EU eT) What remained of the South End neighborhood was isolated from the re: the city by the huge swath cut by the interstate highway. The few busin now in the area are just a shadow of what was there hefore The loss of such businesses represented more than 1 oss of shopping, however. Puerto Rican-owned businesses were an important component of ethnic community, what for many pionero children was their most tangible with e experience of Puerto Rico, arlier immigrant groups, such businesses were also a crucial tool for social mobility for proprietors and their children: i As Tom Rodriguez observed Urban renewal tore the economic heart out of the community, They broke 1. you feel this is your house, even though youre ip the physical and geo You live in @ neighborhe renting, [remember going into buildings that had doors wide open, i¢ was | lke one big amily. But when you move into a profect. you don't know you TOM RODRIGUEZ: Tees nehing Mi eee eee ‘wrong witha pheto. Thats where yout neighbors. Its a whole different sense of existence ee ee | Aogether. When we needed ify, sis, a | Irban changes also broke up traditional Puerto Rican family life, forcing hundred people, a hundred ity people | Urban changes also broke up traditional Puerto Rican Eaal a rmohilzed. all we did was walk up and guez watched new construction that down the suget. And we'd be in City Hall with one hundred and fifty people s up elderly buildings, but our elder Hah aoe Sele now no wal businesses. To me a com ‘any withodt an economic heat isnot 1 commiiity. {believes integration, { telieve that you've got to five a choice it into new models, As a youth, Rodri didn't make sense to him: "They're putt ly traditionally [have] always been taken care of by family. We kept our elder ly at home.” With smaller, more expensive apartments and dispersed neigh: orhoods, it was no longer always possible to continue such caretaking roles. ‘What I dont beeve ins ot giving peopl a choice, I hey want 1 be In the more affluent shoreline towns, there wete variations on this hous~ Tee if people OU MEL way it save them some place to rent sith poo ple of their ovn Kind, like the Ttallans, always Tike the tis, ke everybody else ng and development problem, As property values rose, Puerto Ricans in towns such as Guilford faced displacement, The apartments which ha been scarce now disappeared or became very expensive to rent. People who were fortunate enough to own their own homes stayed; many others were forced to move on. In areas closer to New York, long-time Puerto Rican communities also 1970s andl 1980s, renovation of Norwalk downtown sulfered. During the 1 created apartments for aflluent commuters to New York City. Puerto Ricans moved to other towns in search of affordable housing, of left Connecticut entirely Marina Rivera, who has lived through all these changes, sac! When redevelopment started, the intent as to fall he old uiltings that were mv dint have any beat, they had broken win. same available, ws, people there, Some were living in awful conditions, When those apartment be nobody could afford the luck. So they moved_ poe ere sanonsscoroorermermnenenmmemmmenenn ff away to Stamford or Bridgeport o¢ went hack to serto Rico, then the p from the outside came in. It changed the makeup of the people wha went to problem fora lot ofthe people. Now city hall is svay up here, even though they have the buse ople have problems. [can see it also inthe people that goto the eallege, because some people can’ sill some at night, falier] 7 oelock theres np transportation, Industrial Decline As more Puerto Ricans came to Connecticut and settled in these crum- bling neighborhoods, there was a corresponding deterioration in the atti of many non-Latino residents towards them. Willie Matos of Bridgeport fee | that general harel times set off a chain reaction: j L think atthe begining people were not hostile to Puerto Ricans. We were You would land in New York for you in Bridgeport for you t i= people that were coming in to contnbure: there was ito welfare problem, no unemployment problem, few nized group or anything, and people just went about working andl taking eare 1c Ricans or blacks in Bridgeport at chac time, and there was no oF of eheit families and trying to set themselves up in a new environment. AS ple began to come back sn the competition be ‘not only for entry-level jobs in the shops- remember that at that tine even the ‘more and more people began to came in and as the pe from the war and layoffs stared to take place, and i in factories worked in factories le housing, So | think spulation, most of them, were employe Andla lot of ther that that began to create some friction, an of couse Puerto Ricans began clerand that their rights as American citizens be respected. So when that began to happen, that created a lot of commotion, and we were seen as people then that came in to take somebedly else’ job, etcetera, etcetera Whereas earlier European and Asian immigrants and Puerto Rican and African-American migrants had found an abundance of factory jobs in Connecticut cities, from the 1960s on most of the state urban a experience a decline in their manulacturing. Hartford alone lost 26,400 man- facturing jobs between 1963 and fully 36 percent.