Young Puerto Ricans didn’t actually commit many crimes in the postwar period. The evidence suggests that they misbehaved less than other New Yorkers. But as Puerto Ricans poured in from the island, the tabloid press trumpeted sensational tales of their malfeasance. Journalists who had had conspicuously little to say about the anticolonial uprising of 1950 were only too happy to sound off about Puerto Rican gangs, dope fiends, and switchblade artists. The inflammatory reportage quickly made its way into the culture at large. Wenzell Brown, who by the 1950s had become a major pulp fiction
...more
