When the Aztec Eagle Began to Soar Over Bridgeport: Part 2 (1950-1990)
by Abraham Lima
This is Part 2 of a 5 Part Series at the Bridgeport History Center:
For Part 1 click below: https://bportlibrary.org/hc/hispanic-populations-and-culture/when-the-aztec-eagle-began-her-soar-over-bridgeport-part-1/
For Part 3 click below: https://bportlibrary.org/hc/business-and-commerce/when-the-aztec-eagle-began-her-soar-over-bridgeport-part-3-men-of-maplewood/
How did Bridgeport’s Mexican community arise?
It came about with a few separate chance incidents.
A Few Early Arrivals: The Carmonas and the Solies
There were few Latinos in 1950s Bridgeport as the first wave of Puerto Ricans and Cubans was kickstarting. However, about a dozen or so Mexican individuals ended up in Bridgeport and integrated into that young Puerto Rican community.
An example is Guillermo Carmona, born 1921 in Tepeaca, Puebla. He and his Dominican bride, Rhina Ligia Carmona, settled in on Iranistan Ave. The son of an indigenous woman and a white Mexican man, he had an 8th grade education, higher than average for 1950s Mexico. Carmona later moved to Stratford with his wife and 2 sons, and in 1963 had a daughter, Maria Carmona.
Maria recalls “My dad and mom (a Dominican) moved to Bridgeport in July 1954. They went to Bridgeport because my dad had finally found the type of work he had wanted to find when he first arrived in the U.S. The place was Stanley Works, a steel mill [which later became Carpenter Steel, a major city employer]. My father had worked at a foundry in his hometown of Cholula, Puebla and, so, he was a skilled laborer. It took him about 8 years to find that work after living in New York City and working all kinds of jobs, learning English, figuring out how to make his way.”
The border (where most Mexican-Americans settled) was a question Maria slowly came to understand. Guillermo told her that he didn’t join the bracero program because heard that life for Mexicans in the southwest was hard. He had foundry skills and didn’t want to toil in the fields. “He figured that if he went further north, he’d be less likely to be treated as badly.”
His friend’s (El Gato) uncle was a merchant marine, and told his nephew, Guillermo and a friend (Heriberto Amaros) that there was work in New York. The 3 men set off for New York City.
The reason he left, however, was because he was the head of the steelworkers union, and was receiving threats on his life for refusing bribes. He only left to please his grandmother.
“My parents were very Catholic and were surprised that there was no Spanish-language Catholic mass in Bridgeport when they arrived. So, they got together with a few Spanish-speaking [mostly Puerto Rican]friends that they came to know and after a few years succeeded in getting the Diocese of Bridgeport to establish a “mission church”, Nuestra Señora de la Divina Providencia at St. Peter’s Church on Colorado Ave”, patron saint of Puerto Rico.
The handful of Mexicans in town didn’t grow bigger. “A few relatives from Puebla did join for short amounts of time, but they would end up settling in New York City and later New Jersey. Two of my aunts actually lived in New York and Bridgeport for a couple of years in the early days (in the 50s). One helped take care of my brother while my mom worked. She got her green card at that time (it was so easy to get them back then) and then she moved back to Mexico”.
There were hardly any Mexicans to be found anywhere, only Puerto Ricans and Cubans.
“In fact, my dad and his Mexican friends would say they were it. If you can believe them, then there were four other Mexican families in all of Connecticut in the late 60s/early 70s!”
Maria said there were two Mexican friends in Bridgeport (with their families), another friend in Wallingford, and El Gato, who Maria could not remember much about except his nickname. The two were José Solis (married to an American woman) and Heriberto Amaros from Cholula, who had married a Portuguese immigrant, Natalia, and had a son.
Jose Solis was from Chihuahua and married a Pennsylvanian tourist in Mexico. They lived in Philadelphia before moving to Bridgeport. He worked for General Dynamics in Groton, CT.
Carmona recalls that “Every summer for years all the Mexican families got together for a pig roast. I remember our doing one in Beardsley Park one year! Yes, they allowed that back then. Another memory is of the beautiful Indian Wells State Park. We did a few there. And the men would go to a farm to pick out and slaughter a pig! My dad, El Gato and Heriberto all played the guitar and I have very fond memories of hearing these men sing old-style Mexican trio during the evenings of those all afternoon and into the evening pig roasts.”
