10 CENTRO Journal volume xxix number iii fall 2017 Gendered Fault Lines: A Demographic Profile of Puerto Rican Women in the United States maura toro-morn and ivis garcía zambrano abstract Using U.S. Census of Population data, we offer a demographic profile of Puerto Rican women in the new millennium. Through a range of socio-economic indicators such as employment, education, income and poverty we seek to examine the socio-economic issues that fracture women s lives. The profile that emerges here is complex in that Puerto Rican women have made some advances, but they still find themselves vulnerable with respect to poverty. In bringing together multiple levels of analysis comparing Puerto Ricans across urban centers, comparing Puerto Rican women to men, and to White, Black, and Mexican women we seek to reveal the socio-structural processes that produce and reproduce inequality. [Key words: gender, inequality, Puerto Ricans, single-female households, poverty and migration] Maura Toro-Morn (mitmorn@ilstu.edu) is a professor of Sociology and Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at Illinois State University. She edited, Migration and Immigration: A Global View (Greenwood Press, 2004) with Marixsa Alicea. She co-edited Immigrant Women in the Neoliberal Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013) with Nilda Flores Gonzalez, Ana Guevarra and Grace Change. She has also published numerous articles about the gendered dimension of Puerto Rican migration to Chicago. Her next book is a collaboration with Ivis Garcia-Zambrana about Puerto Ricans in Illinois (University of Southern Illinois Press) Ivis García Zambrana (ivis.garcia@gmail.com) is an Assistant Professor in City and Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah. She is an urban planner with research interests in the areas of community development, housing, and identity politics. She has spent time as a professional planner in Albuquerque, San Francisco, Springfield, Missouri, Washington, D.C., and most recently in Chicago, where she worked closely with the Puerto Rican Agenda.
Gendered Fault Lines Maura Toro-Morn and Ivis García Zambrano 11 Introduction The publication of Sonia Sotomayor s autobiography, My Beloved World (2013), represents an important moment in the history of Puerto Rican women in the United States. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor s story is a powerful one taken from the headlines: a child raised in poverty by a single mother, protected by the unconditional love of her grandmother, and supported by family and friends, overcomes adversity to become Appellate Judge and in 2009 the first Puerto Rican third female appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her mother, Celina Sotomayor, emerges from her daughter s account as a complex woman with a difficult life: orphan at age 9, escaping from her native town of Lajas, Puerto Rico, to join the U.S. Army when she was 17, and moving to New York City, where she met and marriedjuan Luis Sotomayor. Celina s story is one of struggle and survival. Sonia Sotomayor struggled too. When she was nine years old her father died, and the loss was significant for her and for her family. As she put it: When I look back on my childhood, most of my memories are mapped on either side of certain fault lines that split my world. Sotomayor s story defies the stereotypes and negative images that existed (and continue to exist) about Puerto Rican women. Using Sotomayor s insight, the question needs to be raised: what are the fault lines that have historically shaped Puerto Rican women s life chances? Nearly two decades into the new millennium, what is the socioeconomic profile of Puerto Rican women today? How do Puerto Rican women fare in key socio-economic indicators in contrast to Puerto Rican men, White women, immigrant women, and other women of color? Data for this paper have been compiled from the 2000 and 2010 U.S. Decennial Census, and the U.S. American Community Survey 1 (ACS) 5-year estimates (2006 2010) to analyze Puerto Rican women s profiles along a series of key demographic indicators, focusing on issues of poverty, income, education, and employment. Whenever possible we also draw on the vast body of narratives biographical, ethnographic, and historical that exists about Puerto Rican women to further contextualize and humanize the demographic data we offer here. This article offers an analysis of the Puerto Rican experience that is attentive to gender differences within the Puerto Rican community. We recognize that in the last twenty years scholars from a range of disciplines have produced a vast and important body of work attentive to the experiences of Puerto Rican women as migrants (Alicea 1997, 2001; Aranda 2006, 2008; Ellis and Conway 1996; Pérez 2001, 2004; Toro- Morn 1995; Whalen 1998; Sánchez-Korrol 1994); as workers (Cintrón-Vélez 1999; Toro-Morn 2001; Ortiz 1996); as members of transnational families (Toro-Morn and Alicea 2003; Aranda 2008; Torruellas, Benmayor and Juarbe 1996). Puerto Rican women have written eloquent personal narratives about their experiences too (So-
12 centro journal volume xxix number iii 2017 tomayor 2013; Moreno 2011; Padilla and Santiago 1993; Santiago 2006; Carrion 2010; Velazquez Vargas 2008; Perez 2014). At the broadest levels, this paper builds upon that work and seeks to deepen the conversation by offering a demographic profile that is attentive to the unique issues that women have faced. Further, by focusing on the experiences of Puerto Rican women, this essay seeks to contribute to the body of feminist work that focuses on gender as a category of analysis and connection (Hill Collins 1990). Feminist scholars of color have argued that one of the challenges facing scholars at the turn of the twenty-first century is to account for the vast inequality facing women and men in communities of color. Inequality cannot be reduced to one category of oppression or another; instead, they argue it must be analyzed and understood as existing in the multiplicity of intersections. A gender perspective is attentive to the fact that historically race, class, and gender have intersected to create locations of inequality. At the turn of the twentyfirst century, we live in societies that still value men s work over women, as evidenced in the consistent wage inequality revealed by census of population figures, a problem serious enough to be fodder for the 2016 presidential campaign. We also live in societies that are deeply racialized, a condition that Puerto Ricans have not been able to escape since their