The Geography of Bernardo Vega's Memoirs

In 1955 Puerto Rican political activist, journalist and emigré Bernardo Vega finished writing the manuscript of a novel that was ultimately to be published in 1977, through an editing process that remains unclear to this day, as a historical autobiography; that book is Las Memorias de Bernardo Vega. Its editor, the journalist and labor leader, César Andreu Iglesias, subtitled the text ‘a contribution to the history of Puerto Rican community in New York’. Indeed, since its publishing the book, originally written and edited in Spanish and later translated into English in 1984 by the late Juan Flores (as The Memoirs of Bernardo Vega), has been widely considered and celebrated as a foundational text of the Puerto Rican diaspora’s literary body and an important document about the experience of this community in the continental United States and New York City specifically (Sánchez-Korrol 1994, Kevane 1999).

Since publishing Vega’s memoirs have received thoughtful scholarly analysis, mostly from literary and socio-historical Marxist perspectives (Flores 1993, Sánchez-Korrol 1994, Quintero-Rivera 1978, José Luis González 1989, Ruiz Cumba 1990), yet I argue that commentators and critics of the text have systematically overlooked one of the memoirs’ richest aspects: Vega’s Memoirs have deeply embedded all over it the author’s almost obsessive awareness with the spatiality of his surroundings. Vega constantly mentions specific city addresses, street intersections, locales of public meetings and happenings, detailed routes of his commutes and promenades, etc. In short, all commentary on this important work has overlooked that Vega’s memoirs are also, among other things, an eminently spatial text.

I argue that a ‘spatial’ reading of The Memoirs of Bernardo Vega is epistemologically and methodologically important for mainly two reasons: first, it will provide an example of how ‘spatial’ information -when available- should be deemed vital when reading texts (of fiction or non-fiction); for in many cases our ‘spatial awareness’ of texts adds richness, complexity and alternative narratives to our understanding of these texts; and second, and more immediately relevant to the field of Latino Studies, a ‘spatially aware’ reading of this specific text will show how Bernardo Vega was in fact ‘mapping out’, claiming geographic ownership of, significant parts of New York City for the Puerto Rican community.

Reading the Memoirs ‘spatially’ is, in a way, simply following its author’s cue, since the text is positively teeming with geographic pointers. Among the telling facts that have emerged while researching and developing the current inquiry is that the tragic 2014 East Harlem gas explosion that took the lives of 8 people -among them a personal acquaintance- and injured around 70 others, leveled a building (1644 Park Avenue), where Vega lived for a time, and of which he writes in detail about a rather funny occurrence.

A 'spatial' reading, however, demands some specific -if brief- discussion about some immediately relevant theoretical aspects and partially technical issues. Contemporary scholarship, specially within the general fields of the Digital Humanities and the Spatial Humanities, has done notable advances in demonstrating the relevance of space, geography and place for the research and understanding of literary and historical texts and narratives (Travis 2015) (Kemp 2010) (Knowles 2008). These advances are both a technical and theoretical nature, for the so-called ‘Spatial turn’ in the humanities has matured not only into a fairly rich self-consciously disciplinary theoretical body of work about the limits, problems and potentialities of looking at cultural artifacts, creative works and historical text from a spatially-aware perspective (Kirschenbaum 2012), but it also includes a growing body of literature about more eminently technical issues, such as the role that quite complex computer technologies -such as Geographic Information Systems/GIS- can play in bringing forth spatial readings and appraisals of texts, biographies and archives (Gregory and Geddes 2014).

It can be argued that a spatial approach to text can be performed in two alternative, although not mutually-exclusive- ways: we can read and appraise texts in a spatial-metaphorical way, such as the important cultural and theoretical work done on borderlands, cross-cultural spaces and the frontier by scholars such as Américo Paredes (1971)(Saldívar 2000), Renato Rosaldo (1989) and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987). Alternatively, we can also engage with text from a more concretely spatial-cartographic perspective, which requires grappling with the non-trivial and ever-evolving complexities of GIS technologies and software.

In this particular reading of Bernardo Vega’s Memoirs I intend to perform a reading that stays closer to the technical GIS approach. This specific choice, again, demands a few comments of both a theoretical and technical nature.

Geographic Information Systems

By now we are all much or less familiar with GIS or quasi-GIS platforms, such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Bing Maps, Waze, MapBox, CartoDB, GIS Cloud, GRASS, QGIS or ArcGIS, among others; some of these platforms and applications might not be well-known outside of GIS practitioners and specialists, but others we use in our PCs and smartphones on an almost daily basis. For our specific purposes GIS (Geographic Information Systems) can perhaps be best concretely and simply understood as a diverse array of computer softwares -some open source, some for-profit, some available as desktop applications and some served within the platform of a web-browser- that allow us to concretely map in geographic coordinates different types of ‘geographic primitives’: namely points, lines and polygons. Examples of GIS points are the location of a specific restaurant, a street intersection, a museum address, the house of a friend; examples of GIS lines are the length of a street (say Lexington Avenue in Manhattan from 100th Street to 116th Street), or the now-gone ‘Music Row’ on 48th Street in Midtown Manhattan, the route of the New York City Marathon, the driving directions or the commute from home to work. Lines, it must be noted, and this will be relevant later on, are built by aggregating a series of much or less consecutive points. Good examples of GIS polygons are business districts, neighborhoods, a police precinct area, a city council district. While lines are made up by points, polygons -in turn- are made up of at least three lines that enclose a space.

