Researching Peruvians in Paterson

Gianncarlo Muschi

After I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Social Communication in 2000, the idea of leaving Peru followed me day and night. Political and economic problems in the country created a difficult context for young professionals. For a short period, I worked in occupations that did not fulfill my financial or professional expectations. An aunt then suggested I come to the United States to see what I could do with my degree. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I arrived at Paterson, New Jersey on January 2001 without expecting to find so many elements of Peruvianness. Informal vendors and buses, smells of Peruvian dishes, and thousands of Peruvians crowding the downtown area made me feel as if I had never left Lima. Without realizing it, the idea of studying the Peruvian community in the area began with this first encounter with Paterson and its Peruvianness. After some months, I left the Silk City to pursue an academic future. I returned several times to visit family and always left with the impression that Paterson was becoming more Peruvian. This realization lead to the development of my doctoral thesis. I returned to the area to conduct field research in 2016 and, in subsequent years, I established relationships with community leaders, business owners, and officials of the Peruvian consulate who all contributed to my research. Being a Peruvian immigrant like them enabled me to gain their trust and to feel welcomed into their community. I began participating in public events and community meetings, becoming known among other Peruvians as the historian of the Peruvian community of Paterson.

Paterson is now home to a vibrant community of Peruvian migrants. According to the U.S. Census, almost 75,000 Peruvians live in New Jersey, most distributed among twelve municipalities of the northeastern counties of Passaic, Essex, and Hudson. However, officials from the Peruvian Consulate of Paterson estimate that the number of Peruvians living in the Garden State could be closer to 200,000. They have asserted that Census population estimates do not account for roughly two-thirds of the Peruvian population due to factors such as migratory status and non-traditional housing arrangements. Their estimates are based on records kept at the consulate regarding the number of voting-age Peruvians in New Jersey that officially record their vote in Peruvian elections every 5 years while living abroad. Accordingly, the city of Paterson is home to 30,000 Peruvians, who, together with African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans, constitute the majority of its population. Other clusters of Peruvian migrants live in neighboring cities such as Passaic, Clifton, Newark, Elizabeth, Kearny, Orange, and Bergen, while nearby New York City, is also home to 100,000 Peruvians. Co-nationals living in these towns and cities regularly visit Paterson for shopping, work, and participation in religious, sportive, and cultural events organized by the organizations formed by co-nationals.

While researching the community of Paterson, questions about its origins continued to resonate in my mind. Why did Peruvians decide to settle in Paterson? Who were the first Peruvians to arrive in the area? Did this first cohort of Peruvians prompt the migration of those who moved massively beginning in the 1960s? Previous literature about Peruvian migration to Paterson often reiterates inaccurate historical information regarding the origins of this flow of workers without supporting evidence. These studies maintain that the first Peruvian migrants arrived when textile workers from Lima moved to New Jersey after U.S. factories operating in Peru sponsored their relocation to its subsidiaries around 1930. To date, there is no evidence to substantiate the relationship between specific employers and sponsored migration. Thus, it became necessary for my project to elucidate the initial phase of Peruvian migration to Paterson. My aim was to outline patterns of migration and socioeconomic adaptation that help us better understand the subsequent development of Paterson’s Peruvian community.

As I reveal in this investigation, before the great wave of Peruvian migration to the area, a small group had already settled in the city as early as 1920. Emma Rensch, Victor Tarazona, Manuel Tarazona, Frank Maraví, Manuel Cuentas, Carlos Dulanto, Luis de la Flor, Carlos Cubillas, Ricardo Tello, and Talalca Tello were the first Peruvians in Paterson. They followed the trading routes established by U.S. corporations with investments in Peru and independently decided to settle in the Silk City. During the first half of the twentieth century, Paterson was still an important industrial center, a magnet for many waves of European immigrants seeking employment in local factories. These Peruvians, most of them former merchant seamen, followed the economic opportunities available to them in Paterson, reinventing themselves as textile workers. They adjusted to a society structured under North American and European norms in which traces from Latin America, and particularly from Peruvian culture, were nonexistent during most of their lifetime in the Silk City. In this website, I chronicle the life of this group of 10 Peruvians who arrived in Paterson between 1920 and 1950. With the use of untapped documents, pictures, tables, maps, and newspaper clips, it offers information about their socioeconomic background, identity, and families, complementing the findings I present in the book chapter that accompanies this website.

The European character of the city to which the first group of Peruvians arrived has gradually faded. In the second half of the 20th century, African Americans, Latinos, and migrants of other ethnicities changed Paterson’s demography and altered the city’s physical appearance. New waves of Peruvian migrants were less motivated to assimilate into mainstream Anglo society and more inclined to form their own institutions. This new generation of compatriots established the first businesses and ethnic organizations in the area that supported the arrival of family and friends. Today, Paterson has become the barrio of Peruvian migrants. This explains why living in Paterson has become an opportunity for many to continuously participate in creating their own cultural experience. In Paterson, they started a new life, raised their children, and launched Peruvian restaurants, bodegas, bakeries, travel agencies, and insurance offices, fashioning a prosperous future for their ethnic community in the United States. Thus, although the migration experience of the first Peruvians in Paterson is quite different from the process that their co-national contemporaries experienced, they established preliminary migration and settlement patterns that reverberated across successive generations of Peruvian migration.