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El Barrio / 93the area with its description, “Spanish” (Hispanic) Harlem. By 1958, a total of600,000 ƒrst- or second-generation Puerto Ricans lived in New York City, andalthough after 1950 the greatest concentration was found in the South Bronx,East Harlem remained identiƒed with the Puerto Rican community. 5Called “El Barrio” (the neighborhood), its character was quite differentfrom Black Harlem to the north and west. Perhaps the most signiƒcant differenceresided in the way “race” was deƒned. Black Harlem had been settled bymigrants from the American South, long victims of American racism. The residents’lives were shaped by the North American concept of a Negro race, atthe time so rigidly deƒned that the ludicrous “one-drop” rule (one drop ofNegro blood categorizing one as Negro) went unchallenged. The immigrantsfrom the Caribbean came from a culture where the mixing of “races” was anaccepted fact, rather than an illegal act of miscegenation. Although skin colorand associated characteristics of hair texture and facial features frequentlyserved as an indicator of class (that is, the more upper-class, the whiter the populationtended to be), variations were so subtly differentiated that black/whitedistinctions simply could not be applied. Whereas in the United States, PuertoRicans would be categorized by the census as either Negro or White, theirown range of classiƒcations included “brown” and “colored.” Darker-skinnedPuerto Ricans were described simply as “de color” on the Island, but when settlingin the United States they were faced with an inappropriate either/or censusdesignation. 6 Inevitably, this led to con„ict, including gang violence, betweenthe two marginalized groups.The understanding Neel gained in Cuba of the differing concepts of racein North and Latin America permitted her to question the North’s monolithicracial categories. She thus exempliƒes the arguments made by her friend fromthe Cuban years, Nicolas Guillen, in his essay “Havana to New York” in theJune 1949 Masses & Mainstream, which acknowledged that although whiteand Cuban cultures may be inclined to overgeneralization and simpliƒcationwhen writing about one another, such crosscultural analysis could just asfrequently result in insight. 7 A master „esh painter, Neel represented everynuance of skin shade within her family groups, as if to ask, “Where does blackend and white begin? What does “race” mean in a “mixed” culture? How dovisual differences matter?”Several years before Neel began her Spanish Harlem series in 1938–1939,Meyer Schapiro had published an essay, “Race, Nationality and Art,” in ArtFront (March 1936), that ƒrst questioned the notion of “race” within art criticism.An eloquent refutation of Nazi ideology, Schapiro’s essay had challengedthe accepted notion that there are identiƒable racial or national characteristicsin art, reminding the reader that