Sunday afternoon in New York City: from the Puerto Rican parade to the Egg Creams and Egg Rolls Jewish-Chinese festival
Written by Rachel and Arielle Kandel
Earlier this month, on June 8, New York City witnessed two joyful cultural celebrations: the National Puerto Rican Day Parade, an annual celebration of Puerto Rican identity; and the Egg Rolls and Egg Creams Festival, honoring the shared histories of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, and of the long-time Chinese and Jewish residents of the two neighborhoods. Both festivities reflect fascinating immigration flows and community settlement patterns that have taken place in New York since as early as the 19th century.
Many will be surprised to learn that today there are more Puerto Ricans living in the United States than there are in Puerto Rico, by a substantial margin. After Mexicans, Puerto Ricans are the country’s largest Hispanic group, numbering approximately 5 million. Meanwhile, only 3.7 million inhabitants populate the Puerto Rican archipelago. The United States and Puerto Rico share a long history of immigration and migration. The first Puerto Rican immigrants came to the US in the mid-19th century, when Puerto Rico was still a Spanish colony. Following the close of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the US in the Treaty of Paris. The Jones Act of 1917 marked a decisive shift in how Puerto Rican residents in the US were classified. Until the passage of this act, they were considered immigrants. The Jones Act granted all Puerto Ricans American citizenship, changing the status of those living in the US from immigrant to migrant.
Following the Second World War, the US saw the largest wave of Puerto Rican migration to date, often called “The Great Migration.” In 1952 alone, 58,500 Puerto Ricans migrated to New York, settling mainly in Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem, Lower East Side, and Upper West Side. In the 1960s and 1970s Puerto Rican communities also started to form in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Today there are Puerto Rican neighborhoods in the city’s five boroughs: Bushwick in Brooklyn, Ridgewood in Queens, Spanish Harlem (“El Barrio”) and the Lower East Side (“Loisaida”) in Manhattan, the South Bronx, the North Shore in Staten Island, and more.
The first Puerto Rican Day Parade was held in New York City in 1958 to celebrate the burgeoning Puerto Rican community. Every year on the second Sunday of June, participants march up Fifth Avenue, from 44th to 86th Street. Since 1995, when it was incorporated as the National Puerto Rican Day Parade, the parade has hosted several other major events throughout the city in addition to the march. The event attracts many celebrities and politicians: this year, Puerto Rican actress Rosie Perez served as the parade’s queen, while Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo made appearances.
This year’s parade was not without controversy. Many doubted whether the parade would even take place after the non-profit organizing the event came under investigation for financial mismanagement. The case centered around allegations that the parade had become over-commercialized in recent years, catering to commercial sponsors and loosing sight of its origins. But despite the investigation and shuffling of leadership, the parade was preserved, and the new leadership committed itself to bringing the parade back to its roots and to having each float honor and celebrate Puerto Rican history and identity.
“Spectators at the Puerto Rican Day Parade on Fifth Avenue, New York City,” by Diana Robinson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
It was a few minutes before eleven, on this beautiful and warm day of early summer, and the 56th edition of the Puerto-Rican parade was just about to begin. Dozens of colorful floats and hundreds of participants were getting ready to march up Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, and excitement already radiated through the crowds of onlookers who had started to gather along the parade’s route since early Sunday morning – as many as 2 million viewers, according to an article of The New York Times.
Before I knew it, I had joined in with the deafening chorus of chants, claps, and ovations. Dancers in traditional costume and musicians performing classic tunes, honking cars and trucks painted in the archipelago’s red-white-blue colors, and parade participants holding enormous Puerto Rican flags cheered their way through the avenue with pep and enthusiasm. Delegations of Puerto Rican employees proudly represented state and city agencies, while special tribute was paid to the 65th Infantry Regiment, a Puerto Rican regiment of the United States Army, nicknamed “The Borinqueneers” after the original Taíno name of the island (Borinquen). Amid this celebration of Puerto Rican history, culture, and contribution to US society, the parade sometimes took political overtones, with numerous marchers holding banners calling for the release of Óscar López Rivera, a Puerto Rican sentenced in the early 1980s to 70 years in prison for conspiring against the US government, and seen by many of his compatriots as a political prisoner.