There is also the case of Ausencio Yah, his wife Marcuna and their adult son, who came in 1956 to work as the gardener for an employer’s friend in Fairfield. They were from Mani, Yucatan.
By the 1970 census, there were still only 24 Mexicans in Bridgeport. 7 were born in Mexico and 17 were American-born with at least 1 Mexican parent.
Comparatively, by 1970, there were 9,953 Puerto Ricans in Bridgeport, and still growing fast.
From 24 to 300 Mexicans: The 1970s
In the 1970s, Mexicans were contracted by the American Fabrics Company, a lace factory on Connecticut Ave near the Stratford border. It was then one of Bridgeport’s largest employers.
A Mexico-born Bridgeporter, Lizeth Vibaldo, actually knows a first hand account of this: “A family friend from Mexico City was talking about his uncle who came in the 70’s to Bridgeport, brought as a laborer for a factory in Stratford, he said that a lot of Mexicans from Mexico City came with these working visas to work in that company.” Unfortunately, the family friend did not remember the name of the company and did not want to speak further on the subject.
Thankfully, local newspaper obituaries shed light on American Fabrics’s Mexican workers.
They included names like Carlos Ramirez, born in Guanajuato, who arrived 1969 as a machine operator. His Veracruz-born wife and Mexico City-born children followed him to Stratford Ave. In 1970, Leon Villegas of Mexico City arrived with his family, also on Stratford Ave. He worked the evening shifts as a machine operator to be with children during the day, his obituary states.
Others arrived in the mid-1970s, often alongside siblings. Records found include Guillermo Rodriguez Mora with his brother Roberto Mora, or Manuel Reyes Filio and his brother Jose Antonio Rodriguez (all from Mexico City). Guillermo was a knitter and Manuel a machine operator, along with J. Pascacio Saucedo, a machine operator from Curucupatzeo, Michoacan.
In the early 80s came Manuel Valentin Ponce from Mexico City, with his brother, Jose Valentin also in Bridgeport. Besides Manuel Reyes on Stratford Ave, they all resided on the East Side. These were likely not all of the Mexican workers, only those found in newspaper obituaries. Perhaps the company brought in Mexicans due to a lack of skilled lace workers in New England (as was being done by a Rhode Island lace mill). A 1987 New York Time, “For Successful Lace Maker, a Threat” on the company’s employment issues lists Mexicans as among the workers.
“We have machinery just standing idle,” Mr. Ostrover said. ”We can’t find knitters for these machines.” The company employs 500 to 600 people in its Bridgeport operation and has plants in New Jersey, Rhode Island and Mississippi employing another 250. In Bridgeport, Mr. Ostrover said, “employees represent a cross section of the city – black, Cambodian, Greek, Italian, Laotian, Mexican, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Thai and Vietnamese. The shop is unionized except for office and supervisory staff,” he said.
There were also a few Mexican students in different local colleges. They set up booths such as for the “International Folk Festival” in 1975 and the “Mexican American Association of Greater Bridgeport for the 1977 festival. There were a few Mexican-born doctors who came to study.
Also in 1977 came Raul Zavaleta, his wife Isabel and their children from Veracruz, settling in the South End. His brother Silvino came the year after with his family. The brothers were recruited by Bridgeport Jai Alai (click here for info) to be basketweavers for the sport. At first, they didn’t meet any other Mexicans, but a Cuban neighbor introduced them to her co-workers: Inocencio and Martha Jasso with their children, all from Mexico City. They worked at a textile factory near Exit 25 (probably Overland Fabrics on State St) and lived on Stratford Ave, and later Stratford.
Maria Carmona fondly recalls the Jasso family moving into Stratford in the late 1970s; her father befriended and guided them through life in the United States. Perhaps the Jassos were also originally brought to work at American Fabrics, but found similar work elsewhere (after all, at least one of their Mexican workers did just that, switching to a job at Rasamny Mills in Bethel).
However they all ended up so far away, the fact is by 1980, the census counted 322 Mexican-Americans in Bridgeport, up from just 24 a decade ago.
But of those 322 Mexicans in the census, only 125 were actually born in Mexico.
The words of Mia Giunta, a former union organizer for United Electrics Workers, offers an explanation as to why that was. Her union “represented workers in what was then known as the electrical manufacturing industry at places like GE and Westinghouse, in addition to Singer sewing machines in Bridgeport… Based upon memory and observation, most of the workers of Mexican heritage in the ’70’s were not recent immigrants (1st and 2nd generation).”
