Brooklyn Hallways
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
In the late 1950s, San Juan, Puerto Rico served as the location of the U.S. government’s Point Four Program, which promoted a U.S. capitalist model of development for the Third World as an alternative to Communism. In order for the program to work, the Truman administration and the Puerto Rican colonial government under Muñoz negotiated the emptying out of the island’s poorest sectors encouraging these areas’ inhabitants, “many of them mulattos,” to migrate to New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The poor received reduced airfare between the island and the mainland. Some 600,000 “mostly rural unskilled” Puerto Ricans filled the demand for cheap labor in U.S. manufacturing. A large number of Puerto Ricans settled in East Harlem and Brooklyn where they lived in recently crea ted public housing projects where Puerto Rican and blacks residents lived as neighbors. As result black and Latino children grew up smelling chitlins, collard greens, and fried chicken up and down the hallways as well as ropa vieja, mofongo, sancocho, and fried plantains.