Eldridge Street Synagogue
After spending two hours at the parade, I decided to head to my second destination, the Egg Rolls and Egg Creams Festival. What a funny name for a Jewish-Chinese festival, I thought! I had read the festival was an annual Chinese and Jewish celebration organized in the Lower East Side by the Museum at Eldridge Street, a non-profit maintaining and offering tours to a 127-year-old synagogue. But while I was walking from the East Broadway F subway station to Eldridge Street, I wondered if I had the right address. It looked so different from the part of the Lower East Side I was more familiar with, a bit up north, with its tenement buildings, Jewish delis, and trendy coffee shops. The magnificent synagogue on Eldridge Street seemed to be the only sign left of a once-thriving Jewish community in the area, now looking like Chinatown no less than Canal and Mott streets. There couldn’t have been a more symbolic and powerful location to hold a festival paying homage to the coexistence, side by side, of the Jewish and Chinese communities and cultures in downtown Manhattan.
Steady Chinese immigration to the US began in the mid-19th century, initially chiefly to the Pacific Coast. By the 1870s, over a hundred thousand Chinese workers had already settled in California, attracted by the economic opportunities of the Gold Rush. From the start, Chinese immigrants tended to clump together and to form ethnic enclaves, as a result of racial discrimination, self-segregation, and other factors. San Francisco’s Chinatown is the oldest Chinese enclave in the US, and remains the largest Chinese community outside of Asia. Increasing anti-Chinese sentiment and violence as well as scarcity of work in California brought an increasing number of Chinese laborers to the East Coast, to New York and other cities. By the time the Chinese Exclusion Act severely restricted Chinese immigration in 1882, there was already a sizeable Chinese community in New York City, concentrated in what rapidly became known as Manhattan’s Chinatown. Despite the 1882 Act, Manhattan’s Chinese population slowly continued to grow, fed in part by the smuggling of immigrants, and numbered around 7,000 by the turn of the century.
Meanwhile, between 1880 and the mid-1920s, 2.5 million Eastern European Jews immigrated to the United States, fleeing growing anti-Semitism, pogroms, and persecution in Russia, Poland, and other neighboring countries. Over 1.5 million of these Jewish immigrants settled in New York City, primarily in the Lower East Side, a neighborhood adjacent to Chinatown. It was during that time, in 1887, that the Eldridge Street Synagogue opened its doors. Over the next three decades, the synagogue was one of the main religious and cultural centers of the Lower East Side’s Jewish residents, gathering hundreds in its premises during the Jewish High Holidays. But from the 1920s, the synagogue’s congregation began to decline, as restrictive immigration quotas led to a decline in new Jewish arrivals. Also, during the troubled times of the Great Depression and after the Second World War, many Jewish residents of the Lower East Side moved to other neighborhoods of New York City in search for cheaper rents and better living conditions.
“Mah Johng: Ultimate symbol of Jewish-Chinese friendship at Egg Rolls and Egg Cream Festival,” by Neal Ungerleider is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
At the same time as the Jewish population declined in the Lower East Side, the 1943 Magnuson Act, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act, led to the arrival of a small number of Chinese immigrants in New York. When immigration quota systems were eventually abolished under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Chinese immigrants flooded into Manhattan’s Chinatown, and formed new Chinese enclaves in other neighborhoods of New York City, particularly in Queens and Brooklyn. In the last twenty years or so, Chinese residents of Chinatown and new arrivals have also moved into some parts of the western Lower East Side, changing the social and cultural fabric and appearance of this area.
The Egg Rolls and Egg Creams festival held on Eldridge Street was both a plunge in the past history of the Lower East Side neighborhood, and a reflection of its evolving population and atmosphere. Inside the synagogue, participants were invited to join cross-cultural workshops teaching Yiddish and Mandarin, kippah and Chinese headdress making for children, and Jewish scribal arts and Chinese Mah Jongg. Outside, the sounds of klezmer music and of Chinese opera filled the street, and food stands sold for a small price greasy egg rolls and classic New York-style egg creams.
Next month we’ll discover together another of New York City’s enthralling ethnic celebrations, but in the mean time, stay tuned for next week’s post on the Flushing neighborhood, in Queens.