Of the 125 Mexican immigrants in 1980, only 67 of them had registered their address with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). We find at least one documented case of a deportation: that of the Lopez-Argueta brothers in 1982, charged with forging an INS form.
Bridgeport Telegram article, 6/3/1982 (The West Side area later filled up with Mexicans).
A decade later, the American Fabrics Company closed its Bridgeport factory and relocated its operations to the south by 1992. By then, Bridgeport had seen most of its factories close. Ironically, this was when the larger Mexican boom began. They didn’t come for factory work.
Mexicans came to dominate one industry in Greater Bridgeport: restaurant work.
From “Puebla York” to Bridgeport:
In 1987, an 18-year old Guadalupe (Lupe) Lucero and his 16-year old brother Jose Lucero, helped their mother, Gloria Flores, move into their Bridgeport apartment. They had all started in New York six years prior, from a town called Tulcingo del Valle, in the southern state of Puebla.
Poblanos (people from the state of Puebla) are the largest Mexican group in the Tri-State Area. It started in 1943, when three men from rural Chinantla, Puebla hickhiked with a tourist from New York City they met in Mexico City. Then in 1954, a woman from nearby Piaxtla, Puebla was brought to New York as a cook for a retired American diplomat. There were the aforementioned Carmonas from Cholula as well. Family and friends followed, the chain expanding town by town.
Maria Carmona recalls that “I remember first noticing more Mexicans in Bridgeport/Stratford after I graduated from college and was living in New York. I’d ride the train to Bridgeport and just notice little things…a face, hear someone speaking Spanish with a Mexican accent. That was in the late 80s/early 90s, and the Poblanos had already arrived in big numbers in Manhattan. We used to say that we were “spreading out” into Bridgeport.”
There were some Poblanos from New York working across Fairfield County by the 1980s. One of them, Alejandro Lima (from Tehuixtla, Puebla), was landscaping an East Side property for a Stamford-based company when he befriended a fellow Mexican working at Remington Arms.
Other New York-area Mexicans commuted to or were brought to work at upscale Westport restaurants. Notability, Pancho Villa Restaurant (at 35 Main St) where 12 workers were arrested by immigration authorities between just 1978-83. One such incident is shown below:
Pancho Villa’s was consistently staffed with Mexicans from New York City. Westport News, 1983
One such worker was a 15-year old boy from Tulcingo, Puebla named Jose Lucero, who arrived in 1986. The first in their family to come over were “me, my sister Guadalupe Lucero, and my cousin Matilde Flores. We came from the Bronx, and the three of us started working as soon as we arrived in Westport, at a restaurant called Pancho Villa’s, here in Westport on Main St.”
To quote the Luceros’ sister-in-law, Lizzeth Vivaldo, a representative at the Institute for Refugees and Immigrants: “The job at Pancho Villa was a recommendation from acquaintances, Aristeo Garcia and Rafaela Banillas, they lived on Park Avenue.” Rafaela was a family friend from Acaxtlahuacan, Puebla (a town near Tulcingo) who married Aristeo Garcia, by then the main chef at Pancho Villa’s. He was from Indepenencia, Puebla (a town between Tulcingo and Chinantla). They had also arrived from New York City a year prior thanks to Garcia’s relatives.
Their first home was with the Garcia-Banillas couple, sharing a two-bedroom Pequonnock St apartment in The Hollow: “When we arrived, I was sleeping in a hallway, my sister was sleeping inside in a room, Mr. Aristeo with Rafaela in another room because they were a couple, my cousin with my sister, and I was in the hallway because I had nowhere else to sleep.”
Lucero quickly met another Mexican family who worked at Onion Alley, the restaurant across the street from Pancho Villa’s. They were Celia and Cirino Lucero, also from Garcia’s village of Indepenencia, Puebla. They lived on Washington Ave in Bridgeport with their teenage kids.
Jose and Lupe Lucero soon brought over their siblings and their mother, Gloria Flores Huerta, to Bridgeport. In Lizzeth Vibaldo’s words: “The rents were cheaper than New York and more spacious, they liked the tranquil life of the suburbs out of the chaos of the Bronx. Their first residence was in Pequannock St, and they lived mainly in the South End of the city.”
