has served as a rallying point for popular Catholicism among Poles, and, interestingly, among Haitian Catholics as well.91 Likely, Krol’s endorsement of the Shrine to Our Lady of Czestochowa was colored by his support of resistance to religious persecution in Communist Poland; politics is seldom a stranger to religion.

Although their styles of governance and their pastoral models varied, each of these two prelates fostered ethnic ministry in Philadelphia and shaped Catholic social activism that eventually had an impact upon the apostolate toward Puerto Rican

Catholics. Certainly, only Cardinal Krol held office when the Young Lords were engaged in highly visible social struggles, but the nature of Catholicism in Philadelphia owed much to the decisions made by his predecessors. Consideration of the changes in

Catholic theology helps clarify how and why the models for ethnic ministry varied under Dougherty, O’Hara and Krol.

203

Theology in Conflict After the Second Vatican Council

The call of Pope John XXIII for the reform of Catholicism by an ecumenical council, Vatican II, challenged the Church’s traditional authority. The implementation of the reforms, however, proved to be more controversial than the council itself.

Conservative prelates like Cardinal Krol supervised the pace of change. They often came under fire both from conservatives who thought things were moving too fast and from progressives who thought things moved too slowly.92 Thus, unlike Dougherty, whose authoritarian style of governance was generally uncomplicated by innovative theological trends, Krol had to confront different interpretations of what the council reforms required. He tended to take the conservative side and was generally opposed to innovation. For instance, he opposed the reception of Communion in the hand, criticized the adoption of contemporary styles of dress for women religious and withheld permission for obligatory weekly Mass to be celebrated on Saturday evening.93

While the Council urged the diffusion of power to the laity in areas of ministry and parish operations, Krol and others like him sought to control how these lay councils and groups were formed, accepting only leaders compliant with the prelate’s agenda. In many ways, Krol was an intellectual predecessor of the Polish pope John Paul II.

Importantly, he directed the archdiocese at the time that Frank Rizzo was Mayor of

Philadelphia, and both leaders used their institutional authorities against social dissent.

A key issue relevant to this dissertation’s main topic is the political engagement for Catholics within a pluralistic democracy. Just as national trends had weakened the control of the political machine in Philadelphia in the early twentieth century, the

Second Vatican Council and two progressive popes forced local prelates like Krol to 204 follow new paths for the Church in the 1960s. With great optimism, John XXIII had asked that the “Church’s windows be opened” to let new light and fresh air in; once they were opened, it was difficult to close them again. Gaudium et Spes (The Pastoral

Constitution on the Church in the Modern World) was the conciliar decree that addressed the role of the Church in contemporary times. With more specificity, Pope

John XXIII’s encyclical Mater et Magistra (The Church as Mother and Teacher of All

Nations) spelled out how the common good required governments to redistribute services and wealth to compensate for economic injustices.94 The pope’s encyclical

Pacem in Terris (On Establishing Universal Peace in Truth) urged Catholics to work with the United Nations on its assistance programs around the world.95 Rather than prevent cooperation with organizations like UNESCO on account of their secularity or promotion of birth control, as had been the case under Pope Pius XII, John XXIII prioritized church actions in cooperation with those doing good, regardless of theological differences.96

In 1967, Pope John XXIII’s successor, Pope Paul IV, issued the encyclical

Populorum Progressio [On the Development of Peoples], which addressed structural poverty in the Third World and the obligation of government to remedy social injustice by positive welfare programs.97 Paul VI advanced the thinking of John XXIII by highlighting migration as a phenomenon with global implications that could be held in check only by reducing the poverty produced by unjust international economic relationships.98 These key papal documents from two popes charted a course for progressive Catholics who opposed colonialism in Puerto Rico. 205

In Latin America, the conciliar reforms encouraged Catholics to oppose right- wing dictatorships and the exploitative capitalist systems upon which such political power depended. Working under a mandate to articulate church social teachings, the

Council of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) issued a set of theological papers that recognized the structural nature of social injustice after an episcopal conference in

Medellín, Columbia in 1968. The theology employed in many of these documents was distinguished by its systematic use of Marxist analytical categories, especially of class structure and class consciousness. The bishops endorsed these documents which attacked the notion that contemporary economic and political systems were irreversible and inescapable, placing the Church on the side of movements against class injustice.99

Significantly, the Latin American Catholic Church adopted what became “the preferential option for the poor,”100 which stated that in those cases when society was faced with political decisions that could harm the interests of either the well-off or the poor, the Church should advocate tor those that favored the poor. Catholics should oppose structural injustice, wrote the bishops, even if confronting this evil provoked a response of violent repression.101 The license to oppose oppressive governments had been articulated by theologians such as St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), St. Thomas

Aquinas (1225–1274), which Jaime Balmes had repeated in addressing Catholic rebellion against tyranny. Certainly, the Theology of Liberation viewed violence as a last resort after all other options had been exhausted.102 Although the legitimation of violence was consonant with long-held Catholic principles, in the Latin American context of those times, the new theology came to be identified by both proponents and opponents as supportive of Marxist revolution in Latin America.103 206

Latin America liberation theology resonated among Latinos and Latinas in the

United States.104 Growing interest in this new theology produced an ecumenical meeting in 1975 of progressive theologians representing various ethnic groups and races in the United States with key Latin American theologians. Under the name “Theology in the Americas,” this new effort’s intention was to adapt liberation theology to a

United States context.105 The program capitalized on the linguistic and cultural affinity that Latinos in the U.S. shared with the Latin Americans. Not only did Latin American theologians such as Gustavo Gutiérrez become familiar to Latinos thereby, but unique

Latino experiences were introduced as issues for theological reflection. For instance, at

Theology in the Americas’ second ecumenical meeting in 1980, Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón, who had recently been granted freedom from federal prison by President Jimmy Carter, was invited to explain the meaning of Puerto Rican liberation to the theologians.106 Although these formal conferences took place after the founding of the Young Lords of Philadelphia in 1972, the trends they represented had begun at the time that the Young Lords undertook a struggle for social justice in the

United States.

The National Outreach to Latino Catholics

Theology was not the only area in which Latino Catholics gained visibility.

They also became important players in social justice ministry in parish neighborhoods throughout the United States. Federal rules for funding community agencies under the various programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty required leadership from persons of the minority group to benefit. Latino clergy and sisters subsequently 207 became directors of neighborhood organizations, leapfrogging over non-Hispanic leaders in Catholic social service agencies.107 Their experience in the work of the

Church among the Latino community empowered them to choose the best candidates from among the laity to staff their organizations. This scenario rapidly produced a new generation of Latino Catholic leaders in the United States at the local parish level.

Importantly, because liberation theology stressed praxis, emphasizing that religion was not only about belief, but about informed action, those engaged in works of social ministry were entitled to say that they were “doing theology.” In my consideration, the

Young Lords’ social activism in Philadelphia not only coincided with these new approaches in church and society, but also made this activism part of the emerging trend to include ethnic leaders in the endeavor to pair reflective theology with lived theology

(praxis) in the Catholic Church.

The Chicano César Chávez represented a Latino-led labor union movement that claimed the mantle of Catholicism. Oriented primarily toward southwestern Mexican farmworkers, its reputation spread around the nation, drawing support from various racial and ethnic groups, including Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics. In fact, the call for justice for Mexican American farmworkers provided an opportunity for Puerto

Ricans and other Latin Americans in the United States to unify nationwide.108 There was Catholic opposition, however, most notably from Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, who publicly took the side of the growers and from the altar called the Catholic supporters of the strike “rabble.”109 On the other hand, there were favorable examples of the importance of episcopal support. For instance, Francis

Furey (1905-1979), Archbishop of San Antonio, called on the people of his archdiocese 208 to support the strikers. He also chose a pro-Chávez cleric, the late Mexican-American

Patricio Flores, to be his auxiliary bishop. Relevant to this dissertation, I note that

Archbishop Furey had a Philadelphia connection, having served as rector of St. Charles

Borromeo Seminary under Cardinal Dougherty.110 Ironically, opposition to Chávez and his strikers from some in the hierarchy strengthened the convictions of many Catholic supporters about the revolutionary nature of the cause. The Catholic Church’s teachings on social justice led them to oppose negative episcopal opinions about the farmworkers. That precedent would later inspire the Young Lords in their social commitment in Philadelphia, as they pursued their goals despite Cardinal Krol’s opposition.

I believe that the energy with which the Latino Catholics called and worked against injustice to be constitutive of the prophetic burden for Puerto Ricans. The eventual success of the farmworkers’ strike and the national boycott of grapes gave reason to believe that the struggle could triumph in other arenas. In 1970, a labor agreement between between the United Farm Workers and the growers was reached, and a contract was signed. It represented a triumph for Latinos, much as had the signing of Civil Rights legislation for African Americans. Latino students in high schools and public universities, especially in those with departments of Chicano and

Mexican American Studies, saw a new purpose for community activism.111 They studied texts such as Occupied America, which revisited the history of Texas, California and the Southwest as invaded homelands.112 For their part, Puerto Rican students, including some who became Young Lords, examined the history of Puerto Rico’s 209 victimization under Spanish and American colonialism and recovered the legacy of revolutionary heroism of Pedro Albizu Campos.

Through the prism of their own history, Latinos came to see themselves not only as minorities in the United States but as members of an international Third World of oppressed peoples.113 This perspective was supported by both the emerging Latin

American liberation theology and the openness of the Second Vatican Council, which called upon the faithful to cooperate with secular movements that benefitted the wellbeing of the poor and the oppressed. Upon this premise, they based their alliances with protesters against racial prejudice, social injustice and anti-imperialist resistance to armed struggle. Because they had characterized the Vietnam War as a war of aggression, Latinos come to view the 1973 withdrawal of United States’ troops from

Southeast Asia as a victory over imperialistic intervention.114 The theological support for alliances with secular movements that the new theology and the Council offered, I submit, made it possible for the Philadelphia Young Lords to see their struggle as part of their obligation as Catholics in the modern world.

The Hispanic Pastoral Encuentros

The ability to cite liberation theologians supplied Latino leadership in the U.S. with symbolic capital within the religious field of Catholic interactions.115 The application of theology to their praxis produced two approaches to ministry: that of the pastoralists, who focused upon change within the Church, and that of the liberationists, who were primarily committed to change in social class structures.116 The differences between the groups were bridged in the original theology of the San Antonio native and 210

Mexican American priest Virgilio Elizondo (1935-2016). As a seminary professor,

Elizondo had drunk deeply at the wells of Mexican Catholic history.117 The religious image of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe as a mestiza woman surrounded by Aztec religious symbols was of major interest.118 Insightfully, Elizondo equated the abuses from committed by American invaders of the Mexican territories in 1836 and 1848 with those committed by Spanish conquistadores in sixteenth-century Aztec Mexico. In seventeenth-century Mexico, under Spanish rule, Our Lady of Guadalupe had symbolized the merger of two races and cultures (mestizaje); now, Elizondo wrote, the devotion carried a similar reconciling message for the United States in the twentieth century. Based on his conviction that cultural sensitivity was a first step toward social justice, Elizondo’s theology expressed hope for structural change and presented mestizaje as a meeting ground for liberationists and pastoralists.119

The emergence of a Mexican American or Chicano theology supported the convocation of a national pastoral congress for all Hispanic Catholics in the United

States.120 El Encuentro Nacional de Pastoral Hispana, more commonly known as

“Encuentro,” was based on the model of a congress in which each participant was an official delegate of a specific region. Representatives from ministries among movements, such as the Cursillo Movement,121 as well as catechists, liturgists, social workers, educators and the like conducted workshops to share their best practices and to formulate guidelines for action. Each workshop presented a series of resolutions for approval by assembly vote. The resolutions were intended to guide the process for five years, allowing for regional Encuentros to evaluate the plans, redevelop them and identify new leaders. At the end of the five years, a second Encuentro was held to 211 evaluate the local efforts and design a new five-year plan that would critically examine mistakes and cultivate successful programs. The Encuentro model of congress was so successful among Catholics that many Protestant denominations later imitated it for their own members.122

I wish to note that the Encuentro participants were mostly working-class lay people based in parishes. The resolutions promoted the establishment of regional pastoral centers that would provide training for ministry to, and by, Hispanics. With such training, the Encuentro organizers reasoned, Hispanics would acquire the qualifications required for leadership positions under the responsibility of each of the local bishops. This purpose resonated with Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectuals, because they represented the thinking groups produced organically from within the

Catholic Hispanic communities across the country. Like Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, these leaders could draw from their religious and cultural language that which was necessary to articulate the feelings, experiences, needs and aspirations in ways that their fellow-believers could not express for themselves. While these Hispanic

Catholic leaders would represent Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, the aforementioned fellow-believers would represent Gramsci’s subaltern or excluded social groups.

In the five-year period between the first and the second national Encuentros, there were 20 regional or local Encuentros.123 Each reviewed, adapted or added to the recommendations from the national meeting. Additionally, they pointed to an evaluation of each region’s performance in the implementation of those recommendations that had been approved by the United States Conference of Catholic

Bishops (USCCB). By the time the Second Encuentro met in Washington in 1977, 212 some 100,000 Hispanic men and women had participated in the process at the local level.124 Less than a hundred years after their predecessors had emphatically rejected the Luzerne Memorial’s provisions to establish permanent institutions for ethnic pastoral care, the United States’ bishops warmly received the Encuentro proposals for most of the same measures.125 The sole exception was the process of naming bishops, although appointing a native Hispanic as an auxiliary bishop became more frequent.126

The Encuentros were more successful than Call to Action, a program of the

USCCB in preparation for celebrating the American bicentennial. Call to Action consisted of a series of regional meetings to discuss with laity, theologians and civic leaders the path of the past and the trail for the future of Catholicism in the United

States.127 Categorizing the type of person attending Call to Action, Father Andrew

Greely (1928-2013) described them as “a ragtag assembly of kooks, crazies, flakes, militants, lesbians, homosexuals, ex-priests, incompetents, castrating witches, would-be messiahs, sickies, and other assorted malcontents.” Worse yet, in Greeley’s opinion, was that the USCCB bureaucracy had been taken over by “peace and justice activists who were influenced by liberation theologies.”128 This vitriol against the process of Call to Action contrasts with how the bishops generally accepted the Hispanic Encuentros and supported the second meeting in 1977.

While the Encuentros depended on the final decision of the bishops, they successfully defined the basic structure for ministry as defined by the nation’s Catholic

Hispanics leadership.129 Recommendations for lay involvement and training were particularly important and since Cardinal Krol was President of the USCCB during the implementation, these Encuentro measures came to Philadelphia along with elements of 213 liberation theology. As reported in several of the interviews in the next two chapters, this expanded the field of religious engagement for the Young Lords.

Theological and Cultural Wars about Latino Catholicism

I close this chapter with a review of competing versions of Catholic discourse on colonialism, race and ethnicity. The challenges to the Catholic faith in the 1970s were as significant as those that confronted Quakerism in colonial Philadelphia. Although

Catholicism adheres to a hierarchical authority, this was a time of transition where rival theological interpretations often questioned particular pastoral policies, old and new.

The contest among theological opinions was largely recorded in the series of regional hearings that formed part of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops’ program Call to Action, mentioned above. The hearings took place between 1975-1976 under the title “Liberty and Justice for All.” Focusing on ethnicity and race, the one held at Newark, New Jersey, December 4-6, included an animated discussion of many types of pluralism in the Catholic experience in the United States.130 Five presentations were particularly relevant to the themes of pastoral care and ethnic identity.131

Jay Dolan of Notre, for instance, offered a historical overview of the highs and lows in the ethnic and national parishes through the nineteenth century into the twentieth century.132 He suggested that a close look at historical processes would confirm the need for a middle ground between total assimilation and perpetuating ethnicity in ways that impeded social cohesiveness.133

Monsignor Geno Baroni (1930-1984), of the National Center for Urban Ethnic

Affairs, began his presentation by contesting Harvey Cox’s suggestion “that the decline 214 of the relevance of the major faiths was creating a secular city, indicating that the churches have no role in the urban malaise.”134 In rebuttal, Baroni spoke about the strength of the urban parish as a harbor for different ethnic and racial groups that could work together to vitalize neighborhoods. He emphasized the material reality of housing and the impact of bank policies of “redlining,” i.e., not providing loans to prospective owners in areas projected to deteriorate.135 Baroni criticized federal funding for “the poor,” because anti-poverty programs often segmented a parish by race and ethnicity, undercutting the solidarity of a neighborhood, where everyone ought to work together for common goals, such as improved housing and better community services.136 Baroni made the telling observation that the center for neighborhood development was the

Catholic parish and that in strengthening it, the city too grew stronger:

The parish must revitalize the neighborhood not only around the altar where we are one in the unity of the Eucharist, but the parish must develop a new sense of community development. The parish must become a catalyst for revitalizing neighborhoods in order to help them with rapid social change, racial and cultural change. The parish and the neighborhood are partners to the family, and are the size and scope necessary for creating a sense of community that can be the real building block of the cities. Cities are so large and so complicated by themselves, but by developing a new sense of parish-neighborhood revitalization we may begin to provide healthy neighborhoods which can be the nucleus for rebuilding our cities. Otherwise, no one will be able to escape to the distant suburbs or rural areas and not be affected by the creeping cancer of urban decay.137

The political implications of Baroni’s vision have been explored by Robert

Bauman, who attributes to Baroni much of the inspiration for the Campaign for Human

Development (CHD), which was instituted by the USCCB in 1970. In effect, the CHD constituted “the Catholic War on Poverty,” writes Bauman, noting that “Baroni served 215 as Assistant Secretary for Housing and Urban Development during the administration of

President Jimmy Carter, the highest federal office ever held by a Catholic priest.”138

At the hearing, Michael Novak (1933-2017) spoke about ethnicity and race in terms of politics and culture.139 He stated that White ethnic groups and Blacks were forced into an unconscious struggle against each other that neither had created.140

Novak anticipated the politics of White resentment when he complained that African

Americans were given too much special attention as a minority group. He said such a classification penalized White ethnics who also suffered from discrimination:

But nobody asked the question, “What about Italian Americans, what about Slavic Americans?” There is rather good evidence to suggest that Slavic Americans and Italian Americans are considerably more underrepresented in American colleges than blacks. Blacks are not doing worse than all other Americans. By constantly singling them out, something very unfair is being done to blacks. A very great misconception about the many forms of stratification in American life is being promulgated.141

Shortly after the hearings, he accepted a post in 1978 at the American Enterprise

Institute and became a celebrated conservative Catholic author.

Another presenter at the regional hearing in New Jersey was Father Andrew

Greeley. In 1975, Greeley was a sociologist at the National Opinion Research Center

(NORC) in Chicago and a syndicated columnist for many diocesan newspapers. In his presentation, he protested the bishops’ decision to treat ethnicity and race together because, he said, although race was fixed by biology, ethnic identity was more fluid.

He offered examples of optional ethnicity, distinctly mentioning Puerto Ricans.

It is easier to stop being Jewish than it is to stop being Catholic in Ulster. And it is much harder to stop being black, though if you’re light enough, you can pass on certain occasions. But it’s easier to stop being black in the United States than it is to stop being Indian, let’s say in Uganda. Puerto Ricans and Cubans, on the other hand, 216

particularly if they have the right skin color, can with relative ease leave behind their past as soon as they lose their Latin accent.142

Greeley interpreted Black militancy of the 1960s in terms of ethnicity: “Finally the Blacks became self-conscious as an ethnic group in American society and demanded that they be dealt in like all other ethnic groups.” Shawn Copeland, an African America

Catholic theologian, sat on the official panel receiving the testimony. She questioned how being Black was an ethnic choice. Greeley answered that he did not believe

“biology is destiny” and that he hoped that one day “there will be neither Jew nor

Gentile, neither male nor female, but all one.”143

Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, the last to present, was about to be named Director of the Hispanic Consultation of Theology in the Americas when he addressed the bishops from a Latino perspective. Insisting that ethnicity in the United States had to be analyzed together with religion, culture, race and class,144 he criticized the economic system:

Corporate management exists to maximize profits, and when this cannot be done by right-to-work laws, corrupt and company unions, or mechanization it is accomplished by dividing workers against each other by race and nationality -- in other words, by ethnicity.145

Beginning with an allusion to ethnic tensions between Jews and Gentiles in the early Church, Stevens-Arroyo said it was the Church’s mission to reconcile class injustices, allowing culture and racial differences to be shielded from negative stigma.

He sounded an alarm about a rise in fascist thinking in the United States that created ethnic and racial scapegoats for economic dislocation, citing the likelihood that Latin

American immigrants would become the victims of repression.146 Finally, he became 217 the only speaker to link discrimination to colonialism when he asked the bishops to support the Puerto Rican pleas of a “bicentennial without colonies.”147

These five spokesmen at the Newark hearing voiced different definitions of race and ethnicity. I cite their views in some detail here to provide examples of the range of

Catholic social thought in the 1970s. Each of these speakers had already gained recognition for his interpretation of ethnic and racial differences. Each had also produced a definition of a social problem and had charted coordinated actions to address injustice. During the hearings in 1976, however, they were rivals on the field of religious interaction who presented competing visions of ethnicity and race to the

Catholic Church. The invitations to diverse speakers had been delivered, it seems, because the bishops had not settled upon a single narrative to shape their policy. At a time of transition for American Catholicism, the episcopacy was open to ideas from all sides before shaping their future policy. How that process impacted upon the prophetic burden of Puerto Rican Catholics in Philadelphia is the subject of the next two chapters.

218

Endnotes to Chapter 6

1 Charles H. Glatfelter, The Pennsylvania Germans: A Brief Account of their Influence on Pennsylvania. (University Park: Pennsylvania Historical Association, 1990).

2 Franklin College was opened in 1787, with a grant from Benjamin Franklin, who had repented his earlier aversion to the maintenance of the German language and identity in Pennsylvania. In 1853, it would merge with Marshall College, another institution serving Pennsylvania’s German population, becoming today’s Franklin and Marshall College.

3 Charles George Herbermann, ed. The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church, in 15 Volumes (New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1913), 5:82

4 Neumann was ordained a priest in the United States before joining the Redemptorists and, in fact, was the first member of his religious congregation to pronounce vows in the United States. St. John Nepomucene Neumann “The Little Bishop,” accessed March 19, 2016, http://themissionchurch.com/stjohnneumann.htm.

5 E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, Second Edition: (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 424.

6 Richard N. Juliani, Building Little Italy: Philadelphia’s Italians Before Mass Migration (State College, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).

7 Perhaps the most famous of these Latin Americans was the saintly Father Félix Varela from Cuba who would reside briefly in Philadelphia from 1824 to 1825, when he composed a collection of essays promoting independence for Cuba, later collected into a book, El habanero. In 1826, he published in Philadelphia, Jicoténcal, the first Hispanic novel written in the United States. Before Varela, the most recognized Latin American in Philadelphia was Manuel de Trujillo y Torres, a Spanish immigrant to Gran Colombia, took part in a conspiracy to overthrow Spanish rule there in 1794 and was forced into exile in Philadelphia in 1796. In 1818, Simon Bolivar appointed him as diplomatic representative to the United States. He was buried with full military honors in the cemetery of old St. Mary’s Church in Philadelphia and recognized as the first Latin American diplomatic representative in the United States. Anne Arsenault, “Manuel Torres: The Franklin of the Southern World,” Historical Society of Pennsylvania, accessed April 4, 2016, http://hsp.org/sites/default/files/legacy_files/migrated/manueltorres.pdf.

8 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 117-118, 156, 420.

9 Elizabeth M. Geffen, “Industrial Development and Social Crisis: 1841-1854,” in Philadelphia: A 300- Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982); Russell F. Weigley, “The Border City in Civil War: 1854-1865,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, 369: Dorothy Gondos Beers suggests that the foreign-born in Philadelphia peaked at 27 percent. Dorothy Gondos Beers, “The Centennial City: 1865-1876,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, 422. See also the United States Census reports on Philadelphia for 1850, accessed July 30, 2016, https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab22.html.

10 Geffen, “Industrial Development and Social Crisis,” 309.

219

11 Stephen Steinburg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), 52-54; 130-145.

12 Jay P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 27-44.

13 Dolan, The Immigrant Church, 164-169.

14 Dolan, The Immigrant Church, 356-358.

15 The New American Cyclopedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge defined the Irish as a race citing the following as inherited features: “low-browed and savage, groveling and bestial, lazy and wild, simian and sensual.” George Ripley and Charles Dana, eds. (New York: D. Appleton, 1863). See also, Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds. Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). For Jews considered a non-white race, see Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); also Steinburg, The Ethnic Myth, 130-138.

16 Faith Charlton, “Black Catholics in Philadelphia and The Journal,” Catholic Historical Research Center, accessed August 17, 2016, http://www.pahrc.net/black-catholics-in-philadelphia-and-the- journal/.

17 Geffen, “Industrial Development and Social Crisis,” 309. She cited statistics that there were 19,761 Blacks out of a total 408,672 persons living in the city.

18 Neumann had intervened in 1847 on behalf of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, even facing the opposition of the Archbishop of Baltimore. See St. John Nepomucene Neumann “The Little Bishop,” accessed March 19, 2016, http://themissionchurch.com/stjohnneumann.htm.

19 Charlton, “Black Catholics in Philadelphia and The Journal.”

20 James Hennesey, SJ, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 143-148.

21 Geffen, “Industrial Development and Social Crisis,” 354-355.

22 Geffen, “Industrial Development and Social Crisis,” 352-355; Weigley, “The Border City in Civil War,” 387-390.

23 Franz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness” written in 1952, is found in the fifth chapter, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” in Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. (New York: Grove Press, 1967). “The Fact of Blackness” had appeared in May 1951 in the journal Espirit, accessed August 30, 2016, http://www.nathanielturner.com/factofblackness.htm.

24 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox. (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 14- 18.

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25 “In the colonies, the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.” Ibid., 5-6.

26 Steinburg, The Ethnic Myth, 42-43, states that ethnics become white, and concludes that the Melting Pot concept applies only to ethnicity, 48-51.

27 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 424.

28 In the post-Civil War prosperity and increasing Catholic population, new dioceses for Scranton, Harrisburg, and Wilmington were carved out of the territory of the Diocese of Philadelphia in 1868 and Philadelphia was elevated to the prominence of an archdiocese.

29 Silvio Tomasi, Piety and Power: The Role of Italian Parishes in the New York Metropolitan Areas, l880-l930 (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1975), 102-105; 178-184. See Philip Gleason, Keeping the Faith: American Catholicism Past and Present, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 46-49; and Dolan, The Immigrant Church, 123-128; 143-144.

30 Juliani, Building Little Italy, 219.

31 Charles E. Welch, Jr., “‘Oh, Dem Golden Slippers’: The Philadelphia Mummers Parade” Journal of American Folklore 79 (October–Dec 1966) 314: 523–536. See also Susan G Davis, “Making Night Hideous: Christmas Revelry and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,” American Quarterly 34 (Summer 1982) 2: 185–199.

32 Hennesey, American Catholics, 179.

33 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, “Jaime Balmes Redux: Catholicism as Civilization in the Political Philosophy of Pedro Albizu Campos,” in Bridging the Atlantic: Iberian and Latin American Thought in Historical Perspective, Marina Pérez de Mendiola, ed., (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 134-135.

34 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, 1986 reprint edition, with an introduction by Elijah Anderson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899/1986), 219-220.

35 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 220.

36 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro 219-220. The generosity of Mother Katherine and the Drexel sisters was later extended to the Spanish-speaking with money donated in 1905 for the purchase of the building on Spring Garden Street that became the chapel of La Milagrosa. Mother Katherine imposed a condition that the Vincentians continue to serve the 150 “Spanish-speaking of African ancestry” who had been identified among the 1,000 Spanish-speaking Catholics in Philadelphia. It is likely that Puerto Ricans were among those so classified. See Lou Baldwin, May 25, 2011, “100 Years and Still Going Strong,” Catholic Philly.com, accessed April 1, 2018, http://catholicphilly.com/2011/05/news/100-years-and-still-going-strong-at-la-milagrosa-chapel/.

37 Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davies, “The Iron Age: 1876-1905,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 494 ftn. 99.

38 Tomasi, Piety and Power, 87.

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39 Tomasi, Piety and Power, 79 ftn. 70, citing Monsignor Gennaro de Concilio.

40 Gleason, Keeping the Faith, 46-49; Dolan, The Immigrant Church, 19-23.

41 Hennesey, American Catholics, 4-5; 178-179.

42 Hennesey, American Catholics 82-86; Philip Gleason, Keeping the Faith, 49-54.

43 Tomasi, Piety and Power, 89 ftn. 105, citing Father Alphonse Villeneuve.

44 Tomasi, Piety and Power, 86-89.

45 Aeterna Patris restored Thomism as the principal philosophical and theological system for Catholicism; Immortale Dei accepted separation of Church and State within modern democratic republics; Rerum Novarum spelled out a “third way” between the economic excesses of Capitalism and Socialism.

46 For the background and eventual outcome of this proposal see Tomasi, Piety and Power, 83-92; Gleason, Keeping the Faith, 42-43.

47 Tomasi, Piety and Power, 89 ftn. 107.

48 The territory assigned to the Diocese of Scranton was taken in 1868 from the earlier boundaries of Philadelphia. In a pattern also found in Chicago and Buffalo, Co-Adjutor Bishop Michael John Hoban, an Irish American, had been in conflict with Father Franciszek Hodur since 1897. After the Polish priest failed to secure the support of Rome for his complaints, he founded the Polish National Catholic Church in 1899. “Polish National Church,” Polish Genealogical Society, accessed August 31, 2016, http://pgsa.org/polish-national-catholic-church/. See Hennesey, American Catholics, 209- 210.

49 New York Archbishop Corrigan told Mother Frances Cabrini, later declared a saint, that “she could best serve her people by getting on the next boat and return to Italy” to convince Italians they should not immigrate. See Theodore Maynard, The Catholic Church and the American Idea. (New York: Appleton-Crofts, 1953), 143.

50 For opinions on Testem Benevolentiae, see John Tracy Ellis, American Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 117-121.

51 Ted C. Hinckley, “American Anti-Catholicism during the Mexican War,” Pacific Historical Review 31: 2 (May 1962): 121-137.

52 José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 92-113.

53 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, “Pious Colonialism: Assessing a Church Paradigm for Chicano Identity,” in Mexican American Religions: spirituality, activism, and culture, eds. Mario García and Gastón Espinosa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 57-82.

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54 These words are attributed to Father Thomas Ewing Sherman, SJ., son of Civil War General William Sherman. See Elisa Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church in Colonial Puerto Rico (1898-1964) (Río Piedras: Editorial Edil, 1982), 113.

55 Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Concerning New Opinions, Virtue, Nature and Grace, with Regard to Americanism, January 22, 1899.

56 Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church, 5-13.

57 Jaime R. Vidal, “Citizens Yet Strangers: The Puerto Rican Experience,” in Puerto Rican and Cuban Catholics in the U.S., 1900-1965, ed. Jay Dolan, Volume II of the Notre Dame Series on Hispanic Catholics in the U.S. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 30-42.

58 Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church, 233.

59 The same Chief Justice had written the opinion for “Gonzáles vs. Williams” (192 U.S. 1, 1904), that under the immigration laws Puerto Ricans were not aliens, and therefore could not be denied entry into the United States.

60 Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church, 42-60.

61 Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church, 208-209.

62 Aida Negrón Montilla, Americanization in Puerto Rico and the public school system, 1900-1930 (Río Piedras: Editorial Edil, 1970), 121-122.

63 Negrón Montilla, Americanization in Puerto Rico and the public school system, 1900-1930, 240-242.

64 Vidal, “Citizens Yet Strangers,” 29.

65 Donald T. Moore, “Puerto Rico Para Cristo” (Doctoral Dissertation. South West Baptist Seminary: Fort Worth, Texas). See Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), Sondeos N. 43, 1969.

66 These measures are detailed in Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church, 70-84; and in Vidal, “Citizens Yet Strangers,” 38-45.

67 Díaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism, 52-57.

68 Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church, 82.

69 Ana María Díaz-Stevens and Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence in US Religion (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 98-112.

70 Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church, 84. Spanish Capuchins assumed ministry of the Franciscan foundations in Puerto Rico in 1902, although the North American Province of St. Augustine from Pennsylvania later replaced the Spaniards in 1928.

71 Ana Maria Díaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 56.

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72 Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church, 131. Jones had a Philadelphia connection, having been ordained by Archbishop Patrick John Ryan after seminary studies at the Augustinian College of Villanova in Radnor, Pennsylvania, and had learned Spanish while on the faculty of the Augustinian College of Villanova in Havana, Cuba.

73 Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church, 94-98.

74 Charles J. Beirne, SJ., The Problem of Americanization in the Catholic Schools of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras: Editorial Universitaria de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1975).

75 Caruana stated: “A Catholic bishop receiving the blessing of a Protestant minister in a public act is a contradiction.” Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church, 123-24.

76 Ana María Díaz-Stevens, “Missionizing the Missionaries: Religious Congregations of Women in Puerto Rico, 1910-1960,” U. S. Catholic Historian, 21:1 (Winter 2003): 49-51.

77 Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church, 106-107; 247-249.

78 Byrne, as Archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, was to issue a prohibition against Catholic girls appearing in swim suits during beauty contests. He also declared dating illicit for Catholic boys and girls while they attended high school. His successor, Bishop James P. Davis was much more politic. Interestingly, he earned the same promotion in 1963 and succeeded Byrne in Santa Fe, as he had done in San Juan.

79 Dougherty also promoted the appointment of his nephew, Joseph Carroll McCormick, as Bishop of Altona and later of Scranton.

80 When they formalized the band of women into a religious congregation, they chose as their “specific mission…. the preservation of the faith in those areas and among those people who are spiritually neglected and abandoned, especially the poor. Our chief effort is to develop a missionary spirit in the laity, with the goal that every Catholic be an apostle.” Article 5 of The Rule of Life of the Religious Congregation of the Missionary of the Most Blessed Trinity.

81 In 1920, the small band of Catholic women was officially approved as a religious congregation of Catholic women. Father Judge also founded a second religious congregation for men known as the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity. Díaz-Stevens, “Missionizing the Missionaries,” 40-46.

