MUSING At age 12, I boarded a TWA plane flight from Puerto Rico to New York. The plane may have been a TWA four-engine prop plane, or maybe was it was a four-engine jet, but definitely TWA and it did land safely in New York. To this day I am not so sure I personally landed safely. And shortly after that landing, in the mid-nineteen sixties, I began to learn terms that were foreign to my limited thinking by reading the Daily News to learn English. The only reason I needed to learn English was to communicate with my “American” (white) teacher and the “Moyetos” (Negros) at school and the neighborhood. Everyone else in my neighborhood was from or their families were from Puerto Rico (not many Dominica families yet) and you being a Puerto Rican Negro was different from the “Moyetos”, you were a “trigeno” or ”negrito” and said with (Carino). English was just a second language necessity. Mami and Papi did just fine with their Spanish only language skill at the jobs made available to them. I quickly learned from reading the Daily News that Negros and Puerto Ricans committed all the crimes. On slow news days, the papers will give mention to the Italians and build a news paragraph making sure to mention Puerto Rican and Italian together to remind the Italian community they were still tarnish by crime. How we Puerto Ricans arrived in New York was still a topic of discussion in the newspapers as well as in the neighborhood; “you came here on a banana boat”. No not me, I came on a direct flight on TWA!! As was the preferred method of defend, we Puerto Ricans definitely always carried a knife to a fight. The other lesson learned from reading the newspaper to learn English was the term ASSIMILATION. I later learn with a little more English fluency that you should carefully analyze a word that starts with ass. Assimilation is the point of my musing. The United States of America for all its faults is a good country. Just do not delude yourself in believing it assimilates all the citizens and they are govern in an equal system. Economics 101, capitalism requires cheap labor and to create cheap labor you need a division of labor. To achieve the goal of having cheap labor a system is set up that is separate and un-equal and justice is WTF where do you fit.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 21:25:30 +0000
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