Aristeo Garcia’s relatives had been working at Pancho Villa years before, while living in Norwalk for brief periods: “they’d lived here for a time, and for a time in New York”. One nephew, Ferrer Garcia, joined his brother in Norwalk in 1982. He and his Guatemalan wife Frine later moved to William St in Bridgeport and had two children, while commuting daily to El Mexicano Restaurant in Norwalk. He died tragically of an unknown disease in 1991 (the subject of the clipping below).
Front-page Post article on 7/28/1991 “They Wonder if the System Failed” about Garcia’s death.
Snippets of Connecticut Post article “Pain Dulls Memories of Love” by Marisa Orosco 7/28/1991
Another cluster of Poblanos from New York was also arriving, from Central Puebla. It all started with guys from one village who started coming from Brooklyn. Among them was Rufino Flores.
“I’m from Atlixco, Puebla. Well, rather, we are from a [nearby] town- La Trinidad Tepango.”
Of La Trinidad Tepango’s 475 households in the Mexican 1980 census, 260 of them had dirt floors, 44 households had cars, 23 had fridges, and only 2 had telephones.
Flores’ first impression of Bridgeport?
“There was good business to get ahead”.
After all, that’s why he and others came to Bridgeport.
“To look for work. To get ahead”.
Rufino Flores arrived in Brooklyn in 1980 and worked cleaning vegetables and washing dishes at a deli restaurant. His uncle, Fernando Casiano had settled on Marcy Ave in Brooklyn. In his words: “the person who helped us get through [the border]was from Atlixco, she already had a relative here in New York… So she would send them, and that relative here would help them find an apartment, find work, and that’s where it all began”. Antonio says Casiano was the first from their village to settle in the Tri-State Area, and the rest followed.
La Trinidad Tepango was “pure countryside. They planted jicama [a Mexican turnip], maize, onions, tornachiles, all of that was planted. Even today.” Antonio, another long-time Bridgeporter from that village, recalls “Life was very hard there. It was working all day in the fields, from five in the morning to seven at night.”
In the words of Fernando Casiano. “Everyone comes because of necessity, certainly not for pleasure. Nobody comes because they want to… We only ate once a day”.
30% of the town’s people (15 and older) could not read or write. The elderly only spoke Nahuatl, the dying Aztec language. Many, like Fernando Casiano, only had a third grade education.
Flores heard of Bridgeport from a friend from his village. “I had a friend here and he said, “Do you want to go to Bridgeport?” and I said nah. There was a lot of work in New York at that time.” He changed his mind. “There were a few from my town… I came in 1986 and I’ve never left”.
Antonio puts that number a bit higher. “Well, we didn’t all know each other, like 10 or 15 of us were over here, yes. And then, little by little, after that, the whole town started coming”.
No one seems to know who was the first person from this small village to settle in Bridgeport.
Antonio recalls “When I came here there were already quite a few… because there were already some men [from La Trinidad Tepango] here working”. Like everyone else from his village, Antonio had come to Bridgeport from Brooklyn, where he first lived with Casiano.
What brought him to Bridgeport?
“We came here to work. Since a brother of mine was here, he sent for me.” Tony’s brother came to Bridgeport “like in 1985. He hadn’t lived here for very long. I also arrived here, not long after, around 87-86… we came by train”
Flores and others would later join Antonio at the same diner: Frankie’s Diner on Stratford Ave.
Nick Roussas, the current owner of the diner, says he can’t recall exactly when Mexicans began to work at what was then his father’s diner.
“It’s hard for me to tell. The oldest Mexicans I have working for me are 38 years [around 1986]. Tony (Antonio) is from Puebla… We were kids with Salvador”. By the time Roussas started working in the diner around age 9, there were already Mexicans working at Frankie’s Diner.
The co-owners, Peter Roussas and Victor Hasiotis, were themselves Greek immigrants.
Rufino Flores estimates that back then, fellow Mexicans were far and few between. “We’re talking about some 30.. There were like, that I knew, like only 30 in ’86.”
A map of south-central Puebla. The hometowns of some of the first Poblanos in Bridgeport are marked with a red star. Chinantla, the first town to send immigrants to New York, has a pink star.
Tony’s first job in Bridgeport was at Frankie’s Diner, where two men from La Trinidad Tepango were already working. The others from his village “worked in other diners, restaurants.”
Tony’s first home? “Here on Central Avenue, 1477, I still remember that [address]. There were some buildings there but they’ve already demolished them… there were some friends there [also from La Trinidad Tepango], and like six of us lived in that apartment.
