Jesus Colon

Puerto Rican activist-journalist Jesus Colon (1902-1974) stowed away on a ship to New York at age 16 and became one of the first Hispanic writers to write in English.

His book A Puerto Rican In New York and Other Sketches is considered a classic piece of journalistic literature. Here is an excerpt:

"One of the questions that we are most frequently asked is: ‘How can I get to the Puerto Ricans?’ This is not a strange question to ask in a city like greater New York with more than 600,000 Puerto Ricans living, working and struggling along with the rest of our city's inhabitants. This is a question that is crying out for a correct answer, not only in our city, but in many other great cities throughout the nation where the Puerto Ricans have gone to live. ...

"...The first thing we must realize is that the Puerto Ricans have been exploited for hundreds of years. That strangers have been knocking at the door of the Puerto Rican nation for centuries, always in search of something, to get something or to take away something from Puerto Ricans. This has been done many times with the forceful and openly criminal way of the pirate.

"Pirates with such tragically ‘illustrious’ names as Cumberland and Drake. In one of those pirates’ assaults around the middle of the 17th Century, the bells of the cathedral in San Juan, Puerto Rico, were stolen and sold by one of their buccaneer ships in a little town known as New Amsterdam, just being built along the shores of the Hudson River.

"So, in the words of one of my Puerto Rican friends, when one of those 200 percent Americans asks us why do Puerto Ricans have to come to New York? We can answer: ‘We come to take our bells back.’ "

-- from "How To Know the Puerto Ricans," in A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (International Publishers Co., 1961)

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