incorporation as a colony in 1898 (Grosfoguel 2003; Suárez Findlay 2014). Puerto Rican women have encountered a gendered racialized inequality that has spelled disaster for their families. Poverty is the singular most significant problem women have faced across key U.S. Puerto Rican communities. But, women remain committed to the labor market and to working, even if it is for poverty wages. Demographic data cannot fully account for all of these intersecting locations, but it offers a point of departure through which we can raise questions for future research. This essay also seeks to engage the main objectives of this special issue of the CEN- TRO Journal. It challenges social science accounts that have implicated Puerto Rican women in conversations about the failure of Puerto Ricans families to assimilate. At the broadest level, generations of scholars starting with Milton Gordon s classic, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins (1964) have claimed that the lack of assimilation can be explained by Puerto Rican s inability to escape poverty. In the 1980s and 1990s, conversations about poverty become identifiably conversations about women, namely, the percentage of Puerto Rican families headed by women who have lived consistently and historically below the poverty level. These arguments, whether evident or not, placed a great deal of the burden and responsibility for failure to assimilate on Puerto Rican women, and their purported inabilities to provide a stable family life. These arguments are deeply problematic. They tend to take a blame the victim approach since they present female-headed house-
Gendered Fault Lines Maura Toro-Morn and Ivis García Zambrano 13 holds, like Sonia Sotomayor s, as pathological and deviant, unable to conform. Here we offer evidence that inequality is a gendered issue not solely women s because the structural sources of women s position in the economy, labor market, employment, and unemployment must always be seen in relation to men in the same category and to other groups in relation to each other. In bringing together multiple levels of analysis comparing Puerto Ricans across key urban centers, comparing Puerto Rican women to White, Black, and Mexican women we seek to reveal the socio-structural processes that produce and reproduced poverty. Most poor women are not on the welfare rolls; they work for wages. Across the board women still earn lower wages than men and what they earn does not support their families. Here we place Puerto Rican women at the center of this broader conversation to reveal their vulnerability and shed light on the conditions that have keep Puerto Rican women subordinated. We draw on available social science literature to review the unique problems that Puerto Rican women faced as they reconstructed their homes and families in key urban centers. Our paper is organized in the following fashion. In the first part, we offer an analysis that is attentive to the historical legacy of colonization and migration and its differential impact on Puerto Ricans. In the aftermath of the Island s colonization, Puerto Rican men and women migrated to large urban centers in the U.S. New York City, Chicago, Boston, to name a few in search of work, creating an ethno-racial landscape of incorporation that needs to be reviewed. The question has been asked: What happened to those Puerto Ricans? Were they able to achieve successful incorporation? We draw on available social science literature to review the unique problems that Puerto Rican women faced as they reconstructed their homes and families in key urban centers. In the second part of this paper, we turn to our analysis of the problem of poverty, in particular the feminization of poverty. Poverty and unemployment are issues that continue to afflict Puerto Rican women in both the Island and U.S. communities. Relative to other groups, we found that Puerto Rican women continue to encounter high rates of poverty for female-headed families. In the third part of this paper, we compare Puerto Rican women across several groups: White, African American, and Mexican women. This comparison is important because it shows how Puerto Rican women fare in contrast to other women at similar levels. In the conclusion, we come back to the story of Sonia Sotomayor to raise some final questions and offer some closing remarks.
14 centro journal volume xxix number iii 2017 Historical Origins and Migrations: Then and Now Table 1 offers an overview of the larger population distribution of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Historian Carmen Whalen (2005, 41) writes that where they settled, Puerto Ricans sought to adjust to and mold their new surroundings to meet their needs, as well as to improve conditions for themselves and others. At the turn of the new millennium, the large concentrations of Puerto Ricans continue to be found within Northeastern cities, Hartford with the largest share of the city s population Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Chicago also remains an important site for Puerto Rican settlement. But cities in Florida Miami, Orlando, and Tampa are quickly gaining ground and adding their own chapters to the larger narrative of the Puerto Rican diaspora. In terms of absolute numbers, New York City has more Puerto Ricans (765,527) than any other city, followed by Philadelphia (121,175) and Chicago (100,280). Underlying the distribution of Puerto Ricans across U.S. cities lies a complex history of colonialism, labor exploitation, racialization, and gender oppression of Puerto Rican men and women. Historian Eillen Suárez Findlay (2014) puts it best when she states that the U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico was justified through gendered and racialized assertions about Puerto Ricans alleged lack of modernity and consequent unfitness for self-governance. In their view, educated men did not measure up to the task of creating a new social order, and working class men lack the virile strength of character required for political participation. The racial ambiguity of Puerto Ricans also worried the new colonial power, a characteristic they attributed to women s Table 1. Puerto Rican Population in Eight U.S. Cities, 2010 City Number Percentage New York, New York 765,527 9.50 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 121,175 8.10 Chicago, Illinois 100,280 3.70 Hartford, Connecticut 41,296 33.10 Boston, Massachusetts 29,998 5.00 Orlando, Florida 24,901 10.70 Tampa, Florida 23,296 7.00 Miami, Florida 13,323 3.40 Sources: 2010 U.S. Decennial Census.
