Word: barrio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Bodegas & Charms. In the Barrio (i.e., district), the Puerto Ricans have created their own city. The store signs are in Spanish. At the bodegas (grocery stores) they sell green coconuts, chick peas and mangoes. The carnecerias (butcher shops) sell Spanish sausage, salt pork fat, chicken feet (3 Ibs. for 25?) and salted pigs' tails...
...proliferation of such churches, largely sponsored by obscure evangelical Pentecostal sects, is by far the most conspicuous religious activity in the Barrio, though most Puerto Ricans (83%) are nominally Roman Catholics. Columbia University investigators found that though most Puerto Ricans still profess themselves Catholics, they attend church less regularly than they did back home...
...jobs, and there were fights because Negro girls went out with Puerto Rican boys. Puerto Ricans learned what it is to be the object of prejudice, often met discrimination. "The poorest they have in the store is good enough for the Puerto Ricans," is a common observation in the Barrio...
Naturally tidy, they keep the shabby rooms spotless, but there is no keeping down the cockroaches that scuttle across the linoleum flooring or the rats that infest the blocked-off dumbwaiters and the rotting spaces between the walls. (Every week 15 to 25 Barrio babies are bitten by rats as they sleep.) And Puerto Ricans, reared under a tropical sun that burns dry any refuse, have no feeling about garbage. They just heave it into the alley. The men have a hard time getting jobs. When they do, they find the U.S. tempo exacting. Said one plaintively: "If one fails...
...they stay? The Puerto Ricans of the Barrio dislike the big city's impersonal hostility ("People here are cold and act as if they didn't trust each other"), miss the music and dancing of the easygoing life they left. But the slums they came from were no better than the slums they live in now. If they have little chance in this generation of rising to the wide levels of opportunities as lawyers, doctors or businessmen, they have already begun to find places in U.S. society as workers and laborers. And then there are their children. Said...