Hilda Hidalgo and Olga Jimenez de Wagenheim
Dedication
We dedicate this book to the memory of Hilda Hidalgo. Hidalgo was a Puerto Rican community activist, feminist lesbian, and Rutgers professor, who provided leadership to many institutions and movements and became one of the most important Puerto Rican leaders in New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. Hidalgo was born in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, in 1929 to a middle-class family.
She interrupted her university studies to become a nun. After leaving the church, she completed her college degree in education at the University of Puerto Rico in 1957. She then completed a master’s in guidance counseling from the Catholic University in Washington, DC. In 1960, she moved to Newark to work with the Girl Scouts. There she became an anti-racism activist and joined Congress of Racial Equality, Americans for Democratic Action, and the New Frontier Democrats. She partook in organizing against police violence in Newark, and among many other involvements picketed the construction site of Rutgers University Newark to protest the lack of minorities in the construction industry. She also served as a mediator between the National Guard and the residents of the Central Ward during the 1967 Newark riot. When Black students occupied a Rutgers building in 1969, she served as the mediator.
Around the same time, she became involved in ASPIRA and soon directed the Newark branch, an involvement that lasted for many years. She joined the United Community Corporation, the most important anti-poverty coalition and agency in Newark, initially led by the dean of the Rutgers law school, William Heckert. In 1967 she left the Girl Scouts and joined the Child Services Association where she became the director. Hidalgo continued her activism in anti-poverty work and focused on how to expand the participation of Latinos in the United Community Corporation and other anti-poverty programs. She participated in the founding of La Casa de Don Pedro in Newark and was leader of the Puerto Rican Congress during the 1970s. Along the way, in 1969, she moved to work at the newly inaugurated Livingston College at Rutgers as a professor of urban studies while enrolling in a PhD program at Union Graduate school. She worked at Rutgers in various capacities for eight years and organized the BA in social work. From Livingston she transferred to Urban Studies at the Newark Campus. From there she helped create specialized MSW and MPA programs.
She became director of the first Puerto Rican Studies program at Rutgers-Newark. After Rutgers she served as commissioner of the Department of Education in New Jersey in the early 1990s. In retirement in Florida she continued to be active in gay and lesbian rights organizations. She died in 2009, leaving behind a legacy of community research, multisited activism, civic engagement, and educational innovation. In 2010 a street was named after her on the Rutgers-Newark campus, Hilda Hidalgo Way.1
1 Interview with Dr. Hilda Hidalgo, Griselda Cueto et. al, May 9, 1987, Newark Public Library, p17229coll54_629; Hilda Hidalgo Papers Finding Aid, Newark Public Library; Kelly Heyboer, “Rutgers, Newark Name Street after Professor Who Was a Pioneer for Gay, Hispanic Rights,” September 22, 2010, NJ .com, https://nj.com/news/2010/09/rutgers_universitynewarkname.html.
The editors
Foreword
OLGA JIMÉNEZ DE WAGENHEIM
At last there is a book that focuses on the historical presence and major contributions Latinos/as have made to the economy, society, and culture of the state of New Jersey since the early twentieth century.
The various chapters included in the book discuss the national diversity of the Pan Latino community and the places where they settled throughout the state, as well as highlight the opportunities and challenges each group encountered, and how the community contributed to its own and the surrounding community’s development.
In the case of Puerto Ricans, for instance, a large number of the migrants were brought in on labor contracts during the 1940s and early 1950s to help harvest various crops in the southern part of the state. Initially, the migrants returned home after the job was done but, in time, thousands of them found work in nearby towns and cities and moved to New Jersey permanently.
The earliest group of Peruvians who settled in Paterson, according to chapter 6, began arriving in the 1920s, and tended to have connections to American corporations that were doing business in several port cities of Peru, while others were seamen who eventually chose Paterson as their new home. The Peruvians who came between the 1940s and 1960, were attracted by jobs in the city’s silk industry.