Gendered Fault Lines Maura Toro-Morn and Ivis García Zambrano 15 sexuality and to the existence of consensual unions. To be sure, some Puerto Rican labor leaders and activists at the time welcomed the new colonial power because of the potential for democratic rule, economic prosperity, and greater political representation (Suárez Findlay 2014). But these hopes and aspirations were short-lived in fact, crushed when the U.S. imposed economic changes that transformed Puerto Rico s economy. These changes disrupted the gender division of labor for working families. For Puerto Rican women, colonialism ushered the slow but intense journey to becoming wage earners and migrating to U.S. communities in search of opportunities for themselves and their families. We know that women migrated in a variety of conditions, as members of families, alone, or connected to larger networks of friends and families. Broadly, since 1898, U.S. colonialism broke havoc in the lives of women in both the Island and U.S communities, uprooted them from their communities of origin, pushed them into employment sectors that offered low wages, and stretched their gender roles as mothers, workers, and members of families. She notes the paradoxical position of migrants as bringing nontransferable skills and transferable skills that were not transferred. A rich body of historical and sociological work has documented how initial waves of migration led to the settlement of Puerto Ricans in New York City (Acosta Belén and Santiago 2006; Baker 2002; Sánchez-Korrol 1994). Those that arrived in the early decades of the twentieth century encountered a city that knew little about them and could not differentiate Puerto Ricans from the large number of African Americans who were also arriving in the city at the time from the agricultural south. Ray Suarez (2013, 73) writes that for a large number of Puerto Ricans, their first castle on the U.S. mainland was an aging tenement building in East Harlem. The neighborhood has been welcoming immigrations for decades: southern Italians, Germans to the south, African Americans to the west in Central Harlem. Before long, corner groceries catering to Puerto Ricans tastes appeared, along with botanicas. Hollywood actress, Rita Moreno, migrated from Puerto Rico to New York in 1936. She was thirteen years old when she became a performer to help support her family (Suarez 2013). Celina (Sonia Sotomayor s mother) found herself in the Bronx, as a single woman. She didn t want to go back to Puerto Rico. Her fiancé told her to stay in New York so that they could be married as soon as she was out of the service. This is how Sotomayor (2013, 60) describes their early life: The whole family piled into
16 centro journal volume xxix number iii 2017 two bedrooms, girls in one, boys in the other. Until the newlyweds found their own place downstairs. The building was an old tenement, with dark and narrow rooms, but their kitchen was big and Juli [Sotomayor s father] made it beautiful. Life in the early barrios of New York City was hard for both men and women. Historian, Virginia Sánchez Korrol (1994) described el barrio as a tightly knit community. Grocery stores, barbershops, and tenement buildings provided spaces for Puerto Ricans to gather and celebrate weddings, baptism, and other events. Clara Rodriguez (1989, 2) adds that the early migrants were diverse in terms of the occupations represented, ranging from displaced agricultural workers, artists, skilled artisans, professionals, students, writers. She notes the paradoxical position of migrants as bringing nontransferable skills and transferable skills that were not transferred. There were moments in the early stages of community marked by violence and racial prejudice too. Anthropologist Gina Pérez (2004, 17) reminds us that like most human experiences, the consequences of displacement are gendered. In other words, men and women experience migration and settlement differently, not because of inherent social differences but because hierarchies of power and privilege shape their lives. Rita Moreno (2014, 12) writes in her autobiography, The first impression I had of being a newly emigrated Puerto Rican to the mainland was to feel frightened and unwanted. If I could have reboarded the rancid ship, SS Carabobo, and made my way back to San Juan on a tide of nausea, I would have done so gladly. Instead, Mami and I trudged into America... Juanita Sanabria, a young woman from Yabucoa, grew up hearing about New York. She shared her story with Ray Suarez (2013, 140). Juanita was excited by the idea of New York. She said, I imagined myself in this glamorous place with glamorous people. But, it was really hard, too. I had never been separated from my family. We were always together. I was in the middle of thirteen kids. No one in my family had gone to New York yet but many in the town had already left there was never enough food on the table. My father was a farmer even though his farm had grown to almost a hundred acres, a farmer could not make a living in Puerto Rico. Juanita and many others like her found a well-established community, but not for long. Suarez captures the crisis that engulfed Puerto Ricans in the New York when he notes that a desperate people hitched their futures in American to a city on the verge of a thirty-year slide. It was a choice that would end up for many to be calamitous, but at first the new comers adjusted, and struggled. As Acosta-Belén and Santiago (2006, 55) note, most women found employment in the New York garment industry, as Juanita Sanabria did. She was paid a penny for a dress. By all accounts, the most significant movement of Puerto Ricans until the current movement to Florida took place in the 1950s as the Island underwent