But GIS does more than allow us to map coordinates (points, lines and polygons) in a two-dimensional rendering (and even in 3D); perhaps the richest aspect of GIS computer technology, as opposed to traditional hand-drawn maps, is that it allows users to attach, update, investigate and ‘play’ with potentially immense amounts of data/information associated to those points, lines and polygons. And so, a Geographic Information System/GIS allows us to not only locate/read or plot/draw the specific location of a building (a point) or a police precinct (a polygon), but also allows us to attach or read information such as code violations on that building, or crime statistics within the boundaries of the given police precinct. The same is true of lines.

Furthermore, computer GIS allows us to visualize in a two-or-three dimensional rendering an immense amount of relationships between these points, lines and polygons working -as it usually does- by the capability of this type of application to add or subtract ‘layers’ to a map; usually these layers of points, lines and polygons can be switched on or off, re-arranged, or viewed with different levels of transparency. A layer of points (schools, for examples) in which each point is attached to an attribute table/database (containing for example, the name and contact information of the school’s director, ages served, year of construction, private or public, etc.), can be combined/added to a layer of lines (streets and/or subway lines, for example), and it can be further combined with a layer of polygons (census tracts, for example), which also potentially contains vast amounts of economic and demographic data. Just as we can add, combine and rearrange layers to a GIS map, they can be removed or subtracted.

GIS, deformance and a deformed Humanities

The addition and subtraction of layers method of working with computer generated maps, is -in a way- a matter of adding or subtracting complexity to the map; in fact, in working with maps, knowledge, complexity and richness is at times achieved by subtracting layers and data. Similarly, the act of engaging in a spatial reading of a text like Bernardo Vega’s Memoirs, can be understood as a way of adding complexity to the text through focusing in the significant amount of geographical information embedded in the text while partially separating this data/information from the content proper of the text. This issue of adding richness to our understanding of texts and narratives by way of dislodging certain components of the text from the explicit content of the larger work and the intent of its author, presents in itself a tense and complex argument; the concrete and theoretical ‘distant reading’ work of Franco Moretti (2013), and the ‘deformance’ against ‘deformed’ Humanities debate/conversation between Mark Sample (2012), and Lisa Samuels and Jerry McGann (1999) engages in depth with this specific issue.

Indeed, it should be avowed that reading the Memoirs of Bernardo Vega from a spatial perspective constitutes a deviation from the explicit original purpose, intention, content and context of the text. Yet, this type of ‘rough’ and deviant analytical treatment can take two broad approaches, which in our case should ultimately be decided by the reader/user of the present work (adding a certain degree of interactivity to the exercise). Readers are encouraged to explore and play with these two options, or a combination of both.

First, we could, in the words of Samuels and McGann engage in a “deformance” of the Memoirs text, engaging in a purposeful separation or ‘estrangement’ of some of its constitutive components (in our case the geographical markers that Vega embedded in it), dislodge this data from the text, map some of this data out, analyze hidden relationships, speculate potential political and social significance, etc. all with the ultimate aim of re-incorporating our new knowledge back into the text; Sample calls this approach taking “Humpty Dumpty apart only to put Humpty Dumpty back together again”. Alternatively, the reader/user can embrace the more radical ‘deformed humanities’ approach advocated by Sample, and dislodge the geographical information from the text, engage in developing the spatial reading and stop right there, with the intention of savoring the Memoirs text in its ‘newly’ acquired explicit broken-ness and cartographic-ness, while considering this new ‘deformed’ reading a completely new ‘artifact’ in itself. Leaving Humpty-Dumpty broken, as it were. For some of us might agree with Sample when he writes that “there is little need to go back to the original. We work—in the Stallybrass sense of the word—not to go back to the original text with a revitalized perspective, but to make an entirely new text or artifact.” (Sample 2012). These two alternatives posit a -perhaps false- dichotomy between “reading and critiquing” and “building and making” (Ramsay 2011) within the general humanities and the digital humanities more specifically.

About the Memoirs authorship: adding questions and layers of complexity

In 1999 Bridget Kavane wrote an interesting article that problematizes the generic (as in genre) aspect of the extant Memoirs book, going as far as to question the authorship of the text. Kavane questions how Andreu Iglesias’ editing of Vega’s manuscript altered Vega’s unique voice, original intentions, and the book’s genre. “Andreu Iglesias’s editing of Vega’s text forces the reader to wonder who is the real author of this contribution to the history of the Puerto Rican community in New York. The memoirs attributed to Vega are clearly a creation of César Andreu Iglesias” (77, Kavane 1999). Some of the issues raised by Kevane are of the utmost relevance to our discussion. Kavane’s critique and questions are based mostly on her close reading of the introduction to the original edition by its editor, Andreu Iglesias, and on the fact that she had the unique opportunity to have very brief access to Vega’s original manuscript (whose real ownership was mysterious at the time). Her argument is worth restating.