Two strangers from Mexico City joined them: “they didn’t have much time here, like 3 or 4 months… they arrived and knocked there and since it was apartments they went in and said “we’re looking for an apartment, would you give us a place to live?” I told them “if you want, sure, for a time” we gave them housing until they get something. Since they were also immigrants like us, one of us.”
Nick Roussas, the owner of Frankie’s Diner recalled how “Rufino Flores worked here when I was a kid. When I was a kid my family rented the first floor of our house to him and his young family. He was a nice man. He was the nicest man in the world… the other apartment was rented to other guys”. All of them, Rousass said “from Puebla”.
That home was 448 Wood Avenue, right on the corner with Maplewood Ave, in the West Side.
The Waitress is Greek, But the Kitchen is All Mexican:
Somehow, Mexicans found work at every diner in the Bridgeport area by the mid-1980s.
In New York City, Mexicans found a niche in the Greek-owned diners. They spread out quickly: in 1984, 5 diner workers (from Xochihuehuetlan, near Tulcingo) were nabbed up in Groton, CT.
Frankie’s Diner owner Nick Roussas recalled that before the Mexicans arrived, the diner’s workforce was made up of: “Greek, Turks, Egyptians, Puerto Ricans… 70s to 80s mostly Puerto Ricans. Mexicans didn’t come until the mid-80s… from the dishwasher to the cook to the chef.”
Perry Koutroulas, a Bridgeport-born son of Greek immigrants, said “My dad started working in the diner in 1970. He says there were no Mexicans working there in the 70s. There were some people from El Salvador working there.” at Bridgeport Flyer Diner in the West End. Mexicans began to arrive, he said “during the 80s… mid 80s. They went there looking for jobs”.
Antonio’s wife, a Portuguese American, recalled she met her first Mexican “in 1985, because I used to work at State Diner… When I started working there wasn’t a Mexican. There were Italians, Portuguese, here and there a Brazilian, and many Puerto Ricans… the first Mexican I met, it was there.” The diner was on State Street near Iranistan Ave in the West Side.
The Zavaleta brothers recalled the same: “They worked as dishwashers, in restaurants. In the 80s they started coming from Puebla, first they came to New York but then came over here”. Around that time, Raul and Silvino Zavaleta opened Zavaleta Upholstery in Stratford in 1987.
There were a few in other jobs. In 1988, the FBI raided various locations of Chuck & Eddie’s, an auto parts seller. They found 7 Mexicans working at the Stratford location without permits. The owners were found guilty of many charges, including “transporting and harboring illegal aliens”.
Left: from the Connecticut Post, 4/14/1989. Right: from the Hartford Courant 1/8/1988
Rufino Flores recalled that “everything was better than now. There was more work, everything was better than now… Well before we were very solicited. It was better, you were walking down the street and people would say “it’s the Mexicans! Come on over! Put yourselves to work!”.
But as Rufino Flores said, their main source of work in Bridgeport “has always been restaurants… the Greek diners… Colony I, Frankie’s Diner”.
Parts of a Connecticut Post’s article on Christmas Eve, 1993. The Flores’ home on Wood Ave (which they rented from Mr. Roussas) was visited by Bridgeport Hospital’s ER staff’s “Elf Brigade” program, donating to needy families every Christmas. “Puebla” here is misspelled.
Soon, workers from a different part of Mexico were brought here by another local diner.
Nick Roussas recalled that in the mid 1980s, “Puebla and Oaxaca were the two main states”. The Oaxacans all came from one town, which even Roussas is familiar with: Villa de Zaachila.
From Zaachila and “Oaxakeepsie”
Miguel Angel Mendoza, today an artist in New Haven, arrived in Bridgeport in 1988. Economic issues led him to abandon his dream of teaching in his town of Villa de Zaachila, Oaxaca. Once the capital of the old Zapotec Empire, Zaachila was a city of 9,600 people in 1980.
Mendoza retold a story that Zaachila’s diaspora in Bridgeport knows well. It started when the owner of Athena Diner, a Greek-owned diner in Southport, was visiting family in Poughkeepsie.