Gendered Fault Lines Maura Toro-Morn and Ivis García Zambrano 17 an ambitious economic development program, Operation Bootstrap, which transformed the Island into a heaven for foreign investment. Operation Bootstrap is well known for accelerating the entrance of women into the labor force (Acevedo 1993) and for producing the most significant migrations from the 1950s through the 1970s (Acosta-Belén and Santiago 2006). The populist dreams and migration policies of Luis Munoz Marin led to the consolidation of New York City as the largest community in the U.S. and to the growth of significant communities outside the Northeast, such as Lorain, Ohio, and Chicago, Illinois. In their classic study, Puerto Rican Families in New York City: Intergenerational Processes, Lloyd Rogler and Rosemary Santana Cooney (1984) noted that the decade of the 1950 s registered the highest net transfer of Puerto Ricans to the mainland, with an average annual net transfer of about 46,000 persons, the peak year of 1953 bringing the net balance of more than 73,000 Puerto Ricans. This was a working class migration as most men and women who left had modest levels of education and came to do mostly service and manufacturing work. Today, we know that the movement to Florida has surpassed these figures and has now become yet another historic migration, a topic we address later in this section. A gendered analysis of this migration reveals how development policies placed Puerto Rican women at the center of the Island s woes (Suárez Findlay 2014; Toro- Morn 2001). The precursor to the current industrialization model had already introduced the idea that the Island s population woes were decidedly due to the high fertility rates of poor women (Pérez 2004). Further, Operation Bootstrap came with its own gender logic: designed to improve the employment opportunities of men by creating el nuevo hombre puertorriqueño. Like other modernization programs in the hemisphere, Operation Bootstrap targeted specific groups namely women and poor Puerto Ricans in order to create modernity. As Pérez (2004) argues, progress and modernity became closely identified with migration, whether it was real or government induced. The migration of Puerto Ricans to Chicago was also shaped by gender dynamics (Toro-Morn 1995, 1999). Both men and women were contracted to work men in the steel mills and women in domestic work but the migration of women came with an additional quality. The government pushed for their migration on the grounds that they were inherently suited for this work (Toro-Morn 1999). Further, historical correspondence between U.S. and Puerto Rican government officials revealed the gendered calculations to move women of child- bearing ages to U.S. communities as a strategy to guarantee the success of the development program. In New York City, Puerto Ricans dispersed throughout the city, leading to significant communities in Washington Heights, East Harlem, and the Lower East Side
18 centro journal volume xxix number iii 2017 of Manhattan, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the South Bronx. These communities became identified as areas with a high percentage of disadvantaged families. Puerto Rican leaders worked hard to overcome urban problems of housing discrimination and lack of educational opportunities for second= and third-generation Nuyoricans. In the 1960s, more than one million Puerto Ricans were living in the U.S., most of them like Juan Gonzalez, Rita Moreno, Sonia Sotomayor, and Rosie Perez in New York City. Juan Gonzalez (2011, 90) writes that most Puerto Ricans migrants were quietly pushing carts in what remained of the garment industry, cleaned bedpans in hospitals, washed dishes in hotels and restaurants. In contrast, the second generation, including persons like Sotomayor and Gonzalez, faced the educational system and their a sink or swim discrimination. Juan Gonzalez (2011, 91) describes his family as a melting-pot success story. He and his siblings, all first- generation, college-educated Puerto Ricans, went on to become success stories in their own right, but they remained deeply aware that American society still regarded Puerto Ricans as less than full Americans. Juan Gonzalez and other Puerto Ricans of his generation responded to the mistrust by asserting their humanity and identity through protest. He was one of the founding members of the Young Lords. Evelina López Antonetty channeled her activism into education. Others channeled their activism through poetry, music (salsa), and writing. In the 1970s and 1980s, the life chances of Puerto Ricans in large urban centers were deteriorating fast. Acosta Belén and Santiago (2006, 109) note that the large scale migration of Puerto Ricans to New York City, Chicago, and the Northeast coincided with a sustained period of economic change in these areas. There was increasing evidence that the United States was embarking on a process of economic structural change, later to be referred to as deindustrialization, which culminated in New York City s fiscal default in the mid-1970s. For Puerto Ricans this played out in very unfortunate ways. The US Commission on Civil Rights proclaimed categorically that mainland Puerto Ricans were mired in the poverty and cast serious doubt in the ability of future generations to escape this problem. As mentioned above, Puerto Rican leaders and activists tried to address those issues in their communities, but a structural problem like poverty requires different interventions. The next section of our paper addresses the issue of poverty in the Puerto Rican experience, but it is important to note that the current economic crisis in Puerto Rico had ushered yet another historic movement of Puerto Ricans to the U.S., this time mostly to Sun Belt cities and Florida (Silver 2014). Over a century of migrations has earned Puerto Ricans the label a nation on the move (Duany 2002). More recently Edwin Meléndez and Carlos Vargas-Ramos
Gendered Fault Lines Maura Toro-Morn and Ivis García Zambrano 19 (2013, 12) declared Puerto Ricans modern-day nomads. The Wall Street Journal recently introduced the label of refugees to describe the current economic crisis and migrations taking place from Puerto Rico to mostly Sun Belt states and Florida. The U.S. Census of Population marked a historic demographic point in 2004 when it reported that the number of Puerto Ricans living in the mainland exceeded the population of Puerto Rico. Today, migration continues to be fueled by the legacy of over one hundred years of colonialism, failed economic policies, and now the economic collapse of Puerto Rico s economy, made evident in May 2016, when Puerto Rico defaulted on its loan obligations. In contrast to earlier waves of migrants, this new wave is going mostly to Florida. Edwin Meléndez and Carlos Vargas-Ramos (2013, 9) suggest that if these patterns continue, by the end of the decade, it is probable that two-thirds of Puerto Ricans will reside stateside. They