It’s Sunday, Father’s Day, but today New York honors the life of a matriarch. The godmother of the neighborhood, María Antonia Cay, better known as Doña Toñita, parades in a van along Grand Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A crowd of people welcomes her with applause and shouts of appreciation — “Long live Toñita!” — while she, regal and smiling as always, greets them from the window like the queen that she is. As usual, she has both hands full of giant rings, of various colors and shapes, which give her an air of sophistication and wisdom, and her makeup and blonde curls remain intact despite the summer heat that hits the city. .
Today marks 50 years since Toñita opened the doors of the Caribbean Social Club, an iconic bar that for half a century has served as a refuge for Latinos in New York, where Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Mexicans and everyone else gather. Latino in the diaspora who misses his homeland and its people. To mark the half-century, the business street has been closed and filled with people drinking beer and rum, playing dominoes, dancing reggaeton and salsa, and celebrating that this institution has survived since 1974.
It hasn’t been easy: Toñita’s club is located in a neighborhood that in recent years has fallen into the clutches of gentrification. In 1974, when Toñita purchased the building at 244 Grand Street in South Williamsburg, the area was known as Los Sures. The neighborhood was then a piece of Puerto Rico outside the island: thousands of Puerto Ricans like Toñita settled here after having emigrated from Puerto Rico during the second half of the last century in what is known as the first great aerial migration of American history. It is estimated that between the 1940s and 1970s, the Puerto Rican population in New York went from about 61,000 Puerto Ricans to more than 900,000.
But little remains of Los Sures from those years today. To rent an apartment in this area, you currently need more than $4,000 a month, almost what Toñita paid 50 years ago to buy the Caribbean Social Club building. It cost him $5,000, while now it is difficult — if not impossible — to buy an apartment for less than a million. The wave of gentrification in Los Sures has displaced countless residents, and businesses in the neighborhood and for the neighborhood, such as Toñita, have been forced to close. She says she has received “million-dollar” offers to sell the club and the apartments in the building, which are also hers. But she is clear: “I am not going to sell.”
With the demographic change of the neighborhood has also come scrutiny. On the one hand, Williamsburg’s new upper-middle-class and upper-class neighbors complain that the club generates too much noise. In the last four years, New York City has received more than 60 noise complaints at the bar’s address, in addition to several others around the premises, according to city data. There will surely be more complaints about this Sunday’s party.
On the other hand, bar inspections have become constant and fierce. Toñita says that she can be fined for “anything.” That’s what happened last year, when an inspector found that the club had violated her alcohol license and that Toñita didn’t keep any financial records of the business, according to the court. Latino USA podcast. In June 2023, she had to appear before a judge to be held accountable. At the end of the process, the court granted him a six-month adjournment, before shelving the case completely. A year later, Toñita insists that the case was resolved. Of course: he says that he had to pay a fine of “$1,600 or so.”
For the Caribbean Social Club community, that process represented “a threat” against Toñita and her legacy. Several dozen protesters accompanied her to court on the day of her summons, June 1, 2023, and denounced at the courthouse doors the gentrification of Williamsburg, where “longtime residents and businesses” are being “expelled.” ”. The Caribbean Social Club “is a beacon of cultural identity, unity and heritage. Losing him is losing a part of the soul of our community,” Toñita posted on her Instagram account days before appearing before the judge.
This Sunday, that reality was more than present. Everyone who passed by the event stage stressed the need to protect Toñita from those who want to displace her from her neighborhood, from her people. The Democratic representative of New York, Nydia Velázquez, said it herself: “Toñita is ours.” During a short speech, the representative of Puerto Rican origin stated that “despite gentrification, Toñita will continue here” until further notice. “When Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to close the club,” said the congresswoman, referring to the Republican’s administration between 1994 and 2001, “Toñita took him to court and won. She let him know that she is Puerto Rican so he would know.” The current mayor, Democrat Eric Adams, declared June 16 as María Antonia Cay Day.
