This article originally appeared in the February 22, 1983 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
From Aguadilla and San Lorenzo, from Barranquitas and Arecibo, they made their way to San Juan and hopped a $75 flight to Boston. Or they took the subway from the Bronx to the New York Port Authority terminal in Manhattan and caught a bus to Boston for eight bucks. Like so many groups before them, they found fetid apartments in once stately row houses in the South End and settled in to wait. They waited in the barely furnished apartments with the stained ceilings and the cracked plaster, waited for opportunities that could not be found in Aguadilla and Arecibo. They waited under the anxious gaze of their kids, under the compassionate eyes of the painting of Jesus, under the compelling gaze of the photo of the other messiah, Kennedy.
A few died waiting. Some migrated elsewhere. Some gave up. Some made it. Carmelo Iglesias, a young social worker in the 1960s, walked up and down the creaky stairs to their apartments to console them. He drank with the young men in a Tremont Street bar. He talked with the kids and old-timers on the corners of a South End just beginning to gentrify. One night, with a reporter in tow, Iglesias looked up from the street to the Pru, all lit up with the promise of a night out on the town - if you had a fat wallet. What does a Puerto Rican kid think, he was asked, if he stands there, looking up at such a sight? “If he’s introspective,” Iglesias said, “he’d probably want to take a rifle and blow every damn light out.” It was 1966.
It is 1983. The other night, Carmelo Iglesias, still counseling the needy, met with 20 others, many of them Latinos, in a nice restaurant. Nobody in the room believed that life here and now for the Puerto Rican, the Costa Rican, the Colombian, the Dominican is easy and full with promise. But in the years since he looked up at the Pru, Iglesias has seen Spanish-speaking teachers hired in the schools, translators put on duty in hospital emergency rooms, bilingual education implemented for the kids. Creating such change was not easy, nor are the changes enough. But they are the beginning of what is, in part, a political story of a community scrapping for its place in this most intensely politicized state. The meeting the other night was to discuss building a sophisticated city-wide organization to run a Puerto Rican, Felix Arroyo, for the Boston School Committee.
Ten Democrats were fighting for two state-rep seats in a district encompassing parts of the South End, Jamaica Plain, Back Bay, Mission Hill, and Parker Hill. The seats were traditionally Irish, the incumbents spawned from the political breeding grounds of Mission Hill and Parker Hill. A guy at the city’s election department had a tough time with one of the names, Alex Rodriguez. He accented the wrong syllable. There were three incumbents - William Carey, Joseph Loughman, and David John O’Connor - and at least one of them was going to lose, because redistricting had turned three seats to two.
At a candidates night in a South End church, Loughman told a racially integrated, predominately young crowd of college graduates and students, “I was an aide and chauffeur to James Michael Curley for the last eight years of his life.” The people were polite, but to them Curley was only a name, a piece of history, not a real person. Rodriguez finished fourth, behind the three Irish incumbents. Loughman’s ties to the late James Michael weren’t sufficient to elect him, and Carey and O’Connor went on to last hurrahs. Rodriguez went on to organize on every political and social level he could find. The Puerto Ricans hadn’t voted in force. “I’m going to start building a machine that’s going to win,” he promised a reporter. It was 1968.
It is 1983. The other day, John Sasso, the bright young man who ran Governor Michael Dukakis’s campaign and who now serves as his chief secretary, was answering some questions about the Latino vote. Twice, Sasso referred the caller to Alex Rodriguez, who had organized Massachusetts Latinos for Dukakis. This time around, the Latinos had done what Rodriguez wanted them to do back in 1968, when he said plaintively, “All they had to do was come out and vote, man. That’s all they had to do - just come out and vote.” In 1982, they voted. Rodriguez had made good on a 14-year-old promise. John Sasso pronounced his name correctly.
In 1982, the voice on the radio in Boston and Springfield was clearly that of Michael Dukakis, asking listeners to support him in the primary against Governor Edward J. King. The candidate was speaking the language of politics, but he was speaking it in Spanish. To campaign with foreign-language broadcasts is nothing new; it’s almost as old as radio. Over the years, voters have listened to appeals in Polish, Yiddish, Italian, Portuguese. But Spanish? In Massachusetts? It was a signal that Latinos of this state have arrived politically.
