The Cubans of Union City: Immigrants and Exiles in a New Jersey Community

Notes

Notes PREFACE 1. Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America. 2. All these studies are included and discussed in Warren and Lyon, New Perspectives on the American Community. 3. Ibid., 107. 4. Ibid., 98. 5. According to some writers, spatial concentration delays assimilation or integration into the larger society. New immigrants do not have to learn the English language to get by. See Rogg, The Assimilation of Cuban Exiles: The Role of Community and Class. 6. For example, see Lowenstein, Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933–1983, Its Structure and Culture. 7. Kelly, The Portable Kristeva (Introduction). Some of these reflections, in particular the work of Julia Kristeva, delve into the role of the unconscious. For a more political approach to the usage of experience in social and historical research see Scott, “The Evidence of Experience.” 8. Throughout this book, Cubans identified as the first generation are those who came from Cuba as adult immigrants or exiles. Cuban Americans of the second generation were born here or came from Cuba as children or adolescents 15 years old or younger. 9. For example, some interviews for Chapter 5 on religion preceded the 1999–2008 period because I conducted an ethnographic study of St. Augustine Parish before conducting interviews for this book. Similarly, in Chapter 4, on women, I include many interviewees’ quotes from the 1980s, a period when I was 168 Notes studying the labor force participation levels among Cuban women in Union City and West New York (Hudson County), New Jersey. CHAPTER 1 1. Cubans have settled in various places in New Jersey, including Elizabeth in Union County and Newark in Essex County, but Union City has always been the center of the state’s Cuban community. West New York, a smaller municipality next to Union City with an even higher proportion of Cubans, is viewed by many as part of the same concentration. The same is true of adjacent towns like North Bergen and Weehawken. But most people, especially those Cubans outside of New Jersey, refer to the whole area as Union City. A reason could be that the first Cubans who arrived in New Jersey settled in Union City. This book, at times, will incorporate information about other cities, even though its focus is on Union City. 2. Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, 50. 3. The New York Times, “Newest Immigrants Head Straight to New Jersey’s Suburbs,” B1. Throughout this work, the terms Latina, Latino, or Hispanic will be used interchangeably. 4. See Portes and Rumbaut for a discussion of immigrant spatial concentration , 28–56. For studies on transnationalism see Glick Schiller and Georges, George Woke Up Laughing: Long Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home; Glick Schiller, Basch, and Szanton-Blanc, “A New Perspective on Migration,” in Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered; and the articles in Goldin, ed. Identities on the Move: Transnational Processes in North America and the Caribbean Basin. Also, see Pessar and Graham, Dominicans: Transnational Identities and Local Politics, 251–273; Smith, Social, Educational, Economic, and Political Problems and Prospects in New York, 275– 300 in Foner, ed. New Immigrants in New York. 5. See Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migration that Made the American People;Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers, 67–81. 6. See Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America. 7. See the works of Alejandro Portes, Rubén G. Rumbaut, Silvia Pedraza, María Cristina García, Lisandro Pérez, María de los Angeles Torres, Guillermo Grenier, Ted Henken, Jorge Duany, Rafael Hernández, Antonio Aja, and Félix Masud-Piloto, among others. 8. Haslip-Viera and Baver, eds. Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition, 8–9; Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy. 9. Prohias and Casal, The Cuban Minority in the United States: Preliminary Report on Need Identification and Program Evaluation, 15–18. This study concluded that the census underestimated the total number of Cubans by 9.3 percent. The figure used here is the corrected one. 10. U.S. Bureau of the Census 2000. Table DT-1, General Demographic and Social Characteristics. 11. Many social scientists agree that the concept of race is socially constructed . Throughout this work, terms such as white and black will be used to Notes 169 denote phenotypical characteristics only. This topic will be further discussed in Chapter 7. 12. García...