Posted by
Gene on Thursday, August 07, 2008 3:05:02 AM
As an aunt was wont to say, we didn’t have a pot to pee in but there was no class envy, no riots, no gang warfare—except once when some Black kids intruded on “our territory” and we mobilized to defend our turf. I have to admit, I was once armed with a zip gun which scared the bejesus out of me and which, fortunately, I never used.But we were happily diverse in our fashion, and peaceful and relatively content with what little we had and not envious of those who had much more. You could say it was a microcosm of the time. That peace and contentment, now seen as a hallmark of America in the 1950s, came to a swift close after the invasion of foreigners. I still recall their first arrival, from Puerto Rico, sometime in the early years of that decade. Technically, they weren’t foreigners at all since Puerto Rico was an American territory, but they were foreign to us—in their language and their mode of living, and in their attitudes and lifestyles.
My particular neighborhood hadn’t yet entered “decline,” a polite term for slipping into a slum, as was the southern mile or so of the South Bronx but that status changed almost overnight. I still recall one hot summer day when that decline began. My dad was sitting in the kitchen reading the Daily News or the Mirror and smoking a Camel or a Lucky Strike when something whizzed past the window from the floor above. We looked down in the alley and saw that the missile with a downward trajectory was actually a bag of garbage which had unceremoniously been tossed into the alleyway, narrowly missing a family of alley cats who fell on the bag as if it were manna from the fourth floor.
Then ensued the inevitable interpersonal conflicts when vastly different cultures collide.
Our decline had begun in earnest and soon turned into an avalanche–of garbage–as tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans migrated north to New York and the South Bronx.
(For the rest of this article, please see http://genelalor.com)
To be continued…