“You don’t look Puerto Rican”: Collective memory and community in Orlando

“Puerto Ricans in Central Florida 1940s to 1980s: A History”: oral history and collective memory

I moved to Orlando from San Juan in 2005 for an anthropology position at the University of Central Florida (UCF). At that time, one-quarter of Orlando’s population was Hispanic and one half of Orlando Hispanics were Puerto Rican. ⁶ Contrary to the social invisibility of Puerto Ricans before 1980, the Puerto Rican community in 2005 was very much in evidence, and it was evident as a particular voice amid the diversity of other Hispanics in the area. As I drove around Central Florida to one UCF campus or another, I would tune the car radio to Spanish-language stations, which were largely dominated by Puerto Rican cultural presence; the language, the references, the jokes all evoked memories of Puerto Rico. When I asked Puerto Ricans I met about the history of this Orlando community, they told me that middle-class professionals from Puerto Rico had begun to move to Orlando in the 1980s and the numbers surged in the 1990s.

After meeting two Puerto Ricans born in Central Florida in the 1940s, and hearing references to mid-twentieth century Puerto Rican farmworkers in Central Florida, I searched unsuccessfully for documented evidence of the deeper history I was hearing about anecdotally. Oral history became a means to record this invisible history through the voices of those who had lived it (Abrams, 2010; Hajek, 2013). As a technology of memory, oral history has long provided a vehicle for challenging official histories (Abrams, 2010; Kansteiner, 2002). In Puerto Rican Studies in particular, oral history is a time-honored research method, which has transformed social scientific study of the Puerto Rican experience in the US states (García Colón, 2006).

Oral history entails its own partiality, however (Portelli, 1991). Memories are always contingent and always exist within a multi-leveled “field of memory work” (Abrams, 2010: 79). Cognizant of oral history’s partiality as well as of how the very existence of such a collection would challenge the black–-white narrative of Central Florida history, a colleague and I decided to collect whatever stories we could of Central Florida’s Puerto Rican past. ⁷ We called the project, “Puerto Ricans in Central Florida from 1940s to 1980s: A History,” emphasizing “a history” in recognition of the partial knowledge it represented.

From fall 2008 through winter 2009, we recorded over 100 hours of talk by 75 Puerto Ricans, who had come to Central Florida between the 1940s and the 1980s. The participants were self-selected by responding to our press release. We scheduled interviews with everyone who contacted us if they met the minimal requirements of identifying as Puerto Rican and having come to Central Florida between the 1940s and the 1980s, but time and resources did not allow us to secure a demographically representative sample, or even to know what that would look like. As it was, the response far exceeded our expectations, and we quickly trained about 10 students to help conduct interviews. Interviews were in Spanish or English, as the participants preferred, and they were open-ended, inviting participants to tell us what most mattered to them. The interviews were coded according to keywords and themes, which enabled analysis across the collection.

Altogether, the collection includes 36 women and 39 men; 29 participants had arrived in Central Florida after 1980. The remainder, and those most consulted for this writing, came to, or were born in, the Orlando area between the 1940s and the 1970s. The collection includes only a few Puerto Ricans who came to Orlando directly from New York or other already-established Puerto Rican diaspora communities. Several had lived for a time outside Puerto Rico, and some remembered choosing Orlando because they did not like New York. Only four identified themselves as New Yorkers.

Although Orlando’s contemporary Puerto Rican community encompasses a range of class relations, racial identifications, and migration experience, the evidence I draw on is largely from light-skinned, middle-class Puerto Ricans from the island, who recorded their 2008–2009 memories of living on the white side of Orlando’s color line several decades earlier. We are left to imagine who is not represented in this collection. Given the prevailing Jim Crow segregation laws as Puerto Ricans began to arrive in Orlando, we can only wonder if any Afro-Puerto Ricans came to Orlando, and if they did whether they eventually identified as black. ⁸ This article cannot tell their story, but it can give a reading of non-Hispanic white hegemony in Orlando in the days when it seemed to this sample of Puerto Ricans that “there was no one here.”