82 Díaz-Stevens, “Missionizing the Missionaries,” 40-46.

83 He was Bishop of Nueva Segovia (1903-1908) and later of Jaro (1908-1915).

84 Hennesey, American Catholics, 241.

85 Hennesey, American Catholics, 241, ftn. 32.

86 The “National Catholic War Conference” meant to ensure Catholic support for the I World War was converted in 1919 into the “National Catholic Welfare Conference,” or NCWC, from which has come the ministry arm of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), formerly titled as the “National Conference of Catholic Bishops” (NCCB). See Ellis, American Catholicism, 138-141.

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87 William M. Halsey, The Survival of American Innocence: Catholicism in the Era of Disillusionment, 1920-1940 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1980), 11.

88 Halsey, The Survival of American Innocence, 4. The notables are listed as follows: “Charles Péguy, Maurice Blondel, Karl Adam, Romano Guardini and Christopher Dawson. In the Thomist revival Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain became such internationally known personalities that often many were led to the confusion of identifying Thomism with Catholic thought…. In literature, a number of Catholic writers, Georges Bernanos, François Mauriac, Sigrid Undset, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene commanded an attention to Catholic writing….”

89 TIME Magazine, “Milestones,” September 5, 1960.

90 Peter Steinfels, (1996-03-04). “John Cardinal Krol, Pivotal Catholic Figure, Dies at 85". The New York Times. See John Corr, “Cardinal John Krol, 1910 – 1996,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (1996-03- 03).

91 In an ill-fated attempt to quell the slave uprising in Saint-Domingue, Napoleon sent the Polish Legion to the French colony. Some of the Polish soldiers chose to remain in that Caribbean island. During that time, devotion to the Madonna of Czestochowa was introduced. Although the blackness of the original devotion refers to the darkening of the original colors, in terms of the Haitian devotion, the notion that the Madonna is “black” may be understood in racial terms.

92 John Deedy, American Catholicism: And Now Where? (New York: Plenum Press, 1987).

93 Steinfels, “John Cardinal Krol.”

94 Mater et Magistra, Encyclical of Pope John XXIII, On Christianity and Social Progress, May 15, 1961, #115.

95 Pacem in Terris, Encyclical of Pope John XXIII, On Establishing Universal Peace in Truth, Justice, Charity, and Liberty, April 11, 1963, #145.

96 Pacem in Terris, #157-160.

97 Populorum Progressio, Encyclical of Pope Paul VI, On the Development of Peoples, March 26, 1967, #33. See also #69.

98 Octogesima Adveniens, Apostolic Letter of Pope Paul VI, May 14, 1971, #17.

99 “Extreme inequality among social classes: especially, though not exclusively, in those countries which are characterized by a marked bi-classism, where a few have much (culture, wealth, power, prestige) while the majority has very little.” Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops, The Church in the Present-Day Transformation of Latin America in the Light of the Council, Documents from Meeting in Medellín, Colombia, September 6, 1968, “Conclusions,” Vol. 2 (Bogotá: General Secretariat of CELAM, 1970), #3.

100 The Church in the Present-Day Transformation of Latin America, #9-10. The expression “preferential option for the poor,” was first used by the Jesuit Superior General, Pedro Arupe, in 1968. It is

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contained in the resolutions of a conference at Aparecida in Brazil, presided over by the future Pope Francis in 2007.

101 The Church in the Present-Day Transformation of Latin America, #14.

102 The name is derived from a book published with that name which popularized the approach to social issues. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, trans. and eds. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll; Orbis Books, 1973).

103 Samuel Silva Gotay, El pensamiento cristiano revolucionario en América Latina y el Caribe: Implicaciones de la teología de la liberación para la sociología de la religión (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1980). Third Edition: (Río Piedras, PR: Ediciones Huracán, 1989), 325-338. See also, Phillip Berryman, The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions (Orbis: Maryknoll, 1984).

104 Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence, 122, 162-165.

105 Sergio Torres and John Eagleson, eds., Theology in the Americas (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1976).

106 The second meeting, like the first, was held in Detroit, Michigan. Lolita Lebrón (1919-2010) was the leader of the four Nationalists who attacked the House of Representatives on March 1, 1954.

107 Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence, 156-159.

108 Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence, 143-145.

109 David F. Gómez, Somos Chicanos: Strangers in Our Own Land (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 155- 170. The bishop of the Diocese of Monterey-Fresno, Redemptorist Aloysius Joseph Willinger had been the successor to Byrne as Bishop of Ponce, Puerto Rico. He called the strikers “Communists.”

110 Archbishop Furey had been born in Coaldale, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. After service as secretary to Cardinal Dougherty, he was president of Immaculata College (1936–46) and rector of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary (1946–58). He was named Auxiliary Bishop in Philadelphia (1960). In 1963, he assumed the direction of the Diocese of San Diego as Co-Adjutor in 1963. He was named Archbishop of San Antonio in 1969.

111 For a definition of these different terms such as Chicano, Mexican American, etc., see Stevens-Arroyo, Prophets Denied Honor, 349-351.

112 Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1972).

113 Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence in US Religion, 138-140.

114 Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence; and David A. Badillo, Latinos and the New Immigrant Church (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

115 Stevens-Arroyo, Prophets Denied Honor, 269-330.

116 Stevens-Arroyo, Prophets Denied Honor, 175-179.

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117 Influential among the secular writers was José Vasconcelos, author of La raza cósmica. A thorough review of varying interpretations of Guadalupe is available in David A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National consciousness, 1531-1813, trans. Benjamin Keen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). For a perspective from Catholic theology, see Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995) and “Our Lady of Guadalupe: An Ambiguous Symbol” Review Article. Catholic Historical Review LXXXI:4 (Winter 1995): 588-599.

118 Virgil Elizondo, The Future is Mestizo (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1992), 73.

119 Cubans proposed the concept of mulatez rather than mestizaje for the Spanish-speaking Caribbean; and Puerto Ricans insisted that colonialism was central towards an understanding of the Puerto Rican social, cultural and religious struggles. Stevens-Arroyo, ed. Prophets Denied Honor, 214-220.

120 Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence, 116-148.

121 “…. the Cursillo was the prairie grass that caught fire, carrying the flame of the resurgence across the county.” Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence, 148. For a fuller description of the movement, see 133-37.

122 Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence, 163-169.

123 Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence, 313-315.

124 Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence, 316-321.

125 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, “Cahensly Revisted?: The National Pastoral Encounter of America's Hispanic Catholics.” Migration World XV:3 (Fall, 1987): 16-19.

126 See the sections of the Bishops’ Report, #5-6, as reproduced in Stevens-Arroyo, Prophets Denied Honor, 202-203.

127 At the meeting in Detroit beginning on October 20, 1976 there were 100 bishops among the 1,340 voting delegates and the 1,500 observers. See Bradford E. Hinze, Practices of Dialogue in the Roman Catholic Church: Aims and Obstacles, Lessons and Laments (New York & London: Continuum Publishing, 2006), 64-91.

128 National Catholic Reporter: Andrew Greeley, "Catholic Social Activism: Real or Rad/Chic?" February 7, 1975.

129 Otto Maduro, Religion and Social Conflicts (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1982), 126-128; Díaz- Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue, 209-243. See also her work with Anthony M. Stevens- Arroyo, Recognizing the Latino Religious Resurgence, 180-211.

130 Other speakers included Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker, Brother Joseph Davis, from the National Office for Black Catholics, Sister Jaime Phelps from the National Black Sisters Conference, Minister James Shobazz of the Nation of Islam, Msgr. John Oesterreicher from the Institute of

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Judaeo-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University, Congressman Charles Rangel from the United States House of Representatives, Mayor Kenneth Gibson of Newark, and two representatives from Las Hermanas, Sister Armantina Pelaez Pérez and Sister María Iglesias.

131 Committee for the Bicentennial, “Liberty and Justice for All: Newark Hearing, ‘Ethnicity and Race’,” (Washington, DC: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1976).

132 Presentation of Jay Dolan, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 25-29.

133 Dolan, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 28.

134 Presentation by Geno Baroni, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 2-8.

135 Baroni, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 4.

136 “Following the secular model once more, we found ourselves, even in the Church, guilty of either catering to our people’s fears from the right or scapegoating our people’s concerns from the left. In a sense, we ignored or neglected, for the most part, the essential ministry to our own people’s alienation. We did this even though we knew that, for the most part, working class people were indeed more supportive of minimum wage legislation, more supportive of health care, more supporting of housing and educational programs than our more affluent, bankers, lawyers, doctors and businessmen and their national lobbying organizations.” Baroni, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 4.

137 Baroni, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 7.

138 Robert Bauman, “‘Kind of a Secular Sacrament’: Father Geno Baroni, Monsignor John J. Egan, and the Catholic War on Poverty” The Catholic Historical Review, 99:2 (April 2013): 314-316.

139 Presentation by Michael Novak, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 8-13.

140 Novak, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 9.

141 Novak, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 10. Italics added.

142 Presentation by Andrew Greeley, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 87. Italics added.

143 Greeley, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 102.

144 Presentation by Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 101-107.

145 Stevens-Arroyo, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 104-105.

146 Stevens-Arroyo, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 104.

147 Stevens-Arroyo, “Liberty and Justice for All,” 105. 228

CHAPTER 7

MISSION AND MINISTRY TO PUERTO RICANS IN PHILADELPHIA

Ministry to Puerto Ricans from 1950 through to 1980 began within the restrictive structures of the Catholic past and ended with the Church’s windows opened wide to the future by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. At the start of the period, La Milagrosa Chapel was the sole institution for Hispanic ministry in

Philadelphia. However, a dramatically growing migration from Puerto Rico called for additional resources, resulting in the establishment of Casa del Carmen in 1954. While

Casa offered material assistance, several parishes were designated to add pastoral services directed towards Spanish-speaking Catholics. The patterns for both social justice ministry and pastoral care were reexamined when the Council held its first session in 1962. In addition to general changes for all Catholics, in the spirit of the council, the United States Catholic Church in 1972 provided Hispanics with a national

Encuentro to chart a five-year plan for coordinating pastoral care. The Young Lords were organized and carried on their work during these last crucial years.

Chapters 7 and 8 will introduce materials from interviews that I conducted from

December 2015 to June of 2016. The respondents offered reflections on ministry and political involvement over the full thirty years here under examination, 1950-1980. I have divided the interviews into two parts. Narratives about the Church’s response to the Puerto Rican presence in Philadelphia are analyzed in this chapter, tracing the developments from the 1950s through to the Encuentros in the 1970s. I review here the archdiocese’s policies toward Puerto Ricans and how these were implemented from 229 both an institutional as well as a local grass-roots perspective. The following chapter will report on the people’s responses to those Church’s policies.

The interviews represent a sort of “before, during and after” portrait of ministry.

The dissertation covers the decade before the council, then the decade in which the council took place and finally the decade that brought implementation of its policies.

Not incidentally, these same decades witnessed major economic and political changes in city and nation. To help explain the context for references made in the interviews, both chapters include review of important events affecting ministry.

The interviews are supplemented with articles from the official publication of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, The Catholic Standard and Times. From its first issue in January of 1866 to its last day of publication in July of 2012, the newspaper served as the official voice of the Archdiocese. The local hierarchy used the paper to influence and educate Catholics in the archdiocese. I include The Catholic Standard and Times in my analysis of Catholicism in Philadelphia to provide a further perspective on the different functions of the hierarchy and the faithful. The combination of official texts with the individuals’ opinions in the interviews presents more fully the context for the

Young Lords’ engagement with Catholicism in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

The Eclipse of La Milagrosa

La Milagrosa Chapel opened at 1903 Spring Garden Street in 1912, converting a former family home into a house of worship and rectory. Vincentian priests from Spain ran the chapel with the mission to provide liturgy and sacraments to Spanish-speaking

Catholics in the city.1 Meant to provide pastoral care and social ministry to a distinct 230 language group, La Milagrosa Chapel was not a national parish, but only an annex of the Cathedral Parish. Subordination under the jurisdiction of the Cathedral, therefore, immunized La Milagrosa from much of the ecclesiastical rancor toward national parishes that had arisen from the Lucerne Memorial. However, the arrangement also placed canonical restrictions on the ministry conducted by the Vincentians. For example, the priests were restricted from crossing over to Camden County, New Jersey to attend to Puerto Rican migrant farm workers there. In contrast, Protestant ministers in Philadelphia could cross state boundaries, with a frequent result that some of the workers would move to Philadelphia and join these congregations.2 Despite its narrow focus on pastoral care, however, La Milagrosa was the place of Sunday worship for the city’s relatively small community of Spanish-speaking Catholics through the first half of the century. A later purchase of a property at nearby 1836 Brandywine Street provided additional meeting space for pious associations and social events.3

The incoming wave of the Great Puerto Rican Migration to Philadelphia that began in 1950 certainly challenged the notion that a single facility could serve all the

Spanish-speaking Catholics in the city. The chapel could accommodate fewer than two hundred Sunday worshipers at a time, while the community was growing yearly by the thousands. Moreover, even though the chapel had offered charitable services, such as assistance in providing clothing and housing needs, the new demands for material assistance outstripped its resources.4 There was also a need to coordinate a more efficient dispensing of social services in order to meet these needs for the rapidly arriving waves of Puerto Rican migrants from the island. 231

In previous chapters, I pointed out that parish priests, particularly in ethnic enclaves, were often expected to mediate conflicts and represent the local community before civil authority. Unfortunately, the Spanish Vincentian priests of La Milagrosa did not fulfill this advocacy role for the Puerto Rican community after the conflicts of

1953. It is not clear whether as non-citizens they did not feel empowered to do so, or whether they simply did not want to embroil themselves in local politics. Moreover, although Puerto Ricans were the largest and fastest growing segment of Philadelphia’s

Hispanic community, they may have feared that too sharp a focus on Puerto Rican needs would have been counterproductive among, and resented by, other Hispanics.

Responsibility for the pastoral care and social ministry to a rapidly growing number of Puerto Ricans fell to the new archbishop, Msgr. John O’Hara, whose installation as archbishop occurred in November of 1951, six months after the death of

Dennis Cardinal Dougherty. O’Hara’s insight into the pastoral and social needs of

Hispanics was not accidental. In a sense, he had been prepared throughout his life for this undertaking. John O’Hara’s father had served as United States Ambassador to

Uruguay under President Theodore Roosevelt, and the young man had grown up in

Latin America, where he acquired command of the Spanish language and studied at the

Jesuit University in Montevideo. Upon his return with his family to the United States, he enrolled at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, eventually becoming a priest in the Congregation of the Holy Cross, which staffed the university.

The Holy Cross Fathers sent him for graduate studies to the Wharton School of

Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania, the source of his first connection to

Philadelphia. In 1934, after 18 years of service on the faculty, he became president of 232 the University of Notre Dame. The next year, John O’Hara was named Bishop of the

Military Ordinariate, putting him in charge of all Catholic chaplains during the Second

World War. At the war’s end, he served as Bishop of Buffalo, before being appointed

Archbishop of Philadelphia in 1951. Pope John XXIII made him a cardinal in 1958.

His fellow bishops appreciated O’Hara’s fluency in Spanish and his familiarity with Latin American Catholicism. Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York frequently invited him to speak at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to visiting dignitaries from

Latin America.5 In fact, his knowledge of Spanish allowed O’Hara on occasion to address the presidents of Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay in the name of all the Catholic bishops of the United States.6 His proficiency in the language, together with his knowledge of social and economic conditions in Latin America, led President Franklin

D. Roosevelt to name O’Hara to the United States delegation for a meeting in 1938 in

Lima, Peru, where the Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America was crafted to reverse earlier policies of American interventionism. Apparently with the intention of gaining the bishop’s goodwill, then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a letter to O’Hara in 1947 with the text of the director’s testimony to the House of Representatives’

Committee for Un-American Activities.7

O’Hara’s reputation in the United States as an expert on Latin America reached the Holy See. In 1958, Pope John XXIII named Cardinal O’Hara to the Vatican

Committee that was charged with organizing a special pastoral effort focused on the renewal of Latin American Catholicism. The cardinal’s archives include a folder with extensive correspondence from the Secretary of the Sacred Consistorial Congregation,

Marcello Cardinal Mimmi, regarding coordination with American foreign policy. There 233 are also instructions from Pope John XXIII concerning a State Department meeting on policy toward Latin America to be held in Washington, D.C.8

Casa del Carmen

O’Hara brought his bilingual and bicultural awareness to the ministry to Puerto

Ricans in Philadelphia. He decided against opening new chapels or national parishes for Puerto Ricans and instead moved toward integrated parishes that served more than one language group in a given neighborhood. At the time, Latin was the official language for the liturgy of the Catholic Church for all Masses, so that only the Sunday sermon and instructions for the sacraments would need be in the language of the people.

In an ethnically integrated parish of Philadelphia, this meant that English would be used when the congregation attending services was English-speaking and Spanish when that was the language of the people attending Mass.

O’Hara’s choice of integrated parishes had a historical precedent in

Philadelphia. As noted in the previous chapter, the Parish of St. Mary Magdalen de

Pazzi, founded by Bishop Neumann to provide services in Italian, was always a diocesan parish.9 Neumann’s model had provided that all the people of the neighborhood could worship at the local parish church, but sermons, prayers and other devotions would be in each of their own languages. Indeed, it has become today the most common model for linguistic ministry in American Catholicism, allowing for many non-English Masses in a single house of worship.10

Casa del Carmen was established in 1954 to dispense material aid as part of its social justice ministry in the neighborhood. I have been unable to find evidence to 234 assert that the so-called “riot” of 1953 directly influenced the cardinal’s decision to open Casa del Carmen a year later. Incontestably, however, it furthered O’Hara’s vision of pastoral care by extending the services provided to the Puerto Rican community beyond the sacraments and liturgy at La Milagrosa. At a 1955 conference of Catholic religious leaders in Puerto Rico, a priest representing the archdiocese stated that Cardinal O’Hara had decided to open the center for Puerto Ricans while the 1954

Report of the Human Rights Commission was still being drafted:

Before the city’s report was published the Archbishop had given approval for the establishment of the Casa del Carmen, a center for Puerto Ricans as a branch of the Catholic Charities. The program here is varied and includes a well-baby clinic under the direction of a Spanish-speaking doctor with daily office hours, a social service and employment bureau, educational afternoon programs of arts and crafts, outings, and English and sewing adult classes in the evenings. This work is under the supervision of a Trinitarian sister with a diocesan priest as Director.11

It is noteworthy that there were many similarities between the 1954 recommendations of the Human Relations Commission and the services from Casa del Carmen. The fact that the cardinal had authorized the opening of Casa del Carmen before the report, however, does not eliminate the possibility that the decision to create the center for

Puerto Ricans was spurred by the very same disturbances. There is evidence that both civic and religious leaders were aware of issues affecting the Puerto Rican community and of the need for a swift response to such issues. George Schermer, the head of

Philadelphia’s Human Relations Commission, for instance, expressed gratitude for the establishment of Casa del Carmen in a July 7, 1957 letter to the cardinal.12 I surmise that even if the plan to open the center predated the July 1953 violence, the letter indicates that officials like Schermer considered Casa del Carmen a timely and welcome 235 response to the needs of the city’s Puerto Ricans. The letter shows that city officials appreciated the efforts of the archdiocese to address the social inequality affecting

Puerto Ricans. In fact, the commission’s director admiringly paired the goals and methods of Casa del Carmen with the report’s sociological principles.

Casa del Carmen followed the model of the settlement houses that had long served the material needs of immigrants in the United States. By choosing locations within poor neighborhoods, settlement houses embodied solidarity between the better- off, who offered social services, and the poor who needed them. It was generally not a place for formal worship or proselytization, relying instead on an organizing principle of non-denominational witness: “We don’t serve the poor because they are Catholic: we serve them because we are Catholic.”13 Of course, in the spirit of St. Vincent de Paul in seventeenth-century France and the Missionary Cenacle of Father Thomas Judge in

Puerto Rico of the twentieth century, it was hoped that the good example of charity would make Catholicism more attractive to the clients.

O’Hara wanted Casa del Carmen to be an urban institution that would be easily accessible to the people it was to serve.14 A converted storefront at the corner of

Seventh and Jefferson was chosen because it was within the area above Girard Avenue and east of North Broad Street, where Puerto Ricans had begun to cluster in the rowhouse neighborhoods. I have not been able to ascertain that the choice of a storefront in Philadelphia was intended as an antidote to Pentecostal storefront churches, although that strategy had been discussed in church circles at the 1955 meeting in Puerto Rico.15 The archdiocesan newspaper, The Catholic Standard and

Times, carried a brief article announcing Casa del Carmen’s opening with a ritual 236 blessing ceremony. Named in the article is a deacon, Mr. Francis Craven, who had begun studying Spanish in order to engage in priestly ministry among the Puerto Ricans after his ordination.16

The rapidly growing population of these migrants settled mostly within the bounds of several parishes, each of which was to benefit from the social services offered at Casa del Carmen. The Redemptorist parish of St. Peter at Fifth and Girard was the southern anchor, serving the pastoral needs of the expanding Puerto Rican community. In the rest of North Philadelphia and Kensington, the key archdiocesan parishes were: St. Boniface (Diamond and Hancock streets), St. Malachy (1429 North

Eleventh Street), St. Edward the Confessor (North Eighth and York streets), St.

Bonaventure (2842 North Ninth Street), St. Francis Xavier (Twenty-fourth and Wallace streets) and St. Henry (near Hunting Park, at 4400 North Fifth Street).

Catholic efforts to combat poverty in the 1950s were largely dependent on voluntary participation by the laity in works of charity. Through the archdiocesan network of Catholic parishes and institutions, Catholics were summoned to provide aid to the Puerto Rican community. Clothing and vital household items, such as furniture and electric appliances, were requested for the center, which would distribute them to the needy. Antonio Arroyo’s children were among the earlier generation of Puerto

Ricans who responded to the call to serve. Although they themselves had lived for many years in Philadelphia away from their tropical island, they still recognized the challenge of winter to Puerto Ricans migrating north. Josephine, the youngest Arroyo daughter, now wife of Steven, Jr., the son of Istvan, would collect old winter coats and 237 gloves from her siblings and other friends and deliver them to Casa del Carmen for distribution.

While Cardinal O’Hara allocated religious personnel and other institutional resources to operate the center, he relied on lay participation as a necessary component of the center’s work in the 1950s. Note that federal funding for social services to minority communities would become common only in the next decade. Thus, there was little expectation then of securing government funds to finance this effort. In the tradition of the early Church, the laity’s generosity was motivated by personal faith in the Catholic traditions of aid to the poor as found in scripture (Acts 2:44-45; 4:34-35).17

By the early twentieth century, Catholic participation in social justice ministry had spawned “Catholic Action,” a movement which offered cohesion and effectiveness to its volunteer efforts.18 Catholic Action asked lay workers to organize their volunteerism by a process of discernment under clerical supervision in church networks. The succinctness of its formula, “See; Judge; Act,” allowed Catholic praxis to impact the economic and political orders.19 The participation of the laity in the ministry of Casa del Carmen fell within this approach.

To coordinate Catholic volunteers and the efficient administration of the center,

Cardinal O’Hara named as its head Father Frederick H. Hickey,20 a teacher of Spanish at an archdiocesan high school. Daily operations, however, were directed by the

Trinitarian Sisters, under the directorship of Sister Thomas Augustine (1909-2002), a member of the congregation founded by Father Judge and supported by Cardinal

Dougherty for its missionary work in Puerto Rico.21 Though not a Puerto Rican herself,

Sister Thomas Augustine had extensive experience with Puerto Ricans and spoke 238

Spanish fluently. In my interview with Monsignor Vincent Walsh, he noted her talent and enthusiasm for this new assignment. He also described his own first encounter with

Puerto Ricans while still a seminarian at St. Charles Borromeo:

I was in the seminary in 1953 and in my second year I thought, “I want to serve God in the summer.” And then I found this ad: “Are you a U.S. Seminarian wanting to serve God in the Summer?”, and I said, “That’s me.” So, I wrote away [for more information] and it sent a Trinitarian ad saying: “Serve here, serve here.” None of them [the ads] meant anything to me until I got to the last one. It said that there was a new Spanish center, Casa del Carmen, and there were 50,000 Puerto Ricans who had come to Philadelphia, and that Cardinal O’Hara had established this center. That hit me; I said, “That’s what I want to do.” It gave the address and I went up to Casa del Carmen, Seventh and Jefferson, and there was a sister: Sister Thomas Augustine, a Trinitarian sister, who had worked in Puerto Rico in Ponce, and she had just come to head it; and there was a priest, Fr. Hickey, [who] was the priest-head; Sister was the social worker.22

The Works of Casa del Carmen

Walsh praised the efficiency of Sister Thomas Augustine in social work:

Sister would also take all kinds of social problems, all kinds of social difficulties. If people needed food, she had arrangements with different grocery stores. She would not give out any money, but she would write out a slip, you know, and the person would go with the slip and get say $20.00 worth of food. When the grocers got that slip with her signature, they would know they could be certain that they would get their money. Also, with health care, we were tied in with St. Joseph’s Hospital over Seventeenth Street. So, Sister and Casa del Carmen were like the center where the people came with their needs.

Also, there were different companies that would help with food; and big trucks would arrive at the neighborhood. There was an old big bakery, [that was near Casa del Carmen] three-stories high, 1444 North Seventh; it was a corner property with a basement. So, the trucks would come, the big trucks; and if they were going to donate Campbell’s, donate soup.... And then the word would get out: “Soup 239

is in.” So, all the people would come, and you would see them carrying away a carton of soup.23

Even though Casa del Carmen did not make church membership a condition for services, the goodwill created by Catholic attention to the people’s material needs opened the doors of Puerto Rican homes to pastoral workers. The parish census was the tool that connected Puerto Ricans with the local church. Volunteers would canvas the neighborhood, knocking on doors and handing out personal invitations to join the nearest parish. Because traditional Catholic practice is focused on the sacraments, in identifying the homes of Puerto Rican families and recording names of all the residents, the census-takers would inquire if the people needed information about the sacraments such as First Communion and Confirmation for their children. Msgr. Walsh described the instructions delivered to him by Sister Thomas Augustine:

She said, “Look, we have just opened our doors and there are all these Puerto Ricans and we want to find out where they are; so, I want you to go and knock on doors.” OK, that was great. And she gave me this little census card that all the parishes used: name, address, and age, and where you were baptized, confirmed, married in church, children, and so forth. She wrote out the questions for me. I had one year of Spanish. I went down and I started on Seventh and Girard – 1201 North Seventh Street. And I started knocking on doors. I loved it. So, what I did all that summer was to go up all Seventh Street and Marshall and Franklin, etc. Also at that time, the center, Casa del Carmen, which still exists, though it moved to St. Henry’s, -- it was at Seventh and Jefferson -- had a very definite role. The idea was that the parishes would supply the sacraments, Mass, and all the rest; and also the school.24

Walsh described the follow-up by priests to the work of the voluntary census-takers:

Also, the center at that time was at St. Peter’s, at Fifth and Girard. And there was a Redemptorist priest, Father Carlos Hurgert, and he was wonderful. What would happen was, I would go out on the street, I would meet all the people: write out the census cards, and then he would come up to see Sister. He, Father Carlos, would be out himself in the street most of the day. She would say, “Look these are the 240

people who have asked to see a priest.” So, he would then knock on their door. It was a very “knock-on-the-door” type of approach.25

A daughter of Raoul Nicolás, the first son of Antonio Arroyo, was likewise drawn into the work of census-taking for Casa del Carmen. Born in Santurce, Puerto

Rico while her Philadelphia-born father directed his construction company, Mari Gloria

Arroyo accompanied her family to the mainland at age eleven, when her father took on a new engineering position in the United States. Upon graduation from high school in

Atlanta, Georgia, she turned down “a full ride” to the University of Georgia, explaining that she chose Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia “because I wanted a Catholic women’s college.”26 It was at Chestnut Hill College that she learned about Casa del

Carmen. The Sisters of St. Joseph, who operated the college, encouraged volunteer work on behalf of the needy as part of their commitment as young Catholic women. Of the various opportunities posted during the years Mari Gloria was a student at Chestnut

Hill (1963-1967), she chose to work on Saturday mornings at the center. Neither she nor her college classmates were alone as volunteers. Two articles in the Evening

Bulletin in 1958 described the efforts within the archdiocese, one in February with the headline, “High School Girls Teach English,”27 and the other in May with a list of the groups helping Puerto Ricans.28

Mari Gloria described for me how she would travel by the Number 23 trolley from the college to Casa del Carmen. Once other volunteers had arrived, Sister Thomas

Augustine would pair them and send them out for census-taking in the neighborhoods.

Mari Gloria recalled the poverty of the people but was also struck by their generosity.

“While you were speaking with them in the living room, someone would go out to the 241 store to buy a soda and offer it to you.” She also confessed that these encounters nourished her Puerto Rican cultural awareness:

Having the other culture has been an advantage to me. I’m bilingual, which is very helpful. But also, because both cultures have strengths and weaknesses, I was able to really pick and choose how I chose to live my life. I’ve always felt that it was a blessing…. I learned a lot. I learned a lot about myself, about the people that I met.29

While she was in Philadelphia, Mari Gloria encountered prejudice from a boyfriend who stopped dating her when he found out she was Puerto Rican. She also recalls a friend of her mother’s family in New York masking her Puerto Rican identify,

“She said she did it, ‘because Puerto Ricans were looked down on in New York City.’ I just looked at her, like ‘Are you crazy?’ But that’s how a lot of people felt.” 30 Mari

Gloria’s Puerto Rican identity remained intact. She did not allow the generational and class differences with poorer Puerto Ricans to affect her commitment to service. The experience at Casa del Carmen helped her personally to distinguish between problems caused by poverty and those rooted in certain characteristics of Puerto Rican culture, she said. Her contact with the center and the community may have also influenced her choice of a professional career. One summer, when she was home in Atlanta, “a couple of families” from Philadelphia called her for advice, mostly about their teenagers.

It was funny, she [the mother] was asking advice about a teenager from another teenager…. I wasn’t a social worker, although I became that afterwards, after college. That’s what I did for a living. Maybe that’s where it all started.31

Neither the seminarian, who became a monsignor in the archdiocese, nor the college student, who became a social worker, felt it necessary to cite their Catholic faith when they described their engagement with the center. Their actions to benefit Puerto

Ricans in need were based on unspoken faith motivations. The attitudes of both the 242 priest and the college student brought to mind Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, because, in both cases, their Catholic upbringing served as “a cultural structure” that ordered their

“behavior, beliefs and ways of thinking about their social roles.”32 Consistent with

Bourdieu’s notion that habitus incorporates “the objective structures of society and the subjective role of agents within it,”33 praxis at Casa del Carmen drew volunteers into the social context for the struggle of Puerto Ricans living in Philadelphia.

The Trinitarians were not the only religious congregation O’Hara summoned to work among Philadelphia’s Puerto Ricans. The involvement of the Redemptorists at St.

Peter’s on Girard Avenue was a tribute to Cardinal O’Hara’s resourcefulness to take advantage of every possible pastoral resource to serve the Puerto Rican population.

Among the Redemptorists called to this new ministry was Father Carlos Hurgert, who, had several years of pastoral care experience on the island. Walsh commented: “Father

Carlos was not Hispanic; he was a Redemptorist, and they have missions in Puerto

Rico. So, he was pulled back [to work in the States] from that. So, St. Peter’s was the center from the ʾ50s through the ʾ60s.”34 It is not clear if his recall to Philadelphia by the Redemptorists was requested by Cardinal O’Hara or simply motivated by the congregation’s pre-existing pastoral interest in serving the city’s growing Puerto Rican community. The effect was the same, however, because Puerto Rican Catholics were ministered to by a priest who spoke Spanish and had lived in Puerto Rico. Fittingly, he was sent to the same parish where St. John Neumann had inaugurated his linguistic ministry in Philadelphia.

Msgr. Walsh lauded the cardinal’s steady interest in the daily operations of Casa del Carmen and the prelate’s initiatives to summon all possible resources: 243

St. Peter’s was a German parish which was founded by the Germans and so that it was meant to serve them. However, they had a whole third floor of unused classrooms. Sister told me this herself; that Cardinal O’Hara called up to see how the center was going and was talking to Father Hickey and said, “How are the schools going?” To which Father Hickey said, “Well, you may want to talk to Sister.” So, he talked to Sister and said, “Sister, how are the schools going?” So, she said, “Cardinal, very good. There is down in St. Peter’s a third floor which is unused.” The cardinal, said: “Fine, that is my job.” Then he got on the phone to the pastor of St. Peter’s and the pastor said, “Fine.” And he opened up a whole third floor of the school for Spanish children; so basically, St. Peter’s went from a German school to a Hispanic school.35

The pastoral efforts made in these first years should dispel any stereotype of

Philadelphia’s Catholic Church as being indifferent to Puerto Ricans and their material needs. Walsh indicated that outreach to Puerto Ricans included the offer of free tuition at Catholic schools, in fact:

The center had the right to register children for Catholic schools; and of course, the Catholic schools were free of charge. So, my role was to tell the people, “Look, if you have children, they can go to Catholic school. Just go up to the center and sign up.” So, we got about 200 children that first summer who were in public school to go to Catholic school.36

At the meeting in Puerto Rico a year later, the number of Puerto Rican children attending parochial schools was reported to have risen to 543 within two years of outreach.37 There is also an August 8, 1953 letter from Cardinal O’Hara rescinding permission to pastors to charge tuition at parish schools, which in effect assured the extension of this program to Puerto Ricans.38 In terms of school enrollments, therefore,

Casa del Carmen, with its parish census, was instrumental in reaching significant numbers of Puerto Rican families and extending to their children a tuition-free Catholic school education. The parents were expected to bear the costs only for non-tuition items like books and school uniforms. In order to reduce school costs, Puerto Ricans 244 were often asked to engage in fundraising efforts within the parish, thus integrating them to the parish community both as participants and beneficiaries. Msgr. Walsh confirmed that the free enrollment of many Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia’s Catholic schools was to continue until 1980. He noted that it was only when the parochial schools could no longer rely on unpaid religious women that operating costs exceeded the archdiocese’s means to subsidize parish schools.

Philadelphia Priests and the Puerto Rican Apostolate

Casa del Carmen represented a significant commitment by the Archdiocese of

Philadelphia to the Puerto Rican community. However, I consider the assignment of priests to Puerto Ricans’ pastoral to have been yet a greater contribution of the archdiocese. The priest was the key agent of the Church at the local level in pre-

Council Catholicism. The academic and theological training of any priest usually takes four additional years beyond the completion of four years of college-level schooling.