Vega, she tells us, finished his novel manuscript in 1955. Once done, he approached Andreu Iglesias at some point, seeking help in editing the novel. Andreu Iglesias told Vega that the novel best be turned into a historical autobiography for publishing; Vega energetically refused the advice. By the time Vega died in 1965 he and Andreu Iglesias had not come to any agreement about the editing and publishing of the book. Then, in 1975, Andreu Iglesias did precisely what Vega had refused to do: he turned the novel into an autobiography; and indeed the book was ultimately published in 1977 as an autobiography; but by then Andreu Iglesias had also passed, and the book was readied for publication and prologued by the short-story writer and sociologist José Luis González, obviously adding another layer of complexity and questions.

Kavane argues that Andreu Iglesias’s editing went far beyond what almost anybody would commonly understand as a regular editing process, and amounted to “a serious and intentional appropriation of the text” on his part (77, Kevane 1999). She warns us all that “Until the manuscript is available for study, we must consider this contribution, although still important and worthwhile, the work of César Andreu Iglesias and not Bernardo Vega” (77, Kevane 1999).

Kevane presents a cogent critique that questions the wisdom of Andreu Iglesias’ altering the book’s genre; she wonders about Vega’s original intentions and how Andreu Iglesias radically misread, underestimated and possibly misjudged them; she speculates about Andreu Iglesias’ political reasons for appropriating the book, and argues that Andreu Iglesias’ “editing” not only radically altered the text, but possibly ended up limiting its readership, perhaps undermining what both Vega and Andreu Iglesias ultimately wanted: build community.

Given the complexity of the issue, obvious length constraints and the original purpose and scope of this work, I would intentionally (and temporarily) bracket the important questions regarding the issue of authorship of the Memoirs. The analysis that follows will (hesitantly) treat the Memoirs as authored by Bernardo Vega.

However, we cannot totally ignore or bracket some of Kevane’s other observations, particularly in regards to the significant amount data-filtering that occurred when Andreu Iglesias ‘edited’ the text, she writes:

"Andreu Iglesias  changed the text’s frame of reference (her italics) to help promote a revision of the role of the Puerto Rican in New York. The text no longer maintains its original novelistic frame of reference, but becomes an historical memoir providing documentation (my italics) -ranging from lists of names to specific dates that mark the beginning of different organizations- of the life of Puerto Ricans in New York.” (76, Kevane 1999)

In other words, the text of the Memoirs that we have was in fact visited by at least the filtering vision of Andreu Iglesias; it is even possible that the text was further filtered by José Luis González, who prepared the final edition for publication after the passing of Andreu Iglesias. The Memoirs as they exists should be considered -in the words of Franco Moretti- an already ‘reduced’ text (53, Moretti 2005), for some serious data-mining and filtering occurred during the still unclear editing and publishing process.

Mapping literary texts, Moretti tells us in Graphs, Maps and Trees, require that “you reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them from the narrative flow, and construct a new, artificial object…” (53, Moretti 2005). Significantly, it must be added, Kavane’s critique exclusively pertains to what must ultimately be considered the concrete ‘reduction’ of Vega’s original work, and the change of genre that Andreu Iglesias visited on it; there is no mention of Andreu Iglesias adding anything extraneous to the text. Kevane never tells us the editor added facts, data, anecdotes, characters, etc. Andreu Iglesias’ voice can be found, she says, mostly through a series of voids and linguistic ellipses throughout the work. In other words, if Andreu Iglesias went too far, and it is likely that he did, he went too far in reducing and filtering the text, not in adding to it.

This reduction/filtering process/issue should be understood as intimately related to our previous discussion about deformance and the deformed humanities, and should also offer us some guidance as to what we should ultimately do with our spatial analysis (reintegrate it to our knowledge of the Memoirs or let the objects/maps issuing from the present work stand as new ‘artificial’ objects). Putting Humpty-Dumpty back together or leave him broken? The question seems partially moot: we have in our hands, Kavane tells us, a text that has already been “broken”.

It is most likely the case that Andreu Iglesias’ re-framing of the text has in fact done some of the work of extracting spatial data from what was a originally written as a work of fiction, a novel. The chevalier editor has perhaps made our spatial analysis a bit easier.

