From Aguada to Dover: Puerto Ricans Rebuild Their World in Morris County, New Jersey, 1948 to 2000
Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim
This chapter first appeared in The Puerto Rican Diaspora Book: Historical Perspectives, edited by Carmen Teresa Whalen and Víctor Vázquez-Hernández. pp.106-127. Reprinted by permission of Temple University Press. © 2005 by Temple University Press. All Rights Reserved.
The history of New Jersey’s Puerto Rican communities has yet to be written, in part because the documentary evidence of the migration and of the process by which the islanders adjusted to the various state settings is scant, scattered, or altogether missing. Any attempt to document this process first requires a patient reconstruction of the most basic facts. This chapter makes use of several techniques, from oral history to archival research, in order to document some aspects of the Puerto Rican settlement in Dover, a municipality of Morris County, New Jersey. The goal of this work is to explore the motives that brought a group of residents from Aguada, a small town in northwestern Puerto Rico, to Dover; the ways they dealt with the challenges and opportunities they encountered; and the means they used to re-create a familiar world in a foreign land. It is hoped that the findings of this work can provide a basis of comparison for other Puerto Rican settlements in the United States.
The Migration to New Jersey and Dover
Because Puerto Ricans migrated to New York and other regions of the United States long before they settled in New Jersey, a brief outline of that migration history is pertinent. Between the 1860s and 1890s, a small number of Puerto Ricans, for the most part professionals and political exiles, settled in New York City. The United States’ victory over Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898 led to the U.S. takeover of Puerto Rico and an increased migration from the island. Between 1901 and 1903, for instance, more than 5,000 Puerto Rican farmworkers were recruited and sent to the American sugar plantations in Hawaii. By 1910, another 1,513 Puerto Ricans had settled in the continental United States, most of them in New York City. The U.S. Congress’s grant of American citizenship to the Puerto Ricans in 1917 removed all remaining legal barriers, enabling many more Puerto Ricans to move to the United States. In 1920, a total of 11,811 islanders had made the United States their home, and by 1940, 69,096 had settled in the United States, 61,000 of them (88.2 percent) in New York City.1
Beginning in the late 1940s, the United States Employment Service, the Puerto Rican Employment Service (an affiliate of the USES), and the Puerto Rican Migration Division (a unit of the Puerto Rico Department of Labor) made efforts to disperse Puerto Rican migrants away from New York City into other areas. By 1950, the U.S. Puerto Rican population had quadrupled from 69,000 to 301,000 residents. Many of these had settled in twenty-five other states of the union. Of the 1950 group, 226,110 (75.1 percent) were born in Puerto Rico and 75,262 (24.9 percent) in the United States.2
Until 1950, New Jersey ranked a distant third in Puerto Rican population after New York State and California. The number of Puerto Ricans in the state that year numbered 4,055, compared to only 780 in 1940. In a 1955 study, of the 1940 group, a few families indicated that they had lived in three of the state’s major cities for more than forty years. Ten of the families reported having lived in Newark since 1917. The first large influx of Puerto Ricans to New Jersey, however, took place between 1950 and 1954. A state agency reported that approximately 26,000 Puerto Ricans resided in the state “on a yearly basis” in 1954, in addition to 8,000 “seasonal” farmworkers brought in that year for the harvest season.3
Migration from Puerto Rico, natural reproduction, and resettlement away from New York City contributed to the increase of Puerto Ricans in New Jersey. The numbers rose to 55,351 in 1960, 138,896 in 1970, 243,540 in 1980, 304,179 in 1990, and 366,788 in 2000. As in the rest of the nation, by 1990, the composition of the Puerto Rican population in the state had shifted from one primarily born in Puerto Rico to one born in the United States. By 1990, more than half (160,205) of the state’s 304,179 Puerto Rican residents were born in United States, while the remainder (143,974) were born in Puerto Rico.4
Many of the Puerto Ricans who migrated to Dover between 1948 and 1970 came originally from Aguada. The majority were impoverished workers, overwhelmingly rural, unemployed, or underemployed, with seven to nine years of schooling and few nonagricultural skills. The reasons they gave for leaving Aguada include (1) prospects of jobs in the United States for the unskilled and semiskilled; (2) the lack of similar jobs in Aguada, where jobs, when available, were poorly paid and unemployment was a growing problem; (3) invitations from friends and relatives already working in Morris County; (4) the knowledge that as U.S. citizens they could enter and leave the United States without legal restrictions; and (5) the fact that fast, reliable, and inexpensive air transportation was available between the island and New Jersey.5
Puerto Rico’s reorientation of its economic base from agriculture to manufacturing during the 1940s and 1950s compounded the problem of employment of the island’s rural workers. In 1953, there were 650,000 workers in the island’s labor force, with an estimated 16,000 fourteen- year-old workers joining the labor ranks annually. Of the active labor force, traditionally 450,000 found work in the sugar cane industry and another 75,000 were employed in other agricultural jobs.6 Increased emphasis on manufacturing led the government to neglect the rural sector, and to leave idle a large sector of the rural labor force. Meanwhile, the jobs created by manufacturing were either insufficient or not appropriate for the skill levels of those seeking work. Income per capita remained low, averaging $399 in 1954, when the basic diet cost $200 a year.7
These conditions made it possible for a handful of state manufacturers to attract nearly 1,000 Puerto Rican workers in 1944, and for farmers in southern New Jersey to hire the first 246 Puerto Rican “contract laborers” two years later (see Figure 5-1). By 1954, there were 8,298 Puerto Rican farm laborers in New Jersey. Of these, slightly more than half (4,630) were hired as contract workers, while the rest came on their own and were hired as “walk-ins,” according to a state report. The contract workers were brought in under the auspices of the Garden State Service Association (GSSA), an agency established by the Glassboro Service Association (an organization of New Jersey farmers), and the Puerto Rico Department of Labor, which acted on behalf of the island’s workers.8
The contract, devised by the Puerto Rico Department of Labor for the workers’ protection, sought such guarantees as minimum wage, either hourly or by piece rate, a minimum of sixty hours of work per month, a minimum of one hot meal a day, and adequate housing. Employers were also required to pay for the worker’s airfare to and from Puerto Rico and to provide medical insurance for the contract worker.
