Source: Daily Worker, November 8, 1927
Transcription/Markup: Paul Saba
Copyleft: Internet
Archive (marxists.org) 2018. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the Creative Commons License.
For the last few years New York has witnessed the greatest inflow of Porto Rican workers that ever immigrated in this land of Wall Street imperialism. Porto Rican workers are leaving their native country where once life was easy and wage slavery unknown.
At present, there are over 85,000 Porto Ricans in this city, the greatest number of whom are centered in the heart of Harlem.
Since American imperialism set its iron foot on Porto Rico in 1898, the economic life of that country underwent a thoro change, always for the betterment of the plantation owners and worse for the native workers. Eager of possession of the tobacco, cane sugar and coffee plantations, the Yankee trusts sought a prosperous field that would increase their capital in reducing the island with its 1,800,000 inhabitants into an American colony. From 1898 to 1920 the wage workers were shifting from the tobacco factories to the sugar and coffee fields with the periodical unemployment. Men worked in tobacco factories in winter while their women in the sugar plants in summer. Men and women had their seasons respectively. The rapid development of the American technic in production, resulting in an intense exploitation of the working masses, brought about the awakening of their class consciousness with the sequel: spasmodic strikes. A general strike took place for the first time in 1919 which was ruthlessly crushed. Since 1920, over 90 percent of the total production of the Porto Rican tobacco, coffee and sugar is imported in this country by Wall Street speculators. Fleeing from the hungry and misery-stricken abodes, the workers are entering the U. S. A. wherein they find a discrimination against their race, more exploitation and low wages. Most of them are unskilled workers; hotel workers, especially dish washers with an average pay of 10 to 12 dollars per week. Those who work in the tobacco factories are a little better off but the chronic unemployment makes them join the hotel and restaurant workers sooner or later. Still, others toil in shoe and electric factories and constitute easy prey for the employers as they work in open shops and know not of the benefit of unions.
Segregated as a race in a limited neighborhood, the Porto Rican workers have to struggle with high rents which have reached the peak in Harlem. The sanitary conditions are dreadful as they crowd themselves in an apartment in order to meet the monthly high rent.
Porto Ricans have been given the right of American citizenship and “political freedom” in return for their economic freedom. In spite of that, they deeply feel the rude exploitation. The colony has its headquarters in Harlem. A few mutual organizations sprang up which promised economic as political rights to their members not through struggle but through the political influence of their leaders.
For Tammany these creole workers constitute a fertile source for an increase in number of votes, in time of election. Hence the appearance of demagogic leaders in these organizations who aid the workers in deviating them from the real issue, i.e., class struggle.
There are two Porto Rican candidates on the democratic ticket for the November election. It is doubtful whether Tammany will gather many votes in spite of the demagogy of the political leaders of the organizations. Yet, promises and illusions may deviate a good number of these proletarians who belong only to the working class.
Porto Rican workers must understand that if Coolidge and his administration are responsible for the ruthless imperialistic policy towards the Latin American countries, it is because they are the agents of Wall Street. The republican party as well as the democratic party is the party of the capitalist class. It is an error to look upon the democratic party as the expression of a more liberal attitude towards these subjugated countries. If the democratic party were in the White House today, the same militaristic policy would have been pursued by its leaders.
The Porto Rican workers and all Latin American workers must realize that their national independence can only be gained through the downfall of capitalism which can be accomplished by the organized action of the workers on the industrial and political fields.