Generally, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia assumed the bulk of the costs for these eight to ten years of seminary preparation.39 Thus, the assignment of a priest to serve Puerto

Ricans constituted a major financial investment from the institution. Consider as well, that language training required additional years of subsidized study.

Msgr. Walsh recalled the earliest commitment of archdiocesan clergy by

Cardinal O’Hara:

Now, what the diocese had done beginning in June of ’54, they sent two priests each year to Puerto Rico for a year. They would study Berlitz in the summer after they were ordained and in September they would go down until June. There were two in ‘54, two in ’55, two in ‘56. And when they came back they began to be the priests in those parishes with concentration of Puerto Ricans. Father Thomas Craven 245

went down in ’56. He was ordained in ’56. He was stationed at St. Bonaventure. At that point, this became the center [of Hispanic ministry] and we were also able to send there as pastor Father Donald Farrell, who was one of those who went through the language course.40

Language training was matched with work in a parish in Puerto Rico. The archives contain an exchange of letters in the fall of 1956 between Cardinal O’Hara and Bishop

Davis of San Juan who requested the appointment of Fathers Thomas Craven and

Gerard Lavery to parishes in Puerto Rico.41

O’Hara correctly anticipated a continuing and increasing migration from Puerto

Rico to Philadelphia and joined other prelates in formulating a long-range plan for pastoral care. As mentioned above, an organizing conference for inter-diocesan efforts with Puerto Ricans took place from April 11 to April 16, 1955, at the Caribe Hilton

Hotel in San Juan. As part of this meeting, the participants visited churches in rural towns to personally view the most common departure points of the migration. Those attending were 35 priests representing 16 mainland dioceses and 77 priests from both of

Puerto Rico’s dioceses.42 The participants were to “exchange ideas and experiences” behind closed doors. The purpose was to aid the clergy so that:

The priests concerned could become acquainted with the entire picture of the migration and could examine the work already done and the different methods used in the spiritual care of the migrants in these three specific surroundings. They could also analyze what has been most successful and consider methods of coordinating information and activity which would lead to a more fruitful apostolate.43

As the minutes of the conference proceedings indicate, high priority was placed on the coordination of Catholic pastoral care on both sides of the migratory geography -- the island and the mainland. While the conference did not itself make formal policy 246 decisions, the proceedings were presented to the implicated bishops so that they might formulate actions for their dioceses.

Prior to this endeavor, the United States Catholic Church had developed a pastoral outreach program to minister to itinerant Mexican American farm workers in the Southwest. However, the organizers of the conference in San Juan observed that the

Puerto Rican migrant experience was not identical to the Mexican American experience. Although there were migrant farmworkers from Puerto Rico, such as those who went to Camden, New Jersey in the 1930s, the Great Puerto Rican Migration after

1946 was mostly to urban centers and city factories. Thus, while the new inter-diocesan cooperation capitalized on the previous experience of pastoral work among a Hispanic population, it also paid close attention to the specific needs of Puerto Rican urban dwellers.44

The 1955 conference, thus, recognized that the scale of the Puerto Rican migration to the New York metropolis was of a unique dimension:

It seemed quite clear from the discussions that the pastoral situation presents itself in two quite different ways: the one in New York City where the Archdiocese of New York, and to a lesser extent, the Diocese of Brooklyn, were overwhelmed by the rapid influx of enormous numbers; and on the other in other dioceses where the slow increase allows for more gradual and systematic response to the challenge…. Therefore, although the general nature of the challenge is fundamentally the same everywhere, it was agreed that the size and rapidity of the migration to New York has created complications for the two dioceses affected which other dioceses will probably not experience. It was also made clear.... that, if adequate attention is given to the Puerto Ricans when they first begin to appear in small numbers in a diocese, many of the difficulties which might complicate matters later on can be avoided.45

This analysis concluded that: 247

Only the Archdiocese of New York had arrived at the formulation of a diocesan-wide program of coordination in this field and in New York more than anywhere else most diocesan departments are equipped to handle considerable numbers of Spanish-speaking people.46

The New York archdiocesan-wide program for training priests for ministry among

Puerto Ricans was described by Cardinal Spellman in a preface to the printed report as follows: “For the past three years [since 1951] two members of our newly ordained class of priests have gone to Puerto Rico to work in parishes there for one year.” These were the measures taken for an estimated 600,000 Puerto Ricans in the Archdiocese

New York.47

Three priests represented Philadelphia at the conference: Fr. G. Francis Craven, of St. Malachy’s; George Heganbach, of the Cathedral; and Frederic H. Hickey, of Casa del Carmen. They cited the Human Relations Commission’s Report of 1954 about “an estimated 7,300 Puerto Ricans living here [Philadelphia] and that more than half of them had arrived within the two previous years.” 48 They also noted the rapid response in Philadelphia to the sudden increase in migration after 1950, stating:

The Archbishop responded immediately to this influx of Spanish- speaking people and in addition to the “Spanish Chapel,” Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, [La Milagrosa] which had been doing splendid work among them, he assigned Spanish-speaking priests to parishes with a Puerto Rican population. Special Masses on the territorial parish basis are celebrated with announcements, Gospel, sermon, singing and prayers in Spanish at the Cathedral, 18th and Parkway; St. Peter’s, 5th and Girard Ave.; Assumption, 12th and Spring Garden St.; St. Francis Xavier, 24th and Wallace St.; St. Malachy’s 11th and Jefferson St.; and in West Chester.49

The geographic data provided by the official Puerto Rican governmental agency of vital statistics, put the 1956 mainland Puerto Rican population at an estimated

550,000 for New York and 13,000 for Philadelphia.50 Comparing these numbers, it may 248 be safe to say that New York’s Puerto Rican was close to 42 times larger than that of

Philadelphia for the period under discussion. It is interesting to note that Cardinal

Spellman of New York had begun, in 1951, to annually send two priests to language and cultural training in Puerto Rico, while, beginning in 1954, Cardinal O’Hara had annually committed just as many priests as had Cardinal Spellman to be specifically trained for pastoral care among the far fewer Puerto Ricans in his archdiocese. As

Walsh himself explained, he was one of those who accepted a full-time ministry among

Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia and was subsequently sent to Puerto Rico to be specifically trained for this work:

I did that [work with Casa del Carmen] for six summers, from 1955 until 1961. And then they asked me if I wanted to work [full-time] with the Puerto Ricans and I said, “Yes.” So, then Father Cook, who was in charge sent me to Puerto Rico. I had been speaking Spanish from the street, but now I went down for eight weeks of intense Spanish at the Catholic University of Ponce. And then, when I got ordained in 1962, I thought I would be in North Philadelphia. But they had a great need out in West Chester, so I went out to my first assignment in St. Agnes which is sort of outside of your study area. This was with the mushroom workers. I was there for two years; after that they changed their mind, again (laughs), and said they wanted me to study. So, I went to Rome for my doctorate in church law.51

The priests involved in the apostolate felt it was important to inform other

Catholics about the contributions of Puerto Ricans to the vitality of Philadelphia’s

Catholicism.

Another thing we also did, in the summer was a summer school. In fact, the Spanish probably had the largest summer catechetical school in the diocese. And Father Cook who headed Casa del Carmen -- and he was very proud of it -- always made sure that The Catholic Standard and Times came out and took pictures on our final day, so that there would be pictures in The Catholic Standard and Times each year – years ’58, ’59, ’60. We always made scapulars for Casa del Carmen of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel as part of our summer school 249

project so that they all would get their scapular and a photographer would take our pictures.52

The meeting in 1955 led to the creation of the Institute of Intercultural

Communication at the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, in the southern town of

Ponce, thus providing a venue for priests from Philadelphia and other mainland cities to prepare themselves for ministry to Puerto Rican migrants.53 The Institute’s mission was

“to train priests and other religious personnel working with the Puerto Ricans in the

Spanish language and Puerto Rican culture.”54 Directed by the Yugoslavian-born Father

Ivan Illich (1926-2002), the Institute offered a perspective that challenged previous conceptions of ethnic ministry.55 Illich fostered engagement with the Puerto Rican people and culture outside the classroom in an attempt to separate his students from both clerical privileges and presumptions about American exceptionalism. His approach was recorded in a 1966 essay, “The Seamy Side of Charity,” which offered a highly critical view of Americanization within Catholic missionary work.56 Although

Illich’s views later generated considerable controversy,57 they shaped the initial thinking of Craven and Walsh. Upon their return to ministry in Philadelphia along with other priests and religious personnel trained at the institute in Puerto Rico, they brought not only fluency in the Spanish language and knowledge of Puerto Rican culture but also a critical stance regarding the North American Catholic Church’s role in the assimilation of Puerto Ricans and newly arrived immigrant groups into American society.

Philadelphia Catholicism in the Pages of The Catholic Standard and Times

Philadelphia’s The Catholic Standard and Times followed the model of most

Catholic diocesan newspapers of the 1950s: It published articles on national and 250 international issues taken from the standpoint of Catholic-affiliated news sources, and placed these items alongside notices of local appearances of the bishop and pictures of organizations such as the Knights of Columbus, parish events and activities of agencies like Casa del Carmen. Clerical appointments to parishes were announced in the newspaper as well. The publication of all items was controlled by the bishop, either personally or through appointees.

To state it more clearly, Catholic newspapers normally reflected the priorities of the bishops of the dioceses where they were published. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that there was a shift in editorial choices that marked the differing administrations of Cardinal O’Hara and his successor, Msgr. John Krol, who was installed as Archbishop of Philadelphia in March of 1961 after O’Hara’s death in

August of the previous year.58 While, for instance, under Cardinal O’Hara, the newspaper regularly carried pro-and-con columns to educate the faithful, under

Cardinal Krol, the editorial pages were used to promote the archbishop’s opinions, such as his harsh criticism of the English translation of the Canon of the Mass.59 The newspaper also exhibited a disturbing tendency to promote social justice in general terms but refuse to apply those principles within Philadelphia. For example, the paper printed the archdiocese’s opposition to the unionization of its Catholic school teachers, while still professing to favor the unionizing rights protected by Catholic social justice.60

It is safe to say that every edition of The Catholic Standard and Times enhanced the public image of Cardinal Krol by publicizing his appearance at local events, such as during Puerto Rican Week in Philadelphia.61 There were weeks, sometimes months, when a Krol’s picture, official pronouncements and general views dominated the news 251 coverage. Annoyed at what he deemed slanted content, in a 1978 letter to the editor, one disgruntled Catholic made public his decision to cancel his subscription on the account that there simply was “too much on Krol” in the publication.62

In order to illustrate set the context for the emergence of the Young Lords, I will focus on the perspectives The Catholic Standard and Times offered on three relevant issues: Catholics as a minority group, anti-communism, and positions on racism. In my archival research, I was struck by the opinion in the paper during the 1950s that

Catholics were an oppressed minority group in the United States. The Catholic

Standard and Times carried complaints that Catholics were suffering from discrimination against their faith in matters like funding for public schools and election to national and state governments.63 The nineteenth-century Know-Nothing Riots in

Kensington were offered as proof that Catholics were oppressed by Protestants and, therefore, should be considered a social minority group.64 News that Harrisburg rejected a bill that threatened to cut off state support to private agencies for foster children, was hailed as a triumph, noting that Catholic agencies were the most numerous among those that would have been defunded. I surmise that the publishers intended to substantiate the contention that the state legislation about adoption agencies was part of a pattern of discrimination against Catholics. The editorial page carried

O’Hara’s letter of praise to the Catholic public whose letter-writing had swayed the lawmakers.65

With the 1960 election of the first Catholic U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, articles about Catholic minority status in The Catholic Standard and Times became less frequent. Apparently, Kennedy’s election symbolized the successful assimilation of 252

Irish Catholics and other White ethnic groups into American society. For these

Catholics, their minority status could be remedied by assimilation. When the Young

Lords suggested in the 1970s that Puerto Ricans were a permanent minority group on account of race and imperialism, their appropriation of the term “social minority” did not exactly fit the meaning intended by previous Philadelphia Catholics.

The Catholic Standard and Times demonstrated an impassioned anti- communism. For instance, the newspaper defended the tactics of Senator Joseph

McCarthy to remove communists from the government.66 One writer asked: “Is it so bad to be a reactionary?”67 The paper praised the coup by the military in Guatemala that forced the resignation of the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz,68 an event now generally recognized as the result of CIA clandestine interference.69 On the same page, the paper praised the American defense of the regime in South Korea,70 and denounced the French departure from Vietnam as an abandonment of Catholics there.71

Communism behind the Iron Curtain in Europe was a frequent target of scorn in the pages of The Catholic Standard and Times.72 Identification of any effort for social justice with communism, therefore, was particularly chilling to a Catholic public and was invoked as a means of short-circuiting Catholic support for a social cause.

In Puerto Rico, during the 1950s, the label of “communist” had often been used against Pedro Albizu Campos and all independentistas. Similarly, in California, some claimed that César Chávez and the members of the Farm Workers Movement were communists. As reflected in my interviews, some Catholic critics used the communist accusation against the Young Lords in Philadelphia because of their involvement in pursuit of social justice. The Catholic anti-communism promoted by The Catholic 253

Standard and Times, I submit, provides the context for understanding how religion would be invoked against emergent national and local social movements advocating social change.

However, it is important to note that these anti-communist attitudes, which had been the staples of the Church in the first half of the twentieth century, began to change under Pope John XXIII. He lifted the ban on cooperation with Italian leftists when, in

1963, he gave implicit permission for strategic Catholic alliances with non-believers and communists in pursuit of social justice.73 His encouragement of cooperation with other ideologies is reflected in his encyclicals and also in the decrees of the Second

Vatican Council.74

The experience in the Cuban Revolution of 1959 was likely part of the pontiff’s motivation for a fresh approach to Latin America. Refusal to cooperate with the

Revolution because of some of its communist leaders, had resulted in negative long- term consequences for Cuban Catholicism.75 Pope John XXIII sought to avoid a repetition in the rest of Latin America of what the Church had undergone in Cuba.

Perhaps because he saw the revolutionary government’s response to the Church as a reaction to the Church’s closeness to the previous ruling class, he also sought to divorce

Catholicism from unseemly support for right-wing dictators.76 Following suit, a year after the Cuban Revolution, the Catholic bishops in the Dominican Republic would embrace the goals of progressive and secular movements against Rafael Trujillo’s repressive regime, even when this meant they would be placed on the side of socialists pursing the overthrow of the dictatorship.77 254

To implement his reversal of previous policies, John XXIII appealed for missionaries to work at the grass roots for social justice in Latin America.78

Significantly, there was a similarity between these papal volunteers for Latin America and President John F. Kennedy’s program of the Peace Corps, suggesting an embrace of the Church’s new emphasis that the pope fully developed in his encyclical, Mater et

Magistra.79 However, old attitudes persisted. Conservatives at the magazine The

National Review rejected the saintly pope’s encyclical under the title, “Mater, Sí:

Magistra, No,” (Mother, Yes; Teacher, No).80 They formulated an argument that has persisted among politically conservative Catholics that a pope must be obeyed only on matters of faith but not on social justice issues that require political action. In a sense, conservatives correctly anticipated that Catholic praxis alongside socialists in Latin

America would result in a Church engaged with social change, such as was evidenced with the ensuing development of Liberation Theology.81 The Young Lords, however, would follow the pope’s suggestion for cooperation with socialism as later advocated within the principles of Liberation Theology.

In the United States, social justice has often been seen through the prisms of race and ethnicity. In the previous chapter, I supplied examples of differing views for the application of Catholic teachings, noting that in the 1970s, these ran the gamut from conservative to radical politics. Without ever rejecting the goals of racial harmony, The

Catholic Standard and Times exhibited a capacity to voice support for lofty general principles on the one hand, but promote a less generous policy for the city on the other.

For instance, Catholics who fought for an end to racism against African Americans were praised.82 However, when addressing racial conflict in Philadelphia, the paper 255 would deliver a different message, warning of radicalism, dissension, civic unrest and the like negative consequences to confrontation with official inaction. As suggested above, these official opinions contrasted with the views of Catholics like the Young

Lords, who considered Liberation Theology a surer guide to an understanding of the

Gospel than official declarations against political movements that had been published in the archdiocesan newspaper.

Patterns of Racial Conflict in Philadelphia

While Philadelphia’s Young Lords adopted progressive Catholic principles from Latin American theology, their organizational model was directly influenced by the African American experiences. In the interviews, the Young Lords said they had viewed the Black Panthers’ as their inspiration in the struggle for Puerto Rican rights.

Therefore, background about racial relations in Philadelphia helps explain such influences upon the Philadelphia branch of the Young Lords. The policies of Frank

Rizzo are of particular importance. Matthew Countryman considered that the racial polarization under Mayor Rizzo began during the Columbia Street riots in 1964, when

Rizzo was still a policeman.83 Columbia Avenue in North Philadelphia was an area the city police had labeled “the Jungle,”84 an ominous prediction of the attitudes by local officers towards the people who suffered from three days of violence. However, the city’s liberal establishment was quick to praise the containment strategy of Howard

Leary, Mayor Richardson Dilworth’s appointee as Philadelphia Police Commissioner.

Leary’s restraint, it was said, limited the long-term damage to race relations.

Nonetheless, his deputy chief, Frank Rizzo, was highly critical of the orders for restraint 256 while looting was underway, insisting that all law-breaking must be punished, no matter the circumstances. Rizzo continued an unrelenting attack on liberal reformers that he had begun in his testimony in Washington the year before.85 Contradicting Rizzo’s self- promoted loyalty to the police code of behavior, I note here that his overt criticism of

Leary broke the supposedly inviolable chain of command.

James Tate, the Democratic Party ward leader who inherited the mayor’s office when Dilworth resigned, had won election on his own right in 1963 with strong support from African Americans. However, he anticipated a tough reelection battle in 1967 against Republican Arlen Specter, the District Attorney, whose popularity was rising with the gradual drift of the city’s Whites to the Republican Party. When Howard

Leary moved to head up the police in New York City in February of 1966, Tate had a chance to name a new police commissioner. Accordingly, wrote Countryman, the mayor chose Rizzo in May of 1967, believing that Rizzo’s tough law-and-order reputation would attract the Italian Americans in South Philadelphia to vote for

Democrats.86 That political judgment proved correct for white voters, but it provoked the African American leadership to rethink their approach to city politics.

Citing DuBois’ analysis of African Americans in nineteenth-century

Philadelphia, Countryman described two political segments of Philadelphia’s African

American community in 1964, one tied to the machine and the other to a reformist wing.87 Richard Keiser’s study of Philadelphia presented the machine wing as “a part of the substructure of the Democratic organization.” He added the label of “Black clientelistic subordination” to machine members, noting that “Blacks were anointed as 257 agents of the party, and some were given jobs as city clerks, teachers, or policemen.”88

The reformist wing, on the other hand, worked in concert with White liberals.89

The leading voices among the African American reformers in Philadelphia, wrote Countryman, were the Episcopal priest Father Paul Washington, the Reverend

Leo Sullivan and Leon Higgenbotham, Jr. Washington was pastor of the Church of the

Advocate in North Philadelphia, and Leon Sullivan, also known as "The Lion of Zion," advocated Black progress following the model of Booker T. Washington.

Higgenbotham, a Yale Law School graduate, had the distinction of having been hired in

1953 by District Attorney Richardson Dilworth as the first Black attorney to serve in the city’s administration. Their remedy for poverty stressed the accumulation of capital and social integration.90 All three leaders had been born outside Philadelphia, suggesting that the validity of Baltzell’s “outsiders” as agents of change applies as well to African

Americans.91 By 1966, however, the reformers’ patience had been exhausted by the failure to address the causes of the 1964 racial conflicts, and they were increasingly wary of the growing power of Frank Rizzo and his platform of white resentment.

When the African American established leadership’s attempts at reform failed, the door was opened to a more militant approach from Cecil B. Moore. An ex-Marine, born in rural West Virginia, Moore had put himself through Temple Law School, where he attended night classes. His day job, however, had been to supply liquor to the city’s segregated taprooms. Rizzo’s crackdowns on Moore’s clients while the former was a district police commander, had made the two into enemies. Unlike the established reformers named above, Moore was flamboyant in his personal demeanor and public 258 outreach. 92 In 1963, he became President of the Philadelphia Chapter of the NAACP, and announced Black Power as a tool of advancement:

We are serving notice that no longer will the plantation system of white men appointing our leaders exist in Philadelphia. We will expect to be consulted on all community issues, which affect our people.93

A confrontational style of politics emerged for Philadelphia’s African American community, one based more on community organizing for self-help than on petitioning for relief by legislation.94 In 1966, Moore and the national leadership from the Student

Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had won over Father Washington in organizing the Black People’s Unity Movement (BPUM) as a coalition for all African

Americans. The movement spoke the language of Black Power, which it communicated on the pages of an African American newspaper, The Philadelphia Tribune, and through the radio station WDAS. Washington also lent the credibility of his civic prominence to radical groups by bringing to his Philadelphia church the National

Conference of Black Power in 1968 and the Black Panther Conference in 1970, the latter convening on the campus of Temple University.

As a response to growing African American activism, Rizzo launched a police effort to “divide and conquer.” He not only targeted the more radical of the Black

Power groups, the Black Panthers, SNCC, and the Revolutionary Action Movement

(RAM), but also tried linking key Philadelphia African American leaders with these groups.95 This last tactic proved effective in distancing leaders of the unity movement from more radical associations. Countryman stated that although Rizzo successfully quashed the Black Power groups, he could not quell the Black Power discourse.96 259

The Young Lords emerged in the context of the local African American civic leadership’s movement away from reform and toward self-help based on community organizing in Philadelphia. The Young Lords were still high school students on

November 17, 1967, when events on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway demonstrated the virulence of Rizzo’s authoritarianism. As a backdrop to what led to the confrontation between the police and African Americana activists on the Parkway on the November day, it is useful to consider Cecil B. Moore’s decision to run for mayor and his organization of the Political Freedom Rights Party.97 Lacking money and support from the established political parties, Moore opted for a rather unorthodox approach to recruit supporters. He invited young African American high school students to work for his electoral campaign, promising that once he was in office, the city would achieve the goals of Black Power. Needless to say, these students were not of voting age, but

Moore had discovered that the message of African history and culture was a powerful motivation for idealistic young Black people to voice their opinion or join a cause.

Although Moore had suffered a resounding electoral defeat only two weeks earlier, the apparatus of his student support was still in place for the demonstration. Moreover, by recognizing the role of young people in the protest, he opened the door for Puerto

Ricans to eventually do the same.

November 17, 1967 was the day for a regular meeting of the Philadelphia

School Board, then headed by Superintendent Mark Shedd, an appointee from the liberal days of Dilworth and Clark. Shedd granted Moore permission to organize a high school students’ demonstration petitioning for the inclusion of Black history and culture in the public-school curriculum. They planned to gather in front of the School 260

Administration Building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The police task force for such peaceful demonstrations performed the usual tasks of setting up barriers to contain the public. Although the police expected a few hundred teenagers, the number of young demonstrators quickly swelled to more than three thousand. Sounding the alarm of impending mob violence, Commissioner Rizzo rushed to the site with reinforcements in riot gear. Andrea Mitchell, then a reporter for WCAU-TV, stated that the police charged the students when Rizzo shouted: “Get their Black asses!” 98 While that quote has been disputed, November 17, 1967 brought the sad spectacle to television of police beating children with billy clubs under the approving gaze of the new head of

Philadelphia’s security forces.

Public debate about the role of police and protesters ensued for months, dividing the city both racially and ideologically. Rizzo spoke soon afterwards to B’nai B’rith and the Catholic War Veterans in defense of his actions,99 claiming that while peaceful protests were legitimate, they were subordinate to matters of public safety. He asserted that rather than just react to dissent, the police had a duty to prevent it. Rizzo accused the students of violence, Moore of extremism and Shedd, the liberal school superintendent, of weakness, characterizing them as anti-American forces working for a radical Black Power uprising.

Discourse about Racial Conflict in the Archdiocesan Newspaper

A week after the clash between African American students and the police, The

Catholic Standard and Times published an editorial approved by Cardinal Krol. In it, the archdiocesan newspaper not only condemned the protest, it also praised Rizzo for 261 his decisive police action. Under the title “Another Step Towards Chaos,” the editorial of Friday, November 24, 1967 began: “The forces whose aim is to divide the community into armed camps and to set Black man against White man in open racial war gained valuable ground last Friday.” 100 The paper admitted that there were legitimate complaints about conditions in the city schools, but it condemned the mobilization of young people to protest: “The use of boys and girls who should have been in school, and instead were being encouraged to take part in a ‘demonstration,’ brings no credit upon the organizers of Friday’s disorders.” 101 The use of quotation marks for “demonstration” finds resonance in Rizzo’s dismissal of legitimacy to those seeking justice. The editorial exempted the police from any blame, accusing Rizzo’s critics of “hypocrisy”:

Piously, some of those who organized the demonstration and made little or no effort to keep it under control are now blaming the arrival of uniformed police and Police Commissioner Frank L. Rizzo for the outbreak of violence which disrupted the meeting and produced sporadic violence over a wide area of central Philadelphia. One can only deplore the hypocrisy with which the blame is now placed on others.102

The editorial offered lukewarm support of the call by liberals “Mr. Dilworth and Dr.

Shedd” for “constructive dialogue and understanding,” but warned that such dialogue

“cannot take place in an atmosphere of chaos.” The Catholic Standard and Times said the protest had been a plot by “professional agitators” who were “encouraging and excusing riotous behavior.” The paper called for “an atmosphere of orderliness and respect for law.” 103 The editorial concluded:

If this atmosphere cannot be maintained voluntarily, then it must be imposed by law enforcement officers. To permit -- for whatever motive -- another outbreak of violence is to bring Philadelphia one step closer to open racial war.104 262

Krol would later use the same perspective for law and order against the Young Lords’ protests of police brutality and social injustice against Puerto Ricans.

If this were not enough to repudiate protests and justify police attacks, the following week’s editorial in the archdiocesan newspaper claimed Rizzo’s “admirable restraint” had prevented Philadelphia’s riots from being as bad “as in other cities like

Chicago.”105 The paper also featured an article with the headline “Negro Catholic

Students Favor School Discipline, Dress Rules.”106 The feature reported on opinions about Black Power from some young African American Catholics: “The students said they favored neither Negro rule nor Negro separatism.” The issue in Catholic high schools was soda machines that did not always fill the cup: “That’s what’s really bothering us, that’s what we should demonstrate about.”107

The report of indifference among Black Catholic school students during a citywide racial crisis was a telling indictment of the lack of social justice education in archdiocesan schools. The political shallowness of those teenagers cited in the article contrasted sharply with the consciousness-raising efforts of Aspira, an organization that worked through public high school clubs with funding from private foundations.108

Local branches of Aspira, often directed by counselors with outspoken views favoring

Puerto Rican independence,109 were opened in cities such as New York and

Philadelphia. Their mission was to provide education on Puerto Rican history and culture to public school Puerto Rican students. Thus, while insufficient soda machines may have preoccupied Black Catholic students in parochial schools, Black Power issues of race as a rallying cry to radicalism highly influenced many Puerto Rican students in public schools. The Young Lords I interviewed stated that the independence movement 263 for the island served that function for Puerto Ricans. In the next chapter, I shall explore the Aspira connection to the Young Lords, including the Catholic influences in the experience.

A Chancery-based Hispanic Apostolate in Philadelphia

The structural change that the Second Vatican Council brought to the Catholic

Church provided the backdrop for changes in the pastoral care of Puerto Ricans in

Philadelphia. One result was to transfer control over many church operations from the

Vatican bureaucracy to the hierarchy of each nation. In this country, the United States

Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) set many policies by majority vote, but, in the spirit of the Council, also allowed each bishop to adapt the Council’s mandates to local needs. Decentralization, however, sowed some confusion.110 For instance,

Cardinal Krol prohibited the celebration of the Saturday evening Masses in Philadelphia as fulfillment of Sunday worship; but across the bridge in New Jersey, Catholics were permitted to do so. Certainly, the difference was a matter of practice, not of doctrine; however, the local variations fractured the pre-Council uniformity that for centuries had characterized Catholicism. Increasingly, clerics and lay persons contested the administrative decisions of their bishops by arguing that the models in other dioceses would better serve their faith communities than those being implemented in their own.

As was suggested in the previous chapter, this premise drove the organization of the

Hispanic Pastoral Encuentro.

The training of non-Hispanic priests and women religious to work in Hispanic ministry continued, but now there was also a special call to encourage Hispanic 264 vocations to the priesthood and the religious life. The new impetus for local pastoral initiatives also created a pressing need for resources in the Spanish-language.

Publishers discovered a national Spanish-speaking audience for printed materials offering effective programs directed at Hispanics. Most importantly, increasing numbers of lay Latinos received specialized training programs in ministry. To address these multi-faceted demands in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Cardinal Krol chose

Vincent Walsh to be Director of the Spanish Apostolate. As described in his own words, as a seminarian and young priest, Walsh had been deeply involved in ministry among Puerto Ricans. His appointment came just as he had returned to Philadelphia after securing a degree in canon law after study in Rome.

Previously, the person heading the Spanish Apostolate was a pastor. Initially, however, the person giving this charge was Bishop McShea, the Auxiliary Bishop. And as mentioned before, when Cardinal O’Hara saw the growing needs of the Hispanics, he established Casa del Carmen and he made Fr. Frederick Hickey, who taught Spanish in High School, the director of Casa del Carmen, and he named Bishop McShea as the Diocesan Director. Father Hickey died of a heart- attack in 1962, while I was in the seminary; and then Fr. Hubert Cook took over the directorship of Casa del Carmen. Later, he became pastor of St. Malachy’s. I served under him as a curate there.

Bishop McShea’s position is sort of the job I got in ’72, but the apostolate had never had an office at 222 [the archdiocesan headquarters at 222 North Seventeenth Street]. When I got named, it had to be in the building because that was where I worked.111

The job of Director for the Spanish Apostolate was added to Walsh’s position as

Administrator of Priest Personnel. A woman religious served as his assistant:

I was in Priest Personnel beginning in ‘68. In ’72 they wanted to upgrade the diocesan part of the Spanish Apostolate feeling that they really wanted to strengthen it. So, the Cardinal asked me to be the head. So, I was Director of the Spanish Apostolate from ’72 to ‘75. They also at that time brought in a wonderful sister, Marion Vincent. She had been working at Holy Innocents.’ She was named teacher of 265

the year later at St. Veronica. She had been in Latin America. Since I was in Priest Personnel full-time and then working out of the same office [which] became both Priest Personnel and Spanish Apostolate, I got Sister right there an office on the twelfth floor, which is the highest floor in the building; and then for three years, from ’72 to ’75, I worked as Director of this Apostolate. And this was the way to upgrade the church’s role in the Spanish community.112

These personnel changes coincided with President Lyndon Johnson’s program of federal funding for social services to minority groups such as Puerto Ricans. Many of these funds could be administered through programs run by churches. The

Philadelphia archdiocesan Catholic Charities took advantage of the opportunity to widen its service to Puerto Ricans by strategies that would bring such federal funds to church social justice ministry because these government programs targeted minority groups. The effect of the War on Poverty federal funding, however, broke apart the existing patterns of total dependence upon volunteerism. Cardinal Krol gave the responsibility over funded programs for material assistance to Catholic Charities, leaving pastoral care to Walsh as head of the Hispanic Apostolate. To his credit, Walsh adopted a style of consultation with local pastors, such as the late Father Thomas

Craven, preferring to foster their direct experiences in setting policy:

When I became head of the Spanish Apostolate, I had been in touch with it [pastoral work among Hispanics], but not hands on. So, as soon as I was named head in ’72, I would go to Father Craven and say “Tom, what is going on in the Spanish community? What do we need?” And then, he would say, “Well, we need a Puerto Rican Mass, or what we need is this and that.”113

Father Thomas Craven (1928-2004) preferred to work among the people rather than sit behind a desk in the chancery. Before entering St. Charles’ Seminary to study for the priesthood, he had distinguished himself as Valedictorian for his class at Roman

Catholic High School. Upon ordination, in 1956, he was sent to Puerto Rico for 266 language training, after which he would dedicate 30 years of his priestly ministry to work among the Puerto Ricans of Philadelphia.

Walsh drew upon Craven’s advice to organize a public Mass during Puerto

Rican Week in September to replace the San Juan Bautista Day in June:

So, when I became head [of the Hispanic Apostolate] in ’72, Father Craven, who was the great influence, more than me, came and said this festivity celebrated on Puerto Rico’s Patron Saint Day had been secularized and become [part of] Puerto Rican Week, and that there was nothing we could do to get it back, but that we could begin a Puerto Rican Week Mass. So, we did; and that was very successful and still is today. So, in 1972, the diocese wanted to highlight this celebration; so, we held our first Puerto Rican Week Mass at St. Barnabas, and that was packed; the cardinal came -- he came to every one after that. Then we went to St. Veronica, back to St. Barnabas the next year, and it was eventually taken to the Cathedral. So, this turned out to be a very good suggestion. Having begun as a celebration of Puerto Rico’s patron saint in the ‘50s, [the religious part] was lost in the ‘60s and now it was rescued in the ‘70s. And that was Father Tom’s idea.114

Walsh used his administrative influence to select priests in the mold of Father

Craven for the Puerto Rican ministry. In fact, he offered a sort of ecclesiastical reward to those who would work with Puerto Ricans:

Now, usually priests from the diocese became pastors after 25 years ordained. However, when there were special languages the number of years would drop down. So, a priest could be named after 15 years ordained. So, we took priests; I would pick the ones whom I knew would be pastorally the best. I called them up, and said: “Look, would you like to go into Spanish work?” They said “yes,” and they took the course, and we were able make sure they became pastors in the parishes.115

Becoming pastor of a Puerto Rican parish in the city presented more challenges than a more conventional post might have. As well as sharing in the dire economic conditions of their neighborhood, priests in such parishes often experienced criminal acts, including theft of church and personal property.116 As the quote above indicates, the 267 promise of early promotion to the rank of pastor, however, counterbalanced the considerable sacrifices required to serve in poor urban parishes where Puerto Ricans constituted the majority of the faithful.

