Letters to the Editor
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Smurf
"I know some Latinos consider themselves white, but I don't know how many in Peurto Rico do...."
I can't tell you about Puerto Rico, the island, as a whole. I can tell you about areas of Puerto Rico, like Ponce, where there appears to be a recognition of the island's black influence and less of the preoccupation with colour gradation that has been evidenced in New World hispanic areas like Cuba, Brazil and the Dominican Republic.
In NYC, there has been a compatibility between blacks and Puerto Ricans that's similar to the affinity between Jews and Italians. This, in both cases, has pretty much resulted from both sets of groups sharing neighborhoods of the city as points of entry, in the immigrant experience [if you consider the Great, Northward Migration of black americans as a sort of immigration]. Neither pair of relationships are perfect--and there is, or has been, competition within each one-- but there IS a relationship. You don't see that, say, with NYC Dominicans and African-Americans and that may be the result of the complicated history of the island from whence the former group came and, specifically, what happened there between 1822-1844.