Contexts of Puerto Rican migration and community: New York and Orlando

The decades represented in the “Puerto Ricans in Central Florida” collection encompassed the years now called the Puerto Rican Great Migration. Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s, over 500,000 Puerto Ricans left Puerto Rico, most following labor contracts in the fields and factories of northern US states (Acosta-Belén and Santiago, 2006: 87). ⁹ News media and social scientists gave this migration intense attention, and efforts to explain continuous Puerto Rican poverty from San Juan to New York embedded the tenacious and prejudicial term “culture of poverty” into public discourse (cf. Briggs, 2002; Glazer and Moynihan, 1963; Lewis, 1966; Mills et al., 1950). Puerto Ricans who decided to migrate permanently or temporarily to Florida at that time were sometimes motivated by efforts to “do something different” from other migrants; this choice suggests a desire to set themselves apart from negative New York stereotypes (Duany and Silver, 2010).

Precious little documentation exists about those who did not follow the pattern of migration to the northern diaspora communities. Some Puerto Rican laborers came to Central Florida, but unfortunately they are not represented in the collection. Many participants in the collection recorded family memories of parents or grandparents who had labored in fields or factories, but the participants themselves were living more middle-class lives in 2008 and 2009. Some had come to Orlando as college students, lawyers, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) engineers. Others were Puerto Rican veterans, Puerto Rican women married to US servicemen, or family of Puerto Rican servicemen, who were stationed in the area and never left.

These Orlando Puerto Ricans had very different experiences from the contracted workers in the northern US states. Darío González experienced both. After many years in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, he returned to Puerto Rico and eventually came to Orlando in 1980:

A funny thing is that when we, the Puerto Ricans especially, went to New York, we went to live in certain areas. Those who went to Brooklyn lived in that area; those who went to the Bronx did the same thing; those who went to New York [Manhattan], also with the Hispanic barrio. But we Puerto Ricans who came here, to Central Florida, we didn’t go to a specific place. In other words, we went to live all over the place, all over. There was no community known as, eh, the Latin Barrio, or anything like that. There was no such thing, do you see? (Darío Gónzalez, 1980) ¹⁰

In New York and other places, Puerto Rican “enclaves” offered geographies where newcomers could connect memory to place and build community. Despite discrimination and marginalization from the wider society and social differentiation among Puerto Ricans, communities formed, which enabled collective political action (cf. Findlay, 2012; Rúa, 2012; Sánchez Korrol, 1994 [1983]; Whalen, 2001). These diaspora communities give evidence that “community,” as the imagining of an unknowable collective, is a powerful concept for collective memory and identification (Anderson, 1991).

Unlike northern urban communities, Central Florida was a rural area, racially coded in black and white (Beatty, 2002; Brotemarkle, 2005). In 1950, Orange County, where Orlando is located, was citrus country. In all, 80% of the population was white (Bureau of the Census, 1950). Jim Crow segregation was still in place, and racial tensions were high (Brotemarkle, 2005). An ice cream stand on one of Orlando’s main thoroughfares was dynamited in 1951 for selling ice cream to whites and blacks from the same window (Beatty, 2002: 54–55).

This sharp dividing line between white and black was unknown to Puerto Ricans who had never lived outside Puerto Rico, where the absence of US-style anti-miscegenation laws has determined that most families include a range of phenotypes (cf. Findlay, 2012; Silver, 2013). Although a preference for light skin and other characteristics of whiteness clearly exists, there is no clear line between white and black in Puerto Rico (cf. Duany, 2002). The collection’s narratives suggest that most oral history participants built their lives on the white side of the color line, even if others in Orlando did not see them as fully belonging there. In Puerto Rico, class “whitens” (Duany, 2002: 241); in Orlando, the narratives describe Puerto Rican navigation of race, class, language, and second-class citizenship in a “Möbius strip of inclusion and exclusion” (Creet, 2011: n. 21, p. 25, citing Cheng, 1997). ¹¹

The initial oral history project set out to learn about Orlando’s invisible Puerto Rican history. The absent voices of those not represented in the collection, however, and some of the silences from those who are, point to erasures and suggest a “forgetting.” These silences also inform us about memory formation and collective identification in conditions of unequal power, racial hegemony, and colonial relations.

On being seen and unseen: invisibility and hypervisibility in Orlando’s social field

In his work with Senegalese migrants in Turin, Italy, anthropologist Donald Martin Carter (2010) described invisibility as a “corrosive social erasure, insinuated into living memory, that shapes the contours of social imagination and relegates the newcomer to the margins” (p. 5). Carter (2010) described a contradictory tension, “caught firmly in the cross hairs of public debate” (p. 12), between the invisibility of the actual migrant and the hypervisibility of the “idea of the migrant” as a problem and an outsider. He distinguished between invisibility as a “protective cloak” and as “corrosive erasure,” and posited the tension between invisibility and hypervisibility as a complex construction emergent from a combination of public record, media attention, and scholarship.