To recover the cost of the latter two expenses, the employers were authorized to deduct a fixed amount from the worker’s wages. Since the hourly rate in the farms in 1954 was 65 cents and the cost of the airfare per worker was $64, the employer was able to deduct $5 per week per every $25 earned for airfare and the cost of medical insurance. The contract also bound the laborer to the farm employing him for the duration of the season, and required that he fulfill his obligations to the farmer including any debts incurred.9
Despite these specifications, workers sometimes complained that farmers refused to pay the stipulated wages, or that they forced them to work additional hours without payment. They complained also that food and housing were inadequate. Farmers, on the other hand, complained that Puerto Rican workers were easily offended, and when given a chance fled the farms before their contracts expired. In 1954, farm members complained to the GSSA that they had lost $16,000 when workers disappeared still owing their plane fares.10
Although eight out of ten Puerto Rican laborers hired by the GSSA between 1950 and 1954 were placed on the farms of South Jersey, a few thousand were sent to other destinations such as New York and Pennsylvania.11 Many others, as stated earlier, arrived on their own and found jobs on farms throughout New Jersey, including those in Hackettstown and Great Meadows, parts of Warren and Morris Counties, respectively. One of those without a work contract, who later settled in Dover, was seventeen-year-old Esaud Ramos. A native of Utuado, a small municipality of Puerto Rico’s western highlands, Ramos had completed the sixth grade and had minimal work experience when he immigrated to New Jersey in March 1950. According to his own account, he left Puerto Rico with his two uncles, who had jobs waiting for them on a farm in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Because he was underage, the uncles’ employer would not hire him, and he remained idle for a few months before he found work on a vegetable farm in neighboring Great Meadows. Work at this farm, he explained, was very hard and paid low wages. He recalled, “When it came time to harvest the vegetables, we worked from sunup to sundown, from about 5:30 or 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 or 9:00 at night, for just 50 cents an hour.”12
Because housing was provided free of charge, Ramos was able to save much of his wages and return to Puerto Rico in November 1950 with “$400 in my pocket.” He remained in Puerto Rico over the Christmas season and migrated again in January 1951. This time he went to Florida “to wait out the winter.” He took a job in a Miami restaurant until April, when he boarded a bus to Hackettstown, New Jersey. After a brief visit with his uncles, he moved to Dover, where prospects of work beckoned. He explained how he chose Dover:
When I came, I came to Hackettstown. I was there a week, looking for work, when someone said to me, look, there is work in Dover…I began hitch-hiking, which is how I traveled then. In Dover, I was told that the federal government was hiring at the munitions factory (part of Picatinny Arsenal) so I hitched a ride to the front gate. There a policeman directed me to the personnel office. I applied and was hired a week later. The job I got was mixing explosives.
Ramos concedes that the job was dangerous, but “only if one was careless.” In his view, working conditions at Picatinny were “better than at the farm,” where “we worked very hard, worked many, many hours and were not paid time and a half after the first eight hours.” At Picatinny, he explained, “We began working at 7:30 A.M., then had a [mid-morning] break, and an hour for lunch, so the job did not require such constant physical labor.”13
Like Ramos, Puerto Ricans from the rural areas of Aguada were attracted to Dover between the late 1940s and 1960 by the prospect of jobs in the town’s factories, iron mines, and foundries. By the mid-1950s, between fifteen and eighteen Puerto Rican families, mostly from Aguada, had settled in Dover.14 Aguada, a sugar cane-producing town until the late 1960s, provided only seasonal employment for its workers. The harvest and sugar production typically began the first week of December and lasted five to six months before employment ceased. The wages paid the cane cutters in the 1950s—approximately 50 cents an hour— were scarcely enough to support a family for a whole year. Those lucky enough to own their own farmland supplemented their earnings with edibles they planted.15
According to community lore, the first seven Aguadans to settle in Dover arrived in 1948 after a stint elsewhere. One of the seven “pioneers” who still lives in Dover is Juan Agront. He went to Dover with his brother Manuel, after spending two unhappy years at a restaurant job in Manhattan. Like other migrants before them, the Agront brothers found work in an iron mine, the Mount Hope Mine.16 Shortly after their arrival in Dover, they sent for their relatives and friends. Both Juan and Manuel remained at the Mount Hope Mine until it closed in 1959. Afterwards, Juan took several factory jobs, but Manuel opened a boarding house to provide lodging for incoming Aguadans.17
One Aguadan recruited by a fellow migrant was twenty-four-year-old Ismael Acevedo. He recalled arriving in Dover in 1952 with “a seventh- grade education and some experience in retail sales.” Having worked at his family’s grocery store for many years, he viewed Dover as his opportunity to find “better paid work” and to “become financially independent” of his father. He explained how he first heard about the town of Dover. “I learned about Dover from Efrain Mendoza, a childhood friend with whom I used to discuss my plans for the future. We had promised each other that whoever left [Aguada] first would send for the other.”
Efrain was the first to leave. He first went to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with one of his brothers. There, both took jobs in a restaurant until a family friend who was already established in Morris County, New Jersey, invited them to move to Dover. The friend reassured the Mendozas that there was “lots of work in the mines near Dover.” Lured by the prospect of jobs, the Mendozas moved to Dover in 1951, and soon after found work at the Alan Wood Mining Company, in the neighboring town of Mine Hill. Efrain wrote to Acevedo, saying that he had “the ideal place for me to work and that I should come.” When Acevedo arrived in Dover in 1952, Efrain helped him find work at the Alan Wood Mining Company. After a few short months on the job, Acevedo too began encouraging friends and relatives in Aguada to join him in Dover.18
Like Acevedo, twenty-one-year-old Maria Ruiz Agront came to Dover with a fellow Aguadan. She moved to Dover in May 1954 with her newlywed husband, Herminio Agront. Don˜ a Maria, as she soon became known, had completed the eleventh grade by the time she arrived in Dover. A short residence at her brother’s home in the urban center of Aguada, she explained, had enabled her to study past the ninth grade and gain experience in sales. She worked for several years in her brother’s shoe store. Her husband Herminio, also a native of rural Aguada, had been a farm laborer before his migration to Dover. Herminio, she recalled, had left Aguada with his family in 1950 at the invitation of some relatives and, like them, had found work in one of the mines near Dover.19
