About Us: Latinos in Connecticut

Latinos in Hartford, CT

Adapted from the NIH Export Center for Eliminating Health Disparaties Among Latinos Cross-Cultural and Diversity Inclusiveness Training

To understand the living conditions of Latinos in Hartford, Conn., it is helpful to look back more than 500 years, to Spain's colonization of much of the Caribbean and the areas that are now known as Central and South America.

At that time, Puerto Rico was inhabited by the native Taino people who called their homeland Borinquen. The Tainos were an agricultural and matriarchal society. Property, family name and tribal leadership were inherited through the women. 

When the Spanish arrived around the time of Columbus, they enslaved the Tainos to work in their gold mines. Many rebelled and were killed when traditional Taino weaponry was no match for Spain’s gunpowder. Others died from new diseases introduced by the Spanish for which the Tainos had no immunity. As the Taino population dwindled, slaves from Central-West Africa were brought to the Caribbean to continue the Spaniards' search for gold.

The introduction of Christianity, a new system of government and the overlay of a male dominated society brought tremendous changes to native life. As was true in the many other countries that the Spanish had conquered, there were many efforts in Puerto Rico to gain independence.

On July 17, 1898, an independent government was officially installed in Puerto Rico. A very short time later, however, the island was invaded by U.S. forces as a result of the Spanish American War. By the turn-of-the-century, 400 years of Spanish domination was over. The island became a property of the United States, which has maintained political, military, and economic control ever since.  In 1917, Congress mandated that all Puerto Ricans become citizens of the United States.  Later that same year, 20,000 islanders were drafted into the military at the commencement of U.S. combat in World War I.  

At first, public health and public works initiatives such as the provision of clean water and paved roads boosted the quality of life in Puerto Rico. Agriculture became concentrated in the hands of large U.S. companies, and many small farmers were displaced from their land. At first, even this appeared to be a blessing as tax incentives from Operation Bootstrap and other U.S. development initiatives quadrupled the number of industrial jobs for Puerto Ricans. But after tax incentives ran out, U.S. companies left – and 75 percent of the jobs disappeared as well. Puerto Rico was left with rampant unemployment and an economy unable to even feed its own. Today, 85 percent of the food consumed in Puerto Rico is imported, mostly from the United States.

So it should be no surprise that in the 1950s, Puerto Ricans answered the call when the U.S. government began recruiting workers from the island to fill agricultural and other low-wage jobs on the mainland. In Connecticut, many of those workers came to pick tobacco. As they became aware of the higher wages and better working conditions offered by manufacturing jobs in the then-thriving city of Hartford, Puerto Ricans began moving to the city. As they established themselves and family members joined them, the number of Puerto Ricans in Hartford grew rapidly. But as a community, they did not thrive.

Unfortunate timing contributed to problems that made the Puerto Rican experience different from that of immigrants and migrants who settled in U.S. cities before them.  Just as the Puerto Rican population began to grow, mechanization replaced many of the no-skill sources of employment, such as dishwashing in restaurants, operating elevators, or restacking pins in bowling alleys, that were open to them. A short time later, even low-skill manufacturing jobs began to disappear, as companies realized that they could produce goods more cheaply outside of the United States.  Hartford’s economy shifted to one that employed high-skilled financial and data analysts, who largely came to work from the suburbs. The city’s Puerto Rican population was left with jobs in the service sector that paid far below what was needed to support a family. Hartford eventually became one of the ten poorest moderate-sized cities in the country, and has retained that dubious distinction for more than a decade.

By the time the Hispanic Health Council opened its doors in 1978, the nation’s health care system that was such a draw for Puerto Rican migrants was beginning to fail them. Economic and social conditions -- poverty, racism, language barriers, lack of adequate housing, food insecurity, inferior educational opportunities and a lack of access to medical care, among others -- have caused Latinos in  Connecticut to bear the burden of excessive disease, death, disability, and dissatisfaction.

Over the past two decades, immigrants from Mexico, Peru, Colombia, The Dominican Republic, Cuba and other parts of Central and South America have joined the roughly 75,000 Puerto Ricans who account for half of Hartford’s population. While the complexion of the Spanish-speaking population has changed slightly, the problems remain _ sometimes exacerbated by laws that bar undocumented immigrants from receiving needed health care. The Hispanic Health Council is a resource for all of them and a catalyst for change that we hope will someday close the health care gap between minorities and non-minorities in Hartford, the state of Connecticut and across the United States.

(Connecticut Economic Resource Center Inc., 2006; EPA  Northeast City Urban Initiative, 2007; Hartford Schools, 2007; Hispanic Health Council, 1989; U.S. Census, 2007)