John Cardinal Krol and Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican Catholics

The interviews I conducted revealed mixed opinions regarding Krol’s policies toward the Puerto Rican ministry, whether respondents were members of the Catholic faithful or outsiders. Reverend Roger Zepernick, who came to Philadelphia to study at

Lutheran Seminary and has remained in the city ever since, was an impartial witness to

Catholicism’s encounter with Puerto Ricans under Cardinal Krol. He commented:

I don’t have a lot of good things to say about this [arch]diocese. As an outsider, the very little I know, is that historically it has been an in- grown, very conservative, protective entity. I also know that some of the people in the church who were the most brilliant, the most trusted, and the most effective in terms of working with the Puerto Rican community did not get much support from the [arch]diocese …. As to Father Craven, I knew him a little bit, just a little bit; we met mainly around activities in the community; and enough to say that he worked very well with the Puerto Rican community at that time. He was trusted and respected.117

Reverend Zepernick commented on the cardinal’s control over activist clergymen. “It was also difficult for those working from below to stand up to the diocese. I know that Father Dave ultimately had to leave Philadelphia because of the circumstances.”118 The “Father Dave” referenced was the Jesuit priest David

Ungerleider, whom I interviewed by phone from his post in Mexico about his involvement with Puerto Ricans and the Young Lords. The Jesuit narrated his lifelong commitment: 268

I was a novice at Wenersville. I came down to work at Casa del Carmen [during] my two years as a Jesuit novice and helped Tom Craven, who was not a Monsignor yet, to get the kids from Casa del Carmen to St. Joe’s Prep for swimming classes. I used to be a swimming instructor.

And then I came back for my regency, which is the period the Jesuits have between Philosophy and Theology, where we have to work for two to three years in an apostolate, and I worked again with Tom Craven and taught just one course in the morning to freshmen at St. Joe’s. I used to go over from Eighteenth and Thompson to Seventh and Jefferson to help out Craven. Then I founded Center Loyola down the street in Jefferson. And when I went to Theology down here in Mexico, Tom Craven wrote a letter to Krol and to my provincial, I still have it in my files, saying that “David lit up a very dark corner of our neighborhood with his efforts to work among the drug addicts and the gang members.” So, Tom was always kind of a real support for me. I remember sometimes that we would be talking -- I don’t think he was scared of Cardinal Krol -- but he certainly knew he would be walking on thin ice if he tried to push the cardinal to do more for the Puerto Rican community.119

Walsh also had positive things to say about the Jesuit:

I met him [Dave Ungerleider] in those three years ’73-’75; he was a Jesuit seminarian who set up the Loyola Center. And he would come into the office every once in a while. And he did a wonderful job.120

Unlike Walsh and Craven, Ungerleider was ordained after the Second Vatican Council.

Although he also began to volunteer at Casa del Carmen while a seminarian, his pastoral outreach had absorbed the new theology from the council. Walsh commented on the solid theological approach of the seminarian:

As a seminarian, I worked with the Hispanics. But he [Ungerleider] had a much greater insight into what to do, how to approach and work with them. My approach was simply to knock on doors and get them to sign their children for school and refer them to different service agencies -- I mean, that was it; that was all. But he knew how to set up this thing – he knew how to do it. He did a great job. He would come in every once in a while and tell me what he was doing. He understood much more at his age than I did. Now as a priest, I can see more clearly, but not then, I could not see as clearly as he did when I was his age. He did a great job, a great job.121 269

In his interview, Ungerleider described how Krol sought to control every aspect of ministry to Puerto Ricans:

I brought once a Jesuit bishop from Puerto Rico to give a talk at St. Henry’s. I don’t think we have St. Henry’s anymore. The cardinal called the pastor and asked him, “Why are you bringing this Puerto Rican bishop to talk?” The pastor told him I had invited him and the cardinal said, “He is a persona non grata in my archdiocese. So, either cancel it or don’t be there that night in case he says something that is not on the right side.”

The bishop I had brought in was Monseñor Antulio Parrilla Bonilla, an independentista bishop from Puerto Rico. He has since passed away. So, that was kind of nasty. Why won’t Krol get in touch with me directly, or why would he say that about the bishop – why would he call a Jesuit bishop a persona non grata?122

Bishop Parrilla Bonilla had been a member of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party while a young man. As a priest and later as bishop, he had attacked the government’s birth-control and sterilization policies, deeming these policies as neo-Malthusian measures to control Puerto Rican population.123 He had been arrested and jailed in 1964 along with others protesting the presence of the United States Navy on Puerto Rico’s off-shore island of Culebra and would experience the same fate when protesting the occupation of Vieques in 1979.124 His concerns included social justice for Puerto

Ricans outside the island. For instance, he lent his prestige as bishop to demands for an investigation into the death of Julio Roldán, a Puerto Rican activist, under suspicious circumstances at Riker Island’s Prison in New York.125

Cardinal Krol’s extreme reaction to Bishop Parrilla Bonilla’s visit to

Philadelphia was likely spurred by the Puerto Rican bishop’s denunciation of American imperialism on his island. The previous chapter described the best known of these clashes, when police beat supporters for César Chavez and the Farm Workers 270

Movement during the1969 Midnight Mass in Los Angeles’ St. Basil’s Basilica.126 At the time, Parrilla Bonilla was in San Francisco to meet with leaders of the Black

Panthers and draft resisters against the war in Vietnam. He journeyed to Los Angeles and celebrated Mass for the Mexican American protesters in an empty lot across the street from the basilica.127 Much like the biblical prophets, or Jesus himself, who confronted the Pharisees, Parrilla Bonilla served the prophetic burden against injustice.128 Krol had good reason to expect challenges from Parrilla Bonilla.

When pressed in the interview about his encounters with Krol, Ungerleider confessed he had no positive experiences with the cardinal:

This was years and years ago; but that’s the way it was. I hate to have to say these things because so many years have gone by, and I have been very happy as a Jesuit and as a priest, but I really do not recall having any positive exchanges with Krol, to be honest with you. There was never a really positive or reinforcing kind of conversation, where you are being paid attention to or being guided, where he was a good shepherd to you. I can’t say that; I mean, I would be dishonest if I told you otherwise -- that is, if I said there was something good that took place between the Cardinal and me during all those years I spent there.129

Ungerleider does not hold positive memories of Krol. He saw little commitment of the cardinal to Puerto Ricans. In fact, Ungerleider does not even remember Krol “being particularly nice” to them, “except for a symbolic Puerto Rican Day Mass that he

[would] show up to say at one of the churches.” For the most part, the cardinal was very hard and direct, and not at all a kind person:

The few times I was invited in when we got together with Hispanic leaders from City Hall and from the local parishes, the few times he bumped into me, what I remember is that I always thought he was going to knock the drink out of my hand. He was kind of bold and brash; and he did not have a lot of kind things to say about what we were doing at St. Joe’s College, now St. Joe’s University. You see, we were next door neighbors; our place back then was right next to 271

the campus. And then, of course, I was doing things that were upsetting in terms of what he considered to be priestly work.130

The formula for avoiding confrontation was to keep a low profile, something that the more experienced Craven managed:

But as I said, most times the diocesan priests stuck to the plate and oftentimes at great odds made things happen. Tom Craven should be canonized for all the good that he did and all the avenues he opened up for, not just pastoral attention, but for basic stuff like employment, housing and health care, summer recreation, getting legal representation when people got arrested. Tom was everywhere. And some of the other guys with him. But Tom Craven was the one that stood out the most because of his conviction that these were the right things to do.131

The final episode involving Ungerleider and the cardinal was about the church’s role in confronting the Rizzo administration:

And my thing was more social services such as finding housing for people; in fact, we started occupying abandoned homes and so, I was arrested a few times. The whole thing got kind of dicey because of Mayor Rizzo. I think Rizzo and Councilman Harry Jannotti down the street kind of pressured the cardinal to put an end to this. So, the cardinal called my provincial and told him, “Get him out of here.” And that is basically what happened to me. No hard feelings. He is dead now, things are going well for me, and there have been a few other cardinals after him. And so, life goes on.132

Msgr. Walsh had been transferred out of the Hispanic Apostolate and to the

Archdiocesan Tribunal in 1976, when Cardinal Krol ordered Ungerleider out of

Philadelphia. Thus, in my interview he offered no reasons for the Jesuit’s transfer.

Moreover, Walsh confessed that he had no dealings with the mayor over such issues:

I had no personal dealings with him [Rizzo]. I don’t know if he was still in office when I was directing the Spanish apostolate. So, the answer is “zero.” I never related to him when I was head of the Spanish Apostolate Office. It was a non-issue. I was sitting at the office. In all honesty with Rizzo, I won’t, I didn’t…. Rizzo was a non-issue for the Hispanics and he was a non-issue for me, too. I was just not in touch with him.133 272

Walsh admitted that he had left such relationships with government to others. “I never got into that; I focused on the people. Maybe it was part of my own growth. I did not even know [the players]; perhaps I should have.” 134 His overall opinion about

Cardinal Krol’s policies differed substantially with those cited above:

One of the things that happened at the end of the second year, was I said to Sister we need to go to the cardinal; we have been here two years and we should now know what are the needs of these people. So, we went to the cardinal and he was excellent, he was excellent. The one thing that came up as the most important was the Hispanic diaconate. At that time, there were no deacons in Philadelphia; the cardinal felt, “Well, we have plenty of priests.” However, within the Hispanic community he realized this was not the case, and we needed them. He said “Yes” so that the first deacons in the diocese were Hispanics. They were the first diocesan deaconate class group. So, then later on, the African-Americans said: “Look, we need them too.” So, they sought of, got on our pad; so that the second [racial, ethnic] group that got deacons was the African-American and finally they said, “Let’s have everybody.” We also mentioned pastoral situations where we felt that training pastors for the Hispanics was not enough; they should not only be open to Hispanics; they should be able to speak Spanish. So, we had five points and he [the cardinal] accepted them all. And, of course, these were points that we were in touch with. They came from the grass-roots. So, we knew we were not going to go back to say let’s do things differently; we knew from the experience of those two first years what was needed. So, there was a lot of joy in the Spanish apostolate because we were moving ahead.135

The meeting when the five points were presented to Krol took place in 1974. In addition to the request for Puerto Rican permanent deacons and greater attention to

Puerto Rican vocations to the priesthood, Walsh urged the cardinal to require pastor of parishes where many Puerto Ricans resided to learn Spanish. He had observed that conflicts arose when the pastor lacked the necessary background to understand the efforts of the priest serving the parish’s Spanish-speaking community. 273

Walsh explained his strategies for communicating with Krol the pragmatic steps necessary to an effective pastoral policy:

I worked in Priest Personnel, and in all honesty, it is my belief that how good the person at the top is depends in great measure upon the second level. This comes from my experience of having work there [at the chancery]. That is, if your second level doesn’t know what is going on, then the person at the top is not going to know what is going on either. Now, if the second level sort of knows what is going on, and communicates this to the one at the top, he would also know; and know when to say “Yes.”

I was named to the second level; I reported directly to the cardinal and no one else. Now, having been named to the second level does not mean I knew what was going on at all times. So, I asked Father Tom Craven; and we regularly met with all the priests – so, the priests knew that I knew what they knew and what they were feeling. That’s how I got to know what was going on – because I listen to the sisters and priests. And Cardinal Krol knew what was going on because I made it my business to go to him and informed him what was taking place and what needed to be done; and he would say, “Yes.” So, in all honesty the man at the top looks bad or looks good depending on who is his second; who is feeding him the information. Probably most organizations work that way. If, for example, you have someone at the school office who knows what is going on and informs the cardinal, then he looks good.136

The conflicting testimony about ministry under Krol offers an insight into the workings of the clergy in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia at this time. With the various currents of council reform churning the waters, maintaining a low profile seemed to have been a successful strategy with the cardinal. Walsh described his role as that of a bridge:

The issue was: to identity what resources the church had to offer to the Americans and make sure that the same was offered to the Hispanics. The aim was to make sure that the Church served them [the Hispanics] on the same level or even better than the others.137

Puerto Ricans were the main beneficiaries of these efforts. “The Hispanic phenomenon was really a Puerto Rican phenomenon” at that time, he said. “I am still in Spanish 274 work now; I say Mass at over at St. Francis [Springfield, PA], but now it is a multicultural parish.” 138 He also sought to connect the apostolate at the grass roots and local pastors, on the one side, with the cardinal and archdiocesan leaders on the other:

Cardinal Krol never said no to my requests. I not only worked with him; I lived with him. I was living with him for eight years besides working at the Chancery. But you can see that I could talk to the priests and then to him …. But basically, if the man at the top has someone that is in touch with what is happening with the community – not that I, myself, was in touch – but I knew Father Tom, with whom I was in touch regularly and with that [the information Father Tom would give me], the Cardinal would do the right thing; then he would not just have to look at a piece of paper and not know what to do. He would know what to do. Krol had his finger on the pulse because of this. Basically, that is why I say that Father Tom Craven was really the architect of the Spanish apostolate.139

Overall, my interviews with clergy reveal that there was considerable room for different opinions within Philadelphia’s Catholicism, particularly after the Second

Vatican Council. Catholic intellectual diversity survived during the next two decades, as can be seen in the rival views on race, class and ethnicity from Catholic thinkers of the time which were cited in the fifth chapter. When the bishops recognized the different points of view in preparation for the American Bicentennial of 1976, they indirectly provided religious capital to those supporting each perspective. Craven,

Walsh and Ungerleider could legitimate their choices for ministry by citing the theological approach closest to their values. Krol, apparently, was willing to accept pastoral practices as long as he was convinced that they were successful to the overall goal of effective pastoral care for Puerto Ricans.

Nonetheless, in the religious field of interaction, Krol had authority that the priests did not. Considering the cardinal as the hegemonic head of the archdiocese, in

Gramsci’s terms, coercion was available to Krol, even though using that ecclesiastical 275 authority was an admission of weakness. Since he could not accuse Ungerleider of any doctrinal irregularity, the cardinal saw to Ungerleider’s removal from the Hispanic apostolate and his diocese by demanding that the Jesuit provincial transfer the priest.

By eliminating the clerical leadership of the social justice ministry, Krol effectively ended that ministry. His actions echo the reflections of Otto Maduro:

At the very least, every dominant class will seek to obtain from the religious field that it not produce any practice or discourse favorable to the struggle of subordinate classes against the hegemony of the dominant classes.140

Outside this type of control, however, were the resolutions approved by the

Encuentro for ministry to Hispanics nationwide. Cardinal Krol, as the head of the

USCCB from 1971 until 1974, was responsible to all other bishops for respecting the event they had authorized and for implementing the recommendations it had produced.

The Encuentro and Local Programs of Ministerial Training

When the call for the Encuentro was issued in 1971, the Archdiocese of

Philadelphia lacked a chancery-based pastoral office like that of the Archdiocese of

New York.141 Msgr. Walsh, as cited above, had only recently been appointed to head the apostolate from a chancery office. However, the Philadelphia style both for city and church has been to shun centralized authority, and the lack of a chancery office for the

Hispanic apostolate did not mean that local priests like Tom Craven had not been effective. It is noteworthy also that the personnel of Casa del Carmen were eager to count on the support of people at the grass roots. I found it strange, then, that the only participant from Philadelphia at this first Encuentro was Msgr. Walsh, the chancery official. Father Craven was not a participant and there was not a single lay Latino 276

Catholic representing the archdiocese. When asked about such limited participation,

Msgr. Walsh replied:

This was new, and actually Father Tom Craven was named to go to the Encuentro, and I sat in on the meetings because I was head of priest personnel, and that’s when it came up to name the head of the Spanish apostolate, and my name was on the list. The cardinal said, “I had named Father Craven to go, but since you are the director, you are the one that should go,”.... I don’t know whether [anyone else was sent to the 1972 Encuentro] because it was the first one. And again, if there is nobody in place who is telling you what to do, and you only get a piece of paper….142

Ana María Díaz-Stevens was Administrative Coordinator of the Spanish-Speaking

Apostolate Office in the Archdiocese of New York, which issued the announcement of the First Encuentro. She confirmed for me that the letters of invitation had specifically requested that lay delegates attend the meeting in Washington.143 The lack of response to this call for lay participation, I surmise, was not the fault of Walsh, who had just then assumed the position of Director of the Office for the Hispanic Apostolate of the

Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Walsh noted that this mistake did not occur with the second Encuentro in 1977: “For the second Encuentro, we had the office in place; so,

Father Tom went, [and] Sister Marion. We had a whole group -- we flew out together.”

The First Hispanic Pastoral Encuentro, convened in June of 1972, stressed the shared responsibility of hierarchy, clergy and laity for ministry, emphasizing what in

Spanish was referred to as “pastoral de conjunto.” High priority was given to establishing regional pastoral centers to train Hispanic leaders in ministry. Philadelphia responded to this call, adding to it the training of priests and sisters locally. In fact, there are two efforts during Walsh’s tenure as Director of the Hispanic Apostolate that he remembers with fondness: the establishment of a permanent diaconate for Puerto 277

Ricans in Archdiocese of Philadelphia and organization of a language school in that city:

With Sister, we started a language program. So, the language program that I took in Puerto Rico, and to which some had been sent was limited. How many can you send to Puerto Rico for the summer? But then we found out that we, ourselves, could put on a program. So, then we used [the University of] Penn[sylvania]’s Newman Center and we offered it to priests, sisters and any lay person – policemen and all; they all came; they came and took this intensive course. We had a Sister Mary Peter who taught Spanish up at Prendergast [High School], which was [an] excellent [thing]…. Instead of two there would be 30-40 priests and sisters [and lay people] who would be studying. There was a whole atmosphere created. And the priests that were in this work [the Hispanic Apostolate] knew that the diocese was very close to them. We were listening to them and [attentive] to what they needed.144

He added that Bell Telephone sought to participate in 1974. It is his understanding, however, that they had expressed their willingness to help after a lawsuit was issued against them for a lack of minority hiring.

Walsh recognized the Encuentro promoted a chancery-based office in each diocese to effectively coordinate the Hispanic apostolate. Upon his promotion to the

Archdiocesan Tribunal,145 he argued both for Father Tom Craven as new director and for keeping an office in the chancery:

When I stepped out in ’74, I said to the cardinal, “Look, this has to stay in the building, because it is a symbol.” This was fine with the cardinal. And that is the reason why Sister Marion stayed in the building. Since the idea was for the priest in charge to actually be in the community – after all, that was what I argued – it would not have made sense for Father Craven to be in the building; so, he remained in the parish. But he now had all the power of a diocesan director that went with the job; it was an ideal situation – he had an office in the building, but was out there in the field, and Sister Marion was full- time in the building to run everyday things while he was in the field. Eventually, he got named head of Casa del Carmen.146

278

Despite its many contradictions, the pastoral care of Hispanics in Philadelphia had produced a social and religious template upon which the Young Lords’ struggle for social justice could unfold. A number of important Encuentro recommendations were implemented and the pastoral leadership had established closer relationships to the

Hispanic laity when the Young Lords organized a chapter in Philadelphia.

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Endnotes to Chapter 7

1 Victor Vásquez, “The Development of Pan-Latino Philadelphia, 1892–1945,” Pennsylvania Magazine History and Biography 128 (2004): 367–84.

2 Vásquez, “The Development of Pan-Latino Philadelphia,” 377. On the role of priests from Camden to the camps, see Carmen Theresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 70. The organization of migrant ministry nationwide in the United States for mostly Mexican-American labor is discussed in Ana María Díaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 101-103.

3 Vásquez, “The Development of Pan-Latino Philadelphia,” 374.

4 Vásquez, “The Development of Pan-Latino Philadelphia,” 373-376.

5 Archive of Letters of John O’Hara; accessed March 3, 2016, http://www.pahrc.net/wp- content/uploads/2009/03/hara-papers.pdf. See also, 91.297: “From Archbishop John F. O’Hara, Spanish Sermon – Confraternity of Christian Doctrine.”

6 “From Bishop O’Hara, 12/1942, Welcome address to the President of Ecuador, St. Patrick’s, New York;” Letters of John O’Hara, 91.298; “From Bishop John F. O’Hara, 05/17/1942, Welcome address to President Prado of Peru, St. Patrick’s, New York,” 91.303; “From Bishop John F. O’Hara, 1943, Welcome address to President Morinigo of Paraguay,” 91.304:

7 “To Bishop John F. O’Hara, 03/26/1947, Statement of J. Edgar Hoover (F.B.I.) to House UnAmerican Activities Committee,” Archive of Letters of John O’Hara, 91.15

8 “To John Cardinal O’Hara, from Marcello Cardinal Mimmi, Secretary, Sacred Consistorial Congregation, 1958-1959 folder -- concerning problems of the Church of Latin America -- including message from Pope John XXIII concerning a meeting in Washington on this subject,” Archive of Letters of John O’Hara, 90.1183.

9 Richard N. Juliani, Building Little Italy: Philadelphia’s Italians Before Mass Migration (State College, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).

10 After the Second Vatican Council, the entire text of the Mass and the text for the sacraments were offered in the vernacular of the congregants attending the liturgy or the person receiving the sacrament.

11 William Ferrée, Ivan Illich and Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, eds. Spiritual Care of Puerto Rican Migrants, (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 3/16.

12 “To John F. O’Hara, Archbishop of Philadelphia, from George Schermer, Commission on Human Relations, Philadelphia, 07/27/1954, Praise for the development of the Casa del Carmen,” Letters of John O’Hara, 90.934.

13 This is the foundational principle for the sentiment derived from a statement made by Cardinal Hickey of Washington. Carlyle Murphy, “A Steadfast Servant of D.C. Area's Needy,” Washington Post, October 25, 2004.

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14 There was also during his time a growing number of Puerto Ricans moving to West Chester, which though part of the archdiocese, is outside of the Philadelphia’s city limits. Those working in agriculture would find it difficult to travel to the city for Sunday services or other spiritual care.

15 This issue was discussed in the conference in Puerto Rico. See Ferrée, Spiritual Care, 1/10-1/11.

16 “Archdiocese to dedicate new Puerto Rican Center,” The Catholic Standard and Times, Connelly Library Archives, LaSalle University, 1954 Folio, 19. Father G. Francis Craven was stationed at St. Malachy’s Parish. He was a fellow priest with, but not a family relation of, Father Thomas Craven, the cleric who would exercise a leading role in the evolution of pastoral ministry to Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia.

17 The office of deacon was created in the Early Church to provide material assistance. See Acts of the Apostles, Chapters 6-8 et passim.

18 Firmissimam Constantiam, Encyclical of Pope Pius XI, On the Religious Situation in Mexico, March 28, 1937, #14-15; Sertum Laetitiae, Encyclical of Pope Pius XII, On the Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Establishment of the Hierarchy in the United States, November 1, 1939: #11-13.

19 Pius XI issued the Encyclical Non Abiamo Bisgno (June 29, 1931) in Italian to counter Mussolini’s action against Catholic opposition to his dictatorship and the government’s repression of Catholic Action in Italy. This document cited the process for social intervention. “See, Judge, Act.” For a summary of the history of this process, confer Erin M. Brigham, See, Judge, Act: Catholic Social Teaching and Service Learning (Winona, MN: Anselm Academic Press, 2013), 17-18; 20-26.

20 His name appears as Frederic H. Hickey in some sources and Frederick Hickey in others. I employ the latter spellling.

21 See this dissertation’s sixth chapter.

22 Interview with Msgr. Vincent Walsh, retired Director of Hispanic Apostolate: at St. Joseph Villa, Upper Darby, PA, January 15, 2016. Census data for the year 1953 put the Puerto Rican population at a bit more than 7,000 persons. The number of 50,000 remembered in this interview corresponds with the population two decades later, in the 1970s, when Msgr. Walsh was made director of priest personnel for the Archdiocese. Despite this lapse in dates, Monsignor gave witnesses his conviction that the Puerto Rican community was rapidly growing.

23 Interview with Walsh.

24 Interview with Walsh.

25 Interview with Walsh.

26 Telephone interview with Mari Gloria Arroyo Bradley, April 26, 2016.

27 “High School Girls Teach English,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, February 2, 1958.

28 “Groups Help Puerto Ricans,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, May 16, 1958.

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29 Interview with Arroyo Bradley.

30 Interview with Arroyo Bradley.

31 Interview with Arroyo Bradley.

32 “Habitus are cultural structures that exist in people’s bodies and minds and shape a wide variety of their behaviours, beliefs and thoughts.” Philippe Coulangeon and Yannick Lemel. “The Homology Thesis: Distinction Revisited,” in Quantifying Theory: Pierre Bourdieu, eds. Karen Robson and Chris Sanders (Toronto: Springer Science + Business Media B.V., 2009), 47.

33 Pierre Bourdieu, “The politics of protest. An interview by Kevin Ovenden.” Socialist Review, 242 (2000), 19. See also his Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 25.

34 Interview with Walsh.

35 Interview with Walsh.

36 Interview with Walsh.

37 “With the co-operation of Casa del Carmen, a Puerto Rican Center, a campaign was carried on for the Catholic education of Puerto Rican children and at the end of the spring term, reported that approximately 543 children attended our parochial schools as follows: Assumption-134; Cathedral- 109; St. Francis Xavier-59; St. Peter’s-36; St. Michael’s-27; St. Malachy’s-72; St. Edward’s-18; St. Francis de Sales-8; St. Agnes’-8; St. Augustine’s-5; St. Edmund’s-3.” Ferrée et al., Spiritual Care, 3/16.

38 “To Priests of the Archdiocese, from Archbishop John F. O’Hara, 08/25/1953, Previous permission for some pastors to charge tuition for parochial schools is revoked,” Letters of John O’Hara, 91.84.

39 In the 1950s, St. Charles Borromeo Seminary offered the last two years of high school to candidates for the priesthood. Even those who had graduated from high school often repeated these last two years in order to be schooled in Latin and Greek, since these were not included in the curriculum of most Catholic high schools.

40 Interview with Walsh.

41 “To Bishop James P. Davis, D.D., Bishop of San Juan, from Archbishop John F. O’Hara, 09/06/1956, training of Reverend Thomas Craven and Reverend Gerard Lavery in the Apostolate among the Puerto Ricans, related letters attached,” Letters of John O’Hara, 90.438.

42 Ferrée, Spiritual Care, 0/13.

43 Ferrée, Spiritual Care, 0/13-0/14.

44 Díaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue, 101-103.

45 Ferrée, Spiritual Care, ¼, italics added.

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46 Ferrée, Spiritual Care, 1/4-1/5.

47 Ferrée, Spiritual Care, 1/4.

48 El Centro de Investigación Demográfica del Gobierno de Puerto Rico put the estimate for 1956 at 550,000 for New York and 13,000 for Philadelphia that same year, accessed September 1, 2016, http://www.estadisticas.pr/iepr/Estadisticas/InventariodeEstadisticas/tabid/186/ctl/view_detail/mid/77 5/report_id/c1bcd196-f0d3-4237-a8d6-32d0a52678e7/Default.aspx. Cardinal Spellman’s Puerto Rican population figures of 600,000 for New York cited at the conference were exaggerated by 50,000, while those for Philadelphia of 7,300 were undercounted by 5,700.

49 Ferrée, Spiritual Care, 3/16.

50 See José L. Vázquez Calzada, La población de Puerto Rico y su trayectoria histórica (Río Piedras: Escuela Graduada de Salud Pública, Recinto de Ciencias Médicas, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1988), 286.

51 Interview with Walsh.

52 Interview with Walsh.

53 Díaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue, 139-145.

54 Díaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue, 265.

55 Díaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue, 139-145.

56 Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970). The essay can be found as a chapter, 53-68.

57 The agency was the Catholic Interamerican Cooperation Program (CICOP). See the presentation made to reconsider Latin American missionary work within the United States in Antonio Stevens-Arroyo, ed. Prophets Denied Honor: An Anthology on the Hispanic Church in the United States (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1980), 241-242.

58 Krol was named a Cardinal by Pope Paul VI on June 26, 1967, during the same consistory that elevated Archbishop Karol Wojtyła of Krakow, Poland, the future Pope John Paul II.

59 “English Canon Lacks Fidelit,y” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1967 Folio, 7.

60 “A Welcome Decisiveness: Against Union Membership for Oblates,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1967 Folio, 5.

61 “Cardinal’s Puerto Rican Week Message and Mass Marks Puerto Rican Week,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1978 Folio, 35.

62 “Cancel My Subscription (because of too much on Krol),” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1978 Folio, 37.

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63 “Catholics are not only a religious group. They are also a minority group. Used in this sense, minority has no meaning in terms of numbers. It refers to the fact that some groups suffer discrimination at the hands of the majority. Jews, Catholics, Negroes and foreigners are generally apt to fall into the minority category in the United States.” “Irish of Early Philadelphia Set Pattern for ‘Catholic Separatism,’” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1953 Folio, 9.

64 The Catholic Standard and Times, 1953 Folio, 9.

65 “Protests Flood State Senate as Archbishop O’Hara Urges Defeat of Proposed Bill 1132,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1953 Folio, 1.

66 “McCarthyism,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1954 Folio, 1.

67 “Is It So Bad to Be a Reactionary?” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1954 Folio, 5.

68 “Atrocities Found in Guatemala Attributed to Reds,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1954 Folio, 11; “Guatemalan Archbishop Pleads for Social Justice as Check on Communism,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1954 Folio, 11. In Guatemala, President Arbenz was replaced by Carlos Castillo, who quickly suspended the country’s constitution. Similar assistance had been lent to General Tiburcio Carías Andino in Honduras under the watchful eye of the American Fruit Company; the Somozas in Nicaragua; Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic fill out the list. Later the strategy was applied to Chile.

69 Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). The first authorization for intervention came from President Harry S. Truman in 1951 with the code name, PBFORTUNE and funded with $2.7 million. The coup was affected by invasion with United States’ backed forces and Arbenz resigned in June of 1954, seeking exile in Mexico.

70 “Rhee Sees Church As 'Greatest Ally' Against Reds,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1954 Folio, 17.

71 “French Abandon 200,000 Catholics in Vietnam Delta,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1954 Folio, 17.

72 “Polish Crew Given Asylum: Dreaded Return to Red Rule,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1954 Folio, 12; “Priest Flees Titoland,” Standard and Times, 1954 Folio, 18.

73 The issue was the effort in 1963 by Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro of the Christian Democratic Party to forge an alliance with Italian Socialists. Pope John XXIII did not publish a protest. Instead he confided to Father Roberto Tucci, SJ, Director of the Jesuit newspaper La Civilità Cattolica: “It is necessary to be very wary because the politicians today, even the Christian Democrats, are trying to pull the Church to their party and thus use the Church for goals that are not always the highest … I am not an expert on this topic, but frankly I do not understand why one cannot accept a collaboration in order to achieve good things with others who have a different ideology, as long as he does not make concessions in doctrine.” Giovanni Sale, “In bilico sulla sedia gestatoria,” L’Osservatore Romano, 19 octobre 2012, 5.

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74 Gaudium et Spes, Document of the Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution On The Church In The Modern World, solemnly promulgated by His Holiness Pope Paul VI, December 7, 1965.

75 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, ed., Papal Overtures in a Cuban Key: The Pope’s Visit and Civic Space for Cuban Religion (Scranton: Scranton University Press, 2002), xviii-xxiii.

76 James F. Garneau, “The First Inter-American Episcopal Conference, November 2-4, 1959: Canada and the United States Called to the Rescue of Latin America,” Catholic Historical Review 87 (2001): 676.

77 Robert D. Crassweller, Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 381-394.

78 Papal Volunteers in Latin America (PAVLA) was formed in 1960 and secured about one thousand volunteers from the United States through the 1960s.

79 Christian Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 110-115.

80 “Going the rounds in conservative circles: ‘Mater si, Magistra no,’” National Review, August 12, 1961, 77.

81 Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology, 110-115.

82 “Mission to the Poorest,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1954 Folio, 6.

83 “The Columbia Street riots destroyed the myth of racial progress that had been so carefully crafted by Philadelphia’s liberal-reform coalition.” Matthew J. Countryman, “Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia, 1940-1971,” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1998), 301. The same information with different pagination is found in his book, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

84 For accounts of the riot in Philadelphia, see Salvatore A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Philadelphia: Camino Books, 1993), 91-99; Joseph R. Daughen, and Peter Binzen, The Cop Who Would Be King: The Honorable Frank Rizzo (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 92-99.

85 In June 1962 testimony before Senator John McClellan's Senate Subcommittee on Crime in Washington, D.C., Rizzo attacked the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for being "soft" on crime and lambasted liberals: “When they cannot reach top police officials, then they cannot get them under their wing in the ways, the racket element, there is only one other way that can reach us, and that is to scream police brutality against a minority group.” Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 70.

86 Countryman, “Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia,” 231-232.

87 Countryman, “Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia,” 426-430.

88 Richard A. Keiser, Subordination or Empowerment? African-American Leadership and the Struggle for Urban Political Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 126.

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89 Keiser, Subordination or Empowerment, 113.

90 Sullivan founded Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OIC) of America in 1964 and established Progress Plaza on North Broad Street was dedicated in 1968.

91 Fr. Paul Washington was born in Charleston, South Carolina; the Reverend Leon Sullivan was born in Charleston West Virginia; and Leon Higgenbotham, Jr., was born in Trenton, New Jersey.

92 Keiser, Subordination or Empowerment, 127, attributes to Moore a “separatist-messianic vision of racial justice and distributive equity.” In a newspaper interview, Moore is reported to have said: “Yeah, I’m everything everybody says except two - I’m not a hypocrite and I’m not a quitter. Once I told 10,000 people at a convention that I admit I’m adulterous, polygamous, inebriate, but I’m intelligent and militant, and if you’re with me, stand up. Ten thousand stood up.” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 1, 1974.

93 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 72.

94 “In their efforts to more justly distribute power and wealth in the city, this new generation of activists turned to the principles of community-based leadership, participatory democracy, and racial self- determination to replace liberalism’s faith in antidiscrimination laws, technocratic government, and the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition.” Countryman, “Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia,” 441.

95 RAM was led by Max Stanford and represented a Philadelphia-based group for confrontation which had preceded the Black Panthers.

96 Countryman, “Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia,” 466.

97 Countryman, “Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia,” 477. Moore’s later community activism was rewarded with the renaming of Columbia Avenue in his honor.

98 Countryman, “Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia,” 486-491. See also Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 92-93. Rizzo denied making the statement, but Larry Kane, Andrea Mitchell and other correspondents present at the time said he did.