add that it is also likely that the state of Florida will have as many Puerto Ricans residents as the state of New York, the history port of entry and traditional enclave for Puerto Ricans. The Florida chapter of the Puerto Rican diaspora has faired a little bit better than previous waves. Jorge Duany and Félix Matos-Rodríguez (2006) point out that Puerto Ricans in Central Florida have been more successful in terms of income, occupational, educational, and residential characteristics. In other words, the Puerto Ricans that have moved to Orlando tend to represent all sectors of the Island s labor force, but most prominently white-collar workers. Puerto Ricans in Florida are more educated, and Puerto Rican families have higher incomes than those in New York City and the national average. The Institute of Statistics in Puerto Rico reports that in 2012 and 2013 Puerto Rican migration to Florida has included more females than males. Given the recent nature of this migration, work that addresses its gendered dimensions has yet to be done. In the next pages, we turn to examine the struggles Puerto Rican faced with poverty, income inequality and the feminization of poverty. Poverty: A Fault-Line Then and Now There was a time albeit short-lived when some Puerto Ricans were characterized as a model minority. Anthropologist Gina Pérez (2004) discovered that when the Chicago media learned about the migration of Puerto Ricans to the city, there was a concerted effort to compare Puerto Ricans to earlier hardworking European immigrants and to the not-so-hardworking New York Puerto Ricans. According to Pérez (2004, 75), the Chicago Daily News trumpeted Chicago Puerto Ricans as an upbeat West Side Story: they were peaceful and furiously ambitious while New York puertorriqueños were violent, welfare-dependent, and involved in gangs. This depiction of Chicago as a model minority of hardworking families, provided a brief
20 centro journal volume xxix number iii 2017 reprieve from the national argument of problematic and unassimilated dark-skinned newcomers; however, it created a new difficulty: the insidious vilification of the New York Puerto Rican experience. The model minority myth with its attendant gender ideology hardworking men and women in peaceful patriarchal families did not last too long for Puerto Ricans in Chicago. In June 1966, the Division Street Riot in the heart of the Puerto Rican community brought Chicago s love story with the idea of Puerto Ricans as example of a modern Horatio Alger to a sharp close. What happened to Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of the great post-war migrations? Demographic data show that the median family incomes for Puerto Ricans in the Northeast were much lower than for those in the Midwest (Baker 2002, 75). Although not all northeast communities had uniformly low incomes, on average they tended to be low. Further, this migration was a working class movement, and migrants had relatively low skills. To make matters worse, they tended to enter sectors of the economy that were in decline or did not pay enough to support their families. We know that in the 1970s, thirty percent of the entire U.S. Puerto Rican population lived in poverty (Acosta-Belén and Santiago 2006). In fact, poverty rates for Puerto Ricans remained relatively high throughout the last four decades of the twentieth century. Overall, in 1980, poverty rates had increased to 37 percent, dipped some in the 1990s to 31 percent, but remained near 26 percent of the population. Poverty rates for Puerto Ricans in Chicago were also significantly high. In 1980, 33.05 percent of the population lived below the poverty level. In 1990, 31 percent of the population did so. In 1990, the number of people below the poverty went down to 22 percent (Acosta-Belén and Santiago 2006). In contrast, Orlando s poverty rate has been consistently low: 18.82 percent in 1980, 15.43 in 1990, and 15.25 in 2000. What are the poverty rates today? Are there any significant changes in the poverty rates of Puerto Ricans? The answers to these questions can be found in Table 2. Unfortunately, poverty rates are still very high as evidenced by the figures in Table 2. In the Puerto Rican community, poverty has had a decidedly female face. In key northeastern cities, more than 40 percent of Puerto Rican women reported themselves to be a family female householder ; Chicago followed with a figure of 36.3 percent. This is consistent with previous findings offered by Acosta-Belen and Santiago (2013) and Baker (2002). Not surprisingly, female-headed families in the Northeast had the highest poverty rates too. For example, poverty rates for female householders were 56.9 percent in Boston, 56.8 percent in Philadelphia, 55.7 percent in Hartford, and 43.7 percent in New York City. Hartford, which had the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans (33.1 percent), also had the highest percentage of all women living in poverty (48.4 percent). A closer examination of the poverty rates
Gendered Fault Lines Maura Toro-Morn and Ivis García Zambrano 21 Table 2. Family composition and poverty rates of Puerto Rican women in eight cities, 2010 City Family female headed households in poverty (percent) All females living in poverty (percent) Hartford, Connecticut 55.7 48.4 Miami, Florida 37.3 33.2 Orlando, Florida 30.5 24.6 Tampa, Florida 42.0 31.0 Chicago, Illinois 39.8 28.7 Boston, Massachusetts 56.9 45.9 New York, New York 43.7 34.5 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 56.8 47.1 Sources: 2010 U.S. Decennial Census and the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates (2006-2010). among Florida s Puerto Rican women shows that Tampa (42 percent) has higher poverty rates than both Miami (37.3 percent) and Orlando (30.5 percent). Chicago, on the other hand, has lower poverty rates than Tampa (39.8 percent). It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer an exhaustive analysis of the rather complicated social science history explaining Puerto Rican poverty, but a brief outline must be offered as we move forward to unpack demographic data that shed light on the feminization of poverty in the Puerto Rican experience. The problem of poverty among U.S. Puerto Ricans has consumed social scientists for a long time. In the 1950s, sociologist, Milton Gordon (1964) connected the issue of poverty to the lack of assimilation of Puerto Ricans and Africans Americans. But the singular most important empirical and controversial work on the subject of poverty that catapulted Puerto Ricans to the limelight of the 1960s War on Poverty was Oscar Lewis s (1966) anthropological study, La Vida. Although this book is about a slum in Puerto Rico, La Perla, and the culture of poverty was not its principal argument, it became the singular most important and damaging trope used in both academic and popular culture to demonize poor people, in particular Puerto Rican women. After Oscar Lewis, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William Julius Wilson, Marta Tienda, and others followed. Aponte (1991), Acosta-Belén and Santiago (2013), Baker (2002), and Velez (1992) have