In 1954, when Don˜ a Maria arrived in Dover, the Puerto Rican population in town numbered less than two-dozen families. She recalled that while she did not yet speak English she felt comfortable in Dover. She described her first impressions. “When I arrived in Dover it was as if I were still living in Aguada. I don’t know why, but I liked the environment very much; it was a small town, tranquil, but with all the conveniences. adjusted quickly.”20
For Acevedo, as for the Mendozas, the Agronts, and others who followed them, the attraction of Dover was that it had well-paid jobs. The possibility of finding work, especially better-paying work than was possible in Aguada, was the primary incentive that attracted the first migrants to abandon the familiar, well-ordered life of rural Puerto Rico for the unknown world of New Jersey. Once established, they sent home glowing letters and often plane fares for friends and relations to join them.21
Overcoming Challenges and Creating Alternatives
Migrating to Dover, however, proved easier than adjusting to its demands. American citizens at birth, the Aguadans, like all Puerto Ricans, encountered no legal obstacles in moving to any place in the United States. But their Spanish language, rural background, and customs set them apart from their long-established neighbors. Their poverty, and for some, their darker complexions, added to the hurdles they faced in Dover. Shortage of housing, overcrowding, and exposure to racial and ethnic discrimination, for the first time in their lives, merely compounded their problems.22
Finding a place to live in Dover, a relatively small town of 2.3 square miles with few apartments for rent, was a challenge. Restricted to housing in the “Spanish barrio,” the poorest section of town—an eight-block tract that ran along Blackwell Street (the town’s main thoroughfare) from Morris to Salem streets—the newcomers were often at the mercy of greedy landlords, who routinely overcharged for tiny apartments they carved out of old houses and spaces above the stores.23
Maria Agront remembers her struggles finding a suitable place to live when she first moved to Dover. “When I arrived here finding an apartment was a problem. We went to live in a rented room in a building on Blackwell Street. We lived there about four months and then moved in with my in-laws because I was pregnant and did not want to live in a room anymore. We stayed with my in-laws for seven months because no one wanted to rent us a place because we were Latinos.” After nearly a year’s search, she found a four-bedroom apartment, which she and Herminio fixed up before moving in. To help cover the rent and to help new arrivals in search of housing, Don˜ a Maria says, they took in boarders. The housing need was so critical, she recalls, that when she bought her first house four years later, the new renters inherited her boarders.24
Buying a house to escape the apartment shortage also had its share of problems. There were very few houses for sale in the Spanish barrio, and only a handful of families had the down payment, credit, or collateral required by the mortgage companies. Nonetheless, by 1960 a few of the families had purchased homes. Among the first to purchase homes were Ismael Acevedo and Maria Agront and her husband Herminio. Acevedo explained that earning good money at the mines had enabled him to afford many purchases. “Work at the mines,” he said, “was dangerous, but lucrative for those willing to take risks.” He recalled that because he was “eager to get ahead,” he asked his supervisor for a transfer from a “drilling job,” where he was paid by the hour, as part of a crew, to “blasting,” where he could work as an independent contractor. The latter, although much more dangerous, paid him by the job or the number of feet blasted. The transfer from one line of work to another, he said, allowed him to earn “close to $14,000 a year” between 1954 and 1959. That, he explains, “was a lot of money then and it made it possible for me to help my parents and siblings, to buy fine cars and clothes, to put a down payment on a house, and later start my own business.”25
The house he purchased, he recalled, was located in an “old Italian neighborhood.” It needed extensive repairs, but since he had money, he decided to refurbish it before moving in. The presence of so many workers in the house, he explained, “raised questions among the neighbors as to the wealth of the purchaser.” The neighbors’ curiosity, Acevedo recalled, made the seller very nervous. Suspecting that if the identity of the buyer became known the deal might fall through, the seller advised Acevedo, “Don’t tell anyone you are moving here and don’t come to see the house before you move in . . . and don’t park your cars in front . . . or move in during the day.” Pretending not to know the reasons for the advice, Acevedo remembered asking him, “Why can’t I be seen [in the house] if I am paying for it?” The seller is said to have replied, “because that way they [referring to the neighbors] can’t reject you.” For reasons that he did not explain, Acevedo followed the seller’s instructions and moved in at eight in the evening, with the help of many relatives. He said, “I have many brothers and sisters and they all helped us. We moved everything in an instant and slept there that night.”26
The following morning, he recalled, he checked his cars for damage, and finding none, went to his nearest neighbors, “to introduce myself and to place myself at their service.” A few days later, he said, he helped “the elderly couple next door to mow their lawn, and after that I had no problems with anyone in the neighborhood.” He feels that his “friendly disposition and the fact that he kept up his property were the reasons that earned him his neighbors’ acceptance.”27
Maria and Herminio Agront avoided Acevedo’s experience by buying their house in the Spanish barrio of Dover. Although Herminio Agront also worked in the mines and earned relatively good wages, the couple’s expenses were also high because they helped many in their extended families. What made it possible for the Agronts to buy their house, explains Don˜ a Maria, was the fact that she always worked and contributed to the household economy from the moment she arrived in Dover. In addition to her many factory jobs, she said, she took in boarders and cooked and washed for them to make extra income.28
Another challenge the first Aguadans confronted was the lack of a place to worship. As Don˜ a Maria remembered, every time she and the other “Hispanic” Catholics (most of them Aguadans) sought confession and communion they had to travel to the Cathedral in Newark because the Catholic Church in Dover turned them away, saying it did not provide services in Spanish. By 1960, as the number of Puerto Ricans (mostly Aguadan Catholics) grew to 700, the Paterson Archdiocese assigned Father Vincent Puma, a Spanish-speaking priest, to minister to that congregation. The arrival of Father Puma, however, did not solve the problem of access to the Catholic Church of Dover. According to Maria Agront, Esaud Ramos, Ismael Acevedo, and others, the Catholic Church of Dover refused to let the new priest conduct services in Spa ish in its main facilities. It offered them instead the school auditorium next to the church.29
