Boricuas in the News

Under construction. Please post links to news stories below! About PR or Puerto Ricans in the US…

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August 26, 2009

Keeping Radio’s Salsa Hot for 50 Years

By LARRY ROHTER

Spanish speakers in New York know him as El Rey de la Radio — the King of Radio. For longer than most of them can remember, Polito Vega’s booming, ebullient baritone, amusing stories and colorful catchphrases —“andando, andando, andando” — have been a constant and reassuring presence, as much a part of the soundtrack of urban life here as the blare of a taxi’s horn or the roar of the crowd at Yankee Stadium.

Mr. Vega broadcast his first program 50 years ago, shortly after arriving from Puerto Rico, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had yet put a man in space. The station that hired him, WEVD-AM, no longer exists, but Mr. Vega has been on the air, always in New York, ever since, with an occasional foray into television and a side career as the M.C. of choice at concerts and other events.

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August 24, 2009

The Young Lords’ Legacy of Puerto Rican Activism

By Jennifer 8. Lee

The confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has stirred a wide sense of pride among Puerto Ricans. But some the roots of that Puerto Rican pride, many would argue, took hold 40 years ago this summer, with the founding in New York City of the Young Lords, a group that used confrontational tactics to bring services and attention to the residents of East Harlem, or El Barrio, and beyond.

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August 7, 2009

For Puerto Ricans, Sotomayor’s Success Stirs Pride

By DAVID GONZALEZ

In the summer of 1959, Edwin Torres landed a $60-a-week job and wound up on the front page of El Diario. He had just been hired as the first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney in New York — and probably, he thinks, the entire United States.

He still recalls the headline: “Exemplary Son of El Barrio Becomes Prosecutor.”

“You would’ve thought I had been named attorney general,” he said. “That’s how big it was.”

Half a century later, the long and sometimes bittersweet history of Puerto Ricans in New York is expected to add a celebratory chapter today as the Senate confirms Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Her personal journey — from a single-parent home in the Bronx projects to the Ivy League and an impressive legal career — has provoked a fierce pride in many other Puerto Ricans who glimpse reflections of their own struggles.

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