In Puerto Rican Orlando, the protective cloak and corrosive erasure are mutually constitutive aspects of the “Möbius strip of inclusion and exclusion.” The option of trying to “blend in” to the white side of the color line offered a degree of protection, but the hazards of hypervisibility as non-white and “foreign” were what made invisibility desirable in the first place. As Carter (2010) observed, “it is not a matter of what is seen as much as what it means to be seen or unseen” (p. 15).

If Orlandoans in the 1950s and 1960s knew anything at all about Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rico, this likely included knowledge of the Puerto Rican Nationalists who attempted to assassinate President Truman in 1950 and fired on Congress in 1954. Orlandoans also may well have encountered reports from New York, describing “Puerto Ricans and Negroes” as a social problem (Associated Press, 1959; Kuettner, 1958). ¹² Media reports at the time drew inspiration from the academic “culture of poverty” discourse. Derived from research in both San Juan and New York, the theory explained the impacts of macro-level structural inequality and colonial relations in terms that suggested instead a localized diagnosis of a social pathology (cf. Briggs, 2002).

These combined associations rendered Puerto Ricans dark, poor, and dangerous in the public imagination. Rather than as fellow citizens, Puerto Ricans were and are often constructed as volatile Others in the Anglo imaginary. ¹³ Oral history participants described encounters with Anglos who were apparently struggling to align media images with the actual Puerto Ricans they met on the white side of Orlando’s color line:

Nobody ever hurt me or anything like that, but they’d ask me, “Do you have any colored people in your family?” or “Oh, I thought all Puerto Ricans, they were blacks” … I would say “Well, you see me!” What else could I say? (Yvonne Milligan, 1951)

Time and again, Puerto Ricans whose phenotype did not fit the Anglo imaginary of what Puerto Ricans look like heard things like, “But you’re white; how can you be Puerto Rican? You don’t look Puerto Rican.” The narratives suggest a dissonance for Anglos who had no place in their racial frame for the Puerto Ricans in front of them, and they reference a memory of dissonance for Puerto Ricans who saw themselves as white (or at least not black) but still different from the Anglos around them.

Puerto Rican and Hispanic invisibility was reinforced in public documents by a “repressive erasure” that was “encrypted covertly and without apparent violence” (cf. Connerton, 2008: 61). For instance, under the heading “Nativity, Parentage, and Country of Origin,” a 1970 Census table listed Puerto Ricans as “foreign stock” despite their US citizenship. ¹⁴ Another example is the 1950s Florida practice of counting all births as either “white” or “colored” (Sowder, 1952: 45). In the same way that Connerton (2008) analyzes how the placement of non-western art in New York’s Metropolitan Museum renders it “invisible from the Great Hall” (p. 61), the Census categories and birth records are examples of being included but still “edited out.” The effect is that “the seen disappear in plain sight” (Carter, 2010: 13).

As the numbers from the 1980 Census went public, however, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics in Orlando became hypervisible. In 1970, Orlando had 2085 “persons of Spanish language,” only 115 of whom were of “Puerto Rican birth or parentage.” In 1980, the count climbed to 5024 persons of “Spanish origin,” of whom 1493 were Puerto Rican. Corresponding numbers for Orange County were 6940 “persons of Spanish language” of whom 681 were Puerto Rican in 1970, and 19,726 persons of “Spanish origin” of whom 3959 were Puerto Rican in 1980. This increase was due in part to different counting procedures. In 1970, questions about birthplace and heritage followed a question about Spanish language and surname, which likely rendered a good number of “Latins” invisible. In 1980, a question about “Spanish origin” allowed individuals who had been in the United States for generations to indicate their Spanish heritage (Sabulis, 1981).

When the 1980 numbers came out, the media scrambled to assess the impact for Orlando. With each subsequent decennial census, local news articles have highlighted the growing “Latin” population (cf. Hunt, 2001; Kassab, 2001; Mitchell, 1991; Powers, 2011; Rivera-Lyles, 2011; Sabulis, 1981; Santos-Berry, 1981; Shanklin, 1991). News reports have constructed Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics in Orlando using contrasting racial and class-based images. In 1981, for instance, some assumed Hispanic competition with blacks for low-wage jobs and others described Orlando’s growing Hispanic population as middle class (cf. Sabulis, 1981; Santos-Berry, 1981). One declared, “The Latins are everywhere, yet they are almost invisible. Being mostly professional or white-collar workers, they blend into the fibers of Orlando society” (Santos-Berry, 1981). “Latins” were constructed as invisible or hypervisible, according to their class relations and racial identifications.