Francisco de Jesus, a nineteen-year-old migrant from rural Aguada who arrived in Dover in 1961 with a ninth-grade education and little work experience, recalled joining the group of Aguadans that was seeking to purchase a church. Unhappy with the Dover Church’s exclusionary policy, the group enlisted Father Puma’s help to find a church they could own. In January 1962, Father Puma told the group that the Swedish community was selling a Lutheran church it no longer needed. The church had an adjacent school and could be obtained for $45,000.30 The Swedes and Danes, who had arrived in Dover between 1870 and 1900, had begun moving out to the suburbs by the 1940s.31 To pay for the church, the Aguadans formed a purchasing committee, made a census of the Puerto Rican families in town, and obtained their pledges for weekly donations with which to pay the mortgage.32
With Father Puma’s guidance, they renamed the old Lutheran church Nuestra Sen˜ ora del Sant´ısimo Rosario (Lady of the Holy Rosary) and used the school next door to teach evening English classes. Such was the Aguadans’ desire to learn English, according to Ismael Acevedo, that the volunteer teachers recruited by Father Puma were soon exhausted. Since more than half of the fifty students who enrolled the first evening were ready for intermediate lessons, Father Puma volunteered to teach one of the sections himself, according to Acevedo.33
In addition to the evening classes, many of the women in the congregation organized themselves into groups and began to sponsor social and religious events, in an effort to help strengthen the ties between their church and their community. One group, the Legion of Mary, organized by Father Puma and headed by Don˜ a Maria Agront, organized prayer sessions in the homes of the sick and the infirm, visited hospitals, brought food, and provided homecare services to the poor and the elderly within the community.34 According to Esaud Ramos, he and some other men helped the women distribute food baskets to the poor at Thanksgiving and Christmas.35 The social work carried out by the Puerto Rican parishioners of the Holy Rosary, observed Father Puma, relieved him of “much house-to-house visitations,” which formerly oc-upied much of his time.36
Problems between the migrants and the Dover police led the budding Puerto Rican leaders (most of them Aguadan) to establish the Aguada Social Club, in honor of their hometown in Puerto Rico. The primary reasons for this decision, explained Carlos Figueroa, one of the club’s founders, were to keep the young Puerto Rican male migrants off the streets, where they were routinely arrested “for loitering” by the Dover police, and to provide a safe place for the families to hold their dances and celebrations. The son of a onetime mayor of Aguada, Figueroa was only eighteen years old when he came to Dover in 1957. He had a ninth-grade education and some work experience. He had worked as a messenger for the Aguada Credit Union before his migration to Dover.37
The Aguadans, explained Jorge (Georgie) Lo´pez, a native of Barranquitas, Puerto Rico, and one of the club’s later presidents, purchased a vacant lot at 51 Blackwell Street and built a spacious one-story building in March 1963. Only twenty years old in 1966 when he arrived in Dover, Lo´pez recalled having “no intentions of remaining in the U.S. because I had a girlfriend and a job I liked back in San Juan [Puerto Rico] where I had moved three years earlier.” He explained that he came merely to visit an uncle in Dover, at the request of his mother, but that his uncle insisted he find a job, and “once I did I never left Dover.”38
By 1960, the Puerto Rican population in Dover had grown and with the increase came added tensions with other ethnic groups and the town’s police. According to Esaud Ramos, who became a part-time policeman in Dover in 1962, the hardening of attitudes toward the Puerto Ricans began during the late 1950s. He recalled, “In 1953, I used to date Polish and Italian girls without any difficulty, but that had changed by the time I returned from the Air Force in 1957. In those four years it was as if there had been an exodus from Puerto Rico, and I noticed much antipathy from the other groups towards us. There were bars that would not serve us.” He blamed some of the discrimination against the Puerto Ricans on “their own customs.” “Puerto Ricans then,” he said, “had the habit of congregating on the streets to talk, as they used to do in Puerto Rico, and this was considered loitering by the Americans.”39 Loitering, in the shop owners’ view, was bad for business, particularly when non-Hispanic women stayed away, for fear of the Puerto Rican men standing on the street. To resolve the problem, the storeowners called the police and had the men arrested.40 Ramos sympathized with the non-Hispanic women when he stated, referring to Puerto Rican men in general, “we have the bad habit of looking at passersby in a certain [scrutinizing] way and the women were offended by such looks.”41
Maria Agront viewed the men’s actions and the cause of their arrests differently. She explained, “During 1958 and 1959 there were many problems here. The police arrested the Puerto Rican men for any little thing; they arrested them for walking or for standing. If they were in groups of three or more, they were arrested.” In her view, these were “good men who did nothing wrong” and “should not have been arrested.” They were, she said, “lonely, single men, with no place to go on their days off,” who, tired of their “furnished rooms went out for fresh air and to talk to one another.”42 But to the Dover pollice, groups of foreign-looking men standing on the streets represented a problem, especially as rumor had it that Puerto Rican males were a dangerous lot who carried knives and picked fights at the slightest provocation.43
Some of the men interviewed remembered carrying rocks, but not knives. Carlos Figueroa remembered having to run for his life more than once when he first arrived. He explained that by the mid-1950s, Puerto Ricans were on the defensive because they were routinely attacked. “In 1957, when I came to Dover there was much discrimination against us here, to the point that when a Puerto Rican [man] went to work, instead of food, he had rocks in his lunch box with which to pelt the Italians who waited to attack him.”
He described his own frightening encounter with five Italians who were waiting to ambush him one evening:
I was walking home from the Three Sisters Restaurant, where I worked I had no car then When I reached the area by the East Dover School, where I now live, I saw five Italians waiting for me. From the reflection of the light I saw that they had blades. As they began moving towards me I broke into a run, running as fast as I could. I tell you with all honesty, that night I was the best racehorse there was. I circled the police station several times, but had no time to open the door; they were so close. So I continued running up Clinton Street until I reached my aunt’s house. I remember that I always had trouble with the lock to the front door but that night I guess God was with me because when I turned the key it opened. They were already stepping into the hallway when I slammed the door.
