page_title: Puerto Ricans in Holyoke
section_title: Colonialism and early cultural exchange
hierarchical_section_title: Puerto Ricans in Holyoke / History / Colonialism and early cultural exchange
caption_attribution_description: Sixto Escobar &amp; Whitey Brimstein circa 1930 's Press Photo Bantamweight Champion
context_page_description: As of the 2010 census, Holyoke, Massachusetts had the largest Puerto Rican population, per capita, of any city in the United States outside Puerto Rico proper, with 44.7% or 17,826 residents being of Puerto Rican heritage, comprising 92.4% of all Latinos in the community. From a combination of farming programs instituted by the US Department of Labor after World War II, and the housing and mills that characterized Holyoke prior to deindustrialization, Puerto Ricans began settling in the city in the mid-1950s, with many arriving during the wave of Puerto Rican immigration to the Northeastern United States in the 1980s. A combination of white flight as former generations of mill workers left the city, and a sustained influx of migrants in subsequent generations transformed the demographic from a minority of about 13% of the population in 1980, to the largest single demographic by ancestry in a span of three decades.
context_section_description: Following the passage of the Foraker Act, a United States designated colonial government was formed, as the island had been annexed by the Americans following the Spanish–American War. Soon after this government was instituted, several delegations were sent from Puerto Rico to various cities in the United States that were seen as potential trading partners on the mainland. Among the first of these delegations of legislature members and trade representatives, was one which would visit Springfield in 1901. In the following year the newly formed Puerto Rican government would offer to make the first assistant of that city's Mechanic Arts High School, Arthur D. Deane, the supervisor of the island's industrial training. Deane would ultimately decline this offer but accepted one as a temporary agent to the Puerto Rico Department of Education, observing and making a report back to the agency in January 1902 on steps needed to establish Puerto Rico's first industrial arts programs.
  In 1901, former Holyoke mayor and congressman William Whiting invited the first civilian colonial governor Charles H. Allen to the city. Allen, an infamous figure in Puerto Rico's history as an American colony, was a former congressman from Lowell and Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Spanish–American War who was appointed to head the island's new  government by President McKinley, whom he had accompanied to Mount Tom two years earlier. During his visit Allen touted the construction of roads which had been completed with no-bid contracts as a resounding success, while also praising the tariff situation around the island's sugar industry as ideal. He would also emphasize the sugar growing capacity of the island and lament that less than half of the island's arable land was in production. During his short tenure as governor and the years that followed, he wasted no time in changing this to suit his own interests. By 1907 Allen would position himself as the robber baron of sugarcane, controlling an estimated 98% of the United States' sugar capacity through his American Sugar Refining Company, which vastly reshaped the economy of the island. By 1930, an estimated 45% of all arable land on Puerto Rico was dedicated to sugar plantations under Allen's control. At the time of his visit to the city a writer for The Republican would close the description of Allen's reception optimistically, comparing Holyoke with San Juan, remarking that the two cities were roughly the same population at that time.
  While the first Puerto Rican immigrants wouldn't arrive in Holyoke en masse until after the Second World War, its own history in Puerto Rican culture begins with Sixto Escobar's mainland debut at the Valley Arena. On May 7, 1934, Escobar defeated bantamweight contender and Canadian flyweight titleholder Bobby Leitham, in a fight that made headlines in local papers and was seen as a dramatic upset in the world of boxing. A few weeks later on May 22, Escobar faced his second opponent on the mainland, Joey Archibald, at the same venue, beating him handily before moving on to a rematch with Leitham in Montreal. These two matches marked an early chapter in a storied career; Escobar would go on to become Puerto Rico's first world champion.
  In 1950, the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company, other offices of the Puerto Rican government, in collaboration with the government of Argentina, assisted in a trial run of the first bagasse (sugar cane waste) based newsprint paper at the mills of the Chemical Paper Company. The demonstration production batch would be manufactured before more than 100 paper, sugar, and chemical magnates and representatives from more than a dozen other countries.
caption: Sixto Escobar, seen here in a 1930 press photo, made his mainland debut at Holyoke's Valley Arena in 1934, and would ultimately become Puerto Rico's first world champion
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