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Naturally tidy, they keep the shabby rooms spotless, but there is no keeping down the cockroaches that scuttle across the linoleum flooring or the rats that infest the blocked-off dumbwaiters and the rotting spaces between the walls. (Every week 15 to 25 Barrio babies are bitten by rats as they sleep.) And Puerto Ricans, reared under a tropical sun that burns dry any refuse, have no feeling about garbage. They just heave it into the alley. The men have a hard time getting jobs. When they do, they find the U.S. tempo exacting. Said one plaintively: "If one fails to report for work a single day, someone takes his place." They work in small factories, soldering lipstick cases making zippers or paper boxes, packing vegetables or candy. They dig ditches and work ships. Often, they are the big city's men behind the scenes. They wash the dishes, make the beds, clean the offices, launder the clothes, change the tablecloths. All in all, the Barrio seems a disappointing promised land. Nearly half of the immigrants live doubled up, or take in boarders. The average family income is only $36 a week, and 40% make less than $30 a week. The Barrio's death rate from tuberculosis is two or three times the city's average.
The women worry about their children. Even the adults are afraid to go out on the streets at night. Wailed one mother: "Our children grow up to be bandits, playing on the streets. They cannot be scolded or punished." Like other slum children, Puerto Rican boys get into trouble. They fight each other, run away from home, cut school; sometimes there are knifings and rapes. But there are seldom robberies or gang assaults. And once they learn English, teachers report, Puerto Rican children are responsive and quick to learn.
Why do they stay? The Puerto Ricans of the Barrio dislike the big city's impersonal hostility ("People here are cold and act as if they didn't trust each other"), miss the music and dancing of the easygoing life they left. But the slums they came from were no better than the slums they live in now. If they have little chance in this generation of rising to the wide levels of opportunities as lawyers, doctors or businessmen, they have already begun to find places in U.S. society as workers and laborers. And then there are their children. Said one Puerto Rican mother: "Children are better here. Better hope." That, the old immigrant's hope, also holds the new.