99 Countryman, “Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia,” 495-496.

100 “Another Step Towards Chaos,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1967 Folio, 13.

101 “Another Step Towards Chaos,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1967 Folio, 13.

102 “Another Step Towards Chaos,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1967 Folio, 13.

103 “Another Step Towards Chaos,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1967 Folio, 13.

104 “Another Step Towards Chaos,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1967 Folio, 13.

105 “Good Will and Good Sense,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1967 Folio, 19.

286

106 “Negro Catholic Students Favor School Discipline, Dress Rules,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1967 Folio,18-19.

107 “Negro Catholic Students Favor School Discipline, Dress Rules,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 1967 Folio, 19.

108 See the Aspira website on its history, accessed March 2, 2015, http://www.aspira.org/book/our-history.

109 When the Statehood Party won the 1968 elections in Puerto Rico, the island’s new governor used his power over the public-school system and university to remove those favoring Puerto Rican independence. It resembled a political purge, and sent many of the brightest and best educators to the United States seeking employment. Working for Aspira as a high school counselor often became a favored option for these political refugees because it allowed them to communicate their passion for Puerto Rican independence. Private communication with Ana María Díaz-Stevens, December 12, 2016.

110 James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 115-117.

111 Interview with Walsh.

112 Interview with Walsh.

113 Interview with Walsh.

114 Interview with Walsh.

115 Interview with Walsh.

116 John P. McNamee, Diary of A City Priest (Franklin: Sheed & Ward, 1995).

117 Interview with the Reverend Roger Zepernick, Esperanza Center, Philadelphia, December 15, 2015.

118 Interview with Zepernick.

119 Telephone interview with Father David Ungerleider, February 23, 2016.

120 Interview with Walsh.

121 Interview with Walsh.

122 Telephone interview with Ungerleider.

123 Antulio Parrilla Bonilla, Neomaltusianismo en Puerto Rico (Editorial Juan XXIII, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1974).

124 For a personal account of Culebra, see Samuel Silva Gotay, “Semblanza del Profesor, Luis Rivera Pagán, con motivo de su Conferencia Magistral en la Cátedra UNESCO para la Paz,” 2004, accessed

287

February 8, 2017, http://unescopaz.uprrp.edu/act/Lecciones/2004/SemblanzaLRP.htm. For the bishop’s role in Vieques, consult Louise L. Cripps, Human Rights in a United States Colony (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1982), 115-128.

125 Miguel “Mickey” Melendez, We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 186.

126 David F. Gómez, Somos Chicanos: Strangers in Our Own Land (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 155- 170. Cited in Stevens-Arroyo, Prophets Denied Honor, 123-133.

127 Stevens-Arroyo, Prophets Denied Honor, 90-91; 95.

128 “A la memoria de Monseñor Antulio Parrilla, . . . profeta de gran inteligencia; encarcelado por la causa de la liberación de las islas de Vieques y Culebra…. en favor de la liberación de los pobres y oprimidos, para la construcción de un mundo de justicia y paz.” [To the memory of Bishop Antulio Parrilla.... a prophet of great intelligence; jailed for the cause of the liberation of the islands of Vieques and Culebra…. in favor of the liberation of the poor and the oppressed, for the construction of a world of justice and peace.], Samuel Silva Gotay, Catolicismo y política en Puerto Rico: bajo España y Estados Unidos, Siglos XIX y XX (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2005), 10.

129 Telephone interview with Ungerleider.

130 Telephone interview with Ungerleider.

131 Telephone interview with Ungerleider.

132 Telephone interview with Ungerleider.

133 Interview with Walsh.

134 Interview with Walsh.

135 Interview with Walsh.

136 Interview with Walsh.

137 Interview with Walsh.

138 Interview with Walsh.

139 Interview with Walsh.

140 Otto Maduro, Religion and Social Conflicts (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1982), 123.

141 Díaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue, 176-198.

142 Díaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue, 176-198.

288

143 Private communication with Ana María Díaz-Stevens, January 23, 2016.

144 Interview with Walsh.

145 The Municipal Tribunal is an ecclesiastical court made up of three judges. It mostly considers appeals for marriage annulments. The Tribunal in Philadelphia is the court of First Instance, and it allows for appeals to be made to the Tribunal of Second Instance in Baltimore. Resolution of further appeals are made by the highest Tribunal of the Church, the Roman Rota. In effect, Msgr. Walsh went from being a lawyer to becoming a judge.

146 Interview with Walsh.

289

CHAPTER 8

THE PROPHETIC BURDEN OF THE YOUNG LORDS IN PHILADELPHIA

The previous chapter focused on the first decades of Puerto Rican ministry in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia and described Casa del Carmen as a social ministry agency in the model of a settlement house. Located in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, Casa del Carmen also referred those it served to their parish church for pastoral care. I featured interviews that detailed the commitments of archdiocesan parish priests like Father Tom Craven and trained religious missionaries like Sister

Thomas Augustine, the Trinitarian who ran Casa del Carmen,1 from the year it was established, 1954 to 1969. I reviewed the story of volunteers to this ministry, all of whom were nurtured by the spirit of lay involvement that characterized Catholicism before the Second Vatican Council. These interviews stand as evidence of Philadelphia

Catholicism’s ability to draw on multiple institutional resources in pastoral response to

Puerto Ricans. Throughout, I cited articles and editorials from the archdiocesan newspaper to register the institutional Catholicism of the archdiocese.

The need for internal ecclesiastical changes after the close of the Second Vatican

Council in 1965 was complicated by political strife in the city and nation about civil rights and the Vietnam War during the rest of the decade. Moreover, Philadelphia continued to experience economic decay and a dramatic loss of population during the

1960s and 1970s. The previous chapter highlighted the results for race relations as relevant to my study. In particular, I explored the clashes on Columbia Avenue in 1964 and the attack on the African American demonstrators at the School Administration

Building in 1967. I noted that a major effect of these events was to move the city’s 290

African American leaders toward confrontational politics. I offered these as examples of the racial tensions in Philadelphia under the influence of Frank Rizzo, first as police chief and then as mayor. In a city struggling with racial polarization and in a Catholic archdiocese adapting to reform, the Puerto Rican ministry also needed to be reassessed.

How Puerto Rican leaders negotiated these networks of changing power relationships is this chapter’s focus.

The recollections and views of members of the Young Lords in Philadelphia appear here, along with observations from the clergy cited in the previous chapter. In some interviews, the events involved the Young Lords organization while others transpired after the Young Lords had disbanded and their members had formed new groups in Philadelphia, most particularly the Puerto Rican Alliance.2 The people I interviewed tended to connect these two organizations, probably because the leaders of both organizations were the same. I reproduce the words of those interviewed just as they were delivered. In presenting the information, I adopt a thematic exposition rather than a strictly chronological one.

The Turbulent City

Almost immediately upon their organization in 1970, the Young Lords became recognized as the vanguard of Puerto Rican protest politics in Philadelphia. The original Philadelphia group of high school students adopted the tight organizational structure of the national organization that included a core group of full members and a wider circle of supporters, or friends, who could be included in actions such as clothing drives and demonstrations. At its height, the Philadelphia Young Lords had 60 core 291 members and anywhere from 300 to 400 friends, including representatives from

Camden, New Jersey; Wilmington, Delaware; Reading and Allentown, Pennsylvania.3

As will be shown in the interviews, however, their initial goals focused on community development and not on social protest. The shift toward a more radical stance had its precedent in a similar movement toward confrontational politics among the city’s

African American leaders, as described in the previous chapter. In both cases, Frank

Rizzo and his heavy-handed policies played a pivotal role.

In Chapter 4 of this dissertation, I described how Rizzo had laid the planks for his professional and political career by adopting unforgiving attitudes toward homosexuality and by attacking as misguided the tolerance for diversity among the city’s liberals. Appeal to racial resentments characterized his entire career. He developed a strategy of presenting civil rights and the attendant anti-poverty legislation as if they exhibited favoritism for African Americans from liberals who had forgotten the city’s working-class Whites in the row house neighborhoods.

As explained in previous chapters,4 Rizzo equated those who opposed his operations with terrorists. His rise to power was built upon aggressive police action to thwart what he portrayed as civil misconduct and radicalism. While his actions against proponents of Black Power are the most salient, he had acted to prevent perceived criminal behavior by gays and lesbians at the Humoresque Café. In both cases, he justified his raids by supposing that only fierce police action would prevent future violence from social “misfits” and radicals. Although the increasing incidence of police brutality created animosity against Rizzo among African American and liberal segments in the city, he earned political capital among other voters for his reputation as a “tough 292 guy,” stirring the city’s social divisions to gain political capital. In the example I offer in Chapter 4, despite his professed loyalty to the police force’s code of behavior, he broke with the chain of command to criticize his superior, Howard Leary, for employing containment tactics in the Columbia Avenue Riots. Rather than suffer politically for insubordination, Rizzo benefitted by criticizing Leary’s restraint. It proved to be a path to promotion when his predecessor left for New York.

Some African American defended Rizzo’s tactics, suggesting that his actions were not directed against the city’s Blacks but only against those threatening law and order. These allies helped Rizzo refute charges of his being against all African

Americans, allowing him to focus his fire and fury tactics against anyone who threatened the status quo. For instance, in August of 1966, he raided the Philadelphia headquarters of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was working at that time for voter registration. A year later, as already described, he ordered an attack on students demanding courses on Black history in the public-school curricula, claiming that they were radicals.5 After the murder of the Reverend Martin

Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968 led to a wave of violent riots in other urban centers,

Rizzo filled 17 buses with police officers to control protesters on Independence Mall and forestall demonstrations.6 On August 31, 1970, only months before tossing his hat into the mayoral election, Rizzo raided the Black Panther headquarters and used the media to humiliate the Panthers, who were paraded naked before cameras. His stated purpose was to thwart the appearance of Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the party, during the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention at Temple University. At 293 a September press conference, Rizzo expressed contempt for the Black Panthers and heralded the amount of force he thought was necessary to prevent impending anarchy:

We need 2,000 more policemen to stop them. The only thing we can do now is to buy tanks and start mounting machine guns…. It's sedition, it's treason…. We're confronted by a revolution; this is no longer crime. It must be stopped, even if we have to change some laws to do it…. It's happening in New York, in Chicago, on the West Coast. This is well-planned, well-organized. It's centrally controlled. They want to overthrow the government, and the government is doing nothing about it. The federal government has got to act. It's gone beyond the police. Local government can't do it. We're bound by the rules of the U.S. Supreme Court. These imbeciles who are doing the killing are instructed by the Black Panthers. They’re set off by the trash that the Panthers are putting out under the guise of newspapers.7

In that month of August 1970, the Young Lords were founded in Philadelphia.

As will be seen below, the Young Lords I interviewed chose the Puerto Rican people as their essential constituency but otherwise followed the Black Panthers’ model of organization. However, this choice came with a cost. The racially divisive tactics of the mayor forced the Young Lords to take the side of African Americans in the acrimonious battles with Rizzo’s base of working-class Whites. Moreover, when public opinion lumped all the supposedly confrontational groups together, even peaceful protest was subject to repression on grounds of “guilt by association.” As the interviewees described, the Young Lords’ beginnings in Philadelphia took place in the deepening racial polarization in the city, aggravated by Frank Rizzo’s use of power.

The fact that Rizzo had the support of many Philadelphia Catholics is also important to note here. As an example of that support, consider the full-page ad for

Rizzo in The Catholic Standard and Times published just before the November 1971 election. The archdiocesan newspaper publicized Rizzo’s arguments that violent confrontation with outsiders furthered the cause of democracy and that his promise to 294 turn city policy away from programs that favored racial minorities would bring unity to the city and would benefit working-class neighborhoods.8

When he decided to run for mayor, Rizzo shifted from praising the city’s police to claiming a role for himself as savior of Philadelphia from disaster. His rhetoric garnered the passionate support of his electoral base for him personally, although it also made him the lightening rod of racialized identity politics. Skillfully, he divided his

African American opposition by manipulating the Philadelphia tradition of a third-party candidate running for reform. For instance, in 1971, the Democratic primary had three candidates: Rizzo, backed by the machine; William Green III, an Irish-Catholic

Kennedy man, supported by the Clark-Dilworth coalition reformers; and the African

American candidate Hardy Williams a former West Philadelphia High basketball star and state representative.9 When the votes were counted, Rizzo had won, but with less than 50 percent, while Green came in second. Williams later stated that he had received funding from Rizzo to stay in the primary. Paolantonio comments: “The split worked perfectly. Without Williams in the contest, Rizzo and Green would have been locked in an election separated by less than one percentage point.”10 For the general election in

November of 1971, the reformers turned to the Republican candidate W. Thatcher

Longstreth, a blue blood Chestnut Hill liberal.11 He was well known for wearing bow ties and argyle socks as if cast in the role of Philadelphia patrician in the movie,

Trading Places.12 As Paolantonio explained: “Longstreth carried 16 of the 17 predominantly black wards. It was the first time that a Republican had done that since the party’s heyday in the 1930s.” 13 In other words, Rizzo, the Democrat, won the election despite turning African Americans voters into Republicans. 295

Rizzo was elected mayor by a margin of 48,155 votes or 54 percent of the city’s voters, but he made little post-election effort to reach out to White liberal reformers and the city’s growing African American population. Instead, during each of his two terms he used patronage and the bully pulpit to strengthen his credentials as a right-wing hard- liner and law-and-order politician with a voter base of racially-conscious Whites. He knew his promise of neighborhood stability also appealed to conservatives among the city’s racial minorities, who were anxious about the negative consequences of identity politics upon traditional forms of machine patronage. Puerto Rican voters, although still less than four percent of the electorate, would generally find themselves wooed by

Rizzo and the political machine, on one hand, and by reformers and African American progressives, on the other.

The Turbulent Nation

Rizzo extended his politics of resentment to anti-war protesters. The Black

Panthers, who were fighting to organize African American communities throughout the country, were lumped together as terrorists with organizations like Students for a

Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weathermen Underground, which employed radical tactics to derail governmental support for the war in Vietnam. These certainly were not the first radical groups in United States history, but in the 1960s, confrontation with government became more common than it had been during the 1950s.14

In 1968, however, conflict and violence in politics also came from the right.

Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Civil Rights Movement, was assassinated in April and the Democratic Party presidential peace candidate, Robert Kennedy, was murdered 296 in June. At the party’s August convention in Chicago, anti-war protesters were beaten by police. In the general election of November, an avowed white supremacist, George

Wallace of Alabama, won five southern states, which effectively delivered the presidency to Republican Richard Nixon. Before his second term was over, Nixon would be implicated in an extensive coverup of the break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, an action that led to his resignation in 1974 under threat of impeachment.

These tragic national events spread anxiety about the nation’s future beyond partisan politics. Opposition to injustice and imperialism found modes of expression that fitted Saul Alinsky’s definition of “people’s movements.” Distinct from organizations, movements invited public participation without membership in either an organization or a political party.15 Alinsky’s concept incorporated Gramsci’s view in

The Modern Prince that a clearly focused collective group could act as vanguard for popular social movements.16 Whereas in the sixteenth century, Machiavelli had instructed a single individual on how to appeal to the public, Gramsci wrote that these goals could be accomplished in the twentieth century on a cultural front by ‘organic intellectuals’ fighting against the hegemonic class.17 The Philadelphia Young Lords, I submit, were organic intellectuals and they summoned many Puerto Rican Catholics to participate in the social movements of the time in the pursuit of social justice.

Cultural and political symbols were important tools for 1960s protest movements, although there were repercussions for identifying with one or another side in social conflicts.18 At the 1968 Olympics, as an example, two victorious African

American athletes raised clenched fists of defiance when receiving medals for the 297

United States team. The athletes intended the gesture as an act as solidarity with the social justice goals of Black Power advocated by the Black Panthers, who had popularized the symbol as their own. The use of a sports platform for politics opened a national debate that continues today.19 In the case of the Young Lords in Philadelphia, their adoption of symbols taken from the Black Panthers helped define their role as the vanguard of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community in resistance movements and lent the Young Lords considerable prestige as a Puerto Rican organization linked to national and international movements for justice.20 Conversely, the same symbols of resistance, such as military garb and a rifle on their logo, left them vulnerable to being labeled as terrorists.

Religion sometimes complicated organizations promoting political confrontation. For instance, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee started as a youth wing allied with King. When Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown moved into its leadership in 1966, however, the committee abandoned Gandhian principles of non-violence and became an advocate for Black Power, changing its name to “Student

National Coordinating Committee.” At issue were tactics. Note that the 1967 editorial in The Catholic Standard and Times about the demonstration before the Board of

Education expressed support for the goals of greater civil rights. However, the same editorial rejected confrontation, alleging that public protest led to violent clashes with the police.21 While the Civil Rights Movement split into religious and secular wings largely over the role for violence, new groups like the Black Panthers were decidedly open to confrontational politics, even at the risk of violence.22 298

Catholicism in Latin America underwent a similar shift when some activists in the Church’s social justice ministries joined secular liberation movements that accepted armed resistance in defense of a just cause. Washington was concerned that support from Catholicism for the left would undermine regimes friendly to the United States. In

1969, Nixon asked the then governor of New York State, Nelson Rockefeller, to prepare a report on the state of U.S. policy in Latin America. Included in that report was a warning about a radicalization of Catholicism that described the Catholic Church as “a force dedicated to change – revolutionary change if necessary,” adding that Catholicism in Latin America was “vulnerable to subversive penetration.”23

Like most Americans, Philadelphia’s Catholics were split over confrontational tactics of movements for justice. Opposing camps of conservative and liberal Catholics often fell into different political sides. Nationwide, Catholic liberals generally opposed the war in Vietnam, while conservatives mostly supported it. In one notable case, two brother priests, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, destroyed some government files of

Vietnam War draftees, eventually identifying their effort with the passage in Isaiah 2:4 about reducing swords to plowshares.24 Daniel Berrigan apologized sarcastically that his symbolic action had caused “the fracture of good order” because it had burnt “paper instead of children.”25 Although the formal charges were for destroying government property, the Berrigan brothers were nonetheless pursued by the FBI as terrorists.26 As related in the previous chapter, Puerto Rican Bishop Antulio Parrilla Bonilla bore prophetic witness against the Vietnam War as did the Berrigans and also extended the protest against militarism to the off-shore islands of Culebra and Vieques. 299

I find similarities in the division among Philadelphia’s Catholics about the war in Vietnam to the crisis among Quakers about their theology of non-violence in the face of the War of Independence, and I would compare the different Catholic responses to the activism of Civil Rights Movement to the Quaker ambiguities and abolition. These larger movements had local counterparts.

Macro-history shaped Quaker perceptions in the eighteenth century about these issues as did the Civil Rights Movement and protest against the war in the twentieth century. In the case of the Young Lords, the experiences of the Church in Latin

America exercised special influence. Both the FBI the CIA viewed Catholic confrontational movements in Latin America as “vulnerable to subversive penetration,” and this perspective about their radicalism would influence not only persons in politics like Rizzo but also Catholics like Andrew Greeley and Cardinal Krol. Conflating domestic and international causes as common threats fell particularly hard on groups like the Young Lords, since Puerto Rico’s independence movement found support among clandestine groups such as the Macheteros on the island and, in the United

States, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN in Spanish for “Armed

Forces of National Liberation”).27 Both of these groups relied on violent tactics to advance the cause of Puerto Rico’s independence, and all the Young Lords were often cast as terrorists by reason of association with the same cause.28

In Philadelphia, Catholics found themselves expressing their concerns for civil rights or the war with reference to Frank Rizzo, who had conflated both issues.

Ultimately, because the Young Lords were the most visible Puerto Rican organization in Philadelphia at that time, they came to represent the confrontational advocacy of 300 radical causes. Of course, not every Puerto Rican was a Young Lord, nor was every

Young Lord a Puerto Rican. But both supporters and opponents of the Young Lords

Party came to express opinions about the goals for the Puerto Rican community in

Philadelphia in reference to the Young Lords’ actions that placed these issues in the context of macro- and micro-historical events.29 Thus, their role as organic intellectuals whose praxis was identified with a larger class struggle brought both benefits and problems.

The Philadelphia Young Lords and Catholic Upbringing

The first academic exploration of the Young Lords in Philadelphia can be found in the work of Carmen Theresa Whalen.30 Her dissertation focused on Puerto Rican labor force participation in Philadelphia, including the attendant issues of migration and settlement. In a book that resulted from her research, she added a brief description of the Young Lords in Philadelphia because, as she wrote, they “provided grassroots, community-based services and advocated the independence of Puerto Rico.”31

The original idea for the Young Lords was born in Chicago under the leadership of José “Cha-Cha” Jiménez, a member of the street gang La Hacha Vieja (The Old

Hatchet), which provided Puerto Ricans with protection against attacks by White gangs.

Jiménez was serving a sentence on drug charges when an encounter with a Black

Muslim librarian prompted him into study the writings of “Martin Luther King Jr.,

Malcom X, and the American Catholic Thomas Merton, from whose Seven Storey

Mountain Jiménez drew a vocabulary for conversion.” 32 Upon release from prison in the fall of 1968, Jiménez returned to the Puerto Rican gang and remade as the “Young 301

Lords.” They formed a coalition with the Black Panthers and the radical Young Patriot

Organization with Whites in Chicago, where the three operated as the “Rainbow

Coalition.”33

The prestige earned by belonging to a Puerto Rican equivalent to the Black

Panthers encouraged some activists to establish a second chapter of the Young Lords in

New York City. The organization grew through students participating in a new academic effort for Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York. The New

York chapter was the largest and was also host to the Central Committee which directed the national organization by including representatives of the local chapters such as the

Young Lords in Philadelphia. Eventually, there were over a thousand core members and perhaps ten thousand friends of the Young Lords. As a caution against infiltration by hostile government agents, however, the full list and number of the Young Lords was always tightly guarded. “The Young Lords Organization did not publicly reveal the size of its membership. To those who inquired, the Lords' standard reply was, ‘those who tell don't know and those who know don't tell.’”34 Although most members were

Puerto Ricans, national origin did not exclude anyone. Likewise, although most were male, some 30% of the core membership was women. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano provides detailed analysis of gender and nationality among the New York Young

Lords.35 Pursuit of those issues for Philadelphia’s Young Lords, however, lies outside the focus of my study.

While the organizational and membership structure was the same, there were significant differences among the chapters of the Young Lords. Whalen cited Wilfredo

Rojas, a founding member in Philadelphia, for his perception: 302

If we can put labels on the different chapters, you would say that Chicago were like street Lords because they came out of being a gang. New York were like college students who brought in some street people …. and in Philadelphia you had a bunch of Catholics -- Catholics who got together, brought in some junkies along the way, and dragged in a few students.36

Whalen’s subsequent work has consistently noted this distinctive Catholic identity of the Philadelphia Young Lords. But was their connection to Catholicism merely a tactical alliance to secure church resources and support? Or did the connection to

Catholicism in Philadelphia constitute “a prophetic burden,” based on the Young Lords’ faith principles? These are the concerns I brought into my interviews with members of the Young Lords.

Juan Ramos, identified earlier as one of the early members of the Lords, recalled growing up in Philadelphia. Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico in 1951, he has lived in

Philadelphia since he was two years old. His family moved to the city on August 15,

1953, a month after the Spring Garden riots and less than a year before the opening of

Casa del Carmen. Asked to explain the role that religion and the Catholic Church played in the life of his family as it settled in the city, he responded:

Church had much to do with all this. It had to do with my parents landing here and being a part of this community where shortly thereafter Catholic social services had opened up Casa del Carmen for the Puerto Rican people moving into the Philadelphia area. That was huge; it was a big support for poor folks coming from the Island. And we got nourished a lot -- literally. Sometimes it was tough getting work and many times it was the work of Casa del Carmen with its volunteers that came to our aid. Sometimes we would get a case of horrible Campbell’s soup, or powdered milk, but it was food, nonetheless. So, the experience of Church was at my core and it was what kept us going. Mom and Dad struggled, but they gave us a good Catholic elementary school education. My sisters went on to Catholic high school, and I landed in a vocational school. Those years, in my community, with Black and Jewish folks, the time I spent in Puerto Rico, with my extended family, and my years in Catholic school, all 303

constitute my formative years and are at the core of the person I am; they are important even today.37

He added: “My work with the community back then, from the time of the Young Lords, was connected to my Church and faith – these were not two separate things. It was not just church on Sunday. I have always been connected to my Church and my community.” His father’s volunteering at Casa del Carmen led to permanent employment at the archdiocesan office building. Ramos’ choice of the public school of

Dobbins Tech over a Catholic high school required him to convince his parents that it was the better choice for him. However, Ramos’ sisters went to Catholic high schools.

“Both of them were pretty academically gifted; so, they did well,” he told me.

Anna Vásquez was director of the Archdiocesan Office for Hispanic Catholics from 1993 until 2010. A Puerto Rican who had come to Philadelphia from New York, she was much involved in the youth apostolate in the 1970s. Eventually she earned a masters’ degree in theology before being named to the post that Walsh had directed two decades earlier. In her interview with me, Vásquez was quick to point out that the

Philadelphia Young Lords in the 1970s were very young, mostly high school and college students. She had positive memories about them, underscoring the link between their social activism and their Catholic faith.

You know, we have lost a lot of our people to other Christian churches; but at that time, for the most part, Puerto Ricans were Catholics, even when they were not all church-going people. I know for a fact that Wilfredo was a church-going person as were other Young Lords. Juan Ramos, also a Young Lord, was a church-going person. And he was very, very active in the Church.

I believe they were Catholics because their parents were Catholics and that’s what parents do, they teach you. So that you are born, you are baptized, you receive First Communion, you are confirmed -- all 304

the sacraments: they knew and had that relationship with the Church because they were raised Catholic.38

The fact that Catholic values were part and parcel of their upbringing helps explain why the eventual leaders of the Young Lords collaborated with several of the Catholic clergy in Philadelphia while developing a confrontational strategy for social justice. As Juan

Ramos stated, “I came from a pure Catholic family, Juan [González] came from a pure

Catholic family, Wilfredo [Rojas] came from a pure Catholic family. We were all

Catholic kids.” He added: “But we had a hunger for reading different things.”39 Some of these “different things” were Puerto Rican history and Catholic theology.

Awakenings: Aspira and the Second Vatican Council

Education about Puerto Rican history and the injustices of colonialism first came to these young Puerto Rican Catholics through Aspira. In his interview, Ramos described how this educational guidance program helped radicalize the politics of young Puerto Rican teenagers in Philadelphia.

In 1970, I was a senior in high school. And so was Wilfredo. We were in different schools. We both got radicalized during that time, the end of our high school years. In my case, it was tied to my discovery of Aspira that was just setting shop here. And Aspira had a counselor that was visiting the high schools that had Puerto Rican students. If memory serves me right, and I believe it does, that lady was named Patricia de Carlo.40

As described in the previous chapter, many of Aspira’s counselors educated their high school students in the United States about Puerto Rican history through the prism of colonialism. In the early 1960s, after spending two years in Costa Rica as a member of the Peace Corps, Patricia de Carlo, mentioned by Ramos, left her native Puerto Rico for education at a Catholic woman’s college, Seton Hill College in Greensburg, 305

Pennsylvania. In 1970, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania Law School while working as an Aspira counselor.41 Hers was a Catholic trajectory similar to that of my relative, Mari Gloria Arroyo, at Chestnut Hill College, in Philadelphia. Mari

Gloria became a social worker after her positive experiences with her commitments at

Casa del Carmen; after college, de Carlo joined the Peace Corps.

Education about Puerto Rico’s heroes in the struggle against oppression bolstered the local campaign for Puerto Rico’s independence. Chief among these was the Nationalist Party leader Pedro Albizu Campos, whose concept of Catholic civilization drove his vision for the island’s independence. Ramos explained:

At that time, we had clubs which we named after Puerto Rican historical figures. She [de Carlo] came to Dobbins to visit our club which was named after Ponce de León because of his role in the foundation of Puerto Rico. When she pulled me aside and asked why I wanted to use his name, I told her because of this, and because there was a town in the southern part of the island named after him; so, he had to be somebody. That’s all we knew. She responded that we should think about naming the club after someone else. She said, “I’ll give you this little book here.” She pointed to different Puerto Rican figures, and then said, “and this person is Pedro Albizu Campos.” Within two weeks we had changed the name of the club from “Ponce de León” to “Albizu Campos.”42

Izzy Colón, born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York, came to Philadelphia in 1976 to become an Aspira counselor. He explained the impact at that time of

Aspira’s educational emphasis on Puerto Rican history: “Aspira is not a leftist organization, but they understood the importance of teaching kids how to think critically; whatever the media gives you is not something to just take and absorb.”43

Colón received a scholarship from the National Urban Fellowship Foundation and later worked with the American Friends Service Committee at Fifteenth and Cherry Streets 306 in Center City. He was familiar with the Catholic connections of the Philadelphia

Young Lords. His own thinking reflected the Council’s teachings on the Church.

La gente y los pastores empezaron a reconocer que la Iglesia no era solamente el sitio, (the people and the pastors began to recognize that the Church was not just a place) so people began to understand what “Church” means. The Church is not just the building, the Church is the congregation, the Church is us and what we do; what we practice and is a testament to the faith.44

He also perceived the difference between Father Craven, ordained before the Second

Vatican Council, and Father Jesuit Ungerleider, ordained after the council. He attributed to Ungerlieder “a Paulo Freiresque kind of approach.”45 This was a significant reference to the noted Brazilian educator, who turned political issues into a motivation for learning, and in the process, prepared the way for a new post-council theology.46

Anna Vásquez echoed this comprehensive view of religion and politics:

I don’t see [the political and the religious spheres] as two separate things. I see them as one thing. I am trying to be a good Catholic, but I am also trying to be a good citizen. A good citizen takes an active role in what is going on in the community, in the society, so that you can better the situation and be of service to others. But many people don’t see it that way. Their response is: “Oh no, that’s politics; that has nothing to do with what we do here [in Church],” as if life was compartmentalized. And for me that causes friction. I see it differently; I see that if we, as Catholics do not get involved, then who will? And with what results? So, we ought to get involved and influence the process to bring good results. I had a friend who seemed to be involved in everything, but then told me that she did not vote. I was dumbfounded, shocked. I could not reconcile that. To me that [voting] was also [part of] being a Catholic. You have to take care of your city, you have to take care of the place where you live. And in order to do that you have to get involved [politically].47

Colón linked awareness of politics, even radical politics in the United States, with revolutionary movements in Latin America supported by liberation theology. He 307 stressed the need to build bonds of trust between leaders and the people, something

Gramsci had underscored as necessary for the creation of organic intellectuals.

Some people support the revolutionary movement and others not the revolution but those involved in it. The average person does not necessarily believe in armed struggle. They may not be willing to pick up arms and join the fight, but if they know of someone whom they believe to be a good person who has picked up arms, then they will support that person. It is a matter of trust. And the Church played a role in that case…. In that sense, I believe the role of the Church was of critical importance because it gave people a sense of the legitimacy of the struggle.48

Father Tom Craven exercised this role for legitimacy at the local level as head of Casa del Carmen when he indicated his trust for the young people under his pastoral care.

Juan Ramos told me the priest saw him and Wilfredo as “his guys, his kids.”

Father Craven ministered to people; but he also respected them enough to expect something from them so that they could hold their own…. Father Craven was great because he understood where we were coming from. He understood it from a spiritual perspective, but more importantly for us, he also understood it from a material perspective; and that is what we were trying to do: not only take care of an immediate problem but to change things.49

Thus, interactions in the religious field tend to mix personal experiences, family loyalties and theological orientations, embedding them all in praxis.

Becoming Young Lords in Philadelphia

Juan Ramos described how a branch of the Young Lords came to Philadelphia:

It is during this time [1969] that the Chicago Lords came to visit us in Philly, at the same time that Wilfredo [Rojas] and I are putting together our own group in support for the independence of Puerto Rico. It is then that Wilfredo talks to me about the Young Lords in New York. During the first visit, I was not there. Wilfredo was there with a couple of other guys and they visited with Felipe Luciano [in 1970]. But we had our own group called “Puerto Ricans for the Independence of Puerto Rico.” That was in the spring and that 308

summer we had anti-war demonstrations in April of that year. Then we went to New York City to Madison Avenue and we joined the Young Lords [in August]. Chicago never got back to us; they were splintering. Juan [González] was also going through his thing. Felipe Luciano seems to have been the main guy that held things together…. [He was] the leader of the Young Lords for a while and a very charismatic person.50

Ramos describe the desire to belong to a group like the Young Lords as a

“fever” that caused him to drop out of La Salle University after two years, even though he had a full scholarship. He admitted, “I was almost killed at home when my parents learned I had dropped out.” Although he does not regret having been a member of the

Young Lords, in retrospect, he does regret the enthusiasm or “fever” that led him to choose between a college education and belonging to the Lords. “This happened to many of us. I was not the only dummy.”51

The appeal of the Young Lords was their activism; the fear in the larger Puerto

Rican community was that they were communists and independentistas who supported

Fidel Castro in Cuba and Ho Chi Min in Vietnam. As Anna Vásquez commented:

Again, you had the Young Lords and a lot of people, a lot of Hispanics called them a communist group; the fact is that people like that [Young Lords] get things done. And that is what they did, so that whenever there was police brutality, they were the ones that acted up. While the rest of the community was going like, “there go the communists,” they were able to get things done through that activism. It was like the African-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement; if there had not been those who were willing to stand up and get beat up, a lot of things would not have happened. You certainly would not now have African-Americans in government. People like that have a place in society too. So, while it is true that a lot of people condemned them, particularly those who were very conformist -- and that is what we have with church leadership -- they were very conservative, very conformist, believing that the Church should not mix with politics…. But I say, “You know what; you are a Catholic when you eat, when you sleep, whenever; that is, being a good [politically aware] citizen is also a part of being a good Catholic. That is why you have to exercise your right to vote and so forth.52 309

The first issue that the Young Lords addressed was drug addiction. Shortly after the Young Lords’ incorporation by the New York organization, the Philadelphia

Inquirer carried a positive article under the headline: “Young Lords Come to the City:

Ask Food, Shun Strife, Dope.”53 Days later, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin ran both a positive story and a negative one. “Young Lords Declare War on Dope Pushers” read the first; “Young Lords Blamed for Unrest” was the other.54

Father Craven made office space available for the Young Lords at Casa del

Carmen, from where, according to Whalen, “the Lords ran a clothing drive, provided interpreters for the health clinic, and joined in a street procession against drugs.” From nearby St. Edward’s parish hall, they ran a breakfast program for poor children modeled on an early success of the Black Panthers in Oakland.55 In Ramos’ estimation, Father

Craven was “was a pretty radical guy and became a personal friend of the family until his death.” He remembers that “there was tremendous pressure from the [arch]diocese for him to be careful with his association with the Young Lords. ‘These people,’ they said, ‘have a poster with an image of AK 47.’ ”56

Father Craven supported the Young Lords in their work on behalf of the social and material advancement of the Puerto Rican community. Moreover, he extended the resources of the archdiocese to these efforts and thus cemented the relationship of the people to the Church and enhanced the Church’s visibility and good name. The positive effects can be seen in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin series published in June 1971 over three Sundays. The articles evaluated the city’s Puerto Rican community for both the successes it had achieved and the obstacles it still faced. The publication was 310 bilingual, with articles in English placed alongside Spanish translations.57 Father

Craven was pictured as the Puerto Rican community’s Catholic leader.

