Word: rican
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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POPI. Alan Arkin is magnificent as a Puerto Rican widower struggling to get his two sons out of the New York ghetto in this funny, occasionally angry little comedy that is one of the year's most refreshing films...
...comedy and poverty mix, one of them is probably lying. In the case of Popi, the plight of the poor is told with harrowing accuracy. It is the laughs that arise from calculated invention. A Puerto Rican widower, Popi (Alan Arkin) holds down three jobs to keep his family together. He is kept so busy that his children's hour is shrunk to a minute, and his two boys, Luis and Junior, are reduced to shiftless street Arabs...
...simultaneous dishwasher, apartment handyman and hospital orderly frantically adds another occupation to his schedule: logician. His syllogism is primer-simple, though specious: 1) Puerto Ricans grow up to be busboys or elevator men; 2) Cuban refugees are hailed as heroes; 3) a Puerto Rican who passes as Cuban will be hailed as a hero. Turning theory into practice, he trains the kids to navigate an outboard motorboat, drills them on Cuban geography and orders them to speak solamente en espanol. Then he busses them down to Miami and turns them loose on the outgoing tide. "Better to drown...
Unhappily, those goals conflicted. To help minority group students, C.C.N.Y. admitted and gave special tutoring to less-qualified freshmen, but the numbers remained low. In April, 200 black and Puerto Rican students locked themselves inside the gates of the college's south campus. They wanted admissions policy to reflect the racial composition of the city's high schools, which are 45% nonwhite, compared with 12% at C.C.N.Y. They demanded control of faculty hiring and firing in the tutoring program, and a separate degree-granting school of black and Puerto-Rican studies. Backed by the politically appointed board...
...defied all previous attempts to persuade them to abandon seized buildings meekly came out when served with court writs. As angry demonstrations continued at universities across the country last week, however, it became clear that court orders have mixed results. At City College in Manhattan, black and Puerto Rican students did obey an injunction, evacuating property that they had occupied for 13 days, but savage fighting later broke out on campus between whites and club-wielding blacks and Puerto Ricans (see EDUCATION). At Howard and Dartmouth universities, radicals barricaded in school buildings ignored similar court orders. Federal marshals smoked...