® Factories that had employed immigrants for generations now laid off hhousands of workers or closed shop entirely: Automation, competition from abroad, corporate owners who preferred to invest in other enterprises rather than w outdated factory equipment, and “runaway shops” moviri regions and countries with cheaper labor, all spelled drastic decreases it local manufacturing employment, Those Puerto Ricans who had worked in local inclustries for years were witnesses to these changes. Alex Lopez, who labored: EPRAIN DE JESUS; Here in ‘Wallingford, and in Meriden, there were ‘any large factories that employed a lot ‘of people, ike International Silver And there was lot of work, and language was nova barnes Since ther all those factories have closed one by one GIL DE LAMADRID: When the ecomomy started 1 get bad, manufactur fing companies saved closing, People got disphaoed and! they didet have any sails to irate to other jobs, Thats tone problem. The oiher problem i that ‘Windham basically has no transport tion system in place. When you're tll ing about going to Hactord, Manchester, Foxwoods those labor marlots ate closed because thete’s no trinsporiaion ‘You dont have aca, you dont have a Job here, you're dead in the water, cenceee |} for decades at Scovill Br s in Waterbury, gave a heartbreaking account of what he saw in 1981 Scovill depended a Tot on the army, wars. T remember when {started work over there, we worked on bullets. Cartridge cups, We worked 24 hours day. Lworked for five years, doing nothing but that, Bullets, That declined They dont use those; everything is dillerent. They the company} did't change. They kept working with the same thing they used to have; they did nit change the products To me, it was the administration. ‘They were there only to make the dollat: To get every cent they could get. they got a new job, they’d have to get into new tools, new machinery. That costs money. Mr. Baldrige dleided they could take better money to drop all this. Thats why they sold the place. Mier they sold swe thought somethin there. New jobs, better jobs, better ways of working, Nothing happ good was going to happen in Now all the old-timers, the engineets, the guys who know how to work! took them out, Now they've got nothing out thete but sctap, scrap, serap. Thats why [believe the place isnt going to last. Then they tried to take away what we got. That nev he best place to work, there ate betier plaees around. heard that they tried to take away some vacation, They dont want to give any more for pension: They ‘want the employees to pay lor the insurance and CMS and Blue Cross. They're in negotiations now. Maybe going to be a strike re is not th in this pice so m ‘The money reat. Now L gave up my job, 've heen working years, and ics getting harder and harder. So { signed oll the job uy ake five dollars an hou! Recently-arrived Puerto Ricans competed with older arrivals, African Americans, and white ethnics for increasingly scarce jobs. In Willimantic, for example, the poultry plant that had been an important stepping stone for nll Puerto Rican newcomers closed in 1972, and the town remaining textile began to phase out production. By 1983, study estimated that unemploy ment among Puerto Ricans in Willimantic was almost 28 percent.!!" The situa: tion was much the same in other towns of heavy Puerto Rican settlement Community Reactions These acute social and economic crises became apparent in the 1960s and have lasted into our own times, Community people at agencies responded in a variety of ways, In league with the Catholic and Pentecostal churches and other institutions, the proneros had founded many social setvice organizations in the 1950s and 1960s. On their own, they had JAMES FLORES: When I came here se 4, [began working in American “Thread. And at that time i was inthe Jast days, the last months of Arerican ‘heead, 1 worked there banding, paint ‘ng thread, even though I had « ‘Bachelors, I didnt speak English well. ‘One cant blame the Puerto Ricans for the Bight ofthe factories. The town [lle wp wth snany Puerto Ricans, (but) the lacsonies left because the federal gov- fexnmient made sonae very foolish agses- ‘ments favoring olber counties, 1m in Willimantic paying six dollars an hour, ‘85 hotter co go to South Carolina orto ‘Mexico oto Japan and pay two dollars So they left, Betause there were come ‘orld economic changes that favored the factory Might. The factories tet ‘Willimantic stayed behind sn dlificutes. ‘The Anglo hat wns ere, who was olde, he already had some capital, and he could leave wit bis capital to another place. But the poor recently arived Puerto Rican without captal stayed Joehind, trapped. RAFAEL COLLAZO; We were nego tiating labor agieement, and at ahout 230 in the alicrnoon the president of {he comporation came tolls that he sas very sary bul they were going 10 loge [the factory] The Hispanic work: force, the ones that worked steady, many ‘of them took ther reirement, they were therefor riveny-fve thirty years and thoy had the age- The ones that could hot relire, theyre working at other small shops, nol making the same money. We ace expetencinga very deep economic frais, The good-paying jobs are not there, We have alot ol people losing their homes, And us betng the lat ones fn, wore the fist ones out