The Spatial Memoirs

For reasons of space I deem it more optimal to currently engage with a single moment from the Memoirs that I deem ‘spatially’ telling and important, rather than with a spatial analysis and mapping out the text in its entirety. Mapping and reading the whole text spatially is perhaps better left for another format, such as a chapter in a future book or an exclusively digital project living inside a web-site. The analysis of this moment will go -I hope- a long way into proving the fruitfulness of putting the Memoirs, and other texts, through this kind of spatial analytical treatment. Readers are encouraged to explore the web-companion map residing at: http://www.monxolopez.net/MapaDraft/bernardovega_chp2map.html for a more visual and vivid engagement with the argument.

This moment of interest to us regards the very arrival of Bernardo to New York City in early August 1916. The larger historical context is the United States’ imminent involvement in the First World War. This moment of arrival is significant for a few reasons: it presents us with Vega’s first opinion, a first take, of the city that would become his home for years to come and as such, it presents a rather direct unmediated assessment of what he found, and how he felt, upon stepping out of the ship to start a new life; moreover, even though recently-arrived we will see how Vega not only takes measure of his spatial surroundings, recording his physical movements, but endeavors to ‘populate’ these surrounding with data; finally, these first spatial impressions can serve as an anchor point, for as the Memoirs advance and record the life of Vega in New York City in future years, we can use this initial anchor point as a point of reference to see how the understanding and observations of his city changed throughout the years.

Bernardo Vega left his native Barrio Farrallón, in the mountainous town of Cayey in the “early morning of August 2, 1916” (5, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984), and travels to San Juan, the capital city of the island of Puerto Rico, a United States unincorporated territory since the year 1898, whose citizens are to become in 1917, by an act of the US Congress, American citizens. He spends one day and one night in San Juan and on August the 3rd boards a boat, the Coamo (named after a municipality in the island), headed towards New York City. He lands in Hamilton Pier, Staten Island, as so many immigrants at the time. From Staten Island he boarded a ferry towards Battery Park in the southern tip of lower Manhattan.

Immediately upon arriving he begins what, for GIS practitioners, amounts to an informal surveying of his surroundings; he notices and records the train lines: the Battery, he tells us, “was also a port of call for the elevated trains. The Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenue lines all met there” (7, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984). The noise of the trains was “deafening” and he “felt as if I was drowning in the crowd”. He notices more lines of movements, routes, layering his nascent map with chaotic lines, “people were rushing about every which way, not seeming to know exactly where they were headed” (7, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984). People might seem to not know where they are headed, but Vega is determined to make order out of chaos, to keep his bearings, for when he boards a subway car he “pretended to take note of everything”. Why does he felt he had to pretend? Bernardo is commuting with a friend, he is not objectively lost, his friends knows where they are going; but deep inside we can surmise he is in fact lost. That performative gesture of “pretending” to survey his surroundings, “to take note of everything”, is spatially and psychologically significant, because it shows that from his very arrival to the city, Bernardo tries to show that the new city is his city, to pretend that he is not out of place.

While commuting uptown his pre-conceived spatial vision of New York is immediately shattered when “as the dingy buildings filed past my view, all the visions I had of the gorgeous splendor of New York vanished. The skyscrapers seemed like tall gravestones”. He describes the city as “grotesque” and imagines that “the people of New York could not possibly be as happy as we used to think they were back home in Cayey” (7, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984). Him and his friend, Ambrosio, stepped out of the subway on 23rd Street, walking down to 22nd Street “on the West Side” where he rented his first room at 228 (presumably on 22nd Street on the West Side) on a boarding house where his friend lived, this is the home of the Arnao family.

The address at 228 (West 22nd Street) is, from a GIS perspective, a point; and as it is his wont, Vega adds all sorts of information about that specific point and its surroundings: Mrs Aranao, the lady running the pension is married to a Puerto Rican dentist (demographic data), the only other person boarding at the pension is his friend (demographic data), his friend is unemployed (economic data), which leads him to “suspect that she (the lady) wasn’t doing too well financially” (8, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984). He talks about the price of potatoes, eggs, salt pork, prime steak, vegetables, suits, the subway; further adding useful information to a putative attribute table associated with the point of 228 West 22nd Street. Vega’s textual map of New York City is, from the very beginning, a document rich with economic, demographic and spatial data. All of this can be mapped on a GIS application.

On the second day he and his friend take a “tour...to get to know New York” (8, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984). They walked towards Fifth Avenue, and boarded a double decker bus headed “uptown”. The bus goes uptown via Fifth Avenue and “crossed over on 110th Street”. On 110th Street (Central Park North) they went all the way west reaching Riverside Drive. The bus then ran north along Riverside Drive, from 110th Street to 135th Street, turning east one city block on 135th to take Broadway, still direction uptown, all the way to 168th Street; then at the meeting point of Broadway and St. Nicholas Avenue on 168th Street, the double decker took them up north on St-Nicholas to 191th Street, where they debarked.

While in the bus heading uptown Vega “soaked in all the sights -the shiny store windows, then the mansions, and later on the gray panorama of the Hudson River” (8, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984); at this point he tells us that “in later years I took the same trip many times. But I was never as impressed as I was then…” (8, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984). The tour, he says, was “terrific”. We also see how Vega’s original assessment of New York as ‘grotesque’ is already shifting on the second day after his arrival.