Invisibility on the white side of Orlando’s color line apparently helped provide a protective cloak, which suggests Connerton’s forgetting that is constitutive of a new identity. This invisibility, however, remained in tension with the hypervisibility provoked by census data, local media attention, and the still-pervasively negative “idea of the Puerto Rican” (cf. Carter, 2010). This invisibility thus also relates to a forgetting that is a “collusive silence brought on by a particular kind of collective shame” (Connerton, 2008: 67). Whether or not Puerto Ricans experience hypervisibility as a kind of “shame,” Puerto Ricans in both Puerto Rico and the US states nonetheless experience daily reminders that their US citizenship is an abbreviated version. Ramos (2010) suggests a similar reaction for the Mapuche, writing that when memories provoke too much dissonance, it is “better to consign some things to a shadow world” (p. 63).

The dissonance remains, however, even if out of sight and out of mind (cf. McGranahan, 2010). For instance, Ramos (2010) indicates a silenced sadness in Mapuche phrasing and gestures. In a similar way, although the oral history narratives from the earlier decades state explicitly or suggest implicitly that settling into Orlando was “no big deal” (p. 63), comments such as “What else could I say?” cited above suggest an unresolvable sense of difference. Other phrases—“I don’t want to say too much, but …” or “sometimes it hurt”—indicate a “humiliated silence,” or perhaps better phrased, a “silenced sadness” around memories just below the surface. As with the Betsimisaraka in Madagascar, forgetting is not total. The expression of dissonance signals that new identifications do not mean leaving the past behind. Under propitious conditions, unresolved difference becomes a space of creative possibility. This condition is a “lived impermanence” in which “the world and one’s place in it are constantly being refigured” (McGranahan, 2010: 5). Invisibility and hypervisibility, the “Möbius strip of inclusion and exclusion,” have been constitutive aspects of Puerto Rican collective memory formation in Orlando.

Degrees of separation: memories of dissonance and difference

Figure 1 maps Puerto Rican settlement in Orange County in 1980, with each dot representing 25 Puerto Ricans. ¹⁵ Despite a visible pattern, the distances Darío González described are evident. This must have been even more true in the preceding decades. In Central Florida’s geography of orange groves, cattle, motoring tourists, and military training centers, the time needed to travel from one place to another must have increased the sense of isolation for Puerto Ricans and Hispanics accustomed to daily interaction with a close network of family and friends.

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Figure 1.

Orange County, Florida, 1980: Puerto Rican Population by Census Tract. Prepared by Asher Ross, April 2013.

The oral histories also point to a social dissonance that intensified the aloneness imposed by physical distance. One participant said it felt like “cold water, hot water” and that it took a long time to adjust. There were difficulties for the children, name-calling and things written on the car, and she said it was really hard “to feel like we were a part of anything.”

Patricia González Durocher married a US serviceman whom she met during World War II in Puerto Rico. After trying New York and being driven away by the cold, they went to Orlando in the early 1950s. There, Patricia described a different kind of cold. Our interview in 2008 took place in the house where she had lived for some 50 years:

If the neighbors here would be Spanish, and the other one, and this one, and this one, they would have been together for something … It’s not that way. They’re all Americans. They never came over here. My husband died and no one came over. (Patricia González Durocher, 1952)

The Durochers’ daughter Sheila was about 6 years old when the family came to Orlando. Her narrative describes her memory of childhood embarrassment over her mother’s Puerto Ricanness. She attributed this to the pervasively negative images of New York Puerto Ricans and remembered that her father “didn’t like anything Latin, specifically Puerto Rican”:

I think that was part of what we—maybe, or I certainly did—dealt with when I was younger. And I think that was also perhaps the embarrassment of saying my mom was Puerto Rican. I didn’t say that for many years. I said her family was from Spain for many years. (Sheila Alexander, née Durocher, 1952)

Even when dodging the Puerto Rican label by calling her mother “Spanish,” Alexander’s account suggests feeling hypervisible as the child of a “foreign” mother.

