ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at local Puerto Rican politics in New York City through the lenses of the 1988 presidential race. As the comments by the late Willie Velazquez at a 1983 symposium on Puerto Rican voter registration strategies demonstrate, Latinos approach presidential elections with considerable ambivalence. For the 2.5 million Puerto Ricans in the United States and 3.2 million in Puerto Rico, US presidential elections are curious things. The potential electoral clout of Puerto Ricans is far greater than their numbers would suggest. The 2.5 million Puerto Ricans in the fifty states constitute less than 1 percent of the total US population. When analyzing the impact at the local level of the Puerto Rican vote on presidential elections, the most fruitful approach appears to be one that focuses on the interaction between this community and this national electoral institution/process. Puerto Rican political leadership in the city had been in transition for some time.