We can map this route using GIS (see fig 1). The tour Vega took with his friend Ambrosio constitutes a classic GIS line, but in fact Vega offers little information on what he saw to allow us to ‘populate’ that line with interesting information. Things get more interesting, however, on their way back.

But first, an interesting and telling anecdote: once uptown Vega tells us he and his friend strolled through a park around 191st Street and read historical markers about the American War of Independence; on this park they also saw a few couples openly kissing; Vega was upsetted by this public display of affection, but “quickly realized that our presence didn’t matter to them….what a difference between our customs back home and the behavior of Puerto Rican men and women in New York!” (9, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984). Three things jump to view here: first, while Vega is trying to visually and spatially ‘soak in’ the city in an effort to better understand and appropriate it, this episode obviously reminds him he is out of place; perhaps this is what most upsets him. Second, he seems to imply that at least one of these couples was Puerto Rican; if this is indeed the case, the space, the new city, had -by 1916- deeply changed the mores and public behavior of at least some Puerto Ricans that were already living in New York. Are these kissing Puerto Ricans Nuyoricans already? Proto-nuyoricans? Finally, not for the first or last time, the Memoirs offer us here a fleeting glimpse of the ways people used public spaces in New York City; in this, Vega’s chronicle not only represents a contribution to the history of the Puerto Rican community in the city, but a contribution to the history of the uses of spaces in the city at large. In this specific case we know for a fact that the park around 191st Street and St-Nicholas Avenue was a meeting place where lovers could publicly embrace and kiss in ways that perhaps were not acceptable elsewhere.

On their return downtown Vega and his friend Ambrosio follow the same path, but get off the bus at 110th Street and Manhattan Avenue. They start to walk, and the spatial descriptions naturally thickens with the slower pace. They walk on Manhattan Avenue from 110th Street to 116th Street. Three Puerto Rican brothers, cigar-makers all, from his town of Cayey lived there. The León family, he tells us, had migrated twelve years earlier, in 1904. This family, moreover, “were some of the first Puerto Ricans to settle in the Latin barrio of Harlem”. Here the Memoirs suddenly move from Manhattan Avenue and 116th Street to what was to become El Barrio/Spanish Harlem. He lists the family names of some Puerto Rican families that had already been living in El Barrio for some time, and then concludes by offering a demographic tableau of the area: “In all, I’d say there were some one hundred and fifty Puerto Ricans living that part of the city around the turn of the century” (9, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984).

Spatially, the map is at this point still vague, but from a GIS perspective at this early point in his chronicle Vega is clearly beginning to populate the attribute table behind the polygon/area we know today as El Barrio/Spanish Harlem. Slowly, point by point, Vega is building a polygon. At this point in the text we still do not know precisely what or where are the boundaries of El Barrio, and in fact the area was not to be called that way for some time still; but Vega offers us a rather astonishing and uncanny view: he saw and recorded the Puerto Rican presence in El Barrio before it was a Puerto Rican neighborhood. Vega seems to have instinctively known that he had to keep track of the demographics of the area, that he had to record the points, lines and polygons, even before it became a Puerto Rican enclave. He saw the proto-Barrio for what it was: a nascent Puerto Rican community. I argue that this is part of a systematic effort on Vega’s part to claim part of the city’s geography on behalf of the Puerto Rican diaspora.

Timewise (as opposed to spatially), Vega is not content to simply report what he personally encountered then and there; he goes back in time to tells us that around 150 Puerto Ricans lived in East Harlem around the year 1900; among these he mentions “the Nadals, Matienzos, Pietris, Escalonas and Umpierres” families (9, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984); the León family, his friends, had migrated in 1904.

This encounter of time-space that we see in the text of the Memoirs cannot but remind us of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘historical poetics’ and his concept of the chronotope (Bakhtin 1981). Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope was developed with the specific intent of performing “literary criticism”, but we can heuristically deploy it to better understand (or fruitfully deform) a work like Vega’s Memoirs. Within the context of GIS and the Spatial Humanities, the Irish scholar Charles B. Travis has done relevant theoretical, analytical and cartographic work about the layering of time-space from a Bakhtinian perspective in his book Abstract Machine, Humanities GIS (p 49 Travis, 2015). He calls this union of GIS, history and time-space “Bakhtinian GIS” (49 Travis 2015).

Bakhtin defines the chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature”; the chronotope “expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space)” and in it “the spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.” (81, Bakhtin 1981).

As we have seen the Memoirs is a work that presents a complicated and ambiguous textuality and authorship; I posit that the Memoirs can be more richly understood, and/or ‘deformed’ as it were, if we grasp the ways in which Vega “thickens” his historical (time) narratives with spatial data, while at the same time ‘charges’ spatial observations with “the movements of time, plot and history”.