22 centro journal volume xxix number iii 2017 devoted a lot of energy to offering alternative accounts of Puerto Rican poverty, work we have referenced in this paper. Under the Reagan administration in the 1980s, explanations of poverty tended to focus on the rise of the underclass, an argument that was proposed by the University of Chicago sociologist, William Julius Wilson. Journalist Alex Kotlowitz extended the underclass argument to the Puerto Rican community. A line of research about Hispanic poverty also tended to collapse discussions of poverty between Hispanics. This research met with a lot of criticism, most principally the aggregation of poverty rates among Hispanics. Roberto Aponte, for example, argued for the disaggregation of poverty to recognize the unique socio-structural dimensions of poverty. He argued that the economic well-being of Puerto Ricans hinged heavily on the economic conditions of the cities they settled. The decline of manufacturing, trade, and other forms of low skilled employment spelled disaster for Puerto Rican families in the 1960s and 1970s. She placed the problem for the lack of assimilation on the behavior of Puerto Rican women. But, in the 1990s, Linda Chavez controversial book, Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation (1991), came back to notions of linking assimilation and poverty. She placed the problem for the lack of assimilation on the behavior of Puerto Rican women. She claimed that the lack of assimilation rested squarely in the disproportionate number of single-female headed households and their dependence on welfare. She also viewed the large rates of teenage pregnancy in the community and lack of reproductive planning at fault as well. Although Puerto Rican writers and scholars challenged Linda Chavez s work, the lack of progress and assimilation others might say, the persistence of poverty in the Puerto Rican experience has been tagged in large part to the failures of Puerto Rican women, who are said to fail in forming nuclear families or in assimilating into American middle class culture. In other words, families like Justice Sotomayor described in her book have been viewed as the problem of assimilation. What has changed since then? Here is where a gender lens yet again may prove useful. The feminization of poverty argument has offered an analysis of poverty that does not blame the victim and allows us to shed some light on the unique problems poor women face. The old truism underlying the feminization of poverty discourse, Divorce produces a single man and poor woman, holds true for Puerto Rican women.
Gendered Fault Lines Maura Toro-Morn and Ivis García Zambrano 23 Table 3. Puerto Rican women compared to Puerto Rican men, 2010 Men Women Total population 2,241,624 2,382,092 Percent 48.5 51.5 All living in poverty 22.5% 27.0% Median income of householder (2000 figures have been adjusted for inflation) $ 29,870 $ 17,628 Median age 26.7 29.3 25 and older with no high school diploma or GED 27.7% 25.7% 25 and older with a bachelor s degree or more 14.2% 17.3% Unemployment rate 8.1% 11.3% In labor force 67.8% 59.0% Sources: 2010 U.S. Decennial Census and the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates (2006-2010). In our analysis of the feminization of poverty for Puerto Rican women, we begin with awareness that at the broadest theoretical level, colonialism and migration have disrupted the gendered lives of men and women, creating fault-lines, to borrow Sonia Sotomayor s words, that cannot be reconciled. Sonia Sotomayor s life is instructive here. Upon the death of her husband, Celina became severely depressed, nearly losing her job. She continued to work full time, but they were still too poor. They were not able to move out of the projects until Sonia s mother got a gift inheritance from a former boss. Sonia describes how her mom was the nurse on-call for her family and her neighbors and friends, revealing the additional responsibilities working mothers confront. Working single mothers have care-giving responsibilities that cannot be met by only one parent. If a child gets sick and there is no network of support that she can rely on, this frequently spells disaster for poor working women. During times of economic slowdown, it is frequently women workers who face layoffs or reduction of work hours, yet again events that singularly place female-headed households in a precarious condition. Table 3 compares Puerto Rican men and women along key indicators that are frequently associated with poverty. Incomes for Puerto Rican women were $12,242 lower than the income (which includes both wages and other sources) for Puerto Ri-
