Marifeli Perez-Stable

Published in The Miami Herald
December 3, 2009

Along the Jersey side on the Hudson River, New York City stands vibrant if now forever scarred. Between 1892 and 1954, 12 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island, where a must-see museum renders tribute to their hopes and the country that blessed them.

Union City welcomed immigrants well before Ellis Island and continues to do so today. In the 18th century, Dutch and English merchants first settled the area. Later, German immigrants crossed the river from Manhattan. Irish, Polish, Armenians, Syrians, eastern European Jews and Italians followed.

Union City is positioned at the heart of American history in ways Miami is not. Incorporated in 1896, Miami still has the feel of a city in the making. A well-known funeral home proudly flags its founding in 1858 without saying — no need, really — that it first opened its doors in Havana. History is just settling down in Miami. Union City is a grande dame.

In the late 1940s, Cubans began arriving there from New York City. Born in NYC of Cuban parents (a carpenter and a seamstress), Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., grew up in Union City. Others, like Manuel and Lyda Rodríguez, migrated from Cuba in the early 1950s and became pillars of the greater Union City community.

Decades-long history

In The Cubans of Union City: Immigrants and Exiles in a New Jersey Community, Yolanda Prieto draws a moving, decades-long history of Union City from a Cuban perspective. Prieto herself is part of the story: She arrived there in March 1968 with her parents and her sister Zoila. Porfirio Prieto, a railroad worker in Camagüey, became a presser in a New Jersey factory; Juana, a seamstress, worked in the garment industry. Prieto has observant, empathetic eyes that shine throughout the book.

A plurality of Union City Cubans came from small towns or cities, especially from Villa Clara province in central Cuba. A little over a third had graduated high school, a much lower figure than the U.S. or Cuban exile average at the time. Like the author and Menendez, many children of Union City Cubans — whether pre-1959 immigrants or post-1959 exiles — became the first in their families to earn a college degree.

There’s no gainsaying the generosity of the U.S. government toward us in the 1960s and 1970s. The Cuban Refugee Program offered broad support, whether to relocate from Miami (more than half settled in Union City), facilitate educational loans or offer help while looking for a job. There’s also no denying that Washington benefitted us for imperatives having to do with undermining or reversing the revolution.

Entrepreneurial class

Like their Miami compatriots, many Cubans in Union City proved themselves as entrepreneurs. On and around Bergenline Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare, Cuban restaurants, bodegas, stores of all kinds opened for business in locales where Italian or Yiddish was once spoken. Like Porfirio and Juana, others found employment in area industries. Cuban women soon registered the highest rates of labor-force participation among women in the United States.

Civic associations, often based on hometowns or municipalities in Cuba, flourished. So did political organizations, whether nationally based such as the Cuban American National Foundation, Cuban Nationalist Movement and Alpha 66 or New Jersey-bred societies such as youth-group Abdala and the terrorist Omega 7.

Life at St. Augustine, a Catholic parish long-served by an Irish-American priest, reflected the changes in Union City’s human landscape, first drawing parishioners from the older immigrant communities, then several waves of Cubans and now an ongoing influx of Colombians, Central Americans and Dominicans.

Welcoming differences

In 2000, a Cuban woman said: “I’m convinced that, as we welcome difference among us, we are fulfilling our mission as a people of God.”

In 1998, Pope John Paul II’s visit to Cuba inspired many Cuban Catholics in Union City to open their arms to the Cuban Catholic Church.

As in Miami, close ties between New Jersey and Cuban parishes are now commonplace. Religion and reconciliation go hand in hand, as Prieto fittingly emphasizes.

The Cubans of Union City is partly based on interviews conducted over 25 years with 209 Cubans who speak throughout. Above all Yolanda Prieto has written a humane book on what she calls “Cuba’s northernmost province.”