Glenn Vélez was born in 1949 in Sanford, just north of Orlando. Despite having two Puerto Rican parents, he recalled that as a child he did not think of himself as Puerto Rican, but he did think of himself as “different.” He remembered growing up in a segregated society, and although he apparently lived on the white side of the line, he recalled comments in school about his “tan” skin.

These individual accounts represent experiences repeated across Central Florida as the memories Puerto Ricans formed were impacted by encounters with Anglos who situated them as either “dark and poor” second-class citizens or “foreigners” with no claim to citizenship at all. The narratives hold multiple stories that reflect Anglo ignorance about Puerto Rican citizenship; the labels “Latin” and “Spanish” subsumed all people of Spanish-language heritage into one undistinguishable category. Yvonne Milligan remembered people confusing Puerto Rico with Costa Rica and asking her for foreign stamps. Banks did not know how to convert “Puerto Rican dollars,” and Puerto Ricans were often asked to show a green card. A Puerto Rican woman working with migrant Mexican families in the mid-1970s was stopped by Immigration. With the distance of time, she laughed as she told the story of a frightening encounter:

I was trying to explain—I was so nervous—that I’m Puerto Rican. And the person from Immigration didn’t understand that we Puerto Ricans are American citizens. And that I was born an American citizen. (Miriam DaCosta, 1974) ¹⁶

Speaking with an accent did not help matters. Unused to hearing anything but English, many Orlandoans were reportedly unwilling or unable to understand English spoken with an accent. Sheila Alexander remembered translating for her mother in stores although her mother was speaking English. Hank and Tere De Arrigoitia, who came with the US Navy in 1968, said they spoke English with no problem, having learned throughout their schooling in Puerto Rico. But “it was a matter of accent”:

So everybody—to many people—it was shocking to the point that they could not listen to what you were saying, you see … Many people would listen—hear you talk—and immediately they would close their ears. (Hank De Arrigoitia, 1968)

Their narrative places accented speech alongside race and second-class citizenship as another point of dissonance.

Nicholas De Genova (2010) has suggested that accented speech constructed Chicago Puerto Ricans in the 1940s as “foreign” (p. 163), but that those with light skin could claim “an ‘immigrant’ would-be whiteness.” The consequence was that this claim to whiteness meant disavowing “any association with their actual ‘ethnic’ community, whose racialization as not-white threatened to vanquish their tentative and tenuous claims to ‘American’ whiteness.” The almost complete absence of participants in the Orlando collection who identified as a dark-skinned Puerto Rican suggests that this was potentially true there as well. One exception is this narrative from a woman who came in the mid-1970s:

Unfortunately, hardly anybody wanted to talk to me, umm, because of my color. It was very strange for me to see that. You know. My husband is Puerto Rican white and my father-in-law. But he also faced the same thing because my mother-in-law was Indian. So when we used to go in the street and everything, people used to stare at me. They didn’t look; they stared. (Margarita Coll Cermeño, 1975)

Many participants in the collection worked to distance themselves from the tenacious image of dark and poor Puerto Ricans. Most often, they claimed class distinctions or took pains to set themselves apart from New York Puerto Ricans. For instance, despite her childhood discomfort about her mother’s identity, Sheila Alexander contrasted her experiences to those of New York Puerto Ricans: “We didn’t experience any of that. We had a very different lifestyle. As Mom said, she grew up with maids and cooks and never had to do anything.”

Another participant pointed to class-based differences among Puerto Ricans saying that in Orlando in 1979, the Puerto Ricans were mostly Disney workers and that “professionals” arrived later. ¹⁷ She and her family did not seek out other Puerto Ricans at that time, immersing themselves instead in Orlando’s Anglo world. Her narrative of her husband’s troubles adjusting to Orlando illustrates that distinctions of race, class, and language differentiated Puerto Rican experience. She is light-skinned and speaks with no accent; he is darker and speaks with an accent. He worked with “blue-collar workers,” whereas she had a “professional” job. For about 5 years, she recalled, things were extremely difficult. He began to read only English newspapers and forced himself to get along. With time, she said, they adjusted and their social circle was Anglo.