The positive media coverage regarding the collaboration between the Young

Lords and the Catholic Church programs suggests that from 1970 through 1971, the agenda of the Young Lords matched the calls which Casa del Carmen had always made for volunteer help. Craven’s comments about members of the Young Lords who were members of his parish suggested that the Young Lords’ actions were in pursuit of many of the goals of Catholic Action, even if a different ideology was invoked:

Just because young people whom I’ve known for a long time -- and whose families I know -- have been radicalized by a different ideology, I see no reason to stop being their friend, or to break off communications with them.58

Thus, the Catholicity of the Philadelphia Young Lords had multiple sources, beginning with personal formation at home, positive experiences in education and support from the pastor. These were all magnified by Philadelphia’s tradition of tolerance that sheltered neighborhood idiosyncrasy in culture and religion. Under these conditions in

Philadelphia, the Catholic belief embedded within their activism found a field for neighborhood collective action that was congruent with the city’s historical precedents.

The Young Lords: Catalysts for Puerto Rican Social Identity in Philadelphia

Darel Wanzer-Serrano’s analysis of the New York Young Lords begins with a telling comprehensive description of the group:

A revolutionary nationalist, antiracist, antisexist group who advanced a complex political program featuring support for the liberation of all Puerto Ricans (on the island and in the United States), the broader liberation of all Third World people, equality for women, U.S. demilitarization, leftist political education, redistributive justice, and 311

other programs that fit ... their vision of democratic egalitarianism, anti-colonialism, and socialist redistribution. 59

Wanzer-Serrano admired their initial actions to test for lead poisoning and tuberculosis among the Puerto Rican community when civic government had failed to provide these services. The New York Young Lords, like their Chicago predecessors and

Philadelphia followers, “engaged in what they believed were strategically and tactically sound actions to advance their cause and transform their people.”60

It should be noted, however, that although all the Young Lords organizations shared the same national agenda, each branch acted within the respective political structures of each city’s unique network of power relationships. In the interviews I conducted, Philadelphia’s Young Lords frequently stated that they realized that what was successful in New York, Chicago or Puerto Rico did not always produce the same results in Philadelphia. This conclusion was reached most notably vis-à-vis religion, specifically with the Catholic Church in Philadelphia.

I highlight here what I believe were four important innovations provided by all the groups of the Young Lords in their work in support of the Puerto Ricans living in the United States. First, they represented the interests, material and political, of Puerto

Ricans outside of the island of Puerto Rico. Second, they were developing a mainland- based group consciousness of race and ethnic belonging with roots in the 1960s and which would find found radical expression in the 1970s. Third, they identified with anti-imperialist movements that opposed United States interventionism, particularly the war in Vietnam. Fourth, they opposed colonialism in Puerto Rico, thus integrating the most stubborn issue in island politics with matters affecting Puerto Rican people living throughout the United States. 312

This fourth point is especially important. The Young Lords coupled politics in the urban United States to those with the island. This presented a break with existing groups that had divorced politics in the mainland from those on the island. For instance, the Council of Spanish Speaking Organizations founded in Philadelphia in

1962 (El Concilio) consistently avoided importing politics on the status of Puerto Rico into their urban situation, believing partisanship for island matters impeded success within the city.61 El Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño (PSP), held a similar position.

Their intent was to focus its political energies on the island’s liberation, rationalizing the needs of Puerto Ricans in the United States as secondary to the island’s independence.62 Interestingly, when Puerto Rican leaders in the United States today declare a preference for the political status of the island – be it statehood, commonwealth or independence – they echo the Young Lords’ understanding or Puerto

Rican identity: that Puerto Rican identity must be linked to the struggles of the entire

Puerto Rican people, whether they live in the mainland or the island.63

The People’s Church: The Young Lords and Religion

In her description of the early efforts of the Young Lords in Chicago, Jacqueline

Lazú highlights their leadership in the community’s protest against gentrification.64 The

Chicago Young Lords were invited into a local Methodist church by its pastor, Bruce

Johnson, to promote resistance to a forthcoming urban development plan.

Subsequently, they occupied a building at nearby McCormick Seminary, preventing entry until the seminary students and faculty promised to join the Young Lords in serving Puerto Rican residents of the area and opposing the impeding development 313 plan.65 Thus, the favorable result in Chicago involved use of a local church to put pressure upon a larger, but somewhat reluctant religious organization.

New York’s experience with religion was different. Felipe Luciano, State

Chairman of the Young Lords in New York, appealed to the United States legal concept of a tax-exempt institution to justify a hostile takeover of a religious building:

Legally, the church is tax exempt. Any tax-exempt institution is run by the people. The people should be allowed to use the space. They have no right to close the doors to any group of people, whether they be anti-poverty, revolutionary, or whatever the case may be, they have no right to close their doors.66

The New York target was the First Spanish United Methodist Church, in East Harlem, whose pastor was not Puerto Rican, but a Cuban exile. He did not welcome the Young

Lords’ suggestion to open the church’s doors during the week to dispense food and clothing to the needy in Harlem. After failed efforts to secure support for Young Lords programs from the pastor and the congregation, about two dozen Lords remained in the church building, barricaded the doors and proclaimed they had “liberated” the building for the sake of the people.67 The Young Lords in New York explained the reasons for the church takeover in a flier that cited Matthew 25. There, they claimed that the First

Spanish United Methodist Church was not following the Gospel message regarding material assistance to the needy.68

I note, however, that key members of the New York Lords published in New

York’s secular press a public denunciation of Christianity, omitting the biblical references in the flier given to church members. The Lords’ Minister of Information,

Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, issued a statement echoing the Marxist interpretation of religion as the opiate of the people: “They teach only the parts of the Bible that will 314 mollify the people, keep them down, you know, turn the other cheek, be cool, be humble, slow up, wait.”69 Felipe Luciano, Chairman of the New York Young Lords, went even further: “It has to be understood that we [the Young Lords] may not advocate worship in a god. Our god is our people. That is my god. That is my religion.”70

It would be unfair to use Luciano’s statement to categorize religious faith among all other New York Young Lords. Luis Garden Acosta, for instance, had joined the

Catholic Workers’ Movement before discovering the Young Lords in 1969.71 Yet, in the takeover of the church in Harlem, key members of the Lords’ leadership in New

York City chose secular and Marxist vocabulary that pitted them against institutional religion. Note as well how these individuals equated “people” with “god.” Wanzer-

Serrano wrote: “The Young Lords constructed ‘the people’ in opposition to a ruling class and hierarchies in the church that oppress them in various ways.”72

In Philadelphia, it would have made no sense to occupy a Catholic Church as a complaint against Catholic non-involvement, especially when Father Craven was accepted as a veritable member of the Lords.73 Instead, the Young Lords decided to occupy a Lutheran Church, Kings Way Community Church. In contrast to the conservative Cuban Methodist pastor in New York, the Lutheran pastor of the church in

Philadelphia, was a former student of Saul Alinsky. Alinsky was a union and community organizer who advocated confrontational tactics to unsettle the opposition, especially for the cause of Civil Rights. This pastor had invited a young seminary graduate, Roger Zepernick, to share in the progressive work within this Lutheran congregation. Having been also introduced to theology of liberation and having worked with African Americans, Zepernick welcomed the Young Lords and other 315 members of the Puerto Rican community into the church. The congregation’s members, mostly African Americans, did not complain of his and the pastor’s progressive theology, said Zepernick, but rather questioned what Catholic Puerto Ricans were doing there. In contrast with the more secular New York experience, I conclude, the

Philadelphia Young Lords did not develop the concept of “the people” in opposition to

God or to the churches.

Why was there such a marked difference in the approach to religion from two branches of the same movement? I consider unsatisfactory an explanation that New

York had non-religious members while Philadelphia’s branch was made up of pious

Catholics. As noted above, some members in the New York Young Lords were

Catholics and they had produced a flier with sound biblical reasoning for their takeover.

However, to explain this action publicly, the New York chapter adopted the secular vocabulary that appealed to that city’s traditions. Thus, I suggest that even if the members of the two branches of the Young Lords had been equally religious, their differing responses to issues of injustice were reflected by the historical and social circumstances unique to each city. Speaking against the establishment in Philadelphia required a different discourse than in New York, where secularism held greater sway.

The close connection of Puerto Rican Catholicism to Latin America in history and culture also had a theological dividend. In his interview, Zepernick said that during the occupation of the Lutheran Church he began sharing books about Theology of

Liberation with the Lords, especially with Juan Ramos:

I know at the seminary we were looking at Gustavo Gutiérrez’s book on theology of liberation, and I am thinking that we also did that with Juan and the Young Lords ... people like Juan [Ramos] and Wilfredo [Rojas], who ended up being followed around by the FBI Counter 316

Intelligence Program, had to have some basis of strength; it was their faith and the notion that religion went beyond the personal that helped them see their way through that kind of intimidation. And liberation theology certainly plays into that. In doing the type of work they did, it was the conviction that it was God’s work: it was God’s love and God’s power that got them through their situation. It was almost like the old Book of Revelations when Rome told people that if they did not say that Caesar was God, they would be thrown in jail. But John says, “Look at all the power that God has; don’t be afraid about Caesar.” So, we certainly had contact with at least that one book, Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation.74

Juan Ramos also commented on his encounter with the Liberation Theology during those years and said that his acceptance of Gutiérrez’ theology was vindicated during the 2015 visit of Pope Francis to Philadelphia:

One of the things that I have seen with the coming of Pope Francis is that the writings of the Jesuit Gustavo Gutiérrez whose writings I could not bring up [when I was a Young Lord] -- though I read them all -- now are validated. Gutiérrez was my hero, particularly because of his dedication to the poor…. I remember being criticized for talking about him and liberation theology. And now all these years have gone by and, when Pope Francis becomes Pope, one of the first things he does is to invite Gustavo Gutiérrez. And I say to myself, “Ain’t that a kick in the ass!” They maligned us for being his followers and the Pope turns around and says, “there was nothing wrong with him in the first place.” That’s Church for you!75

Juan Ramos admitted that his activism caused him to drift away from active participation in the Church for a time. He attributes his return to regular practice of the faith to the work of the Holy Spirit. While campaigning for a seat on Philadelphia’s

City Council in 2003, he sought ordination as a permanent deacon in the program that

Msgr. Walsh had coaxed from Cardinal Krol. A decade later, after the closing of St.

Joseph’s Hospital where he had ministered for many years, Deacon Ramos joined the pastoral team at St. Peter the Apostle Church on Girard Avenue, where he serves as a deacon in the parish that is home to St. John Neumann’s shrine.76 317

The Young Lords in Puerto Rico

In his examination of the New York Young Lords, Wanzer-Serrano describes their ideology as “revolutionary nationalism,” reluctantly acknowledging that in history nationalism has often become a reactionary right-wing movement. He asserts, nonetheless, that under certain conditions, it can bring about a left-wing revolution. In ways that differed from the New York experience, the Philadelphia branch of the Young

Lords approached this issue by adopting the anti-imperialism within Albizu Campos’ defense of Puerto Rico Catholic identity and culture.77 As I described at length in the fifth chapter, the radical defense of culture and sovereignty that Albizu Campos espoused served as a bridge that reconciled revolution and nationalism. Moreover, because Latin American Catholicism had widely embraced liberation theology, the religiously-inclined Young Lords in Philadelphia had an ideological resource that their secular compatriots in New York did not invoke.

The connection between revolutionary action and the Catholic religion was embodied in the person of Bishop Antulio Parrilla, who had been introduced above as both a former member of the Nationalist Party and an activist prelate opposing the War in Vietnam. As mentioned in the seventh chapter, Bishop Parrilla had joined a protest on Culebra, a tiny off-shore Puerto Rican island which U.S. Navy planes bombed for target practice. The imagery of the United States dropping bombs on the inhabitants of

Culebra prompted some Americans to advocate the total cessation of war maneuvers on the island. Quakers from the American Friends Service Committee on Cherry Street in

Philadelphia joined the cause. The protests ultimately proved successful when 318

President Richard Nixon announced the withdrawal of the Navy from Culebra on April

1, 1971 and transferred them to Vieques, a nearby island.78 The withdrawal announced by Nixon constituted a significant victory for a confrontational strategy by independentistas. The Young Lords in both New York and Philadelphia used the

Navy’s withdrawal to rally support within the continental United States from both

Puerto Ricans and sympathetic allies such as the American Friends Service.

Having perhaps become overconfident because of this modest success, the New

York leadership of the Young Lords decided to transfer their community organizing to

Puerto Rico. They believed that such involvement would hasten the cause of revolutionary independence from the United States. Since every chapter pledged to follow the party line, Juan Ramos of the Young Lords of Philadelphia was ordered to the island.

When I went to Puerto Rico representing the Lords in 1972, I saw first that there were cops over all the damn place. I had landed in Aguadilla with a compañero from New York, Jesús Villanueva. Cops were all over our asses. The one that was a clincher for me was that we were in what must have been the poorest areas up in a hill in Aguadilla; and at that time in that area of Puerto Rico, the police department had Volkswagens. And we were making a little bit of money making flags and nationalist stuff with the image of Albizu- Campos, and so on, and spending time doing reading of all this Marxist stuff on Marx and Lenin; and the cops had a certain amount of fear of us.79

Understandably, when the Young Lords entered the island, they encountered a type of direct political repression of independentistas that they had not been encountered stateside. Juan Ramos reported on the overt threats to their life.

So, here we are making our rounds through the hill and this Volkswagen pulls up – this has to be around February of 1972 or ’73 – and this particular Volkswagen does not have a police shield. It comes up to us, and the guy – a big burly guy – he looks up and he 319

says, “Hey! Young Lords, ¿qué carajo hacen ustedes aquí? ¿Quién carajo les dijo que podían treparse a esta loma?” (What the hell are you doing here? Who the hell told you that you could set foot on this hill?) And we kept on walking. But they followed and continued, “¡Hey! Young Lords, ¡hijos de puta! Ustedes se creen que son bravos, ¡ah!” (Sons of bitches! You think you’re tough!) We were trying not to mind and so kept on walking trying to get off that hill. Another five minutes passed and here they come again, “¡Hey!, Young Lords, ¡a que no nos dicen puercos ahora!” (We dare you to call us pigs now!) We looked at each other; we were alone. We were two skinny kids. I barely weighed 115 pounds and Jesús merely 100. And this guy comes, and this time he slows up. And he has this 357 which is like a small canon. He comes closer, pulls down the window and he goes like this [pointing the gun at us] and repeats, “Young Lords, ¡a que no son tan bravos ahora!” We bet you are no longer that tough!80

Juan Ramos told me, “Puerto Rico did not play,” adding:

The policemen that followed us laughed and took off. So, we are coming down the hill to an apartment we had. Don’t we get to the apartment and there they are telling us, “Miren, Young Lords, ahora sabemos donde ustedes viven.” (Look, Young Lords, now we know where you live.) After that we thought, “These guys are going to set us up one night and they are going to kill us.” The next day I called New York.81

Ramos was not the only one to resign: the entire staff sent to the island quit at the same time.82 Abandonment of his mission in Puerto Rico led the New York headquarters of the Young Lords to expel Ramos and the others in 1972.

And they put me and Jesús [Villanueva] on the front page [of Palante] for betraying the Young Lords. But my thinking was, “I am not going to be killed and Jesús is not going to be killed over here backing some rhetoric.”83

Not long afterwards, the Philadelphia chapter of the Young Lords disbanded.

The chapter in the city had existed for less than two years. After that summer of 1972, the original members pursued their community goals from within each of several new organizations that had a lower profile with the FBI. However, the individuals who had 320 been Young Lords continued to express the same motivations as before and transferred their energies to new agencies working in Philadelphia for Puerto Ricans. The New

York chapter, I add, followed a similar pattern at the party’s congress in July of 1972 and became “The Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization” (PRRWO).84

Ramos and his companion had reason for their fears. The police force on the island had been aligned with the FBI in the repression of the independence movement under the aegis of COINTELPRO, or the “Counter Intelligence Program.” It consisted of a series of covert operations first ordered by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in August

1956 and continuing until 1971. Its mission was to surveil, infiltrate, discredit and disrupt domestic political organizations. The disclosure of the operations and their violation of constitutional rights has a Philadelphia connection, in as much as peace activist and later Temple Professor John Raines and his companions exposed

COINTELPRO in 1971 by releasing the contents of stolen dossiers to news agencies.85

Director Hoover was compelled to end the program shortly thereafter. However, it was not until 1976 that the U.S. States Senate formed a committee to review the operation under the leadership of Idaho Senator Frank Church.86

Because COINTELPRO was active both in Puerto Rico and the United States, the FBI and the CIA were drawn into an unorthodox cooperation. The sharing of information meant that U.S. States citizens were harassed by both agencies.

We were being targeted. They got Benji -- I forget his last name, but he is from New York -- for evading the draft. So, everyone got hurt during that time…. Juan González, Gloria and people who openly protested the war got hurt. That stuff petrified my parents. It took years for me to understand how real their fear was -- the scare.87

321

Fear of such threats of physical violence and even of murder by law enforcement agents reappears in the interviews, and to secure their personal safety, the original members of the Young Lords in Philadelphia migrated into less threatened groups. The Young

Lords’ experiences with police in Philadelphia and in Puerto Rico were perhaps not as dangerous as those Catholic activists in Guatemala and Salvador had undergone and would continue to face from right-wing governments; nonetheless, it is evident that they often feared for their lives. Other activists in the United States had and would continue to pay the ultimate sacrifice.

Firebombing in Philadelphia

The dissertation’s historical chapters about Philadelphia showed how the row house neighborhoods are a distinctive characteristic of the city’s organization, virtually dating back to its founding under William Penn. Wilfredo Rojas spelled out the advantages and challenges housing presented to community organizing efforts both then and now. After suggesting that home ownership in Philadelphia before gentrification was less expensive than renting an apartment in New York, he added:

Life was different; in New York we were apartment dwellers. Here, we were part of a community that were home owners. It was not so much that it changed our status, but it was different. It was more like Puerto Rico.88

Reverend Zepernick also commented on the close connection between the material reality of the row house neighborhoods and the moral sense of community:

I think that Philadelphia is also interesting compared to some cities, especially east coast cities, in terms of the housing. In this community, one can have a very low income and still be able to afford a house; one of those small, row houses, that may be small but 322

still can be made very efficient…. This makes it possible for these communities to develop leadership.89

The Puerto Ricans’ search for decent housing in the 1970s was even more challenging than it had been in 1953 at the time of the Spring Garden Street incident.

On October 5, 1975, two white men firebombed the home of Radamés Santiago in the

Feltonville section of Philadelphia, near Hunting Park. The Santiago family had moved into the area as the Puerto Rican community was expanding and the firebomb was intended to scare the family into leaving the neighborhood. However, the bomb killed five family members: Ramona, wife of Radamés, and four of their six children. Some believed the city’s Human Relations Commission shared in the guilt because the agency had not acted on frequent complaints of harassment. I would not suggest that the fatal attack on this Puerto Rican family was of the magnitude of the Know Nothing riots in

Kensington in 1844, but the antagonism of long-time residents against the newcomers repeated the same pattern of hate and destruction by arson. In this instance, instead of

Irish Catholics, the victims were Puerto Ricans Catholics.

The Young Lords’ Philadelphia co-founder, Juan Ramos, was one of the leaders of community protest. He led a demonstration a few days after the bombing to demand action against the perpetrators. A newspaper report described the clout the Puerto Rican community had acquired not only in securing a meeting with Rizzo but also gaining the mayor’s support for a full investigation.

About 15 members of the Puerto Rican community met with Mayor Rizzo, Police Commissioner Joseph F. O’Neill, Clarence Farmer, executive director of the City’s Human Relations Commission. Also present were members of the Cardinal’s Commission on Human Relations of the Philadelphia Archdiocese. The meeting discussed ways of dispelling rumors of violence and of persons obtaining arms to protect themselves, as a result of the firebombing incident. In a 323

prepared statement after the meeting, Rizzo said he would personally “do my utmost to ensure that those responsible for the firebombing be brought to justice swiftly and decisively.90

Significantly, Father Craven had brought to the table the official support of the

Cardinal and the clout of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The connection between

Juan Ramos’ activism in the community and the support from Father Craven is easy to explain by way of their personal relationship through Casa del Carmen. It is more difficult to account for the support from the Cardinal and the archdiocesan chancery for community activism, especially because of the tensions that have been explained above.

However, I note here that Walsh used his position in the ecclesiastical bureaucracy to promote the agenda of Father Craven with Cardinal Krol. In his interview, he had said:

Cardinal Krol knew what was going on because I made it my business to go to him and informed him what was taking place and what needed to be done; and he would say, “Yes.” So, in all honesty the man at the top looks bad or looks good depending on who is his second; who is feeding him the information.91

Although Sister Marion had already replaced Walsh in the chancery office by that time, the dynamics of communication he established earlier seem to have remained in place.

In any case, the lay leadership, the local clergy and the hierarchy of the institution worked together to promote justice for this Puerto Rican family.

As important as it was to policy-making, the meeting with archdiocesan officials and Mayor Rizzo was not the highlight of this effort. Father Craven announced that

Casa del Carmen was to sponsor a candlelight procession to Independence Hall. He said: “The procession will walk around the hall seven times to beg forgiveness for all those guilty in this tragedy, to beg for peace, to beg for justice for the Philadelphia

Puerto Rican community.”92 In my evaluation, the on-the-ground presence of Juan 324

Ramos and other members of the Young Lords in this symbolic demonstration for the people’s rights induced the mayor to act. The final application of justice in this case was swift, even if it was not lasting.93 I consider this a high-water moment both for the effectiveness of Puerto Rican leadership and for the Catholic Church’s solidarity with the Puerto Rican community. Sadly, it was spoiled when a contingent from a political group left Independence Hall to march on City Hall, thus altering the focus of the demonstration and politicizing the event as an anti-Rizzo rally.94

The Young Lords and Political Minefields

Antonio Gramsci wrote that a hegemonic class exhibits its weakness when it resorts to repression to hold power. As noted in the second chapter, Gramsci had focused on coercion by the ruling class:

If the ruling class had lost its consensus, i.e., is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.95

I suggest this insight could be applied to Mayor Rizzo’s and his administration’s response to crisis when the waning of his popularity led to greater police repression.

Juan Ramos described to me an earlier act of violence linked to the Philadelphia police:

Matters got worse when someone set fire to Casa del Carmen’s storage space for clothes for the poor on Franklin Street. It was at a second-hand store that Casa del Carmen had set up where people for a nickel or a dime would buy an item of clothing. It was that type of era. No one seemed to know who was responsible for these things. But we believed that the people responsible for the pipe bomb that exploded at the entrance to the office we had there were either drug dealers or the mafia. When the bomb went off, it just happened that I 325

and Wilfredo Rojas were in the premises. We sort of suspected that something was developing because they had previously broken our back windows. And we would always see cops parked behind our building. So, a bomb was set off. Luckily, we knew about this small window on the first-floor window where the clothes were stored, and we were able to get out of there just in time. Otherwise, we would have been blown up. So, that made Father Craven not be as supportive of us anymore. And he kind of went negative on us. I believe that more than anything, he was disappointed that we had put ourselves in that position. In retrospect, I think he was right.96

Without the ability to interview the late Father Craven, I can only suspect that he considered it necessary to protect the innocent people at Casa del Carmen first, sacrificing free space once used by the Young Lords for a greater good. Ramos added:

“The local police were something else. That pipe bombing stuff, that was a cop with the mob sending a message that they did not care if they killed us or not. They did not care.”97

The confrontational approach may have been the path that put the Young Lords at the forefront of the Puerto Rican community in Philadelphia, but it was a route traced on a minefield. Unlike established organizations for African Americans or Puerto

Ricans that sought to negotiate with the state for funding to serve their communities, confrontational movements attacked the entire political structure as an obstacle to progress. The cry, “Power to the people!” was generally intended as an appeal for direct democracy, and one that would end the patronage system of machine politics.

However, since the injustices in the political system were expressions of social and economic structures, the effort to destroy political patronage was often mis-portrayed as a call for revolution. Under Rizzo, Philadelphia was held in the grip of this conflation of political change with social revolution, and the Young Lords could not seek toward greater community influence without stepping into the minefield where government 326 could attack them as terrorists. This meant that the more success they achieved, the more vulnerable they became to repression.98

There was a definite tilt toward a Marxist understanding of class among such confrontational groups of the 1970s. However, as pointedly argued by Alinsky, this radicalism differed from the union movements of the 1930s because the groups of the

1970s mobilized the working class by appeal to language, culture, religion, race and ethnic particularities.99 Groups achieved unity by identifying the social and political order as a common threat to all peoples. The Young Lords were accepted by other

Philadelphia groups as the representative organization for Puerto Ricans in a general coalition for distributing power to the people. They proved willing to step onto the minefield of Philadelphia politics as long as the benefits outweighed the dangers.

The problem with minefields for the people who set them, is that they explode regardless of who steps on them. Rizzo conflated every form of social activism with terrorism with the intention of menacing his opponents, but he also ran political risks that the tactic would backfire. One example is what took place soon after his reelection in November 1975. Rizzo knew he had to seek from the City Council drastic fee increases, so he raised again the specter of terrorism that, he claimed, he alone could prevent. On the very day of the new taxes legislation in 1976, the mayor held a press conference warning the city of impeding chaos that would be perpetrated by “thousands

[of leftists] from all over the country” during the bicentennial celebrations in July. In a letter to President Ford, Rizzo asked for 15,000 federal army troops for protection against radicals.100 The timing of the press conference to correspond with the vote on new taxes was an example of Rizzo’s mastery of the Philadelphia media. He would use 327 a bombastic statement with news about a fake threat to distract attention from policy and divert commentary to an issue that fired up his political base. But his claims of impeding terrorism had grown so common that they no longer were effective distractions. Ultimately, this effort to distract from the tax issue was seen as transparent manipulation and Rizzo’s political ploy became self-defeating.101 The 1975 election will be further explored below for its impact on Rizzo’s career, but the focus here is on his use of fake threats of terrorism and use of repressive police power to gain power.

Roger Zepernick provided yet another insight into Rizzo’s brutalizing repression when Puerto Ricans planned a demonstration with a concert for a “Bicentennial Without

Colonies.” The head of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, Juan Mari Bras, was to be the speaker, and composer-performer Roy Brown was to sing. To maintain his claim that terrorists were on the march and had to be prevented with violence, Rizzo placed snipers on rooftops along the route to the demonstration. According to Zepernick:

Either the police or the national guard had put their armed men on the roof of the houses; and Mari Bras said, “No, I am not walking; not until those people come down.” And [David] Kairys, who was, and still is a very good civil rights lawyer, somehow negotiated to have them come down; and then people marched down to the park [near the Art Museum], and Roy Brown was there singing, “Los yankis quieren fuego” (The Yankees want fire). It was beautiful. That was one of the activities that I remember came out of the efforts of the Young Lords. They tried to keep alive that struggle for identity and dignity -- they, along with the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and other successor groups.102

The Squatters’ Movement

The struggle for housing was perhaps the most difficult of the social efforts in which the Young Lords participated, while the clothing drive, the breakfast program and even the demonstrations against drug dealers disturbed few. Most of these 328 activities were easily managed through Casa del Carmen. But the housing issue went beyond property rights; in Philadelphia, it constituted the building block of neighborhood identity. Perhaps for this reason, it was also an issue that at times brought Puerto Ricans to conflict with African Americans.103 Alyssa Ribeiro chronicles the tension that emerged as these groups vied for the same dollars in the Model Cities

Program to provide housing for their people.104 The program created a climate of hostility, writes Ribeiro, adding that Philadelphia’s Puerto Ricans were at considerable disadvantage in seeking segmented community housing because of the greater political influence of Rev. Leon Sullivan, who had greater experience of how these programs worked.105 Thus, working within Philadelphia’s existing political system put Puerto

Ricans at a disadvantage.

The legacy of the Young Lords for confrontational action carried over into their fight for housing on behalf of the Puerto Rican community, often acting beyond established policies. Ungerleider explained the effort to me referring to the Homestead

Act, which was a New Deal provision that appealed to the original law signed by

Abraham Lincoln in 1862. It allowed people to acquire ownership of property by what might be called today “sweat equity.” The neighborhood chosen was around the closed

Stetson Factory, where my Hungarian great-grandfather, Istvan Cseltiz, had settled before the First World War. The goal was to get homes that had been abandoned and were being used as hang outs by drug users by appealing to the Homestead Act. The houses in question had been previously used by Eastern European immigrants and then by African Americans. According to Ungerleider, “they were a lot of nasty things were taking place in these deteriorating neighborhoods.” He described them as “Trinity” or 329

“Father, Son and Holy Ghost houses,” because they consisted of three rooms, one to each floor:

The first floor was the living room and a tiny kitchen. Then you went up these steps and there was a bedroom and a bath, with another bedroom on the last floor.

Ungerleider remembers that there were eighty of them to a block, in sets of twenty, and that the factory owners loved them because of the proximity of the workers to the factories:

So that when they would blow the whistle at the start of a working day, the workers would be there right away. All the houses shared an interior courtyard for kids to play or to hang out clothes to dry, and so forth. Now, these houses deteriorated rather quickly after they were built in 1920s. So, by the time the Puerto Ricans moved in, they were very crappy.106

The city was no getting any tax revenues; but instead of handing them over to Puerto

Ricans who could fix them, they would board them up. Since the city was not responding to their appeal, Ungerleider and Ramos would crash the barriers imposed by the city and turn the homes over to people in need.

So, I would go and break up the boards since the city was not responding to getting a Homestead Act together. When things had to be brought up to code, I had to help them raise the money to get the basics such as windows, doors, making sure the pipes were not leaking -- you know, that kind of stuff. And then after a year, the city would give it to these squatters, if you want to call them that, for a dollar through the Homestead Act. This way they could get them back on the tax roll, and that was the idea.107

Roger Zepernick also recalled this effort for housing.

When the squatter movement stared in the late ’70s with Father Dave, Juan and Wilfredo, what they learned about organizing this community was helpful for other groups that would come after them, such as the Puerto Rican Alliance, who engaged themselves in issues that were very similar to the struggles of the Young Lords. Now, they did not have a rifle as a symbol [as the Young Lords did] but they 330

were also very confrontational; and, again, their focus was defending the dignity of the Puerto Rican community.108

However, flooding a neighborhood with Puerto Rican residents, who were also

Philadelphia voters, had political repercussions to the race-conscious politics of Rizzo, whom Ungerleider described as “a real pain in the ass…. who tried to stop them because he thought that providing the Puerto Ricans any service “was not part of his agenda.” Ungerleider explains that he and the Young Lords were undeterred; consequently, he ended locked up a few times. Eventually, they had to stop:

We went to Independence Hall and put up the Puerto Rican flag, and some jerk from the police thought it was the Cuban flag and that the Cubans had taken over Independence Hall. So that was the last straw. And Rizzo, who was really a nasty guy, mobilized his police to get us arrested and we had to stop. He was just a nasty guy to deal with.109

The persons placed in such homes would likely be more loyal to the community leaders who had made it possible for them to own a home than to the mayor who had ignored their needs. As fate would have it, the neighborhood affected was the home district of the Majority Leader in the Philadelphia City Council, Harry Jannotti, a Rizzo ally. Not only did the squatter movement affect Rizzo’s patronage, it also impacted on

Jannotti’s voter base, according to Roger Zepernick:

I know that a guy named Harry Jannotti, who was a councilman, and was running this housing program [the Homestead Act] was put in jail for getting kick-backs…. This had repercussions not only for the diocese but for the people working in the community; I know this bounced back on some of the people like Father Dave.110

Reverend Zepernick was justified in identifying Jannotti as a prime example of the endemic political corruption because the councilman was eventually caught accepting bribes in the 1978 Abscam sting operation and jailed in 1982. Note, 331 however, that as Majority Leader in 1978, he effectively controlled the City Council’s legislation docket and could intervene in the awarding of grants to Catholic Social

Services. Without alleging some shady collusion with the councilman, I assume

Cardinal Krol wanted to insure a favorable funding formula for church operations through Catholic Social Services. It was probably in the overall interests of the archdiocese to keep the councilman favorable to funding Catholic agencies.

Speaking of “Father David” as a “pure Jesuit,” Ramos also remembers the strong role that he played in the Puerto Rican Alliance days. Ramos provides an account of the intersection of community interest and hierarchical power that adds a personal dimension to these power relationships. He recalls an event that took place around 1979 to which Ungerleider had been invited. It was a housing meeting and

Ungerleider asked Ramos to come along, because along with the invitation, he had received free meal tickets for the archdiocesan cafeteria. Most likely because it was a bit hot, Ungerleider had pushed his Roman collar to one side and opened his black clerical shirt a bit. They were on the food line, discussing what had taken place at the meeting and generally having a good time:

All of a sudden David stops talking, and he is looking over my shoulder. And I am thinking, “What’s wrong, David?” I look back and two persons behind me there is the Cardinal who is all 6’5” easily. And I turn around and he is looking at Dave. And then we get seated. Now, the Cardinal had his own private place, but before we sat down, he goes up to Dave and gives him that stare of “I am looking at you from head to toe.” A glare -- like hrmm! I mean, that man was no joke. Forget about Rizzo. Rizzo was a sissy compared to Krol. My father worked for him for about 20 years. That happened on a Friday and two weeks later, Dave was asked to leave the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. And that is how he lands down in Mexico. He is still there.111

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It is possible that Cardinal Krol did not oppose better housing for Puerto Ricans but resented the affront to his authority when Catholics in the archdiocese acted without his direct approval. In any case, his intervention with the Jesuit Provincial to remove

Father Ungerleider ultimately undermined the confrontational strategy for better housing for Puerto Ricans.