24 centro journal volume xxix number iii 2017 can men ($17,628 vs. $29,870); this is 59 cents to the dollar. As a point of comparison, Puerto Rican males made 80 cents to the dollar of what the average male in the U.S. made ($37,151). Taking into account that the number of female-headed households has increased across the board, an income gap of 40 percent between male and females raises questions about the relationships among gender and poverty. We know that the feminization of poverty is not a problem unique to Puerto Rican women. On average, women of all ages, regardless of race, migration status, with or without children, face a higher risk of living in poverty compared to men. Poverty for Puerto Rican women stood at 27 percent in comparison to Puerto Rican men at 22.5 percent. As previously shown, the presence of children in female-headed householder families substantially influences poverty rates. The difference is about 20 percentage points higher in overall poverty if there are children living in the household 63.6 percent vs. 42.7 percent, with and without children, respectively. Another factor addressed in the feminization of poverty literature is the vulnerable position of women in the labor market. Working moms face occupational sex-segregation. As Pressman (2016, 353) put it, If women are excluded from higher-paying occupations, their wages, and incomes will be lower than the wages of men. In 2010, Puerto Rican women continued to earn considerable less than Puerto Rican men. Last, the neoliberal state has also further exacerbated the social conditions facing working mothers as the safety net of support provided by the state has nearly disappeared. Next we turn to analyzing the experiences of Puerto Rican women in the labor market. Market and Employment Patterns of Puerto Rican Women Susan Baker (2002, 131) notes that in the 1950s and 1960s, mainland Puerto Rican women had fairly high rates of labor force participation when compared to White women and African Americans. But, in the 1970s those numbers fell precipitously for mostly New York City. Baker captures the paradox for women when she writes that in New York City, women were not leaving their jobs, the jobs were leaving them, as a result of the city s deindustrialization. Labor market conditions, such as technological advances, credentialism, and reorganization of work sectors, impact all women in negative ways Baker (2002, 132) also observed that in Chicago Puerto Rican women had a more balanced job mix and a high rate of participation too. Baker (2002) asserts and the empirical evidence agrees- that when the labor market conditions are favorable, Puerto Rican women respond. In the 1980s, when clerical jobs were opened up in the Middle Atlantic region, Puerto Rican women benefitted.
Gendered Fault Lines Maura Toro-Morn and Ivis García Zambrano 25 Single moms, she found, had to negotiate work and welfare benefits in order to sustain their families. Aixa Cintrón-Vélez (1999) used ethnographic data to further elucidate how race and gender intersected in the lives of Puerto Rican women workers in New York City. In keeping with Baker s analysis (2002), older early migrants did not have problems securing a job in the garment industry. For those whose marriage ended in divorce, many could not wait for a job opportunity and had to rely on public assistance to support themselves and their families, known as welfare then. Younger migrants had more aspirations because of their educational attainment but faced language barriers to securing better paying jobs. Single moms, she found, had to negotiate work and welfare benefits in order to sustain their families. Cintrón-Vélez (1999, 237) concludes that it is tempting to argue that assimilation is intergenerational but the good news is tempered by evidence of discrimination, residential segregation, and persistently high rates of poverty and unemployment across education and family groups. Toro- Morn (2001) also studied the labor market distribution of Puerto Rican women in Chicago from the 1960s and 1990s. In keeping with Baker (2002) and Cintrón-Vélez (1999), Toro-Morn also found that working mothers had been employed in the manufacturing sector in Puerto Rico prior to migrating to Chicago. Many of the early migrants struggled to balance work and family responsibilities. The decline of industrial employment in Chicago pushed women into other labor market areas. Some who call themselves arriesgadas (bold, daring women) pushed for self-employment, others through educational opportunities moved into white-collar jobs. Toro-Morn (2001) also notes that employers recruited educated Puerto Rican women to work in the city s growing white-collar sector in the 1980s. But whether working class or educated, Puerto Rican women clearly struggled to balance work and family responsibilities. Puerto Rican women faced an additional task the transnational emotional work they do to support their families (Alicea 1997; Aranda 2006) In 2010, 59 percent of Puerto Rican women vs. 67.8 percent for Puerto Rican men were in the labor force. Although women report slightly lower labor force participation rates, the rates have actually grown in the previous decades. Overall, female participation has risen from 43 percent to 59 percent between 1970 and 2009 (Ceci and Williams 2011). Even though more Puerto Rican women have joined the labor force, they have higher shares of unemployment than men (11.3 percent vs. 8.1 percent).
26 centro journal volume xxix number iii 2017 Table 4. U.S. Puerto Rican workers by sex, occupation and type, 2006-2010 (in percent) Occupation by sex Men Women Management, business, science, and arts occupations 22 31 Service occupations 22 23 Sales and office occupations 20 39 Natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations 15 1 Production, transportation, and material moving occupations 21 7 Type of worker Private for-profit wage and salary workers 76 68 Employee of private company workers 74 67 Self-employed in own incorporated business workers 2 1 Private not-for-profit wage and salary workers 5 10 Local government workers 7 11 State government workers 3 4 Federal government workers 4 3 Self-employed in own not incorporated business workers 4 3 Unpaid family workers 0 0 Source: American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates (2006-2010) Table 4 offers an overview of the occupational distribution of Puerto Rican men and women in 2010. Puerto Rican women s employment allows us to examine the quality of women s employment the types of jobs they have, as well as the earning that those jobs generate, in order to uncover the phenomenon now referred as income poverty. The ACS shows that women tend to be overrepresented in lower paying jobs like sales and office occupations (39 percent vs. 20 percent for men). Nonetheless, women also tend to be overrepresented in management, business, science, and arts occupations (31 percent vs. 22 percent), which are better paid and in general require more education than say transportation or construction, where men tend to be represented disproportionately. In addition, women tend to be overrepresented in the public sector (17 percent vs. 14 percent); these jobs usually are stable and have better benefits than those of the private sector.