It is worth mentioning that in Travis’ work we learn that this union of time-space, which Bakhtin borrowed from the theoretical work of Albert Einstein (“time as the fourth dimension of space”), has a rather long pedigree; after all, the chronotope concept is -in a few ways- rather common-sensical and self-evident; for example: as far back as 1624 John Smith, the author of Generall Historie of Virginia wrote that “As geography without history seemeth a carcass without motion, so history without geography wandereth as vagrant without habitation” (23-24 Travis, 2015). Vega sees history as motion, and, I will argue, is trying to construct-by-mapping the enclaves and neighborhoods of the Puerto Rican community in the city, giving this community a ‘habitation’.

But Vega is not by any measure a nationalist exclusively obsessed about the (urban and spatial) development of the Puerto Rican community in the city; he is quick to tell us there were other groups, in fact other ‘Hispanics’, living in East Harlem before the arrival of the Puerto Ricans; and he goes into some detail about what he saw in 1916, leaving a record of the spatial distribution of these other communities and their usage of the space.

A Cuban ‘colony’ of families of some means lived in apartments owned by Sephardic Jews on 110th Street (Central Park North) facing Central Park (9, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984).

What in later years became known as El Barrio was, in 1916, mostly inhabited by Sephardic Jews. He draws and organizes the spatial lines and polygons of the business life and the living quarters of the Jewish community emphasizing social class, adding resolution to his spatial description (some of these can be seen both in the companion web map and in fig 2). “Seventh, St. Nicholas, and Manhattan avenues, and the streets in between were all inhabited by Jewish people of means, if not great wealth” (9, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984). 110th Street he calls “the professional center of the district” (9, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984), Lenox Avenue had the “expensive stores”; the “modest stores” were located on Fifth Avenue.

Poor Jews lived in a “ghetto” in a polygon area limited by Park Avenue on the east, Madison Avenue on the west, 117th Street on the north, and 110th street on the south. Here, among the poor Jews, was the heaviest concentration of Puerto Rican and Cuban families in 1916, some fifty families according to his reckoning. Among the Puerto Rican families, there was a considerable amount of “cigarworkers, bachelors for the most part” living mostly between Madison and Park avenues (9, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984).

In the webmap companion to the present work readers/users can activate the layer for the 1920 census of the city and see that what was to become El Barrio was among the densest places in the city (see also fig 3). The specific blocks that Vega identifies as a Jewish ‘ghetto’ were in fact the densest blocks (population-wise) in uptown Manhattan. There was where Puerto Ricans originally settled in significant numbers at the time of Vega’s description. Using the same census layer, users can also see that the Lower East Side, another area that was to become a Puerto Rican enclave, had the highest density in New York City at the time and was also populated mostly by Jews at the time. Here we clearly see, thanks to GIS spatial technology,  how the Puerto Rican ethnic enclaves took root in what were Jewish ethnic enclaves at the time.

Additionally, for reasons that we will see shortly, the companion webmap includes a layer -updated to 2016- including/symbolizing future New York City Housing Authority developments (NYCHA ‘projects’) in the area. The GIS mapping exercise is indeed useful by allowing us to add layers of data, and complexity, to Vega’s narrative. It allows us to visualize not only the environment and demographics of the text, but to also juxtapose data from the present.

The Jewish community had by then already established an open air market on Park Avenue, what was later to become the iconic Puerto Rican Marqueta. This market offered “low prices”, but it was “dirty and stank to high heaven” (10, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984), according to Vega. The Jews living in the area had arrived recently, and came from regions like Turkey, Greece, and the Near East; they constituted a “Tower of Babel” (10, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984), speaking many languages.

It is while dining in the restaurant owned by one of these Sephardic Jews, La Luz restaurant “the first Latino restaurant in East Harlem” (218, Gill 2012), that Vega is hit by the epiphany that New York City was “the meeting point for peoples from all over the world” (10, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984). The restaurant offered fare from Spain and Portugal; but the smells and the furniture, Vega tells us, in fact everything in the place made it “hard to believe that it was located in the United States” (10, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984).

Vega’s description of this proto-Barrio East Harlem is relevant for contemporary debates about urban development and gentrification in 21st century New York City. He injects a class-centered reading to his spatial depictions, and shows a nuanced understanding of how tenancy and ownership regimes determine the quality of the spaces he sees. These type of businesses, and the houses and apartment buildings within this polygon that Vega describes and populates with so much valuable information, were mostly “owned by people who lived there” (11, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984); in a sense, the polygon he describes, were “there was still little or no exploitation of tenants by absentee landlords who had nothing to do with the community” (11, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984) This area was -in 1916- organized very differently from the ownership and tenancy patterns that were later going to plague the life of the Puerto Rican community, and that would continue to our days. What he describes sounds like, and is, another world: “The apartments were spacious and quite comfortable. They were well maintained precisely because owners themselves lived in the buildings. Clearly, the Jewish people who lived in Harlem back then considered it their neighborhood and felt a sentimental attachment to it.” (11, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984)

It is hard not to get the sense that in these passages Vega’s Memoirs is paying homage to that old Jewish community. East Harlem eventually became the center of a thriving Puerto Rican neighborhood, but Vega is committed to make us all see that the place had been loved and taken care of by another group before the arrival of his own ethnic community. It is hard not to feel that Vega is offering a point of comparison between what East Harlem was before the arrival of the Puerto Rican community, and what it later became. He is passing judgment.