Afraid for his life, and without any other means of transport than his feet, he says, he quit his job at the restaurant and took a day job that paid less.44
The Aguada Social Club, explained Jorge (Georgie) Lo´pez, was needed because, “When the Puerto Ricans made a wedding, a party, or a celebration they had to make it in their homes because renting a hall in an American establishment was not possible. The language barrier was one obstacle and discrimination against us was another.”45 Carlos Figueroa recalled an incident with the police the very night the Aguada Social Club opened:
It was the practice at the time to hire two policemen to guard the door at dances and other public functions. We had complied with the requirements, but one of the two policemen, one called Esller [sic], did not like us. Then someone at the dance got drunk and picked an argument with another patron, and Esller [sic], instead of letting us handle the situation, called the riot police, which arrived within minutes. I remember I had taken the microphone and was trying to calm the dancers, when a big monster of a policeman said to me, “You goddamn Puerto Rican! You are going to shut up that goddamn mouth or I am going to make you eat that goddamn microphone.” I tried to explain what I was doing and he hit me so hard across the mouth that he split my lips. That is a night I will never forget.46
Other witnesses recalled that the arrival of the police provoked some of the dancers into throwing chairs and fighting each other and the police.47 By dawn, adds Figueroa, “twenty four of us were behind bars on charges that we had attacked the policemen.” “But that night,” he said proudly, “was a turning point for the Puerto Rican community. Fed up with the police’s behavior, many went to the police station to demand the prisoners’ release.” Figueroa was released, but the others were left in prison a few more days, “until news of the incident began to make headlines.” At that point, Figueroa explained, the county officials met with a team of Puerto Rican leaders and with Father Puma and agreed to release the remaining prisoners.48
“After that incident,” stated Figueroa, “relations between the Puerto Ricans and the Dover police slowly improved, in part because the Aguada Club made a concerted effort to help keep the Puerto Rican men off the street,” and partly because “the police began to exercise some restraint when dealing with us.”49 In Don˜ a Maria’s view, the police’s attitude “changed because of the unity and growing strength of the Puerto Rican community.”50
At present, the Aguada Social Club is shared by other Hispanic groups, which began settling in Dover during the 1970s. The arrival of the new immigrants, primarily from Central and South America, led the Aguadans to revise the membership policy and mission of their club to be more inclusive. They strove to promote and safeguard the cultures and traditions of all Hispanic America. One event that for decades served to unite the various groups was the Fiesta Latina, a Latin Festival held on Labor Day at Crescent Field Park. The Fiesta, no longer held, provided a variety of foods and staged games and activities for every group. It also featured popular musical groups from Puerto Rico and other regions of Latin America.51
In addition to buying their own church and establishing a social club, the Aguadans founded a “pre-kinder” program for their children. Worried that their youngsters might fall behind academically unless they learned English before they enrolled in school, the leaders sought the help of two teachers to design a curriculum, known in Spanish as El Primer Paso (the First Step).52 El Primer Paso became part of the Holy Rosary Church’s list of programs. The curriculum of El Primer Paso, explained Fel´ıcita (Alicia) Santiago Smolin, a volunteer teacher and founding board member, “seeks to teach English and other skills to the Hispanic kids so they go on to kindergarten without the stigma of having to be separated from other children because they don’t understand English. We felt that separate, even if equal, was not good.”53
Santiago Smolin, a native of Humacao, Puerto Rico, migrated originally to New York City in 1956 at the age of twenty-two. A secretary by training, she soon learned English, obtained a college education, married, and in 1965 moved with her husband and family to Randolph, New Jersey (a town near Dover). In Randolph, she met Elizabeth Whitehead, a neighbor and schoolteacher who was active in civic works and local politics. Their work eventually led them to collaborate in the establishment of El Primer Paso program. The program, according Ismael Acevedo and others, has made an enormous contribution to the lives of all Hispanic children of Dover.54
Although a few Puerto Ricans had purchased homes and established businesses before 1970, for the majority, the hope of obtaining property remained a dream until the Aguadans established their own Spanish-American Federal Credit Union in Dover in January 1970. Known to all simply as La Cooperativa, the credit union made it possible for Puerto Ricans to secure loans and mortgages previously denied to them. As a result, by the late 1980s, nearly 30 percent of Dover’s Puerto Rican families owned homes and other properties in the town and neighboring suburbs. Before the Cooperativa was founded, obtaining credit and loans had been a major problem for the Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics in Dover, in part because of the language barrier and partly because as newcomers they lacked a credit history in the area.55
At first, the Puerto Ricans solved their banking needs by keeping their savings in the strongbox of the Spanish-American Grocery Store, the first local bodega, which opened in Dover in 1957 in front of the train station (see Figure 5-2). Its owner, Nasario Rodriguez (Don Saro), a native of Fajardo, Puerto Rico, moved to Dover after spending several years in Brooklyn, New York.56 “Until we established La Cooperativa,” recalled Georgie Lo´pez, a founding member, “the people here kept their savings at the bodega even though Don Saro did not pay them interest.” Smiling, he added, “They kept their money in that box until the Dover Bank and Trust Company hired its first Puerto Rican teller, Jose´ Vazquez, in the late 1960s.” Lo´pez recalled also that on Saturdays, when most Puerto Ricans did their banking, “the lines in front of Vazquez’s window stretched around the corner.”57 The realization that the banks that saved their money were less than eager to extend them loans, led some of them, explained Francisco de Jesu´s, one of the seven founders, to create their own financial institution.58
Francisco de Jesu´s, then twenty-seven years old, and Carlos Figueroa, age thirty-one, both Aguadans, took charge of the initial phases of the project, first visiting a Puerto Rican credit union in the Bronx, and later seeking advice from the mayor of Aguada. After consulting with the officials of the Aguada Credit Union, the mayor of Aguada advised the two Dover leaders that, to succeed, their project needed the support of their county and state representatives. “Selling the idea to the state and federal credit union officials was no easy task,” said De Jesu´s, in part “because by then many credit unions had failed and partly because no one in our community was an economist or even a college graduate.” They persisted, and eventually won the support of State Assemblyman Rodney Frelinghuysen. The assemblyman, said De Jesu´s, “helped us to secure the charter of incorporation we needed” in January 1970.59
Having secured the charter to incorporate, they opened the Cooperativa with an initial sum of $55, deposited by the seven founding members. Without money to rent an office, De Jesu´s said, he kept the $55 in his desk drawer at the Dover Neighborhood Center, a federally funded community project where he and Carlos Figueroa worked as director and assistant director, respectively.60 They claimed to have used their positions at the Neighborhood Center, where they came in daily contact with prospective depositors, to sell the idea of banking at the Cooperativa and to convince the Morris County Office of Economic Opportunity (MCOEOM) to give them a seed grant of $17,500.61
According to De Jesu´s, the argument that won over his compatriots to deposit their savings at the Cooperativa entailed a promise that it would lend them funds to purchase their own property. “That strategy and the many hours of work we put in paid off,” stated Figueroa and De Jesu´s. By 1983, they explained, the Cooperativa had over 3,000 depositors and the initial $55 had multiplied into more than $7 million. It had also purchased a brand-new building in town and had been recognized as a model institution of its kind by both the state and federal governments.62 “The Dover credit union,” said John Curran, executive director of the New Jersey Credit Union League, “should be considered extremely successful by any standards.” He explained that while “the average delinquency rate among such institutions is 3 to 5 percent, the Dover rate is 2 percent.” In 1983, the only other Hispanic credit union in operation was in Paterson, New Jersey, and this had only 1,000 members and $400,000 in assets, while the Greater Morristown Area Credit Union, founded by blacks in the mid-1970s, had $1,200 in assets.63
Success in this economic venture, conceded De Jesu´s, was due in part to “our determination and hard work” and partly to “the trust we enjoyed in the community.” “That trust,” he said, “came from years of living together, praying together, working together, and simply knowing one another as neighbor, friend or relative.” It came also from the fact that the founders delivered on their promise to lend money to the depositors with which to acquire homes and businesses.64