Gendered Fault Lines Maura Toro-Morn and Ivis García Zambrano 27 Table 5. Socioeconomic indicators for Puerto Rican women in eight cities City Hartford, Connecticut Median age Unemployment rate Median income Cents per dollar compared to all women Bachelor s degree or more 27.3 23.9% $ 9,197 0.58 6.0% Miami, Florida 31.6 8.5% $ 12,083 0.82 20.2% Orlando, Florida 28.4 9.1% $ 20,059 0.62 19.4% Tampa, Florida 33.7 12.2% $ 9,809 0.37 14.6% Chicago, Illinois 35.3 13.7% $ 15,950 0.50 12.3% Boston, Massachusetts New York, New York Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 30.5 18.1% $ 9,999 0.27 12.1% 26.5 12.5% $ 13,096 0.40 14.2% 30.1 18.4% $ 9,632 0.46 7.7& Sources: 2010 U.S. Decennial Census and the Census American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates (2006-2010). Table 5 offers a rather mixed assessment of the social and economic conditions of Puerto Rican women across urban areas. Our analysis has shown that Puerto Ricans have similar outcomes, regardless of destination, with the possible exception of Miami. For example, their incomes are lower when compared to all women. Nonetheless, when compared to other Puerto Ricans, there is a clear gap between cities. How do Puerto Rican women fare, compared to other White women and to other racial and ethnic groups? In the last section of this paper, we offer an analysis that is attentive to cross-cultural comparison of women.
28 centro journal volume xxix number iii 2017 Comparing Puerto Rican women to other racial and ethnic groups Demographers have traced socioeconomic differences to the levels of educational attainment, as human capital affects employment and labor market outcomes. In 2010, Mexicans had the highest percentage of women over 25 years old without a high school diploma, obtaining a GED (43 percent), followed by Puerto Ricans (25.7 percent). Nonetheless, it is important to note that Mexican figures include that of im- Table 6. U.S. Women by Ethnicity and Race Puerto Rican White (alone, non-hispanic) Black or African American (alone, non-hispanic) Mexican Total population females 2,382,092 113,399,701 20,365,349 15,421,869 Percent female 51.5% 50.7% 52.3% 48.5% Family female householder, no husband present Family female householder with related children under 18 years Family female headed households in poverty All females living in poverty Median income (2000 figures have been adjusted for inflation) 36.3% 17.7% 37.6% 27.5% 63.6% 45.4% 60.8% 72.4% 42.7% 24.5% 35.6% 40.9% 27.0% 12.2 % 27.0% 26.3% $ 17,628 $ 27,596 $ 20,872 $ 21,741 Median age 29.3 40.7 33.7 25.4 Women 25 and older with no high school diploma or GED Women 25 and older with at least a bachelor s degree 25.7% 12.2% 17.9% 43.0% 17.3% 28.3% 19.2% 10.0% Unemployment rate 11.3% 6.0% 11.9% 10.3% In labor force 59.0% 58.7% 63.2% 57.3% Sources: 2010 U.S. Decennial Census and the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates (2006-2010).
Gendered Fault Lines Maura Toro-Morn and Ivis García Zambrano 29 migrants whose educational attainment, on average, is lower than Mexicans born in the United States; and therefore, these figures might underestimate the percentage of native-born Mexicans with higher educational levels (White and Kaufman 1997). Non-Hispanic whites had the lowest percentage (12.2 percent) of women not graduating from high school or obtaining equivalency followed by non-hispanic black or African American women (17.9 percent). High school outcomes are connected to other levels of educational attainment, such as college. As expected, whites are the most likely to complete college (28.3 percent), followed by African Americans (19.2 percent), Puerto Ricans (17.3 percent), and Mexicans (10 percent). In general, Puerto Rican women have more probability of achieving higher levels of schooling than Mexicans but less than for whites and African Americans, respectively. In other words, Puerto Rican women (including island-born and mainland-born) made on average only 63 cents for each dollar made by a non-hispanic white woman. The disparities in levels of educational achievement help to explain some of the differences in the labor market between women of color and white women. For instance, there is a marked income gap between U.S. Puerto Rican women and other ethnic and racial groups. Puerto Rican women had lower incomes than any other group the Puerto Rican- white income gap was -$9,968, while the Puerto Rican-Mexican and Puerto Rican-black or African American gap was, respectively, -$4,113 and -$3,244. In other words, Puerto Rican women (including island-born and mainland-born) made on average only 63 cents for each dollar made by a non-hispanic white woman. A disaggregated analysis regarding the differences between the earnings (wages and salary) of island-born and mainland-born women showed that Puerto Rican born-women earned less than their mainland-born counterparts (Dávila et al. 2007). As a point of comparison, in terms of income, which includes both wages and other sources, white women made 70 cents for every dollar that white men made; while the Puerto Rican female-male gap, as previously stated, was 59 cents to the dollar. In addition, the Puerto Rican males made on average 80 cents for every dollar that the average male this difference is not that substantial, after considering the differences between the Puerto Rican female-male gap and the Puerto Rican-Non Hispanic female gap. The incomeaggregated data at the national level follows the same general trend, in contrast to the earnings of disaggregated data, which is far more nuanced. For instance, regression models employed by Dávila and colleagues show a low correlation of male earnings and