|
|
|
|
|
|
BOOK
PRESENTATION & DISCUSSION: |
|
 |
PUERTO RICANS AND THE LEFTIST POLITICS OF THE 1920’s AND 30’s |
|
One of the pages there, it’s on page 64, if I recall correctly, there’s a photograph of a banquet that took place in December 1937 and in the reproduced version in the book you can’t really see it because it’s small. It’s a much larger photograph, but anyway, when I showed the book to my mother about two weeks ago, we took out the magnifying glass and we looked at the crowd that was in this photograph and one of the people that is in this banquet scene which, by the way, commemorated the retirement -- I don’t know what to call it. Anyway, Joaquin Colon, who Felix Matos made reference to earlier as one of the important community leaders, apparently decided to go back to Puerto Rico after the Second World War. So they had this event for him and in the crowd we could see with the magnifying glass -- you can pick out my grandfather, my father’s father, who was, as it turned out, this was one of the surprises during my tenure at the Centro, involved in Puerto Rican, Latino and West Indian politics during the 1920’s and 30’s. This was a story I had never been told, no one had ever explained this to me. My father had never sat me down and told me about the experience of his father and mother in the politics of the 1920’s and 30’s. Probably the reason for that -- if you know the period, especially the 1930’s, politics, especially in the city of New York tended to be more, shall we say leftist in its orientation. You had the American Labor Party which was a kind of socialist group, even the Republican Party was considered a progressive party because it was in opposition to the Democratic Pary which was controlled by Tammany Hall which, certainly in the 1920’s before they lost power was seen as a corrupt party presiding over a corrupt political system. So this photograph and two others I happened to find which showed either my grandfather or my grandparents were taken at banquets that were in part organized by these leftist groups. And I think my father was kind of leary about that in the 1950’s and 60’s. He never mentioned it to me or my brother. |