in partnership with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College


The State of Puerto Rican Politics: Aquí y Allá
Presented by Amílcar Barreto and Angelo Falcon
 
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LOS COMICHEQUES DEL BRONX -- The Bronx Boyz

Now the Bronx County is the most important concentrated place of Puerto Rican political power. As you may know, Roberto Ramirez, a Puerto Rican, is the chairman of the Bronx Democratic organization. Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx Borough President, is planning to run for mayor and is maybe one of the most credible Puerto Rican/Latino candidates out there. Herman Badillo is also planning to run for mayor but as a Republican -- which is interesting. By the way, he is the Chair of the Trustees of CUNY, sorry about that. If we could do something about it, we'd do it but...

What's been occurring is we have to watch -- many people have been watching closely what's happening in the Bronx in terms of the Ferrer campaign, in terms of what's happening with Roberto Ramirez and ese grupo as we used to call them -- we used to do a little magazine called Critica -- we used to call them los comicheques del Bronx or the Bronx Boyz. What occurred was not good news for this group. One was that a lot of the candidates they supported lost -- up in the Bronx. It doesn't look like they're able to deliver politically. Roberto Ramirez and the Bronx Democratic organization, they had some important losses.

So that the Ferrer campaign looks like it's losing steam and really has a long way to go. We have to look closely at what that means because a lot of people are looking forward to the day when there will be a Puerto Rican mayor of the City of New York. That's interesting because Roberto Ramirez also decided not to run again as Bronx Assemblyman which was the source of much of his power. And now I think he's gone into political consulting and plans to run the Ferrer campaign then he wants to run some other campaign. Carl McCall's campaign in two years down the road. So he has plans to become a big politcal consultant. But there's some shifting going on. And certainly it doesn't look good in terms of the future of the Bronx in terms of being able to claim that they've been successful in running all these candidates and having all these successes.

I won't go into the details of different campaigns but some of you may have been following the Elliot Engels campaign and what happened with that. You may have seen the tapes of Pedro Espada? He's another one that's interesting. This is a Puerto Rican who is running for State Senate against the Democratic machine. He was under indictment while he was running. In fact, he was in court and he won. And then he was acquitted but the fact is that this was a guy who was running under a cloud of a court case against him that was brought by the Democratic machinery and he still beat them. And beat them in a dramatic way. So that's going to be important to look at what happens to that group in the Bronx because that's defining a lot of Puerto Rican electoral politics in the city and as I said it really opens a lot of questions about what's happening to these people there.



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