“The people from Zaachila first came to Poughkeepsie. They say that the owner of the Athena Diner traveled to Poughkeepsie to visit his family who also had or owned a diner. He was surprised by the way the workers did their work, and he asked his relative to get him people to bring to work at his restaurant and he agreed. I don’t know if he gave him some of his workers or looked for workers for him and he brought them himself. Apparently they lived in the restaurant. Then they got them an apartment in Bridgeport and sent them a taxi to pick them up and return them after they had completed their work schedule. The people he brought were like 4, and from there those 4 brought more. In 1988 when I arrived we were only like 15 people from Zaachila. I came because my father was working here too…”
The migration chain from Oaxaca to Poughkeepsie started with Santiago Adolfo, from the nearby town of San Agustín Yatareni, Oaxaca. He worked in a NYC diner in 1980 when the owner decided to sell and open a diner in Poughkeepsie. He brought friends from nearby towns.
Soon, the first person from Zaachila arrived.
“The first person who came to Poughkeepsie from Zaachila, Oaxaca was a deceased man who I knew as Tito Diego, owner of Garibaldi Restaurant on Park Ave in Bridgeport, of whom much of the Zaachileña population and those [Zaachileños] who live in Bridgeport are unaware [of]. He was the one who made my Zaachileña people have a different way of life and opportunities.”
The first people who came to Athena Diner were around 1985 or so, I don’t have exact information, and all of us from my town knew each other because it was a very small [here]population, barely 10 people, and there were people from Puebla, but also in small numbers, very few from Ecuador, Salvadorans, perhaps from some other countries but not so many.”
Like many of his countrymen in Bridgeport, Everaldo Garica has also heard this origin story. “From Poughkeepsie, the one who bought it [the diner] brought people, I can tell you and assure you that – in fact it was a family, it was a family with a last name of Coache-Mendoza.”
Clippings from the Poughkeepsie Journal series on Oaxacan immigrants there from 7/16/1998 Left table: from “Same Continent, Different Worlds” by Dean DiMarro. Villa de Zaachila is listed. Right clippings: from “Scraping out a Living on Hands and Knees” by By Mary Beth Pfeiffer
They crowded inside 320 Maplewood Ave, the apartment their employers found them. It just so happened to be next door from 448 Wood Ave, where Rufino Flores and other Poblanos rented from Peter Roussas. This fact could be why Mexicans began clustering on the West Side.
Rufino Flores himself recalled “they started arriving in Maplewood Avenue. It was one of the first places where many [Mexican] people started arriving.”
From San Bernabe to Black Rock:
Immigrants bring over more family and friends, and sometimes family is from a few towns away.
As was the case of Don (Mr.) Gregorio, who arrived at a brick tenement in Black Rock in 1990.
“One of my aunts and my mother told me that a cousin of mine had already come over, and if I wanted to go to New York… When they told me, they talked a lot about New York, but in truth, they were not in New York… We had to take the train from the airport to Bridgeport”.
Gregorio is from a town called San Bernabe Temoxitla, Puebla (not far from the state capital)
He had long heard of a relative in the United States. “My cousin was here [in Bridgeport]. They already had like 5 years here”. That cousin’s husband was from the next-door village of La Trinidad Tepango called San Diego Acapulco. “She worked in a factory that made cold pastas.
I crossed the first of the first month of that year, 1990…I was crossing that day… in San Diego, in Tijuana. I arrived on New Year’s… My wife also came around March.”
In Mexico’s 1980 census, San Bernabe Temoxtitla was home to 1,985 people. 200 of the town’s 314 homes had dirt floors, 11 had cars, 6 had refrigerators, 5 had running water, and no one had telephones (233 homes did have electricity though).
Like those from La Trinidad Tepango, Don Gregorio unknowingly began a wave from San Bernabe Temoxtitla (and nearby towns) to Bridgeport, a story we see evolve in the next article.
Gergorio’s daughter watched the wave begin to unfold before her young eyes. She had arrived in 1991 with her mother and siblings and immediately started 6th grade at Blackham School.
“I don’t know how they started but I know it was only like 3 cousins, and then they brought him [her father] in, and then my father brought my mom, my mom brought my aunt and an uncle, and that’s it, and I guess everybody else started hopping the trolley. I have no clue.”
Gregorio’s first jobs in the United States were dishwashing in iconic Black Rock restaurants like the Black Rock Castle and Arizona Flats, both on Fairfield Ave.
Gregorio’s daughter is glad her family bypassed New York and went straight for Bridgeport.
“Yeah a lot of people came from New York. “I came from New York, New York, New York” and I’m like “oh oh ok” because I came directly here. A lot of people came directly here too.”