“Toñita takes care of us”
In reality, more than a bar, the Caribbean Social Club is a family, and Toñita, the matriarch. Toñita has no employees or clients — the business is supported by volunteers. On the busiest nights, everyone does their part to help: they pick up empty beer bottles and cans, mop the floor if someone spills a drink, take out the trash. The place itself is small: a sign on the wall indicates that the capacity is 50 people, but here that means nothing. Any Friday or Saturday the bar is so full that there is no room for another soul. To get to the bar in the back, you have to apologize a thousand times — “Excuse me, can I come in?” — and tripping several times.
In the bar, beers are three dollars, there is Latin music for all tastes and during the week, every afternoon, there is free food: rice with beans, stewed chicken… The menu varies, but the usual thing is that there are beans. “It’s what people like the most,” says Toñita. She prepares lunch herself in her apartment, located in the same building as the bar. At around three in the afternoon, when she opens the doors of the club, she takes down the same pots in which she made the food and places them on one of the tables. Thus, whoever is hungry can help themselves to a plate and have lunch with her. Toñita does not expect anything in return: only that each one pick up her plate, as if she were at her grandmother’s house.
In fact, the Caribbean Social Club looks more like a grandmother’s house than a bar. The walls are lined with portraits of Toñita along with family members, neighbors, friends or celebrities who have visited the club. Some of the photos have a sepia tint and look blurry, proof that they have been there for many years. Colored lights also hang from the walls and ceiling, the kind used to decorate trees at Christmas, and too many Puerto Rican flags to count.
Beyond the cheap beers or free food, Toñita says that people come to her bar to find out “about the fun.” In Puerto Rico, the land where Toñita was born 85 years ago, bochinche is gossip. She migrated to New York in 1956, when she was 16 years old, but the almost seven decades that she has lived in the diaspora have not erased her Puerto Rican accent. She continues dragging the double ‘rr’ and doubling the singular ‘r’, turning it into the ‘l’ so characteristic of Puerto Ricans.
Being a great fan of baseball — as they call baseball in Puerto Rico — Toñita wanted the Caribbean Social Club to be a private social club in the beginning — hence its name — where the local baseball team and their families could meet. to eat, drink and share. It was born as a space mainly for Puerto Ricans, but now people come to the bar from all corners of the world. With New York’s growing immigrant population, especially Latin American, there are nights when Puerto Ricans are the minority at the Caribbean Social Club, and Venezuelan or Ecuadorian accents are heard instead.
Birthdays, photo sessions and afterparties of movies. And through its doors stars like Puerto Rican reggaeton artist Bad Bunnythe Colombian Maluma or the queen of pop, Madonna.
“Here Toñita is an authority in the sense that she has a matriarchy. “He treats us like part of his family, he takes care of us,” says Rafael Clemente. This 35-year-old Puerto Rican immigrated to New York in 2013. One day, shortly after arriving, he was walking through the Williamsburg neighborhood with a group of friends when he suddenly heard someone playing salsa. “We thought, what is this? We’re going over there. We found a small door, where the music was coming from, and when we walked in it was literally like a portal to Puerto Rico,” she remembers.
Since then, Toñita’s club has been her second home. “Whenever I come here I feel at home, not only for Toñita, but also for the other people who are here,” she says. “Many of the times I feel like I’m a little drained by the city and I need a breakecito to recharge, I come here.”
For her part, Toñita says she has no plans to retire. “I’m going to be here until I die,” he says. Do you want to return to Puerto Rico one day? “All of us who left Puerto Rico left with the idea of making some money and returning to our country to buy a little land and build a house,” she says.
– Why have you stayed in New York instead of returning to the island?
– I have never said that I am going to stay. I always say I’m going to leave. One says I’m leaving, I’m leaving, and he keeps staying. But one always has that longing to return.
For now, his plan is to continue having a good time with the boys: “Sing, dance and enjoy.”
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