In addition to buying homes and founding their own institutions, the Puerto Ricans of Dover also established a few businesses in downtown Dover. The first of these, as stated earlier, was the Spanish-American Grocery Store, opened by Don Saro Rodriguez. Located in the heart of the Spanish barrio, the store remains a landmark of the town’s Hispanic presence. Before the Aguada Social Club was founded, Don Saro’s store was the place where Puerto Ricans met to shop, exchange news, and save their money. A few doors down from the grocery store, and with Don Saro’s blessings, Ismael Acevedo opened a general store of his own in 1960. He named it Yasmin and Amy “in honor of his two daughters.” At first, he let his wife Leonilda manage it while he “continued to work for Don Saro.” As sales increased at Yasmin and Amy and “Don Saro decided to retire to Puerto Rico,” Acevedo took over the operation of his own store. His decision, he said, was welcomed by his wife, Leonilda, “who needed time to become a beautician.” Acevedo’s store is still in business and Leonilda owns a beauty parlor.65
In the 1970s, two Puerto Rican restaurants opened in downtown Dover. The first, El Coquı, closed recently, while the other, the Plaza Restaurant, closed several years ago. Their survival in the early years, explained Acevedo, was made possible by two interrelated factors: (1) “the fact that they catered to the single males living in furnished rooms,” and (2) “their willingness to serve meals on credit until their clients received their wages.” “Taking meals on credit,” stated Acevedo, “was then a very common practice in Puerto Rico that was carried over into Dover.”66 During the 1970s, Teodoro Sanchez and Angel Mendoza also opened their own businesses in downtown Dover. Sanchez opened an insurance agency and Mendoza a furniture store. During the following decade, Francisco de Jesu´s set up a travel agency, Travel Sun, and Carlos Figueroa established an auto insurance business, also in downtown Dover. In the back streets of the Spanish barrio, a few opened small garages or body shops, and women set up beauty salons or clothing outlets.67
The continuous presence of Puerto Ricans and the arrival of other Hispanic immigrants during an economic shift in the Dover area during the 1970s “intensified the ethnic discrimination against the Spanish speakers in Dover,” according to Jose´ Torres. It was that “discriminatory practice,” reported Torres, that led him and members of other Hispanic groups in Dover to found the Morris County Organization for Hispanic Affairs Inc. in 1977. A native of Barceloneta, Puerto Rico, a World War II veteran, and a Newark resident from 1945 to 1966, Torres worked as a state employee from 1966 until his retirement in 1983. His partial college training and his volunteer work with the Boys Scouts, he said, brought him to the attention of the Morris County Human Resources Agency (MCHRA) in 1968. This agency, in turn, hired him to work with the Hispanic community of Dover.68
His work in Dover, Torres explains, was to “find jobs for unemployed Hispanics, to help arrange classes and training for others, and to instruct the community in general about the services the county offered the poor.” After a short time at MCHRA, he discovered that there were “very few programs geared to Dover’s Hispanics because the majority of the funds were earmarked for the blacks [of Morristown].” He blamed the service inequality on MCHRA’s director, James Varner, who, he said, “assigned fewer resources to Dover, even though the problems there were becoming serious.”69
The realization that “Varner used us as a front to get funding we never saw,” explained Torres, De Jesu´s, and others, “was what led us to break with the MCHRA in 1977 and to establish our own office in Dover.”70 Torres noted that “during Varner’s tenure at MCHRA, the Office of Hispanic Affairs received little support from the Morris County office.” Varner dismissed the charges against him, claiming that “there were some hard feelings among some Hispanic leaders because I wanted to name a black director to the Dover Neighborhood Center.” Whatever the reason for Varner’s unpopularity within the Hispanic community, in 1981 he resigned his post under allegations that under his watch MCHRA had misused over $100,000 in federal funds.71
The goals of the Office of Hispanic Affairs, according to its founders, were to “provide social and educational services to the needy Hispanics of Dover, and to promote cultural programs that would benefit the entire Hispanic community.” Torres credited both the establishment and the survival of the Office of Hispanic Affairs to the determination and hard work of its founders, the activists Alicia Smolin, Ernesto De Salazar, Alvia Morales, and the Holy Rosary’s new priest, Father Felipe Carvajal. Father Carvajal, Torres explained, was particularly helpful, for he obtained an $8,000 grant from the National Conference of Bishops. That sum, Torres reports, “enabled the agency to rent its first office” on the second floor of the Dover Credit Union building.72
During the early 1980s, the county freeholders closed the MCHRA office and rerouted some of the federal funding to the Dover Office of Hispanic Affairs. Again, State Assemblyman Rodney Frelinghuysen, reported Torres, was instrumental in helping them to obtain a variety of grants for training through the CETA program (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) and for home improvement through the Weatherization Program.73 The Office of Hispanic Affairs, a joint project of several Hispanic leaders in Dover, remains an important source of social services for the needy members of the various Hispanic groups in Dover.
By 2000, enormous changes had taken place in the size and composition of the Hispanic population in New Jersey and throughout the United States. The Puerto Rican population residing in the United States totaled 3,406,178, roughly eleven times larger than in 1950. However, the rate of growth during each of the post-1960 decades had declined from 194 percent between 1950 and 1960 to 35 percent between 1980 and 1990. More important, the composition of the U.S Puerto Rican population had changed markedly. While in 1950 three-quarters of all U.S. Puerto Rican residents had been born in Puerto Rico, in 2000 more than half of all U.S. Puerto Ricans were born in the United States.74
By 2000, New Jersey’s total population ascended to 8,414,350 inhabitants, divided into the following racial/ethnic groups: white (6,104,705); black or African American (1,141,821); Hispanic (1,117,191); Asian (480,276); American Indian and Alaskan Native (19,482); Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander (3,329); and “other”(450,972). According to the 2000 census, Puerto Ricans totaled 366,788, or 4.4 percent of the state’s population and 32.8 of the Hispanics. The state’s distribution of population in 2000 reveals that Hispanics tend to concentrate most heavily in Hudson County (242,123), Essex County (122,347), and Passaic County (146,492).75
Fewer Hispanics (36,626) have been attracted to Morris County, where they represent (7.7 percent) of the residents, including 7,930 (1.7 percent) Puerto Ricans. One-third (10,539) of Morris County’s Hispanics live in Dover, however, where they represent nearly 60 percent of the town’s 18,188 residents. Puerto Ricans (2,413) represent 13.3 percent of the town’s residents and 22.9 percent of the town’s Hispanic residents. By contrast, in 1990, Dover had 6,098 Hispanics, including 2,730 Puerto Ricans, while the town had a total of 15,115 inhabitants.76
Updates of the 1988 interviews reveal that Puerto Ricans, although still the largest Hispanic group in Dover, have come into competition with other Hispanic groups. According to the 2000 census, Dover also has 2,050 Colombians, 1,557 Mexicans, and 2,134 “other Hispanics.” The Puerto Rican community leaders have either retired or are no longer as active as they once were, while their children have moved out to the suburbs and take little or no part in the daily struggles of Dover. Nonetheless, the institutions they created, such as the Holy Rosary Church, where all newcomers find welcome services in Spanish; the Aguada Social Club, where newcomers congregate to celebrate their Hispanic heritage; the Spanish-American Credit Union, whose assets of more than $30 million contributes to the prosperity of old and recent immigrants alike; and the Office of Hispanic Affairs, where newcomers find needed information and services, stand as reminders of their legacy. “In all of these,” explained Francisco de Jesu´s recently, “the Puerto Ricans welcomed the newly arriving Hispanic groups into our organizations, and today most of them run them, without any idea how much sweat and blood we put into building them.”77
Conclusion
In retrospect, the Puerto Ricans I interviewed in Dover felt fiercely proud of their accomplishments and guardedly confident about the future. They emphasized that they had “progressed” in a relatively short time because of their determination and willingness to work hard. They stressed the fact that they purchased property, started businesses, raised families, educated their children and often themselves, and also helped their relatives in Puerto Rico. In 1990, the mean household income for Hispanics in Dover was $44,303 per year, virtually the same ($44,366) as that of Dover’s total population. The 1990 census does not subdivide the Hispanic income by specific nationality, but since Puerto Ricans are the oldest and largest single Hispanic group in Dover, it is probable that they would have a household income on a par with their long-established neighbors.78 Those interviewed expressed gratitude for the opportunities Dover had offered, but insisted that it was their unity and vision that enabled them to succeed.