Finding Mexicans Products in the Park City:
“Well, the truth is we hardly ever contacted each other. But some people live on Park Ave, in various parts. Since we came here to work, we worked at night, we slept during the day, we didn’t go out at all. If we did go out, it was only to buy groceries at the market and that was it.”
Such were the initial days of Don Gregorio and his kin. Where did they go to buy groceries?
“Ooo, the Mexican food was kinda sad. We didn’t have transport, so we had to walk [from Black Rock]all the way up to the area of Washington Park, at a store…It was the first store we saw that had tortillas. Since there were a lot of Puerto Ricans, some food products are similar to us [Mexicans]… Since they saw that we would buy tortillas, the owner would order more. Before the bus came every hour, and that was all that we had”.
Don Gregorio’s daughter recalled the place as well. “There was a Puerto Rican bodega and my parents went there to buy chiles, green tomatoes, cilantro, and tortillas… Yeah. There was a little box of tortillas like that, And that’s it, because that was all there was that was Mexican”
That store was Casa Grande Spanish-American Supermarket, a Puerto Rican grocery store at 280 Noble Ave on the East Side, just one house away from facing Washington Park.
Rufino Flores recalled the same thing. “There was a market called Casa Grande… tortillas only in Casa Grande.” In terms of Mexican items, Casa Grande had “chiles- more more Mexican chiles, jicama, tortillas, green chiles, green tomatoes”.
“There were already quite a few [Mexican products], like tornachiles, there were tortillas too. There were beans, canned, but there were already. Not a lot, but they already had most of the Mexican products there. And only that one place, because there was no other place”.
Casa Grande Supermarket in October 2008, before it closed. From Google Maps Street View
It all started when Silvino and Raul Zavaleta befriended the Cuban owner of Casa Grande. They had been going to 14th St in Manhattan to buy Mexican products (to Casa Moneo: a famous Spaniard grocery known as the only place to get Mexican goods in the Tri-State Area). In the mid-1980s, they convinced their Cuban friend to begin stocking tortillas. He ordered one box, and it sold out quickly. Since then, Casa Grande began selling a few other Mexican products.
Tony’s wife explained how, “before they opened there [La Poblanita, Bridgeport’s first authentic Mexican restaurant], there were no Mexican stores at all. The closest thing to [a] Mexican [store] was Casa Grande because it had Mexican products. But just like now, nothing! Nothing!”
Jose Lucero said that when he arrived, “there were no Mexicans around, man. And to buy Mexican items you had to go to New York- New York or Port Chester, New Rochelle”,
The latter two also had Mexican communities and businesses by the 1980s, unlike Bridgeport.
How did they get around? Tony said, “oh, by taxi… Some were Hispanic, but most weren’t. And before there were a lot of taxis, not like now.”
For long-distance trips, “when I arrived, it was all trains. Yes, if we wanted to go to New York on a day off, we would go by train. Then we would come back on the train because there were no cars [among the fellow Mexicans]. There were cars, but taxis, and taxis charged more…Sending money was through Western Union on Stratford Avenue. To make calls, it was, well, a public telephone. Like before, you’d have telephones on the street…
Beyond that, there was a booth where you could call over there in Mexico [in Casa Grande]. We call it a booth, well. Where you would leave money [to send to relatives in Mexico]they had there so you could call. If you made an appointment, or you called the owner and said I want to talk to so-and-so, to anyone, to my mom or my dad, on such a day, they would let them know and the day would come, you would call.” House phones were still rare in rural Mexico then.
Bringing “La Patrona” to the Parish:
Meanwhile, the Flores-Lucero family found “not many, but some” Mexican families in town via Roman Catholic churches. Lizzeth Vibaldo states that Gloria Flores, the mother of the Luceros: “remembers in St. George, the only Hispanic community she knew were Puerto Ricans. She thinks that at the beginning she was the only Mexican.” It took a few years for others to arrive.
The other parish Mexicans began to concentrate in?
Flores said,“San Pedro [St Peter’s Church on Beechwood Ave]. Everyone went to San Pedro. The only church where the priest was a Spaniard”.
Snippet from a Bridgeport Post article titled “Thugs Shatter Part of History” on 7/21/1990. Mentions the sizable number of Mexican parishioners by that time.
That Spaniard was Aniceto Villamide. He was originally pastor of St Anthony’s Church until it merged with St. Peter’s in 1991. At first, the Spanish-language mass was only at St Anthony’s.
After the merger, the Spanish-language mass moved to St Peter’s, and with it, the Mexicans.