The Waning of Rizzo’s Rule

Mayor Rizzo’s reelection bid in 1975 was opposed by the political machine and its boss, Peter Camiel. Daugen and Binzen blamed this alienation on Rizzo’s inordinate desire to replace the Democratic Party’s apparatus with himself. As early as the first year of his mayoralty, he had bucked the Democratic Party to back Richard Nixon in

1972. Nixon, in turn, had envisioned Rizzo as a model for Republicans to follow in building up a “silent majority.” The White House altered the funding formula for community-run agencies, using the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act

(CETA) to shift the distribution of funds to community agencies through municipal governments. As a result, patronage in Philadelphia was no longer funneled through the ward leaders but placed under Rizzo’s personal control.112

Based on his early access to President Nixon, who had virtually suspended the onerous racial quotas imposed on city hiring by the 1968 Philadelphia Plan,113 Rizzo had begun to envision a cascade of federal funds to Philadelphia in preparation for the 1976

Bicentennial Celebration.114 A convention center, a sports complex, new and improved highways, additional hotels, an airport expansion, and the like, had already been placed on a development list by city planners. Rizzo anticipated that the federal government 333 would pay for the construction jobs and the improvements and let him use personal patronage in awarding contracts. One commentator wrote: “What Dilworth envisioned as a monument to the twentieth century renaissance, Frank Rizzo has reduced to a giant ward picnic.”115 Rizzo also promised prosperity without new taxes. However,

Watergate forced Nixon’s resignation in August of 1974, and when he left the White

House, funding for the Bicentennial in Philadelphia left with him. The mayor, however, had already pledged “no new taxes,” and he ran on a platform he knew would never be implemented.

Animosity toward Rizzo’s commandeering of Philadelphia’s patronage system was not limited to the city’s political machine. In March 11, 1974, Pennsylvania governor Milton Shapp released a document prepared by the Pennsylvania Crime

Commission. It was a 1,400-page indictment of corruption and brutality perpetuated by the Philadelphia Police Department. Frank Rizzo’s reaction was characteristically blunt and vulgar: “It was like somebody kicked me in the balls.”116 To seek indictments, the governor appointed a special prosecutor, Walter Phillips, who would hound Rizzo for the rest of the campaign.

Thus, by 1975, Rizzo’s enemies had been emboldened by his profligacy in spending, brutish behavior, vulgar language, overt nepotism, and naked abuse of patronage to benefit his cronies. Even the usually sympathetic Paolantonio reports on

Rizzo’s high-handedness:

The general public might have had little sympathy for the fat cat contractors who had to ante up to the Rizzo campaign, which needed money and bodies as the mayor geared up for reelection. Back as far as anybody could remember, that’s just the way politics had worked in Philadelphia. But they could not tolerate the horrible disdain Rizzo operatives showed ordinary working people on September 7, 1974. 334

The Rizzo administration advertised that 280 manual labor positions were available. The jobs paid $8,400 a year [$43,900 in 2017 dollars]. Applicants had been told to show up at one of the city’s seven recreation centers. Thousands of men, many of them poor, most of them black, showed up. It was raining and cold. But they stood in line for hours for the jobs, which were to be given out on a first-come, first-served basis. Three days later, the Bulletin uncovered the ugly truth. The night before the lines formed, Rizzo operatives had given out the 280 jobs to politically connected friends.117

African American Charles W. Bowser, a star football halfback from Central

High School, had served as Deputy Mayor under Tate, and his qualifications could lay claim to run for mayor himself. However, the Democratic machine refused to back him, fearing that two primary opponents to Rizzo would divide the vote opposing

Rizzo’s renomination. Yet, Rizzo knew that his victory in 1975 depended upon another three-candidate primary as it had in 1971, so he encouraged the Reverend Muhammad

Kenyatta to run in the Democratic primary campaign.118 Rizzo’s ploy in the primary of creating an African American candidate helped him win the nomination over Hill, the reformer from Chestnut Hill.

The general election in 1975 was also a three-way race. Divisions among the opposition again gave Rizzo his victory, but two weeks after his second term inauguration, news revealed the city’s crushing debt of $80 million.119 The possibility of federal largesse to avoid bankruptcy was nil because Nixon’s replacement, Gerald

Ford, was not about to give a helping hand to Rizzo.120 Governor Shapp in Harrisburg stood in the way of a state bailout. Rizzo was forced to double the city utility rates, one of the revenue sources under his control. He also closed the only public hospital,

Philadelphia General. These were burdens that fell heaviest on the working class, who had been the core of his electoral support.121 335

As if these betrayals of his campaign promise to the working class were not enough, he seems to have lost his populist touch. Right after his reelection, and in the midst of the city’s financial crisis, Rizzo left his modest middle-class home in East

Mount Airy and announced plans to build mansion.122 Critics asked how a mayor with a salary of $24,000 a year could afford a house costing $400,000.123 His populist image had been shattered. His opponents organized a recall drive that amassed the required number of signatures, which were submitted the City Solicitor for authorization on the last day of May. The City Solicitor, however, owed his position to an appointment by

Rizzo. He favored the mayor’s cause by declaring the recall null because some signatures were questionable. Appeal in the courts failed and the recall died in June

1976.

Rizzo continued to employ his formula of fear and division, as for instance when he ordered a stern crackdown on a fringe group, MOVE, in 1977.124 However, his hopes of running for governor of Pennsylvania in 1978 had been deflated. Anxious to retain a cadre of municipal employees upon which to build his gubernatorial campaign, Rizzo attempted to overturn the City Charter’s two-term limit by holding a referendum in

1978 to adopt an amendment allowing him a third term as mayor.

Rizzo anticipated using the 1978 September Puerto Rican Day Parade to boost his chances in the November referendum to amend the City Charter allowing him a third term. One of his allies was a Vincentian priest, Father Gabriel del Real, who had served at La Milagrosa. Back in 1971, Father del Real had successfully secured federal funding to renovate 20 dwellings on the 2000 block of Green Street, near La Milagrosa.

He had named the project, “Spanish Village,” and had awarded housing to Hispanics, 336 many of whom worshiped at the chapel.125 Anticipating the charter referendum in

November 1978, he professed loyalty to Rizzo because the mayor backed the priest’s new project for Spanish Village II.126 The new project’s purpose was based on the previous success in providing affordable “middle-class” housing to keep Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood.127

Father del Real was at odds with the archdiocese, however. For his first housing project in 1970, he had made himself legal head of the corporation. He intended a similar position for himself in the new project, although his religious congregation had already announced withdrawal from La Milagrosa. Anxious to promote his housing project, he made misleading public statements about the reasons for leaving his position at the chapel. Walsh was head of personnel and explained the issue:

I want to say in all honesty that the diocese came out looking bad. But it wasn’t the diocese’s fault. It was the Vincentians who initiated moving. They came to us and said: “We don’t have the personnel to staff it.” At that point, I was no longer director of the Spanish Apostolate but was head of Priest Personnel. And that was totally their decision to leave. And then, as it hit the street, it got turned around. I had to call the priest back in. So, I said: “Wait a minute; you told us one thing and now you are telling the people something else.”…. I called him back in and said: “You are two-faced; because you came in here – and you know what happened. Now, you are telling people that we are the ‘baddies;’ but, we did not do anything, except that we will staff it when you leave. We’ll keep it going.”128

The lack of support from the archdiocese was a contributing factor to the rejection of the project. The incident was a reminder that control by the hierarchy over funded projects headed by religious orders has always been a point of friction in the ministry to ethnic groups from members of religious orders. As in the nineteenth century Cahensly affair, this was a conflict on the religious field of ecclesiastical competition where the hierarchy usually won. 337

African American leaders also opposed Spanish Village II. They resented the share of resources they believed were taken away from their constituency. In reaction,

Judge Nelson Díaz voiced support for the project on the grounds that African

Americans already had many housing projects, and that they had made minority status in Philadelphia “synonymous to black.”129 The confrontational image of the Young

Lords entered into the deliberations because the lawyer for the African American interests invoked the image of violence from Puerto Rican terrorists attacking African

Americans.130

Father del Real may have believed that demonstrations from Rizzo’s opponents in the 1978 Puerto Rican Day Parade would threaten the mayor’s support for his project. Whatever the cause, he tried to keep the “communists” out of the parade, in clear reference to the Young Lords. This was an unwarranted accusation in as much as the Young Lords had already disbanded in Philadelphia. Nonetheless, the clergyman’s accusation was a version of Rizzo’s notorious tactics of casting his opponents as terrorists. Apparently aware that his presence would serve as a reminder of his divisiveness, Rizzo declined to participate in the parade. I note that this was the last major city-wide recognition of the Young Lords as leaders of the Puerto Rican community.

In Rizzo’s effort to amend the City Charter in 1978, complaints against his record of waste and mismanagement trumped his rhetoric of fear. Already mobilized during the stalled recall effort, the organized opposition was ready to defeat the amendment. Moreover, the “divide and conquer” strategy of a third option was not available; this was a yes or no vote. The amendment lost roundly: 66 percent to 34 338 percent.131 Worse yet for Frank Rizzo, soon after the vote, law enforcement announced a slew of indictments against him and 20 others in his administration. Public disgust and disgrace characterized his last months in office. Roger Zepernick delivered a biting indictment of Rizzo’s legacy:

After Rizzo left [City Hall], there was no way to inventory city property; for example, the vehicles. So, they organized an event somewhere in South Philadelphia where the parking available all around the stadium was used, so that they could bring all the cars and do the inventory there. He had left the city in terrible disarray and maleficence. He was like Donald Trump now; he played on the fear and the prejudice of people. He got a lot of support so that even now many good people in this neighborhood, not just White, but Latinos and African-Americans, do not remember him for this but have this picture of Rizzo as one who stood up to crime – quite the opposite of what he actually did. That charisma of the strong man persists.132

After leaving City Hall, Rizzo championed right-wing causes on talk radio.

Paoloantiono states that the epithet that most disturbed Rizzo was the charge of “racist,” and he strove to erase it as his legacy until the day he literally dropped dead in 1991, right after winning the Republican primary for mayor.133 The debate about whether

Rizzo was a racist continues, with his statue across the street from Philadelphia’s City

Hall, the target of racially charged protests.134 Tragically, the racial polarization and divisiveness spawned by Rizzo during his life, have continued after his death, finding echo even in contemporary politics. Spawning fear of potential attacks as a route to enhance social and political power retains its appeal as the principal claim for a right- wing populist platform of law and order. The Young Lords no longer oppose such policies in the name of Puerto Ricans in the city, but the need to oppose injustice has not disappeared.

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The Young Lords and Mayor Frank Rizzo

As police chief, Rizzo rose to prominence on a wave of racial animosity, a wave that he had helped create. Roger Zepernick recognized that his populism alienated some, while others welcomed it.

In some instances, Rizzo used the people’s needs and aspirations; in conservative sections, areas such as South Philly and up here where people were all White, he appealed to their fears. He used a language that people would understand, language that was based on race division and class division…. He played on that fear to develop their support – which is something that we now see with candidates playing to people’s fear to build their own base at the presidential campaign level: but, ultimately, this tactic hurts those relationships.135

Izzy Colón reflected on the image of authority projected by Rizzo in Philadelphia. “He could be as mean as he wanted and get away with it. Never before had we seen a mayor walk into a place with his weapon on him. You know, he wanted to send a message.

Like a little dictator.”136

Rizzo’s representative to the Puerto Rican community was Oscar Rosario. Juan

Ramos afforded Rosario credit for assuaging Rizzo’s heavy-handed tactics against some of the actions taken by the Young Lords.

Rizzo did not like anyone who was radical. He looked at the Black Panthers as being a threat. He most likely would have looked at the Young Lords in the same way except for the fact that he had a Puerto Rican that was collaborating with him -- a dear friend of mine -- Oscar Rosario. Oscar was his right-hand man in the Puerto Rican community. I think that Oscar was of tremendous help because he played the role of confidant of Mayor Rizzo. And in that role, I think that Oscar sort of saved us from getting a lot of ass-whipping from the cops. Because of his relationship with Rizzo we did not get all the repression that the Black Panthers got.137

The role of Oscar Rosario was instrumental in preventing the Young Lords from more “ass-whipping from the cops” than were the Black Panthers, it must be 340 remembered that it was generally believed that “the cops” were responsible for firebombing the storage place at Casa del Carmen used by the Young Lords with two of them inside. Although upon first glance, Rizzo’s leniency at the request of Rosario may appear to contradict his authoritarian tendencies, it is not uncommon for such leaders to emphasize their power by doing favors for those faithful to their leadership. Ramos remembers how he used his role as dispenser of patronage to Puerto Ricans in Rizzo’s name to protect even those who did not share his political views. He believes that

Rosario liked them as individuals, and that is the reason why he tried to persuade them toward institutional politics. At the personal level, Ramos gives Rosario credit for helping him secure employment at a time when he was no longer a member of the

Young Lords, had dropped out of school and had become a young father:

When I dropped out of school and became a young father, I landed a job as a laborer in Fairmount Park picking up trees and I got that job through Oscar Rosario. Some woman told the mayor that Oscar had gotten me a job at the park. Oscar spoke to Rizzo and told him I was no longer with Young Lords; Rizzo said, “If you don’t have a problem with him working there, I have no problem with him either.”138

Favors from Rizzo flowed from his control over machine patronage. In contrast to his rise to power by bashing radicals and racial politics, as head of the machine,

Rizzo needed to mollify and co-opt local leaders. Izzy Colón rendered this kind of judgment.

For all his brashness, Rizzo was willing to listen to the plight of the Latino community. I argue that he did, most likely because he found it easier to work with them than with Blacks, or because he wanted to keep this community in check. One of the things he had learned was that “Es mejor bregar con esta gente que tenerlos de enemigos.” (It is better to deal with these people than have them as enemies).139

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It is in this light that there was appreciation expressed for Rizzo as mayor when contrasted with Rizzo the cop. Summarizing Rizzo’s relationship to the Puerto Rican community, Ramos commented:

As a whole, the Rizzo era was not a bad era for the Puerto Rican community; he just did not like us militants. He did not like activists. He did not like anyone criticizing the police. We criticized the police. On the other hand, when it came up to opening the door for Latinos in government, he can be considered a crusader.140

The willingness of the Young Lords to accept favors from Rizzo’s hand is comparable to the tendencies described by Du Bois for African Americans in turn-of- the-century Philadelphia to participate in machine patronage. In my estimation, the activism of the Young Lords targeted not Rizzo, the individual, but an entire hegemonic class controlling the networks of power relationships in Philadelphia. The election of former Young Lord Juan Ramos to the Philadelphia City Council (2003-2007) reflects the organization’s basic pragmatism. A brief review of the role that Marxist theory played for these Young Lords helps to clarify the transition from the confrontational tactics of the 1970s to more conventional politics.

The Marxist Agenda

My interviews with the Young Lords in Philadelphia revealed their hesitation to define their goals in exclusively Marxist terminology. Juan Ramos told me:

When the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist thing comes and we start to go to these classes here in Philly, in Bridgeport, Boston, in La Perla, Puerto Rico -- you know, we are booking stuff that we really did not understand. And then New York got hooked because as you know Juan González, my good friend, is an intellectual through and through. They got into that real good and they passed it on. I mean, if you were not in it, you would get thrown out.141

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The obligation to take orders from New York hindered the development of the Young

Lords in Philadelphia, who faced a different city political structure.

The things got worse and more centralized with the Marxist-Leninist stuff. When the Young Lords were dissolved, which was about a year after we came back from Puerto Rico, they went on to do the strictly Marxist-Leninist group whose name I can’t remember. Juan González and Gloria moved to Philly; Juan worked in a factory. So that there was an influx of Young Lords that moved to Philly. I stayed with them for a very short period of time; but the whole thing was this Marxist-Leninist thing going on. And it was so alienating; it was alien talk for the Puerto Rican community. The feeling was “What the hell are you talking about?”142

Wilfredo Rojas described the same events, noting how the same group of people changed names of their organizations. He recounted the erosion of organization after

1976.

There was a split between the people who had gone to Puerto Rico -- something that in my estimation should not have happened -- and those from New York. This group changed its name to “Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Party” with a Maoist outlook that basically focuses on workers. And they went to factory workers organizing. That is when the Young Lords began to split up; and then interior fighting ensued between Gloria González and Juan González. And Juan was thrown out of the party and it just fell apart.143

In a more detailed description, Rojas gave the ebb-and-flow of Marxist ideology as the diverse groupings in Philadelphia began to disband and regroup under different nomenclature.

The Puerto Rican Revolutionary Association actually stayed active for a little bit, but eventually it vanished. And those who remained in Philadelphia went to the Socialist Party, like Juan, Ralphie, Freddy, and as such we stayed together for a while until, I would say, 1978. The way I know is that in 1976, we had Bi-Centennial Without Colonies here and then we had Madison Square Garden. After this other group faded, we started the Puerto Rican Alliance with some Young Lords like Angel Ortiz, [and] people from the Island that belonged to this sort of movement -- some of them from the PIP [Puerto Rican Independence Party], and from other agencies such as 343

El Congreso. So, we all came together and knocked around for a while as the Puerto Rican Alliance. And then the Puerto Rican Alliance faded and it morphed into the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights. And I was the local president for this group. That also broke up and now you don’t have much.144

Juan Ramos firmly believes that the “Marxist-Leninist stuff” caused the breakup of the

Young Lords in Philadelphia.

I tried to be supportive with Juan [González]. And this is after the Young Lords were dissolved [in Philadelphia]. But that Marxist- Leninist stuff, I was not feeling that one. Also by then Wilfredo had already gone. That Marxist stuff killed the Young Lords. Had we stayed as a community-based organization challenging the system on police treatment of poor folks in the Bronx, Manhattan, Philly, it could have lasted a bit longer.145

Roger Zepernick agreed that the Young Lords made a mistake in traveling to Puerto

Rico: “It seems they moved too far; they over-reached and they were not well received.”146 He noted, however, the relative youth of the Young Lords and commended them for the ability to face these subversive tactics from the government.

These were young people, kids like Juan and Wilfredo who were nineteen, that were willing to stand up and confront those in the power structure. They were very young but also very talented, and had developed kind of a partly faithful and partly philosophical base out of which they could work and be very clear what it was they wanted to do and how they were going to accomplish that. They developed a base that offered them good strategies so that their work had a great impact, especially among young people. Later on, people came to realize that this was part of the Young Lords, and those who were involved would say; “Yes, I was part of the Young Lords,” and say this with pride…. I think the Young Lords were talented, committed and very impressive in what they accomplished in spite of the fact that they were just kids when they started.147

Zepernick’s comments reflect the negative consequences of the Marxist ideology imposed by the central organization in New York. This decision derailed the original 344 agenda that the Philadelphia branch had developed in cooperation with church and community efforts in their city.

Catholic Praxis and the Young Lords in Philadelphia

In evaluating the class-based praxis of the Philadelphia Young Lords, I suggest that they encountered many of the limitations in Marxist ideology that had been identified in the Italy of Antonio Gramsci. Similar to the later experience of the Young

Lords in Philadelphia, Gramsci had criticized organizations that depended excessively on terminology and instruction rather than on praxis. Interestingly, Gramsci wrote that the Marxists of his day could learn about the creation of leadership by the loyalty exhibited by the Catholic faithful toward the Church. Moreover, he was convinced that the praxis on behalf of others was a surer path to mobilization of the worker class than ideological indoctrination.148

I found a similar sentiment about reliance on Catholic values in service to the people rather than on Marxist ideology. As Juan Ramos pointed out:

A lot of my Marxist-Leninist stuff I got rid of. I did spend a few years reading that stuff. The only thing that I found appealing was the worker’s dignity and rights -- and that stayed with me as you can see; here I am representing construction workers. So, I can relate to the Leninist stuff about workers having more power over wages, what they get paid for, and their influence on society -- that at the core of this is a belief that is legitimate. That is, without the workers of our world, nothing in our society would move. The guy with the lunch box is very influential in our world. My challenge was to turn this into a theory of belief and equate or relate this to other beliefs such as religious belief; but saying that this Leninist belief is much bigger and better than Christian theory? I don’t know [expressing doubt, as in “I don’t think so”]. And that was what killed the Young Lords.149

Reverend Zepernick added: 345

I think one of the good things about the Roman Catholic Church, and other Christian churches as well, is that they take seriously the mandate to follow in the path of Jesus. And that path begins in Galilee, where he works with people who are marginalized, who are on the outside of the power structure. From there, he fans out and reaches out to people who are not protected; and for this he gets into conflict with those who are in power. And I think that the Catholic Church has had always that strong element to care and work for people around the issues of justice – of having to go out and actively work for this. Historically, you see this is present in the social teachings of the Church as well as in the actual work of the Church. This is in contrast with congregations that sometimes pop up where religion is used almost as a drug; where they teach you about a personal relationship to Jesus, and the focus is on [personal] salvation and in the hereafter; and if they are not careful that can separate people from the problems that exist in their community. In that sense, it becomes like a drug, like an escape.150

I do not suggest that all the Young Lords in Philadelphia could recite chapter and verse of the teachings of the Catholic Church; but one thing that cannot be denied is that the co-founders and key leaders had been steeped in Catholic attitudes from childhood. They carried these over into confrontations with the structures of injustice.

The Puerto Rican Young Lords in Philadelphia, I surmise, were shaped by an emerging theology after the Second Vatican Council that supported cooperation by Catholics with many secular and some Marxist organizations in response to the serious challenges to city and nation in a turbulent decade. The Young Lords served as a vanguard of a globalist worldview that joined domestic and international causes as part of a single struggle for justice. However brief their existence as an organized group, the Young

Lords Party was the first and most effective of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican organizations to communicate this vision to the public and to their own people.

Catholic faith shaped their commitment. It was a factor in bolstering their willingness to risk social rejection and even bodily harm to change the course of events 346 that allowed racial polarization and a foreign war. The religious dimension of their commitments was supported by progressive Catholic clergymen such as Fathers Craven and Ungerleider and Lutheran minister Roger Zepernick. Although they were never accepted officially by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia under Cardinal Krol, the Young

Lords served Philadelphia’s Catholicism as prophets delivering the burden of a message from God calling for an end to injustice. Their individual faith and praxis outlasted the organization. I end this chapter with Juan Ramos’ concluding words during his interview:

Thank God that the very basic core of our leadership group went on to do positive things. That is the real story: that at the end we succeeded and continue to serve our people, not just through our professions, but we continue to be involved beyond dialogue; that is, not just in the discussions but in the doing.151

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Endnotes to Chapter 8

1 An archdiocesan priest does not take vows and ought not be confused with a member of a religious congregation or order, who does. A woman who takes vows is generally referred to as “sister,” and if she has responsibility for administration, as “mother.” in the case of a woman. Sometimes, they are referred to as “religious women” and “religious men.” When these consecrated women live apart from the secular world in isolate communities, -- called cloisters – the proper term to use for them is “nun.” Some members of religious orders, societies or congregations, receive holy orders, so that their vow of obedience ties them to the rule and constitutions of their particular monasteries and religious orders. These religious priests, along with other mem who have taken vows but have not received holy orders, are sometimes referred to as “monks,” and answer directly to the father superior or abbot of the religious order they have joined. Archdiocesan or secular parish priests, on the other hand, though celibate, have not taken a vow of poverty, nor do they necessarily have to live in community with other priests. Their obedience is directly to the bishop of the diocese to which they belong. Personal communication with Ana María Díaz-Stevens.

2 Juan D. González, “The Turbulent Progress of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia,” Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños Bulletin 2:2 (Winter 1987-88): 34-41.

3 Telephone interview with Wilfredo Rojas, April 20, 2018.

4 See Chapters 4 and 7 of this dissertation.

5 Salvatore A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Philadelphia: Camino Books, 1993), 90-94.

6 “Thousands of blacks, angry and sullen about the loss of King, congregated on the long, rectangular lawn in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia the day after King was shot. Rizzo was ready. He had seventeen busloads of police officers hidden among the 18th and 19th century buildings in Philadelphia’s historic section. Black leaders kept a lid on emotions…. No one wanted a repeat of the bloodshed at the Board of Education building in November…. And again, Philadelphia did not burn.” Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 96-97.

7 Joseph S. Clark, Jr. and Dennis J. Clark, “Rally and Relapse: 1946-1968,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 677.

8 Catholic Standard and Times, October 28, 1971, 1970 Folio, 35.

9 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 111, notes that Hardy William’s campaign manager was W. Wilson Goode, who was then 33 years old and had come north from North Carolina with his family to settle in West Philadelphia in the 1950s.

10 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 116.

11 W. Thatcher Longstreth was an eighth-generation descendant of Philadelphia Quaker settlers, and cousin of President Herbert Hoover. Son of an investment banker, Thatcher attended the Haverford School and Princeton. He married a Quaker socialite, Anne Nancy Claghorn, a great-granddaughter of Justus C. Strawbridge, a cofounder of the Strawbridge & Clothier Department Stores, and lived in Chestnut Hill as an investment banker. He was the losing Republican candidate for mayor against Richardson Dilworth in 1955.

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12 “Street guy versus grown-up preppy.” Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 117.

13 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 121.

14 “America was begun by its radicals. America was built by its radicals. The hope and future of America lies with its radicals.” Saul Alinksy, Reveille for Radicals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 22.

15 Alinksy, Reveille for Radicals, 79-86.

16 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 125-205.

17 “The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognized and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form.” Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 129.

18 See Lewis A. Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: The Free Press, 1956); and Conflict and Consensus: A Festschrift in Honor of Lewis A. Coser, Walter W. Power and Richard Robbins, eds. (New York: Free Press, 1984).

19 Richard Hoffer, Something in the Air: American Passion and Defiance in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics (New York: Free Press, 2010).

20 Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict” in The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, eds. William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel (Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole, 1979), 33-47.

21 “Another Step Towards Chaos,” Catholic Standard and Times, 1967 Folio, 13.

22 Carson Clayborne, In Struggle, SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

23 Nelson A. Rockefeller, “The Rockefeller report on the Quality of Life in the Americas,” The Department of State Bulletin 61 (December 8, 1969) 504, accessed November 22, 2016, http://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/united-states-dept-of-state-office-of-public-co/department- of-state-bulletin-volume-v-61-oct--dec-1969-tin/page-47-department-of-state-bulletin-volume-v-61- oct--dec-1969-tin.shtml.

24 Shawn Francis Peters, The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

25 Peters, The Catonsville Nine, 225-232.

26 Peters, The Catonsville Nine, 6-7.

27 Ronald Fernández, Los Macheteros: The Wells Fargo Robbery and the Violent Struggle for Puerto Rican Independence (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987).

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28 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 71-75.

29 In this analysis I have adapted concepts taken from Judith Goode, “The Contingent Construction of Local Identities: Koreans and Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia” Identities 5 (1998): 33-64.

30 Carmen Theresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001). Subsequent to the completion of Carmen Theresa Whalen’s doctoral thesis at Rutgers University in 1994, the theme of the Young Lords was explored by Lorrin Thomas in Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth- Century New York City (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005) and by Jeffery O. G. Ogbar, “Puerto Rico en Mi Corazón: The Young Lords, Black Power and Puerto Rican Nationalism in the U.S., 1966-1972,” Centro Journal 18:1 (2006) 148-169. The latter works, however, had limited treatment of the Philadelphia branch. I have adapted

31 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 231.

32 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, 49. See also: José Jiménez and Ángel G. Flores-Rodríguez, “The Young Lords, Puerto Rican Liberation, and the Black Freedom Struggle: Interview with José ‘Cha Cha’ Jiménez,” OAH Magazine of History [Organization of American Historians] 26:1 (2012): 61-64.

33 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, 49.

34 Judson Jeffries, “From Gang-bangers to Urban Revolutionaries: The Young Lords of Chicago.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 96:3 (Autumn 2003), 292 citing Michael T. Kaufman, "Black Panthers Join Coalition with Puerto Rican and Appalachian Groups," New York Times, November 9, 1969, 1.

35 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, 91-121.

36 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 233

37 Interview with Juan Ramos, Philadelphia, April 13, 2016.

38 Telephone interview with Anna Vásquez, October 29, 2015. Vásquez also pointed out that while some members of the Puerto Rican community initially criticized the Young Lords, later, looking back at the struggles of the Puerto Rican community in Philadelphia, the same people not only regarded the work they did with admiration, but also sought to be identified with it.

39 Interview with Ramos.

40 Interview with Ramos.

41 De Carlo’s biography was accessed April 2, 2016, http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/patricia-l-decarlo- executive-director-norris-square-civic-association/.

42 Interview with Ramos.

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43 Interview with Izzy Colón, Philadelphia, February 10, 2016.

44 Interview with Colón.

46 For the influence of Paolo Freire on Latin American theology, see Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation (Maryknoll; Orbis Books, 1973), 91-92, 232-235.

47 Interview with Vázquez.

48 Interview with Colón.

49 Interview with Ramos.

50 Interview with Ramos. See Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 231. From my conversations with Ramos and the other Young Lords I interviewed, I do not think the Philadelphia chapter had more than a dozen official members. José Yglesias claims that the organization kept secret the number of its members, partly because they did not want this information in the hands of the FBI. José Yglesias, “Right on with the Young Lords,” New York Times, June 7, 1970, accessed April 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/06/07/archives/right-on-with-the-young-lords-right-on-with- the-young-lords-without.html.

51 Interview with Ramos.

52 Interview with Vázquez.

53 Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, 1970.

54 Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, August 13, 1970.

55 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, p. 233. See also, Alyssa M. Ribeiro, “The Battle for Harmony: Intergroup Relations Between Blacks and Latinos in Philadelphia, 1950s to 1980s” (PhD Diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2013).

56 Interview with Ramos.

57 Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, June 13-17, 1971.

58 Cited in Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 233.

59 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, 5.

60 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, 5

61 Ariel Arnau, “The Evolution of Leadership within the Puerto Rican Community of Philadelphia, 1950s- 1970s” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, CXXXVI (2012) 1: 53-81.

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62 Juan Mari Bras, El independentismo en Puerto Rico: su pasado, su presente y su futuro. (Santo Domingo: Editorial Cepa, 1984), 157-161. The party was founded in 1971 as an outgrowth of the Movimiento Pro Independencia (MPI).

63 Take for instance the experience related by TV reporter, Geraldo Rivera, at a rally for Puerto Rican independence held at Madison Square Garden in 1977. In a book published years later, he affirms the need of connecting Puerto Rican identity to the status question, although he has switched sides. Geraldo Rivera, His Panic: Why Americans Fear Hispanics in the U.S. (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 257.

64 Jacqueline Lazú, “The Chicago Young Lords: (Re)constructing Knowledge and Revolution,” Centro Journal XXV:II (Fall 2013), 30-39.

65 Lazú, “The Chicago Young Lords, 38-42. The author incorrectly identifies McCormick Seminary as Catholic on page 39.

66 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, 160 ftn. 83.

67 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, 150-163. Wanzer- Serrano notes that there were two take-overs of the church in New York.

68 “We want to make it very clear to the parishioners that the poor people are not going to allow any institutions, groups or persons to take up space in our community and talk about serving the people. When they are confronted by a group of people form the community that are truly interested in serving the people, all they do is make excuses as to why they can’t take an active role in the community. This was the case with the First Methodist Church, and their excuse was that their job as Christians is to fill the spiritual needs only and that poor people are poor because they want to be that way. The wrong interpretation of Christianity leads people to forget the true teachings of the bible. They use the Bible to excuse themselves from facing the realities of life, which are made very clear in the flowing verses from the Bible: (Matthew 25:31-40) ‘Come receive the kingdom which has been ready and waiting for you ever since the world was made. I was hungry and you fed me; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. When I was a stranger you took me in, and when I had no clothes you gave me something to wear.’ The Young Lords will continue to go to the church to make these realities clear to the church.” ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!” Taken from the flier (reproduced on page 153 from New York University Taminment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, National Lawyers Guild, TAM 191, box 92, NYC Young Lords Party, folder 2.)

69 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, 157 ftn. 68. Taken from Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán and Graciela M. Smith, eds. “Interview with Yoruba, Minister of Information, Young Lords Organization, Regarding confrontations at the First Spanish Methodist church in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem): December 19, 1970,” National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America (New York: NCC Communication Center, December 19, 1970) 28.

70 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords, 160 ftn. 88. Taken from Felipe Luciano and Graciela M. Smith, “Speech by Felipe Luciano, New York State chrmn., Young Lords Organization, at the first Spanish Methodist Church in El Barrio (11th St. and Lexington) on Sunday December 21, 1969,” in National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, Young Lords Organization, 3.

71 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords, 47.

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72 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, 158.

73 Interview with Ramos.

74 Interview with Reverend Roger Zepernick, Philadelphia, December 15, 2015.

75 Interview with Ramos. Note that Gutiérrez became a Dominican friar, not a Jesuit.

76 Interview with Ramos.

77 Despite his party’s advocacy of Puerto Rico’s Catholic identity, Albizu Campos did not exclude Protestants from the nationalist. He was not so much a critic of Protestant believers as he was of Protestant culture, particularly American Protestant culture.

78 A Quaker Action Group (AQAG). Resistance in Latin America: The Pentagon, the Oligarchies & Nonviolent Action. (Philadelphia: National Peace Literature Service/American Friends Service Committee, 1970). Operations were moved south to the sister island of Vieques. Finally, on May 1, 2003, after years of continuing protests, the Navy also withdrew from Vieques. As a personal note, the Arroyo family still holds property in Culebra since María Márquez, the wife of Antonio Arroyo and also my great-grandmother, was the daughter of the island’s first mayor, Pedro Márquez, whose name was given to the town’s main street.

79 Interview with Ramos.

80 Interview with Ramos.

81 Interview with Ramos.

82 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, 60 ftn. 130.

83 Interview with Ramos. Palante [version of the contraction for para adelante] was the name of the Young Lords’ newspaper.

84 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, 61-63.