In a recent interview, Francisco de Jesu´s explained why political power has eluded the Puerto Rican community. “In my opinion,” he said, “political power has eluded us because our children, the best ones prepared for public office, have shown no interest in politics or even in the affairs of the Hispanic community. Once they grew up, they moved to the suburbs and forgot about this. The other reason is that the composition of the community has changed. The majority of the Hispanics in Dover now are recent immigrants who do not or cannot vote because they lack residence status. As you know, a community that does not vote does not count.” He recalled that only two Puerto Ricans from the second generation ran for office during the late 1980s, but that neither sought reelection when his term ended.79
Lack of political power and the changed economy of Dover and Morris County have created new challenges for the newcomers. De Jesu´s explained that the “good jobs” that attracted the Puerto Ricans to Dover between the 1940s and 1960s began to disappear during the mid-1970s, when factories closed or relocated and the mines and foundries shut down. The Picatinny Arsenal, which once employed many of the Puerto Ricans, changed its focus in 1976 from mining and weapons production to research and development. The loss of jobs in the better-paid sectors has forced many of Dover’s unskilled and semiskilled residents to find work in the service sector, and to accept minimum wages, at a time when the cost of living in Morris County has more than tripled since the 1980s. Despite the economic shifts, Dover continues to attract workers from Puerto Rico and other Spanish-speaking countries. According to the 2000 census, the Hispanic population of Dover increased by 4,000 residents since 1990. Family ties and the town’s reputation for safety are among the incentives.80
Some from the earlier Puerto Rican group have retired to Aguada “to enjoy the fruits of their labor,” to build homes, and to purchase farms or open businesses. Others, such as Juan Agront, Esaud Ramos, and Ismael Acevedo, have chosen to remain in Dover. They view the town as their home and see no reason to leave it. For Maria Agront and Herminio— whose children married members of other ethnic groups and purchased homes in the suburbs near Dover—this, rather than Aguada, seems to be the place to retire. As Don˜ a Maria explained, with a tinge of sadness, her children are “used to life here and would never consider living in Puerto Rico.” She hopes that if she and Herminio move to Florida some of their children might follow.
In sum, the study of the Puerto Ricans of Dover suggests that the struggles, accomplishments, and evolutionary patterns of that community were shaped by a set of variables that may not be found elsewhere. As stated earlier, in the specific case of Dover, the Puerto Rican community was composed of migrants from the same town, many of them related by blood or social ties. They arrived when the economy of Dover was thriving and jobs for the unskilled and semiskilled were available. The small size of Dover, its housing shortage, and its initial discriminatory practices forced the incoming group to stay together, to define itself in relation to its neighbors, and to fight as a united front for the rights others took for granted. The struggle for personal and collective survival in turn helped shape a small cadre of leaders, whose job it became to keep the community united. For without unity, they would lose their hold and their power.
Notes:
1. Gabriel Haslip Viera, “The Evolution of the Latino Community in New York City: Early Nineteenth Century to the Present,” Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition, ed. Gabriel Haslip-Viera and Sherrie L. Baver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 7; and Kal Wagenheim, A Survey of Puerto Ricans on the U.S. Mainland in the 1970s (Praeger Publishers, 1975), 4.
2. Wagenheim, A Survey, 4; Haslip-Viera, “Evolution,” 7.
3. Isham B. Jones, “The Puerto Rican in New Jersey: His Present Status,” Report commissioned by the NJ State Department of Education, Division Against Discrimination (Newark, July 1955) (hereafter cited as Jones, NJ Report), 8; and Frederick Tobias Golub, “Some Economic Consequences of the Puerto Rican Migration into Perth Amboy, New Jersey, 1949–1954” (Unpublished M.A. Thesis, Rutgers University, May 1955), 16.
4. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990 and 2000, NJ Census of Population Housing, Summary Tape File 3. Prepared by New Jersey State Data Center, NJ Department of Labor, May 1992 and August 2002, Profiles 1, 3. For statistics up to 1970, see Wagenheim, A Survey, 46.
5. The reasons for the Puerto Rican migration to New Jersey were compiled from the interviews I conducted. They vary little from those uncovered by several other scholars. For example, see Joseph Fitzpatrick, Puerto Rican Americans: The Meaning of Migration to the Mainland (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Second edition, 1987), 18–20; Centro de Estudios Puertorriquen˜ os, History Task Force, Labor Migration Under Capitalism: The Puerto Rican Experience (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).
6. Cited in Jones, NJ Report, 15; and Tom Seidl et al., “The San Juan Shuttle: Puerto Ricans on Contract,” The Puerto Ricans: Their History, Culture, and Society, ed. Adalberto Lo´pez (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishers, 1980), 417–32.
7. Cited in Jones, NJ Report, 15; and Golub, “Some Economic Consequences,” 8.
8. Jones, NJ Report, 15–17; Golub, “Some Economic Consequences,” 9; and Seidl, “The San Juan Shuttle.”
9. Jones, NJ Report, 18; Golub, “Some Economic Consequences,” 9; and Seidl, “The San Juan Shuttle.”
10. Jones, NJ Report, 19; and Seidl, “The San Juan Shuttle.”
11. Jones, NJ Report, 20.
12. Esaud Ramos, interview by author, February 20, 1988, Transcript, 1–6. English translation by author.
13. Ibid., 23–24, 26–27, 28–29.
14. Ibid., 29.
15. Information from several interviews; see also William Rawson, “Six-Month Economy Big Factor in Puerto Rican Immigration,” Newark Evening News, 2 December 1969, 30.