Gregorio recalled, “When I started going to Saint Peter’s Church, we saw about 10 [Mexicans]. Around ’92-’93. But before that, we didn’t know about them. We started getting to know more.”
Miguel Angel Mendoza got to witness the rapid rise of an entire community before his very eyes:
“In reality I don’t know about the origins of the [Mexican] population in Bridgeport. I only remember in the year 1988 when I arrived in the country and precisely arrived in Bridgeport, the population was very small…I can’t give you a stat, maybe 400 or less, the majority mostly men and in the 1990s the population grew considerably, there started to be [Mexican] women and later children [in Bridgeport]. The great majority at the time were from Puebla and Oaxaca. Today we find [people] from Guerrero, Michoacan, Veracruz, and other states…”
The Lucero-Huerta family from Tulcingo said “cousins, aunts and uncles slowly started moving to Bridgeport from The Bronx and started building a Mexican community”. Then later came Gloria’s siblings themselves. They lived on Pequonnock St, then afterwards on Washington Ave.
Her relatives really liked Bridgeport. “It was calmer, New York had a lot of violence… , we’d just get up, go to work and come back from work at night to sleep… My children would fall asleep on the train, at 3 in the morning” coming back from work in Westport. They “went to the train station waiting until one, two, three o’clock at night because there was no transportation [compared to New York]. Because the train didn’t come every so often, they had to wait.. and from there they walked home at 3 in the morning and nothing ever happened to them, thank God.”
Bridgeport Mexicans Receive 1986 Amnesty:
How you were treated at work varied. Antonio’s wife said, “The immigrants when they came in, they were very good to them. They were loved, it was like here too [at Frankie’s Diner]. They weren’t bad, they didn’t treat you bad. They were good. Not just saying that because I work here
Mr. Pedro, Nicky’s father, but Victor too. He helped a lot of immigrants, Mexicans here, to get their papers. When the President passed the order that if you had been here for more than five years, and you could prove that you worked and that you had a bill with your name on it, he [Victor] would help you.”
This 5/5/1988 snippet shows the start of a front-page CT Post article on last minute local amnesty applications. The “Indian features” it mentions refers to indigenous (native) peoples. The average Poblano and Oaxacan has mostly indigenous ancestry. More in the next article.
The Immigration and Control Act of 1986 was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan. The law, among other things, established an 18-month period for all illegal immigrants in the United States who could prove they lived in the US before January 1, 1982.
When Reagan passed the law, the man [Victor Hasiotis] told them, “Guys, we’re going to do this and I’ll help you.” He helped those who were [working] here find letters.”
A New Decade:
In the 1990 census, Bridgeport numbered 402 people of “Mexican origin” and 193 people born in Mexico. In total, Bridgeport’s Hispanics numbered 35,840 people.
Bridgeport was 3rd in Connecticut for people of Mexican origin. The Mexican population was 4th of all Hispanic groups, overshadowed by the Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Colombians.
Stamford had the largest Mexican-origin population in Connecticut, at 912 Mexicans. New Haven’s count was 781 Mexicans, and Norwalk had 182.
In the year 1990, there were still 0 Mexican-run restaurants or grocery stores in Bridgeport.
New Rochelle’s first Mexican goods store, La Michoacana Grocery, opened in 1975, and Port Chester followed with a Mexican grocery by 1984. Stamford had Tacos Guadalajara in 1980, Norwalk with El Mexicano Restaurant, and New Haven had El Charro Restaurant by 1991.
But Bridgeport still lacked a genuine Mexican grocery or restaurant.
Miguel Angel Mendoza recalled how the city’s Mexican establishments popped up just a few years after he arrived in Bridgeport:
“I don’t remember the year they opened, it was in the 90s. When I arrived [in 1988], after a few years, the first Mexican restaurant that opened was La Poblanita and La Flor de Mexico Bakery, then El Mexicanito [Grocery], and then later La Guelaguetza [Grocery] and Garibaldi.”
Fernando Casiano, remembers that in those days, “The famous street was Maplewood. Those areas were well known to the Mexican.”
PREVIEW OF NEXT ARTICLE:
“When the Aztec Eagle Began Her Soar Over Bridgeport: Part 3 – Men of Maplewood”
In the year 1990, there were no Mexican-run businesses in Bridgeport, no restaurants or grocery stores…
Mexican businesses opened in town starting in the early 1990s, clustering on one intersection…
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