85 See Betty Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret F.B.I. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). It contains a personal description of the burglars' effort and revealed the identities of most of the activists.

86 “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,” Church Committee final report. United States Senate website. II (United States Government). 1976-04-26, accessed September 10th, 2016http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_II.pdf. In the U.S. mainland, African American civil rights movements were a special concern in this investigation, because Hoover had illegally taped conversations of leaders like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael. The same tactics were used to attack the Puerto Rican Independence Movement

87 “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans.”

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88 Interview with Wilfredo Rojas, March 21, 2016. Philadelphia.

89 Interview with Zepernick.

90 J. Harry Camp and John T. Gillespie, “20 Demonstrate for Justice in Firebombing,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, October 8, 1975.

91 Interview with Msgr. Vincent Walsh, retired Director of Hispanic Apostolate,at St. Joseph Villa, Upper Darby, PA, January 15, 2016.

92 Camp and Gillespie, “20 Demonstrate for Justice in Firebombing.”

93 Some years later, a man found guilty had the decision overturned in the courts. Chief among other reasons, was the granting of immunity to one of the actual perpetrators by the police, before the perpetrator falsely attributed the crime to others. See “Robert WILKINSON et al. v. John ELLIS et al.” United States District Court, E. D. Pennsylvania, 484 F. Supp. 1072 (1980), January 21, 1980. See also the report by Accuracy in Media on this and other newspaper reports of police violence and brutality in Philadelphia, accessed April 5, 2015, http://www.aim.org/publications/aim_report/1978/08b.html.

94 Bob Fensterer and Murray Dubin, “Protesters in Phila. Urge Death for Firebombers,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 11, 1975.

95 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 276.

96 Interview with Ramos.

97 Interview with Ramos

98 Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict, 121-138.

99 Alinksy, Reveille for Radicals, 99-111.

100 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 312-313.

101 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 314.

102 Interview with Zepernick. See David Kairys, Philadelphia Freedom: Memoir of a Civil Rights Lawyer, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 245-247.

103 See the treatment for Puerto Ricans in Hartford, Connecticut in José E. Cruz, Identity and Power: Puerto Ricans Politics and the Challenge of Ethnicity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). For tensions between Puerto Ricans and African Americans in Philadelphia, consult Ribeiro, “The Battle for Harmony.”

104 Ribeiro, “The Battle for Harmony.”

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105 Ribeiro, “The Battle for Harmony,” 148-152.

106 Telephone interview with Father David Ungerleider, SJ, February 23, 2016.

107 Telephone interview with Ungerleider.

108 Interview with Zepernick.

109 Telephone interview with Ungerleider.

110 Interview with Zepernick.

111 Interview with Ramos.

112 Daughen, Joseph R. and Peter Binzen, The Cop Who Would Be King: The Honorable Frank Rizzo, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 254-266; 297-299.

113 The Philadelphia Plan had been mandated by the federal government in 1967 to force the racial integration of construction trade unions in order for the city to receive federal construction contracts. See David Hamilton Golland, “The Philadelphia Plan” Black Past.Org, accessed November 1, 2016, http://www.blackpast.org/aah/philadelphia-plan-1967.

114 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 151-153.

115 Mike Mallow, “How They Blew the Bicentennial,” Philadelphia Magazine, 66:6 (June 1975), 116.

116 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 175-176.

117 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 179.

118 “On May 18, 1969, the 25-year-old Mr. Kenyatta, a Chester native, walked into St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church in Chester and presented demands for reparations from St. Anthony's and other white churches. That demand for $500 million, called the Black Manifesto, had been presented by the Black Economic Development Conference two weeks before. It set off intense debate over what, if anything, was owed black people for the years of slavery and what churches should do about it. Over the next few years, in demanding reparations, Mr. Kenyatta and his followers from the Black Economic Development Conference spilled blood on the altar of a Main Line church and wrestled with an outraged parishioner there; hammered through double oak doors at the Philadelphia Presbytery and took over the offices, and dumped a collection plate at Holy Trinity Church on Rittenhouse Square.” Obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer, January 7, 1992.

119 “The only solution, [Finance Director Lennox] Moak told reporters, was emergency legislation from the state legislature raising taxes 29.3 per cent and new taxes on everything from theater tickets to parking fees.” Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 192.

120 He had already denied help to a financially distressed New York City, which the New York Daily News headlined: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” New York Daily News, Oct. 30, 1975, 1.

121 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 202.

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122 Daughen and Binzen, The Cop Who Would Be King, 210-221.

123 Daughen and Binzen, The Cop Who Would Be King, 213.

124 Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo, 220-221.

125 Katrina Dyke, “Spanish Village of 20 Homes Sought for Green St. by Priest with a Vision,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, May 2, 1970, del Real, Gabriel, Rev., Bulletin Clippings, Temple University Archives.

126 Charles F. Thomson, “Mayor Is Cheered on Pledge to Build Spanish Village II,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, August 27, 1974, del Real, Gabriel, Rev., Bulletin Clippings, Temple University Archives. Bill Curry, “Rizzo Backs Housing in Fairmount” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 20, 1974.

127 Ribeiro, “The Battle for Harmony,” 148-152.

128 Interview with Walsh.

129 Nelson Diaz, “Ahora!: That Controversy over Plans for Spanish Village II,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 1, 1974, del Real, Gabriel, Rev., Bulletin Clippings, Temple University Archives.

130 “Henry Reddy, leader of the Francisville Neighbors Association, vowed to stop it. He and others were incensed by early reports that Latino tenants would be given first preference, and bristled at a rumor that the Young Lords might be called down from New York to defend the development. Attorney Donald Weinberg explained, “My clients are middle-class black people who are working hard to preserve their houses and their neighborhood. They resent something created solely for the Hispanic community.” Diaz, “Ahora!: That Controversy over Plans for Spanish Village II.”

131 “Ninety-six percent of the voters in 11 predominantly black wards voted no. Black turnout was the highest in the history of city elections. Rizzo only won five of 13 wards in the Northeast. He won South Philadelphia, but he lost everywhere else.” Paloantonio, Frank Rizzo, 229.

132 Interview with Zepernick.

133 Paloantonio, Frank Rizzo, 241-243.

134 Kristen De Groot, “Time to go, Rizzo? Some want Philly ex-mayor’s statue gone,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 11, 2016, accessed August 11, 2016, http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20160811_ap_790c4d4831e44e0f9219e086f5615145.html

135 Interview with Zepernick.

136 Interview with Colón.

137 Interview with Ramos.

138 Interview with Ramos.

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139 Interview with Colón.

140 Interview with Ramos.

141 Interview with Ramos.

142 Interview with Ramos.

143 Interview with Wilfredo Rojas, Philadelphia, March 21, 2016.

144 Interview with Rojas.

145 Interview with Ramos.

146 Interview with Zepernick.

147 Interview with Zepernick.

148 Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci’s Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 150-161.

149 Interview with Ramos.

150 Interview with Zepernick.

151 Interview with Ramos.

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CHAPTER 9

CONCLUSIONS

The title of this dissertation encompasses several components: prophetic burden,

Philadelphia, Catholicism, Puerto Ricans, and the period from 1950 until 1980. I conducted research on the premise that each element in the title represented a point of inquiry about the interactions of religion, economics, history, culture and politics.

Throughout this dissertation, I offered examples of the effects of these interactions, paying special attention to their evolution over time, both for Puerto Rico and

Philadelphia. My intent was to show that the micro-history of the Puerto Rican experience in the city is part of macro-history for the Church, the nation and the world.

I do not claim in this dissertation to have discovered the connection to

Catholicism among the Young Lords in Philadelphia, since this characteristic had been reported by others.1 What had been lacking in the literature, however, was an in-depth analysis of the nature and significance of that connection. To fill that gap, in this dissertation, I have provided previously unreported insights into the religious motivations of the Young Lords in Philadelphia. In this last chapter, I summarize those insights and also highlight conclusions from my research that contribute to a better understanding of Puerto Rican Catholics in Philadelphia. First and foremost, this dissertation shows that the period, 1950-1980 was crucial for an emergent Puerto Rican community in the City of Philadelphia and in the Catholic archdiocese. In addition, I present here some reflections on the long-term meaning of my research to community, city and church.

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The Prophetic Burden

As explained in the first chapter, the prophetic burden rests upon a religious conviction that unjust social behavior ought to be changed; otherwise the future will bring serious consequences. I restate here what distinguishes the prophetic burden from simple political action: faith motivation. The believer may adopt the same tactics and espouse the same goals as the secular political activist, I would say, but the foundation in faith makes the action qualitatively different. Certainly, the issues summoning

Puerto Ricans to collective action against injustice in the 1960s and 1970s arose in different cities, which explained why the Young Lords everywhere had common goals.

However, as shown in Chapter 8 where I compared the Philadelphia Young Lords with their peers in New York, religious faith made a greater impact on the former than on the latter. In New York, for instance, the occupation of a Methodist church occasioned a public statement from certain Young Lords that denigrated Christianity. In

Philadelphia, an occupation of a church building led the Young Lords to study religion more intensely by reading about the Theology of Liberation.

Another example of the religious character of the Philadelphia members of the

Young Lords is offered in the same Chapter 8; it involves response to the national organization’s decision in 1972 to dissolve in favor of a successor organization following a Marxist-defined role in class struggle.2 In Philadelphia, instead of espousing Marxist principles, when the leaders returned to collective local action calling for social justice, the Lords fell back on their religious faith as a motivating resource.

This was evident, for example, in their collaboration with their religions mentors in the protest demonstration of a candlelight procession in 1975 around Independence Hall. 359

The demonstration was intended to decry the fatal firebombing of a Puerto Rican household and combined the confrontational tactics of the Young Lords with religious symbolism in a public appeal for governmental action. The protest in front of

Independence Hall also had support from the archdiocese. In the dissertation, this event is presented as evidence of the Young Lords’ strong ties to their Catholic faith in their struggle for social justice. It is to be noted, that even though in this instance, they employed a confrontational approach, they had gained enough legitimacy with the supporting local clergy to also win a favorable response from the hierarchy for the cause.

Throughout this dissertation, I have colored my use of the biblical concept of the prophetic burden by citing Alain Badiou’s treatment of the Apostle Paul’s theology as an example in macro-history of religion’s transformative potential. Badiou asserted that the early Christian belief in a new universal possibility for humankind undermined the hegemonic power of the Roman Empire that had rested on forcible conquest.3 My interviews, presented mostly in chapters seven and eight, have confirmed that individuals who became the Young Lords of Philadelphia believed in the universal truth claim of Christianity. On this basis, their collective actions were not only protests against an unjust system, but also affirmations of faith in a better world.

It is not my wish to confuse motivation by religious faith with success in politics. As in the case of many of the Hebrew prophets and even of Jesus Christ, the person delivering the prophetic burden against the status quo may ultimately fail to produce immediate social change. Moreover, the call to reform that arises from an enduring faith is religiously significant even if it fails politically. On that account, I 360 submit that the actions of these Philadelphia Young Lords should be understood through the prism of the prophetic burden. This perspective best explains why many in the

Puerto Rican community continue to admire the Young Lords even though their organization in Philadelphia was short-lived.

The period in question in this study included the fifteen years before the closing of the Second Vatican Council. The particular impact on institutional Catholicism receives more extensive treatment below. However, I wish to raise here the influence of a Catholic upbringing for many Puerto Ricans in the day-to-day response to their social circumstances. The historical scarcity of ordained priests on the island of Puerto Rico had placed greater responsibility for the transmission of the faith upon the laity.

Reliance on family education in the faith was, therefore, a traditional outlook that

Puerto Rican migrants brought to the urban centers of the United States. My research traced the importance of family to the shaping of Catholic belief among those I interviewed as Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican Catholic community developed its lay action leadership as evinced by the Young Lords.

The dissertation also illuminated an important continuity between the volunteerism at Casa del Carmen and the social activism of the Young Lords, particularly in Chapters 7 and 8. Both voluntarism in the 1950s and the mobilizations of the 1970s expressed the embodied values of the individuals who organized collective actions to benefit Puerto Ricans. Although there was a qualitative difference between the two patterns of Catholic lay involvement, there was also continuity between the

Catholic commitment during the 1950s and the new forms adopted after the Council closed in 1965. The Young Lords were different from the earlier volunteers at Casa del 361

Carmen because the Catholic faith commitment after the Council required greater cooperation with secular groups working for social justice. The interviews reported in

Chapters 7 and 8 trace the transformation of personal faith commitments in pursuit of social justice for Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia. Moreover, Catholicism lent an exceptional influence that was not as pronounced among the Young Lords in other cities.

My study followed the outlines of Gramsci’s understanding of organic intellectuals. The overview of the history of Puerto Rico and its convergence with political thought in nineteenth-century Spain in Chapter 5 was intended to bolster the argument about organic intellectuals. As explained in the treatment of Gramsci’s thought in Chapter 2, organic leaders who are engaged in direct praxis become intellectuals as they realize the coherence of their counter-hegemonic actions with principles for class struggle. I explained in Chapter 8 that the first Young Lords were young high school students who quickly acquired an understanding of Puerto Rico’s colonial history, the struggle for independence and a multi-racial cultural identity by contact with counselors from Aspira. Those same contacts focused them on the iconic leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos and his advocacy of Catholic values within Puerto

Rican nationalism.

The description of the city’s political structures, especially in Chapter 4, offered evidence that the injustices these Puerto Ricans found in the city’s social and political order triggered a response among several of the young Catholics who first formed the

Philadelphia branch of the Young Lords. I traced the notion of “symbolic triggers” to the thought of Pierre Bourdieu in Chapter 2. I concluded that their motivations in 362 seeking social justice were based on their rearing in the Catholic faith and were sustained by the spirit of the prophetic burden.

In describing the linkage of the individual’s religious experience with social movements in Chapter 2, I alluded to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus toward evaluating the role of religion in instilling deeply ingrained attitudes, skills and dispositions among Puerto Rican Catholics in Philadelphia. 4 I also used Bourdieu’s interpretation of social and symbolic capital along with his notion of “fields.” This was useful in explaining the interactions of religious and political matters despite their differences. Because they were leaders on both fields, the Young Lords were agents of change both for the Catholic theology of social justice and indirectly for the pastoral praxis within the archdiocese during the 1970s. As shown in Chapter 8, they added confrontational politics to the range of organized responses to injustice from Catholics.

Although such tactics had originated among secular movements of the time, the application to Catholic causes was particularly noteworthy for the Young Lords of

Philadelphia.

Tolerance, Authoritarianism and City Neighborhoods

Chapters 3 and 4 connected observations about the physical disposition of neighborhoods to Philadelphia’s political structures, which gave extensive power to ward leaders in the decision-making process of government. I concluded that the resulting bias against centralized civic authority reinforced the provincialism of these neighborhoods into the mid-twentieth century, when Puerto Ricans began to arrive in

Philadelphia in significant numbers. Chapter 5 offered data which showed that Puerto 363

Ricans in Philadelphia initially developed community organizations that suited the particular conditions for civic engagement that had long been customary in the city.

Chapter 3 was a historical treatment of the city’s origins. It linked civic tolerance with an inclination to cede power to an authoritarian figure at a time of crisis.

The reluctance to invoke civic authority to directly confront dissent or deviance emerged as a characteristic particularly important in Philadelphia’s subsequent history.

My review stressed that this attitude toward authority, like the physical layout that favored urban villages, derived from the city’s Quaker roots. On the one hand, the tradition of tolerance for non-conformists attracted innovative thinkers. Their achievements in Philadelphia bestowed on the city an epithet as the “Athens of

America.” On the other hand, because the reluctance to impose sanctions was accompanied by the shunning of civic responsibility, government in Pennsylvania eventually fell under the control of self-interested politicians. I accepted the logic of E.

Digby Baltzell in this regard,5 additionally citing Baltzell’s description of how Quaker tolerance turned into a form of “amiable anarchy,”6 leaving governance and the definition of civic order to an authoritarian figure.

In Chapter 4, I established a link between these foundational characteristics to the tendency for “going along” related in W. E. Du Bois’s work in the nineteenth century and Lincoln Steffans’ in the twentieth.7 These two sources helped in tracing the impact of Philadelphia’s political machine, which controlled municipal government through patronage and corruption. I stressed the relative weakness of the mayor’s office relative to the power of ward leaders, noting this was a special characteristic of the

Republican machine in Philadelphia after the Civil War until the 1951 charter reform. 364

Puerto Ricans came to the city, however, when economic and demographic events had begun to impact the vitality of the traditional neighborhoods. Together with national political events, multiple factors at the level of national macro-history produced crisis in the micro-historical setting within Philadelphia. My analysis in Chapter 4 suggested that the special characteristics of the Puerto Rican experience are more fully understood when compared with the experience of both immigrants and African

Americans.

To connect the historical tendency for Philadelphia’s government to political theory, Chapter 2 explored Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist analysis about a crisis that the existing political structure could not resolve. In this way, the narrative in the dissertation linked Philadelphia’s pattern to cede power to an authoritarian figure to macro-history. The social process that legitimated authoritarianism in Philadelphia, I concluded, was linked to the loss of public confidence in the status quo, often resulting in the use of coercion to maintain order in the class structure.8 In this perspective, I validated Gramsci’s argument that coercion against protest in the public square was a sign of governmental weakness caused by an inability to maintain hegemony in society.

The influence that race has exercised in class conflicts in the United States and in Philadelphia was a recurrent issue in the dissertation. Chapters 4, 7 and 8 offered details about race issues in Philadelphia, especially when Frank Rizzo became the dominant local political force. These same chapters outlined the frequent recourse to a third party to advocate political reform through the electoral process, and special attention was paid in Chapter 4 to the African American experience recorded by W. E.

B. Du Bois. Chapter 5 offered data about race perceptions in Puerto Rican history and 365

Chapter 6 reviewed pastoral care towards racial and ethnic groups in Philadelphia’s

Catholicism. All these factors help explain Frank Rizzo’s appeal to Whites in

Philadelphia’s working-class neighborhoods. He promoted racial resentment by blaming the city’s multiplying economic woes on the rising power of Black Power advocates in the city. Rizzo repeatedly turned third party politics to his advantage. For example, he promoted an African American candidate to reduce Black support for

White reformers. He further fragmented his political opposition by employing swift and aggressive repression of confrontational groups, claiming it was necessary for the police to forestall violence from radicals. Many voters tolerated the racial polarization produced by Rizzo in ways that echoed Philadelphia’s historical pattern of “going along” with political corruption as the inescapable price for order.

I related crucial aspect of racial identity in the history of the island to the experiences in Philadelphia. In Chapter 5, I argued that when Puerto Ricans came to

Philadelphia during the 1950s and early 1960s, they encountered a city culture that had loosely stitched together a patchwork quilt of virtually homogeneous neighborhoods, each with a traditionally dominant racial or religious group. This social particularity of the city led the most salient Puerto Rican social and political organizations to seek an ethnic identity that frequently placed them on the White side of the racial divide.

Chapters 7 and 8 related the impact of federal legislation for the War on Poverty, which awarded funds to community groups defined as “racial minorities.” The opportunities afforded Puerto Rican organizations argued for an abandonment of any racial alignment with White ethnics. These same chapters described the risks incurred by racial politics 366 for the city’s Puerto Ricans as Rizzo took hold of Philadelphia’s political power in the

1970s.

Although the Young Lords were not alone among the city’s Puerto Rican leadership in claiming minority-group status, the dissertation stated that they were the most visible of Puerto Rican organizations to adopt confrontation as a political tactic at that time. By adopting models of organization directly derived from the Black

Panthers, they signaled their racial identity preference with the non-White side of the city’s deepening racial rift. Advocacy for the interests of the people through confrontation made the Young Lords highly visible to the media, to city leaders in government and to the Catholic archdiocese. On this basis, I conclude that the Young

Lords functioned as a vanguard political movement in Philadelphia.

The Young Lords were unique among the city’s protesting groups because they brought the island experience of colonialism into the confrontational political movements of the decade. Not only in Philadelphia, but in the other cities, the Young

Lords connected United States interventionism halfway around the world to imperialism closer to home, coupling the Puerto Rican political struggle for self-determination to the dissent against American meddling in southeast Asia. While others also recognized the validity of both causes, the Young Lords were the most visible organization of the time to advocate the essential linkage between the fight against oppression in these two parts of the world. The Young Lords’ call for social justice decisively linked the defense of civil rights for socially oppressed people at home to the defense of a people’s right to self-determination. Likewise, they coupled the imperialist nature of American intervention in the war in Vietnam with that of the United States invasion and political 367 domination of Puerto Rico as of 1898. This was a singular achievement for the Young

Lords for Philadelphia at that time. Moreover, their insistence that domestic and international issues need to be seen in relationship to each other is still evident today in

Puerto Rican leadership in the United States.

Philadelphia and Catholicism

Catholicism is not an unchanging institution without intellectual freedoms. In

Chapter 6, the functions of hierarchical power were underscored, particularly at times of social and political crisis. I suggested that forces of hegemony and dissent within

Catholicism often correspond to secular experiences of the events. For instance, I highlighted how the proposals in the Luzerne Memorial of 1892 favoring cultural maintenance within the Church were rejected in the nineteenth century, when anti- immigrant attitudes in the general public viewed the preservation of national traditions as unpatriotic. Nonetheless, many of the same measures were adopted after the 1972

Encuentro to benefit ministry to Hispanics, at the time when the nation was engaged in programs that protected minority groups. Another example of theological evolution in the dissertation, treated in Chapter 7, concerned Catholic anti-communism in the 1950s, as contrasted with the cooperative stance toward Marxist groups after the key encyclicals of St. John XXIII and the Latin American liberation theology.

Chapters 6 and 7 devoted considerable attention to the role the Philadelphia bishops played in the evolution of pastoral strategies meant to adapt the Church’s outreach to the changing needs of their times. I underscored the interest in Puerto Rico taken by Cardinal Dougherty of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia before the significant 368 migration of the 1950s. Of particular importance was the cardinal’s support for Father

Thomas Judge and the members of the Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity, commonly known as the Trinitarian Sisters, who eventually administered Casa del

Carmen. Examination of reports in The Catholic Standard and Times, the archdiocesan newspaper, in Chapter 7, served as a gauge for official changes in attitude and showed that, much like the Catholic Church throughout the world, the archdiocese exhibited policy changes over time, often reflecting the political climate. The initiatives of

Cardinal O’Hara in opening Casa del Carmen, for instance, were presented as favorable support for social justice. The time of these initiatives coincided with City Hall’s search for a solution to the integration of Puerto Ricans in the city, or what officials called “the Puerto Rican problem.” The dissertation showed that under Cardinal Krol a decade later, Philadelphia’s institutional Catholicism abandoned the earlier proactive stance about social justice in favor of a law and order approach. In fact, the Catholic newspaper’s editorials supported Frank Rizzo’s repression of students seeking a revised curriculum during the 1967 demonstrations at the Board of Education building.

Examples of how Catholic response to politics did not always appear in published statements, but sometimes hid behind personnel decisions, were offered in

Chapters 6 and 8. I placed particular importance on the negative results for Puerto

Ricans by describing how Cardinal Krol intervened with the Jesuit Superior to remove the activist priest David Ungerleider from the archdiocese. On the other hand, in the same chapters, I highlighted how Msgr. Walsh took positive steps when he consciously set out to recruit the most talented seminarians to train for an apostolate among Puerto

Ricans through immersion in their language and culture and sought the best qualified 369 priests to serve in parishes with a high concentration of Hispanics. These contrasting examples of personnel decisions demonstrate some of the less conspicuous aspects of policy that have major effects on the performance of the institution.

Thus, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was not monolithic in its response to the needs and interests of the Puerto Rican Catholic community. The human factors that conditioned the attitudes of the individual leaders explained their differing approaches to the social issues confronting Puerto Ricans. Without denying the hierarchical power within the Church, I showed how the actual exercise of that power was influenced by pastoral praxis at the grassroots. By detailing this process in the response to Puerto

Rican ministry, this dissertation has contributed some fresh perspectives to the history of Catholicism in Philadelphia.

As I researched and wrote this dissertation, it became clear that the Young Lords were not organized to oppose Frank Rizzo, the individual; rather, they opposed the social injustices that intensified under Frank Rizzo. This is an important point because the Young Lords were not resisting the ascendency of a single personality, and they did not disband because Rizzo fell from power. The Young Lords attacked economic structures, the use of state coercion, the political cult of authoritarian governance and the resulting racial polarization in the city.

In sum, my analysis placed Philadelphia at this particular time in the larger context of class struggles and dictatorships of the right. The social justice goals of the

Young Lords and the other Catholics described in this dissertation were limited to their immediate circumstances, but they also have relevance for students of wider historical trends. 370

A Missed Opportunity

The time frame for my dissertation covers the period from 1950 to 1980. One might legitimately ask: “What was the result after 1980 of the social struggles and the efforts of the Catholic Church to respond to the needs of the Puerto Rican and other

Hispanic Catholics?” In a doctoral dissertation for Temple University, Jesuit Father

William Rickle analyzed the organization of ministry to Hispanics in Philadelphia during the 1990s.9 I would like to summarize here some of his findings to explain what happened after 1980. Rickle’s evaluation of archdiocesan effectiveness focused on the attitudes and opinions of those working in ministry. He reported Catholic leaders’ dissatisfaction on issues of planning, of training, and the material condition of poverty in the 1990s.

The sources of dissatisfaction or unhappiness in the work center around three types of issues; lack of support, planning, and development which people expect from Archdiocesan and local parish structures and personnel; lack of training and preparation of the respondents themselves for the work they are doing; and the poverty, both material and cultural, of the Hispanic people they are serving.10

On the matter of social justice for Hispanics, Rickle highlighted a disconnect between the intensity directed to liturgical celebration and the inattention to community issues.

There is a clear lack of integration of parish staffs in the economic and political development of the community. A variety of factors may contribute to this condition. In Hispanic majority communities, most of the parish staff members are not Hispanic and while they are actively involved in serving the community, they are not perceived either by themselves or by the larger community as spokespersons or leaders of the civic community.11

371

I call attention to the observation that parish staff members “are not perceived either by themselves or by the larger community as spokespersons or leaders of the civic community.” This is most telling when considering the potential of the Young Lords, who were native community leaders and, with proper training as recommended by the

Encuentros, might have been placed at the head of programs serving Latinos. Rickle does not deny that there were some Puerto Rican elevated to leadership posts, but he states that there were not enough of them. The situation made him pessimistic about the future of the Hispanic ministry in the archdiocese.12

What might have happened to ministry toward Puerto Ricans and other

Hispanics in Philadelphia’s Archdiocese if the Young Lords had been accepted into

Catholic leadership? I leave aside the individual experience of a person like Juan

Ramos, who became a deacon. As a group, the Young Lords challenged authority in the city and nation according to principles derived from liberation theology. They engaged in confrontational methods to seek justice in the distribution of public resources and the protection of Puerto Ricans from violence such as firebombing and police brutality. Initially, the Church provided the Young Lords with physical space at

Casa del Carmen. Moral support came from local pastors, although political and social circumstances later eroded this open pledge of space. If the support at the parish level had been sustained, however, might not the result have been a stronger ministry for social justice led by Puerto Ricans?13 Certainly, the Young Lords adapted to changing political circumstances, which explains the genesis of the Puerto Rican Alliance and the

National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights.14 If institutional Catholicism support had continued for the successor organizations of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican version of 372 the Catholic Worker Movement in Philadelphia might have evolved to carry on a social justice ministry.

I conclude that the Young Lords, supported by progressive clergy, confronted power relationships within the city. They did not produce substantial political or social change in their own day, but they heralded its goals for the future. Much like the biblical prophets, these leaders’ message remains relevant because control of

Philadelphia’s space and resources has assumed the nature of a class struggle for the city’s future. In light of how the Young Lords confronted Frank Rizzo’s divisive politics, people of faith would be likely candidates to unite, rather than fracture the city’s racial groups. This certainly would be important for Puerto Ricans.

Epilogue

In 2010, more than half-century of annual population losses finally ended in

Philadelphia. The United States Census that year reported the first rise of the number of residents since 1950. The Latino growth rate in twenty years, 1990-2010, was 110

15 percent. Clearly, Latinos, whose majority constituent at this point remains Puerto

Rican, are and will continue to be a vital segment of Philadelphia’s population. In the

Catholic Church, a new pope from Latin America, Pope Francis, has inspired millions, including both Catholics and non-Catholics, with his message that the church is aware of the signs of the times, as it was under John XXIII. As Pope Francis’ visit to the city in 2015 demonstrated, there is a hunger for spiritual and moral inspiration in

Philadelphia. In front of Independence Hall, birthplace of the nation, Pope Francis spoked passionately for the rights of undocumented persons in the United States, most 373 of them from Latin America.16 It was the same symbolic backdrop for the candlelight procession that Father Craven had led with “his guys” from the Young Lords in protest for the firebombing of a Puerto Rican home in 1975. For those seeking hope, these are favorable signs that Catholicism has indeed moved toward a preferential option for the

17 poor.

Nonetheless, Philadelphia remains the poorest of America’s ten largest cities; it faces major problems of crime, failing infrastructure, decaying housing stock and failing schools and drug abuse. The problems are particularly acute in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia’s Seventh Council District, which is among the districts

18 with the highest density of Puerto Rican residents for any neighborhood in America.

Average household income in Kensington is lower than 80.7 percent of all neighborhoods in the U.S., while and 43.6 percent of the children living there are below the federal poverty line, which places the neighborhood at a higher rate of childhood

19 poverty than 86.3 percent of the rest of the United States. A sense of hope is a hallmark of believers and people of good will. For them, as this dissertation has demonstrated, a time of crisis may also be an opportunity for change. Did not William

Penn intend his city as a “Holy Experiment?” In a sense, Puerto Ricans are now part of that experiment, which will likely long remain a work in progress.

374

Endnotes to Chapter 9

1 Carmen Theresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 231.

2 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 61-63; 168-174.

3 Alain Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford University Press: Redwood City, CA., 2003), 9.

4 The principal works I cited for these concepts are: Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) and Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). I was guided in the application of these notions to religion by the thoughtful interpretations from Terry Rey, Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy (London: Equinox, 2007).

5 E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, Second Edition (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996).

6 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, 450-451.

7 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. 1986 reprint edition, with an introduction by Elijah Anderson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899/1986). Lincoln Steffens, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented,” McClure’s Magazine, v. 21 (1903) May-October.

8 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1910-1920, Quentin Hoare, ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 239; 263. Gramsci’s position is summarized by Carl Boggs, The Two Revolutions: Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism (Bath: South End Press, 1999), 83-94.

9 William Rickle, “Interethnic Relations in Hispanic Ministry Parishes in The Archdiocese of Philadelphia,” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1994).

10 Rickle, “Interethnic Relations in Hispanic Ministry Parishes,”187.

11 Rickle, “Interethnic Relations in Hispanic Ministry Parishes,”197-198.

12 “The relations between the Hispanic community and the Catholic Church in Philadelphia have often been difficult and distant. There are few indications that the situation is likely to change very soon.” Rickle, “Interethnic Relations in Hispanic Ministry Parishes,” 225.

13 For examples of Catholic political and social justice activism, see Carlos Vargas Ramos and Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, eds. Blessing La Política: The Latino Religious Experience and Political Engagement in the United States. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012).

14 Juan D. Gonzalez, "The Turbulent Progress of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia." Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños Bulletin 2:2 (Winter 1987-88): 34-41.

375

15 United States Bureau of the Census, Population Estimates, July 1, 2015 showed the Hispanic population of Philadelphia to represent 13.6 percent of the city’s total. The results from the 2010 Census showed the number of Hispanics to be 187,611. This number represents an increase of 98,418 from 1990, which represents a 110 percent growth rate. Of 187,611 Philadelphia Latinos, 121,643 or 65% were Puerto Rican. Pew Research Center. June 1, 2011. A City Transformed: The Racial and Ethnic Changes in Philadelphia Over the Last 20 Years, 10-15, accessed October 31, 2017. http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2011/06/01/a-city-transformed-the-racial- and-ethnic-changes-in-philadelphia-over-the-last-20-years.

16 “Meeting for Religious Liberty with The Hispanic Community and Other Immigrants” Address of The Holy Father, Pope Francis, Independence Mall, Philadelphia, Saturday, 26 September 2015, accessed April 17, 2018, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/september/documents/papa- francesco_20150926_usa-liberta-religiosa.html.

17 For a view of a modern church effectively offering critique of secular society. see José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

18 Pew Research Center, A City Transformed. Puerto Ricans represented 21.8 percent of this neighborhood's residents, while 6.9 percent are Dominicans by heritage.

19 Pew Research Center, Philadelphia: The State of the City, March 2016, 7-10, accessed October 31, 2017. http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2016/03/philadelphia_the_state_of_the_city_2016.pdf.

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APPENDIX A

LIST OF INTERVIEWS

Arroyo Bradley, Mari Gloria. (April 26, 2016). Former volunteer at Casa del

Carmen while a student at Chestnut Hill College (1960-1964). Telephone interview.

Ramos, Juan. (April 13, 2016). Founding member of the Young Lords

Philadelphia Chapter. Interview conducted at the Laborers’ District Council offices, 665

North Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Rojas, Wilfredo. (March 21, 2016). Founding member of the Young Lords

Philadelphia Chapter. Interview conducted at his real estate office on Cecil B. Moore

Avenue and 18th Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (April 20, 2018). Telephone interview.

Colón, Izzy. (February 10, 2016). Social worker and community activist who was a former Aspira counselor. Interview conducted at Tierra Colombiana Restaurant,

4535 North 5th Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Ungerleider, Father David. (February 23, 2016). Former seminarian volunteer at

Casa del Carmen and partner with the Philadelphia Chapter of the Young Lords as member of the Society of Jesus, Maryland Province. Telephone interview.

Vásquez, Anna. (October 29, 2015). Former Director of Hispanic Apostolate,

Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Telephone interview

Walsh, Monsignor Vincent. (January 15, 2016). Former seminarian volunteer at

Casa del Carmen and retired Director of Hispanic Apostolate, Archdiocese of

Philadelphia. Interview conducted at St. Joseph Villa, Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. 402

Zepernick, Reverend Roger. (December 15, 2015). Former assistant at

Kingsway Lutheran Church, which was occupied by the Young Lords; presently a member of the Board of Esperanza Academy. Interview conducted in the offices of

Christ and St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, 6th and Venango Streets, Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania.