Nuyorican
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nuyorican is a blending of the phrases "New York" and "Puerto Rican" and refers to the members or culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora located in or around New York State especially the New York City metropolitan area with a major hub of over 500,000 Puerto Ricans living in Northern New Jersey, or of their descendants (especially those raised or still living in the New York area). The term Nuyorican is also sometimes used to refer to the Spanish spoken by New York Puerto Ricans. An estimated 800,000 Puerto Ricans (including the popular self-title Nuyoricans) are said to live in New York city, the largest Puerto Rican community outside Puerto Rico.
Mainly the Nuyoricans are second and third-generation, but their parents or grandparents represent the Gran migración of Puerto Ricans. The majority of Puerto Ricans in the city began to arrive in the 1930s, then came in larger waves in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Gran migración came to a halt by 1960. Historically, the Nuyoricans resided in the predominantly Hispanic/ Latino section of Manhattan known as Spanish Harlem, but they expanded across the city in the 1960s and 1970s into newly-created Puerto Rican/Nuyorican enclaves in Brooklyn, Queens and the South Bronx. Today, there are fewer Puerto Rican-born persons Puerto Rican-descnded people as a proportion of New York City's large Hispanic community, now made up of other Latin Americans since the 1990s.
[edit] History of the term
The Oxford English Dictionary cites this word as evolving slowly through roughly the last third of the 20th century, with the first cited reference being poet J. Carrero using neorriqueño in 1964 as a Spanish-language adjective combining neoyorquino and puertorriqueño, and many other variants occurring along the way, including neorican, neoricano, newyorican, Neo-Rican, Neorican, and New Yorrican. Nuyorican itself dates at least from 1975, the date of the first public sessions of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