The earliest Cubans to settle in Hudson County, New Jersey, according to chapter 9, arrived prior to the Cuban revolution and tended to be rural workers from the region of Santa Clara. These actually welcomed Fidel Castro when he paid a visit to Union City prior to becoming Cuba’s maximum leader. By contrast, the Cubans who arrived shortly after the Cuban revolution were mostly urban migrants who were fleeing the Castro government. As political refugees, they were generally welcomed and aided by the U.S. government in ways no other Latino group had been. Many of the new migrants who arrived in Hudson County settled in Union City just as Germans and other Europeans were leaving the city.
Chapter 12 focuses on the significant roles played by the Catholic Church in helping the Cubans adjust to the new environment they encountered in an English-speaking society. Though that chapter focuses mostly on the Cuban community, one could argue that many Latinos in other communities benefited from similar church programs. In my own study of Puerto Ricans in Dover, I found that the Catholic Church was instrumental in providing Masses in Spanish at the Dover church, offering English classes during the evenings for working adults, and helping to set up pre-kinder programs for the community’s children.
Most chapters discuss the economic conditions each group encountered at various times, and the ways they dealt with the opportunities available during the industrial bonanza of the war years, and how they adjusted when the industrial jobs disappeared.
A couple of the chapters discuss the language challenges most Latinos faced, and the racial and ethnic biases some groups faced while they tried to support their families, educate their children, and trying to fit in. Chapter 11 focuses on the important roles women played in the Peruvian community, though they were hardly recognized. The same could be said of other migrant groups, where women played significant roles that were, for the most part, ignored by the patriarchal societies they came from.
In general, the book offers wonderful insights into a Latino community about which little had been written. The fact that this book is dedicated to the late Hilda Hidalgo is significant, given that she was a pioneer leader in many of the struggles that resulted in the establishment of organizations that led to political empowerment, improvement of social services, and educational programs including the creation of the Puerto Rican Studies Department, and a master of arts social work program at Rutgers University.
In the process Hidalgo mentored many of us. I first met Hilda Hidalgo in the early 1970s, when I moved with my family to New Jersey after obtaining a master’s degree in Latin American history from the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo). I met Hilda on the recommendation of Professor Maria Canino, then director of the Puerto Rican Studies Department at Rutgers-New Brunswick. I had met Canino at a Puerto Rican Women’s Conference I had organized at SUNY-Buffalo. Shortly after I met Hilda, she recommended me to teach a course she had developed for the Sociology Department at Rutgers-Newark called Puerto Rican Life Styles. After obtaining a PhD in Latin American and Caribbean history, I remained at Rutgers-Newark for another twenty-seven years.
Following in Hidalgo’s footsteps, and with her help, I established a Puerto Rican studies program at Rutgers-Newark during the mid-1970s. Hidalgo ran the program during one of my sabbatical leaves. That program in turn led me to research the Puerto Rican community in Dover, New Jersey, and later to pursue the idea of creating an archival research center at the Newark Public Library (NPL) in order to begin documenting the Latino communities in the state.
A fortuitous collaboration with Ingrid Betancourt, a highly regarded member of the NPL staff, led to the creation of the New Jersey Hispanic Research and Information Center (NJHRIC) at the NPL in 2001. Years earlier, with the support of several Latino leaders, Betancourt had created the Sala Hispanoamericana, a resource center with books and other materials in Spanish, in order to better serve the Hispanic community in Newark and other cities.
One of the tiers of the NJHRIC is the Puerto Rican Community Archives, where I donated dozens of oral histories conducted by students in the courses I offered at Rutgers, as well as books and archival materials on various subjects pertaining to Puerto Ricans I had accumulated for nearly thirty years. Creating the archival component of the NJHRIC required having a trained archivist to manage it. That job was shortly thereafter entrusted to Yesenia López, a Rutgers-Newark graduate, who took it upon herself to train in the field after a brief apprenticeship under the guidance of now-retired head archivist Nelida Pérez at Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College.
I am not sure whether any of these ventures would have been undertaken by us in Newark had it not been for the lessons we learned from Hilda Hidalgo. I am glad this book is dedicated to her memory.