CARMEN HAYDEE RIVERA


industry on the island and by the lure of foreign job recruitment to work
elsewhere. Others (like Ram6n Emeterio Betances, Eugenio Maria de Hostos,
Lola Rodriguez de Ti6, Pachin Marin, Sotero Figueroa, Arturo Alfonso
Schomburg, etc.) suffered political persecution that resulted in exile during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These first migrants, known
as the "pioneros," settled mainly in New York City. They began to form Puerto
Rican communities bonded by a common historical and geographical past,
by traditions, customs, and language, and by their social struggles and efforts
to obtain the coveted benefits of the "American Dream."
 The author who best captures the crude realities and contradictions of
this historical era with detailed precision is Bernardo Vega in Memoirs of
Bernardo Vega. Migrating to the United States in 1916 at the age of thirty,
Vega carefully delineates his encounter with an alien and often hostile society
referred to as the "Iron Tower of Babel." His writing reflects the first stage of
the awakening of a cultural consciousness discussed by Juan Flores ("the
state of abandon") in which the newly arrived migrant is confronted with an
environment totally different from the one he left on the island.6 This contrast
produces a cultural shock that leaves a lasting imprint and develops in the
newcomer a desire for returning to the island. Getting over this initial stage
of cultural and linguistic disruption marks the beginning of an adaptation
process that enables the migrant to exist within the hostility and limitations
of the new environment.
 Vega's Memoirs contain the most detailed and politically coherent account
of Puerto Rican life in New York from 1916 to the aftermath of World War II.
The work also reveals Vega's efforts to construct a historical and cultural
legacy of the Puerto Rican migrant experience that would counteract the
defamatory and insulting depiction of Puerto Ricans in the media.7 As an
erudite intellectual tabaquero, adhering to the ranks of the Socialist Party
and actively involved in the unionization of the working class, Vega's writing
is a living testament of a self-proclaimed Puerto Rican jibaro from the
highlands of Cayey who values his cultural heritage as he forges his way
towards a metropolitan, proletariat, global perspective of a multicultural
society. His work is an indictment of the era's racism, discrimination, and
classicism but also a celebration of the early Puerto Rican migrants' tenacity,
courage, and cultural pride.
 Though Vega originally wrote his Memoirs in Spanish in the 1940s, it was
not until 1977, and after his death, that his friend and partner in social causes,
Cesar Andreu Iglesias, published the work. Juan Flores's 1984 translation of
the work published by the Monthly Review Press exposed Vega's story to a
wider, English-speaking audience and helped consolidate the work's
reputation as a seminal contribution that fills many critical voids in
conventional assessments of the Puerto Rican experience in the United States.
 Jesis ColOn is another important writer who charts the history of struggle,
solidarity, and cultural unity of the early working-class Puerto Rican migrants.