El Profe: Paquito Lindor & The Roar Heard Across the Puerto Rican Diaspora
By Adrian Burgos
Lamento Borincano. Puerto Rican Mourning.
Each time I hear the song written by the great Afro-Boricua composer Rafael Hernández, I am reminded that “Lamento Borincano” and his other beautiful (and similarly soulful) song “Preciosa” were written while Hernández was living in Spanish Harlem in the 1920s and not residing in Puerto Rico.
These two songs were inspired by a longing for home. They describe the migrant’s lament, even a mourning, as he recalls and celebrates the beauty of our querido Borinquen, Puerto Rico.
Hernández’s songs powerfully express the Puerto Rican longing, the looking back across time and space, of ocean waters that separate the migrants from the land of their forebears, from nuestra familia, yet knowing that distance cannot dilute their love for the island and its people.
With that swing of the bat in the first game of last week’s Puerto Rico Series, Francisco Lindor did more than launch a pay-off pitch from Jake Odorizzi over the right-field wall, he had connected with Puerto Ricans everywhere.
Those in Estadio Hiram Bithorn roared. Those watching on TV powered by generators across the island cheered, as did those listening on radio. So did many of us watching from across the waters dividing us from the 100-by-35-mile-island the native Taínos called Borikén.
There was something in the roar of the crowd last Tuesday night that reverberated with a similar longing, of being together again, of seeing a native son back home, succeeding. That roar surely rippled across the diaspora of Puerto Ricans.
Paquito was home.
He had done what so many had dreamed of as little kids: Hitting a big home-run in front of our people.
But this wasn’t a winter league game.
Nor was it a Doble A.
Lindor did it in a regular-season Major League game being played at Hiram Bithorn. Paquito did it in front of a nation that was needing an uplift, that needed to feel connected when so many are still dealing (reeling even) with displacement, with the apagones (power outages) that have become the new normal, and separation from what was familiar.
Routes of PR Migration
Even before the devastation of hurricanes Irma and María, Puerto Rico had been in the midst of an economic crisis. Austerity cuts have meant reduction in governmental services, school closures, and increased difficulty in accessing quality healthcare. These changes along with high unemployment have contributed to an ongoing outmigration.
A tipping point in the Puerto Rican population demographics occurred in 2006, as reported by the Pew Hispanic Center. That was the first year when there were more people of Puerto Rican descent living stateside than on the island.
The Puerto Rican migration has continued to increase. In the 12-year span between 2004 and 2016, Puerto Rico had a net loss of 400,000 residents. And that was before Maria.
Why focus on these migration numbers in a baseball article about Francisco Lindor?
Because it was during this 12-year span that a 12-year-old Lindor migrated stateside with his father, stepmother, and younger sibling from Caguas. My grandmother brought my mother and her siblings to the mainland from the same town nearly a half-century earlier.
But instead of heading to New York City, as many Puerto Ricans like my grandmother and her children did during the “Great Migration” of the 1950s, Florida was the destination for the Lindor family.
The Lindors are part of the new Puerto Rican migration. Indeed, they settled in the Orlando metro area, where over 332,000 Puerto Ricans already called home even before the migrations that have taken place after the 2017 hurricanes. And this is very much a migration driven by Puerto Ricans searching for better economic possibilities. Among Puerto Ricans who migrated between 2007 and 2013, a Pew Hispanic Center survey found that 42 percent claimed they moved for job-related reasons, another 38 percent answered their migration from the island was family/household related.
Longing for Home
Like previous Puerto Rican migrants, there is a desire among the recent arrivals to remain connected to the land of their parents, of their abuelos, of la familia. Puerto Ricans who migrate from their native land feel it, as do their children. La isla del encanto beckons them. Borikén, as the Taínos named the island, está llamando (is calling). It beckons to its native sons and daughters, and to the children of the diaspora.
That is part of what made participating in the Puerto Rican Series special to the Twins’ José Berríos and Eddie Rosario as well as Cleveland’s Roberto “Bebo” Pérez, Francisco Lindor, and their coach Sandy Alomar Jr.
Yet Lindor resides in a different place than the other boricuas who participated in the Puerto Rico Series. And I’m not talking about his superstar status. Unlike the others Paquito is part of the migration stateside from the island. Just like Chicago Cubs second baseman Javy Báez, Lindor came as youngster and ultimately graduated from a Florida high school.
Francisco Lindor, in fact, has a lot in common with the hundreds of thousands Puerto Ricans who have migrated over the past 100 years since the United States conferred citizenship on island residents through the Jones Act of 1917.
Lindor came mid-stream, still in his adolescence, just 12 years old. He would become part of what sociologists called the 1.5 generation, who have and maintain experiences and connections in two countries — the experience of my own father and mother when they arrived from Puerto Rico in the late 1950s. Like many before him, he had to adjust to living in stateside communities, master English, and push himself to succeed. And on top of all that, remain connected, to his people, to la isla.
I keep asking myself: why did that roar from the Hiram Bithorn crowd resonate so much with me? Why did it move me and countless others boricuas? To shout ¡WEPA! Or perhaps shed tears of joy.
Lindor is both a native son of Puerto Rico and now part of the diaspora.
His home-run was both a celebration and cathartic. He is living what so many Puerto Rican families have experienced for generations. Of migrating, sometimes back-and-forth, and not quite not knowing if they will be coming back (or if they can), of living the dream and being able to return and perhaps retire back in la isla del encanto.
The crowd roared for Lindor and for themselves, of no longer having to lament Paquito’s absence, at least for these few days.
Featured Image: Jean Fruth / La Vida Baseball
Inset Image 1: Clemson Smith Muñiz / La Vida Baseball
Inset Images 2 & 3: Jean Fruth / La Vida Baseball