16. Information from several interviews; see also Ed Grant, “Puerto Ricans in Dover Hail from the Same Locale,” The Advocate, 5 July 1962, n.p.; and Robert
M. Meeker, compiler and editor, “Dover: The Forging of a Community” (1990), unpublished report, Dover Public Library (hereafter cited as Dover Report), 152.
17. For details about Juan Agront, see Robin Schatz, “Dover’s Roots Stretch to Puerto Rican Town,” Star Ledger, 15 April 1979, 22. Information about the Agronts was provided by every person I interviewed, including Maria Ru´ız Agront.
18. Ismael Acevedo, interview by author, July 5, 1988, Transcript, 5–6, 9–10,
11–12, 24–25. English translation by author.
19. Maria Ru´ız Agront, interview by author, March 5, 1988. Transcript, 2. English translation by author. See also Schatz, “Dover’s Roots,” 22.
20. Maria Ru´ız Agront, Interview Transcript, 24.
21. Information from several interviews; Ismael Acevedo, Interview Transcript, 24–25; and Maria Ru´ız Agront, Interview Transcript, 25.
22. Information provided by most of the interviewees.
23. Meeker, Dover Report, 52; Ismael Acevedo, Interview Transcript, 30; and Maria Ruız, Agront, 25.
24. Maria Ruız Agront, Interview Transcript, 25, 26.
25. Ismael Acevedo, Interview Transcript, 51.
26. Ibid., 51–52.
27. Ibid., 54–55.
28. Maria Ru´ız Agront, Interview Transcript, 18–19.
29. Ibid., 30, 31; Acevedo, Interview Transcript, 15, 16.
30. Francisco de Jesu´s, interview by author, August 12, 1988, Transcript, 36–37. English translation by author. Also Acevedo and Agront, interviews cited.
31. Meeker, Dover Report, 152.
32. Maria Ruız Agront, Interview Transcript, 27; Francisco de Jesu´s, 37.
33. Ismael Acevedo, Interview Transcript, 16, 53.
34. Maria Ru´ız Agront, Interview Transcript, 28.
35. Esaud Ramos, Interview Transcript, 39–40.
36. Ed Grant, “Puerto Ricans in Dover.”
37. Carlos Figueroa, interview by author, July 25, 1988, Transcript, 23–24. English translation by author.
38. Jorge (Georgie) Lo´pez, interview by author, January 21, 23, 1988, Transcript, 16. English translation by author.
39. Esaud Ramos, Interview Transcript, 35, 36.
40. Jorge Lo´pez, Interview Transcript, 16; Carlos Figueroa, 24.
41. Esaud Ramos, Interview Transcript, 70–71.
42. Maria Ruız Agront, Interview Transcript, 56.
43. Information provided by several interviewees.
44. Carlos Figueroa, Interview Transcript, 24–25, 26–27.
45. Jorge Lo´pez, Interview Transcript, 26.
46. Carlos Figueroa, Interview Transcript, 27–28.
47. Information from several interviews.
48. Carlos Figueroa, Interview Transcript, 28, 29–30.
49. Ibid., 31.
50. Maria Ru´ız Agront, Interview Transcript, 56.
51. Carol Talley, “Town Swings to a Latin Beat,” Daily Advance, 14 September 1970; see also David Salowitz, “Dover Hispanics Celebrate with Cultural Festival,” Daily Record, 6 September 1982. Jorge Lo´pez, one of the founders of the Fiesta Latina, describes its purpose, Interview Transcript, 42.
52. Details provided by Felicita (Alicia) Santiago Smolin, interview by author, January 20, 1988, Transcript, 33. Ismael Acevedo, Interview Transcript, 36–37.
53. Alicia Santiago Smolin, Interview Transcript, 33–34.
54. Ibid., 34–35.
55. The need for founding the credit union, La Cooperativa, was discussed by its founding members, including Francisco de Jesu´s, 39–44; Carlos Figueroa, 31–32; and Jorge Lo´pez, 39–45. See also James Kullander, “Hispanic Credit Union Earns Success,” Daily Record, 27 December 1981.
56. Ismael Acevedo, Interview Transcript, 55–56.
57. Jorge Lo´pez, Interview Transcript, 39–41.
58. Cited in Kullander, “Hispanic Credit Union.”
59. Francisco de Jesu´s, Interview Transcript, 41. See also Judy Peet, “Tight-knit Hispanic Community Carves Niche in Quest of Upward Mobility,” Star Ledger, 15 March 1983, 10.
60. Francisco de Jesu´s, 41; Carlos Figueroa, 32; Lo´pez, 41; and other sources cited.
61. Peet, “Tight-knit Hispanic Community.”
62. Figueroa, De Jesu´s, interviews cited.
63. Peet, “Tight-knit Hispanic Community.”
64. Francisco de Jesu´s, Interview Transcript, 41.
65. Ismael Acevedo, Interview Transcript, 39–40.
66. Ibid., 32–34.
67. Francisco de Jesu´s, Interview Transcript, 31; Carlos Figueroa, 34–35.
68. Jose´ Torres, interview by author, August 8, 1988, Transcript, 29, 5, 13, 15, 31–32. English translation by author.
69. Jose´ Torres, Interview Transcript, 46–48, 51–52.
70. Ibid., 35; De Jesu´s and others cited in Peet, “Tight-knit Hispanic Community.”
71. Details about Varner’s resignation appear in Peet, “Tight-knit Hispanic Community.”
72. The goals of the Hispanic Affairs Office, discussed in interviews cited, including Jose´ Torres, 59–60, 60–62, 33–34; see also Peet, “Tight-knit Hispanic Community.”
73. Jose´ Torres, Interview Transcript, 60–62.
74. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000, NJ Census of Population, Summary File 3. Prepared by New Jersey State Data Center, NJ Department of Labor, July 2002. For the details about the 1950 composition of the Puerto Rican population in New Jersey, see Wagenheim, A Survey, 46.
75. U.S. 2000 Census, New Jersey.
76. Ibid., and U.S. 1990 Census, New Jersey.
77. Information on the changing composition of the Dover population is evident in the U.S. 2000 Census, New Jersey, source cited. For details about the impact of that population change, I talked to several members of the community. I also interviewed Francisco de Jesu´s on May 18, 2001.
78. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990, NJ Census of Population, Summary File 3.
79. Francisco de Jesu´s, Interview, May 18, 2001.
80. Meeker, Dover Report, 91, 170.