Race, class, language, and second-class citizenship presented points of dissonance for these Puerto Ricans in their collective identification in Orlando vis-à-vis non-Hispanics and vis-à-vis each other. Caught in Orlando’s black–-white binary, living with reminders that blackness was dangerous in the South, and acknowledging a “preference for whiteness” in the Puerto Rican color spectrum, these Puerto Ricans must have felt a pull to the possibility of mitigating difference and “blending in” as much as possible to the white side of town. To mitigate difference and “blend in” as much as possible, however, necessitated exercising a kind of “structural amnesia” (Connerton, 2008: 64). In earlier Puerto Rican diaspora communities, collective consciousness of colonialism, blackness, and working-class solidarity have underwritten Puerto Rican community formation (cf. Rúa, 2012; Sánchez Korrol, 1994 [1983]; Whalen and Vázquez-Hernández, 2005). In absence of this, individual memories of feeling alone emerged instead. The choice of what was desirable and what dispensable in cultural identification was informed by both a black–-white binary in the historically derived field of hegemonic non-Hispanic whiteness and a desire to distance oneself from the negative “idea of the Puerto Rican” in US discourse.

The above indicates that an emergent 2008–2009 Puerto Rican memory of being alone in Orlando in earlier decades was constituted by the accumulation of individual experiences of dissonance and unresolvable difference in the slippery space between invisibility and hypervisibility. Next, I examine how those experiences of dissonance and unresolvable difference—with time and the increasingly inescapable visibility that came with growing numbers—became foundational to an emergent sense of community across a diverse Puerto Rican population in Orlando. I also suggest that the ongoing processes of community formation set Puerto Ricans into new sets of differences among diverse Latin American national identifications as part of a more politically powerful pan-Hispanic identification. ¹⁸

Collective memory and emergent identifications in the New Orlando

For many of the Puerto Ricans represented in the 2008–2009 oral history collection, middle-class social relations apparently mitigated racial dissonance, making it possible for some to almost disappear into the dominant society. Mitigation is not erasure, however, and in that almost is a dynamic space of dissonance and unresolved difference, where strategic moments of forgetting and re-remembering inform the dynamics of collective memory formation. For instance, despite how the family described above worked to “forget” their past and adopt a new “American” identity, their coming forward to contribute to the project narratives suggests an importance attached to remembering. Despite the apparent coherence for light-skinned, middle-class Puerto Ricans, this and other narratives describe the jarring feelings just “beneath the more obvious order of things” (Cole, 2001: 281). The Möbius strip of inclusion and exclusion nurtured a parallel process of forgetting and remembering.

If “memory is where we have arrived,” the repeated assertion that “there was no one here” posits a current, contrastive reality. In 2008–2009, Hispanics, and especially Puerto Ricans, were very much “here” in Orlando. Indeed, this once-invisible group had become a focal point on the national electoral map. Florida’s importance as a “swing state” in national elections now rests on the voting behaviors of Hispanics in the central part of the state. As birthright citizens and the dominant Hispanic population in Central Florida, Florida Puerto Ricans have become hypervisible to national-level political strategizers. Ironically, although Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico cannot vote in federal elections, they now have the power to determine the presidential vote if they reside in Central Florida. Thus, changing conditions in the social field, through which power relations are formed and contested over time, have created openings for “forgotten” identifications to re-emerge with new meanings for new circumstances.

By the time of Mary I. Johnson’s first election, Puerto Rican institutions dotted the landscape. A Puerto Rican cultural organization and Spanish radio and print media offered linkages to counter the collective sense of being alone. At the San Juan Restaurant, the Puerto Rican tradition of viernes social (Friday happy hour) had become an important moment in the week. Amaury Díaz had convinced the Wet and Wild waterpark to experiment with a festival marking a Puerto Rican tradition, and the massive turnout took everyone by surprise.

Scholars chart community formation by the emergence of such institutions, especially in how they nurture and sustain a sense of commonality. How that feeling of commonality develops is more difficult to trace (cf. Barth, 1969; Cohen, 1985; Redfield, 1960). In the case of Central Florida, this collective identification emerged in part from repeated experience of unresolvable difference. In their most adamant claims to “fitting in,” the narratives of the collection contain signs that a sense of Puerto Rican “difference” remained. A frequently recorded image is the door to the home as a boundary between Puerto Rico and Central Florida. Even in 2010, individual houses in any of Orlando’s many developments often give no sign from the outside of the cultural border to be crossed on entering. Inside, Puerto Rican artwork covers the walls and in the back, a garden is planted with seeds from the island. This turning inward may have reinforced invisibility in the early years, but it also provided a protective space, where things kept below the surface could re-emerge.