These passages are full of nostalgia, but they are firmly and explicitly anchored in Vega’s politics, for he writes that “At this time Harlem was a socialist stronghold” (11, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984). The Socialist Party, he says, “had set up a large number of clubs in the neighborhood”, including “two major community centers (my italics)”: the Harlem Terrace, on 201 East 104th Street, between 2nd and 3rd avenues; and the Harlem Educational Center, on 62 East 106th between Madison and Park avenues (these points of interest can be seen on fig 4 and on the web companion map). These two points mentioned by Vega housed “Other cultural societies and a large number of workers’ cooperatives” (11, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984). Tellingly, the blocks where these two important centers of the progressive political and ideological life of the community at the time were located, were later developed as super-blocks for public housing. Is this a mere ‘spatial coincidence’ or were these (super) blocks ideologically and spatially ‘gentrified’ and co-opted from radical political spaces into ‘New Deal’-type of social projects? Spatial analysis allows us to uncover and question precisely these kinds of coincidence/relationships.  

"Meetings and large indoor activities were held at the Park Palace” (11, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984), on the corner of Central Park at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue; for outdoors events they simply went to the street corner at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, presumably near the Park Palace. Later chapters see the Park Palace and the Park Plaza (on the second floor of the same building as the Park Palace) reappear constantly in the Memoirs. The repeated mentions of these two venues, the Park Palace and the Park Plaza, located on the same building at the corner of 110th Street and Fifth Avenue allow us to assume that it was a ‘hot spot’ of political, cultural, and educational activity that passed from the hands of the Sephardic Jewish community that Vega witnessed in 1916 to the usage of the Puerto Rican community later on.

The social, cultural, sports, and educational activities throughout this physical urban network of the socialist/leftist movement in the neighborhood was constant, “every night speakers aired their views, with the active participation of the public” (11, Andreu Iglesias, Vega 1984). Vega obviously felt at home. The Memoirs, are intended to make Puerto Ricans feel at home in New York City as well; they reclaim not only history, but space.

Two things are worth mentioning here; first, it should be apparent that the Memoirs is not just a document about the life and history of the Puerto Rican community in New York City, but an invaluable contribution to the history and development of the physical urban infrastructure of the New York City left at large. More than a few books, among them Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician, 1902-1954 (Meyer, 1989), The Cruel Years: American Voices at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Katz and Lehman, 2001), East Harlem Remembered: Oral Histories of Community and Diversity (Bell, 2012) and Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America (Gill, 2012), have in fact used the Memoirs as a primary source for the historical descriptions of the political life and urban history of not only Harlem, but the United States at large. By performing a GIS analysis of the book, mapping its spatial data, we gain a rich layer of visual information not only of the Puerto Rican community in the city, but about the activity nodules of its political life (specially the left) at the turn of the century. While it is beyond the scope of the present work to study the relationship between the spatial markers of the Left recorded by Vega and other city environments, this presents a fruitful line of future inquiry.

Second, it must also be evident that Vega relates the urban development of East Harlem -as it regards the Puerto Rican community- as partially determined by these activity nodules of the larger New York City and North American Left. It could be hypothesized that the community  of well-educated, working-class, Cuban and Puerto Rican tabaqueros that moved into East Harlem at the turn of the century decided to move into the area not only because there were other ‘Latin’ groups in the area, among them Spanish and Portuguese Sephardic Jews (ethnic/linguistic explanation), nor because the area housed a thriving working-class community (social class explanation), but because the area was already settled at a physical, spatial, and institutional level by a rather active cultural and political network of anchors devoted to ideological struggles common to the tabaqueros political ideology and concerns. A spatial reading of the Memoirs allow us to focus our research and analysis in ways that encourage and welcome alternative explanations and hypotheses such as this.

Conclusion

As I hope to have demonstrated, engaging with a text like the Memoirs of Bernardo Vega from a spatial point of view allows us to unveil new vistas and relationships, and posit new questions and lines of inquiry, that complement the text and enrich our historical understanding of the context in which the text is embedded. Spatial context of this kind helps us make sense of fragmented cityscapes by artificially and heuristically creating some kind of order out of narratives. This type of exercise also invite us to slow down the pace of our critical reading, while allowing us to bring the environmental urban context into the foreground of the narrative.

