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To the Barrio. North from Manhattan's 96th Street, the railroad tracks that run muffled under fashionable Park Avenue burst noisily into the open. The proud avenue itself splits around it, plunges down into narrow, squalid lanes flanked by ancient tenements. There, in what New Yorkers now call Spanish Harlem, the Puerto Ricans clotted. The Puerto Ricans call it "the Barrio."
Gradually, the swarming Puerto Ricans pushed the Negroes north, the Italians eastward. They expanded across the top of Central Park, crept down the other side. Other pockets established themselves on the lower East Side, in Brooklyn and The Bronx.
But the Barrio remained the receiving station, and the Puerto Rican core, This is the noisome, teeming squalor that greets the hopeful immigrant seeking the promised land.
Piraquas & Manure. Garbage cans line the curb, from many of them refuse spills over on to the sidewalk. A fire burns in a cluttered gutter. A honking car scatters a game of stick ball in the street. On the corner, a cart vendor sells piraguas (shaved ice flavored with colored sirup) for 3¢ a cup. An old woman scrambles on her hands & knees under a horse-drawn cart, scooping fresh manure into a cardboard box.
In a vacant lot, two kids wrestle among the blackened cans and broken glass. Men sit on the stoops of the rotting brownstone tenements, or stand in curiously static groups around a store front. There are girls in short, shiny black dresses, insolent-eyed young bucks in sharp, striped suits. Dogs, furtive and thin-ribbed, slink through the areaways sniffing for scraps. In an abandoned building, windows glare emptily, but a family is living in the basement. From other windows patched with adhesive tape and cardboard, women watch the noisy street with worried eyes. They seldom scream-at the kids, as women of other lands do.
Bodegas & Charms. In the Barrio (i.e., district), the Puerto Ricans have created their own city. The store signs are in Spanish. At the bodegas (grocery stores) they sell green coconuts, chick peas and mangoes. The carnecerias (butcher shops) sell Spanish sausage, salt pork fat, chicken feet (3 Ibs. for 25¢) and salted pigs' tails.
In cafes, men sit for hours playing dominoes or cards, quietly sipping rum or beer.
Every morning the sidewalks are thronged with vendedores, selling chances on the day's bolito (the numbers game). From tiny store-front churches comes a strange calypso-like music of tambourines, banjos and maracas.
The proliferation of such churches, largely sponsored by obscure evangelical Pentecostal sects, is by far the most conspicuous religious activity in the Barrio, though most Puerto Ricans (83%) are nominally Roman Catholics. Columbia University investigators found that though most Puerto Ricans still profess themselves Catholics, they attend church less regularly than they did back home.
Under the guise of "religious articles," stores do a thriving business selling spiritualist charms. There is Attraction Incense, incense "to vibrate the powers of Lady Luck," Compelling Incense, High Conquering Incense ("Its fumes the steppingstone to the mighty conqueror condition"). Harder to find are the brujos, who cure asthma by hanging a tiny dead green frog in a bag around the neck.