Other efforts to maintain a sense of distinctiveness as Puerto Rican included sending children to the island to “connect with their roots.” Sheila Alexander had an “epiphany” in Puerto Rico. On her return to Orlando, she began to speak only Spanish to her mother and became outspokenly angry when people told her, “You don’t look Puerto Rican.” The Vélez children returned to Sanford from Puerto Rico missing the daily interaction with a close network of friends and family there. Others took Anglo friends to Puerto Rico, a practice that incorporated their Puerto Rican pasts into their Orlando present and asserted their “right to be different and to belong” (Vega, 2012: 198, citing Rosaldo, 1994).

These private, individual practices did not constitute public positioning as a racial/ethnic community, however. Johnson’s campaign fliers in 1980 seem crafted to project her solid position in Orlando’s mainstream white social order. ¹⁹ The fliers listed her credentials as wife of a Naval officer, mother of three sons, community volunteer for Scouts and Little League, regional president of the Navy Wives of America, and precinct election official. The newspapers referred to her as a housewife, and after the election one paper subtly suggested a distant Hispanic connection, not with reference to Puerto Rico, but with a passing mention that her grandfather had been mayor of a town in Cuba. The same year of the election, however, Orlando mayor Bill Frederick started an Hispanic Advisory Commission; the 1980 Census numbers came out in 1981; and by the 1984 elections, an Hispanic voter registration drive was underway and Mary I. Johnson’s Hispanic identity (though not necessarily understood as Puerto Rican) was openly acknowledged in the papers.

Stories and attitudes poke forth from the 2008–2009 narratives, quietly suggesting that an emergent identification, set against the white “American” Other, was taking shape. A woman who came in 1985 told a story about how the day-care center where she first worked would not let her give food to the children and excluded her own child from activities: “Because it was all Whites, you know, Americans, you see?” Hank De Arrigoitia, cited in the above discussion of accent, made a claim to full citizenship as he reframed English speakers in Orlando as “continental Americans” and drew a distinction between them and Spanish-speaking “Puerto Rican Americans.” About his accent, he said, “Yes, you have a Philadelphia accent and you have a Massachusetts accent. So I have an accent and it’s geographical.” Taken together, the narratives point to a commonly experienced sense of unresolvable difference informed by dissonant encounters of race, class, language, and citizenship.

Even as a collective Puerto Rican identification vis-à-vis the non-Hispanic white Other takes root in the Orlando area, new tensions emerge from differences among Hispanics, who may separately embrace identification as Mexican, Cuban, Venezuelan, Colombian, Dominican, and so on. Amid this Hispanic diversity, the specific Puerto Rican history of birthright citizenship shaped by US colonial relations means that Puerto Ricans navigate between the potential for greater political strength by adopting the generic “Hispanic” label and the dangers of being subsumed into non-Hispanic labeling of Hispanics as “illegal.” It is a new form of tension between being seen and unseen. If an Hispanic pan-ethnicity is indeed emerging in Orlando, it may necessitate another kind of Puerto Rican forgetting in order to form the new identification. It may mean subsuming historical Puerto Rican claims to de-colonization of their US relations into broader Hispanic claims to cultural citizenship regardless of legal status.

Conclusion

Whether or not the stories happened just as they were narrated in 2008–2009, the narratives in the oral history collection affirm contemporary efforts to assert a collective identification distinct from Orlando’s hegemonic whiteness and deserving of its place in Orlando’s social field. I have argued here that the feeling of aloneness was constitutive of an imagined Puerto Rican (and perhaps eventually Hispanic) community, where difference remains a productive element, if not always recognized as such. Taken as a collective, the Puerto Rican narratives from before 1980 describe individual experiences of navigating between invisibility and hypervisibility; they point to a collective sense of unresolvable difference informed by dissonant experiences of race, class, language, and citizenship. Though still not often expressed, consciousness of colonialism, blackness, and working-class histories lies just below the surface of Puerto Rican collective identifications in Orlando, poking forth under propitious conditions.

In Orlando, a localized memory of social invisibility exists in tension with wider Puerto Rican collective memory of historical subordination, and these inform current-day struggles as Puerto Ricans assert their right to belong and to be different. The stories of Puerto Rican experience in Orlando, as remembered, narrated, and sometimes silenced in the collection represented here, remind us to listen to the elements of dissonance and difference that poke through the elastic boundaries of collective memory, and to look for the new formations they provoke.