All sorts of observations, questions and future explorations open up with a concretely spatial engagement with textual material. Narratives thicken with the type of geographical/environmental awareness that GIS and mapping provide us; many things that were out of our viewport come to the fore. Moreover, and tellingly, a spatial reading also allows us to see absences that are significant. For example, in the case of the Memoirs as we spatialize the data in the book, we realize how Puerto Rico, Vega’s homeland, is almost totally absent from the narrative from a spatial point of view. Puerto Rico, and its problems (among them its colonial situation) are always present in Vega’s text, but not spatially so. When Vega moved to New York, Puerto Rico’s landscape and its places recede to the background to the point of invisibility. This break is telling, and it is worth exploring.

The computational aspect of this type of mapping/spatial exercise offers researchers and users much flexibility, and an open-ended approach. By adding a few lines of code new layers can be brought into the digital map, potentially opening up new lines of inquiry. The possibilities offered by the digital nature of these types of maps are indeed different from the ones offered by traditional ‘closed’ paper maps. Digital maps are also ideal for collaborative endeavours that could further deepen and thicken our understanding of texts in perhaps unforeseen ways.

On the other hand, this type of GIS/spatial engagement with texts like the Memoirs goes beyond the traditional instrumentality of GIS technologies, allowing us to map the metaphor, or to discover more metaphoric/spatial relationships that are as important as the plotting of concrete points, lines and polygons. For example, we have seen how on the very second day of his arrival to New York City Vega throws a rather wide net in his roaming and exploration of the city; this I argue is part of an effort to claim territory for his community from the very first day of his arrival; he moves from downtown to uptown, offering us a regard of the networks, demographics, and history of what was going to become El Barrio and other areas of the city.

In the case of Vega’s Memoirs, we have here examined but one chapter among 29. In the future, we could potentially keep engaging with the text in a per chapter basis, or alternatively, create thematic maps; or both. Among other potential spatial examinations and thematic maps: the locales and sites (meeting places, union halls, cultural venues, offices) of the New York City Left as described by Vega; the geography of the Latino press as per the Memoirs (offices, journalists addresses, location of printing presses); the geography of the cigarworkers New York City network, among many other potential topical inquiries.

Indeed, this present work offers one among many ways in which GIS and thinking spatially could be used to map the Memoirs, or any other text for that matter. We could have performed, for example, a spatial-chronological analysis, including specific dates and years as a central component in the investigation, trying to explore how Vega’s mapping varied with time, or how the city around him changed according to his spatial observations. Similarly, we could have performed a hot-spot spatial analysis to see the recurrence of certain specific places in the text of the Memoirs and discern spatial patterns. We could have analyzed Vega’s spatial movements and physical wanderings, or we could have extracted, say, all the multiple mentions the author makes of the many Hispanic journalistic offices in the city at the time, or of tobacco workshops, and map them out and investigate relationships with other variables such as demographics, rents, police precincts, proximity to public transportation, etc. The possibilities are almost infinite, and so it must be kept in mind that the current analysis is one among many other potential spatial readings. This multiplicity of potential spatial readings goes to buttress one of the main meta-arguments of this essay: demonstrating the richness gained when we “admit new perspectives” (Spatial Humanities book, xiii); including the spatial vector in our analysis is one specially fruitful way of allowing new perspectives to emerge.

A few years back the manuscript of the Memoirs was found among items in the estate of César Andreu Iglesias; the manuscript is currently under seal inside an archive in the Universidad de Puerto Rico. For legal reasons only a handful of scholars have access to the document. Yet, in a phone conversation with the scholar leading the research, Carmen Ana Pont Castillo, Dr. Castillo could only confirm that Kevane’s assertions about authorship were mostly and generally correct, and that the published text and the extant manuscript are vastly different documents. From a spatial perspective this could only promise more exciting vistas and research. The current Memoirs are written mostly from the first-person perspective of Bernardo Vega, the novel’s manuscript, however, will likely be organized around different points of view and narratives. Diverse idiosyncrasies are likely to abound and psychological descriptions are probably plentiful, allowing us to delve into more DeCertau-nian situationist-type psychogeographical and spatial analyses of the text. The current Memoirs offers us Bernardo Vega as a proto-tour guide of New York City, is he the only tour-guide in the novel? It seems unlikely. The novel, the text in its unabashedly fiction form, would probably offer us thicker renditions of the city and the Puerto Rican community; and the effect of ‘being there’ -already significant in the current Memoirs- is probably stronger in the novel. We wish for the manuscript and other relevant documents to be made available to interested researchers without delay as soon as legally possible, preferably through a stable digital delivery format within an open-source platform.

Generic and technological issues aside, spatial analysis of the present kind is a rather timeless endeavor: playing with patterns; visualizing them, finding new ones, synthesizing and/or analyzing them; figuring out meaning. It is in this aspect that the digital humanities and more specifically the spatial humanist, is not proposing a rupture, but rather following on the steps of traditional humanistic research. But it goes beyond the humanities, and squarely into the social sciences and politics. Apprehending works spatially, mapping them out, not only allows us to see space and time simultaneously (in addition to and distinct from sequentially), but -politically, historically and socially more relevant-: it allows us to see the constructed nature of place, the social dynamics of place-making, and the diverse and unique ways in which people create community.

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