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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

San Antonio market looted

Sometime after midnight, a group of Black people ["un grupo de personas de color"] took the trash cans in front of the San Antonio Market at 71 West 116th Street and threw them at the window on the right side of the store front, according to accounts circulating at the store reported by a La Prensa reporter. Staff discovered the damage when they arrived to open the store, owned by Delfino Rosete. There had been no attacks on the market when they had closed the previous evening. An employee estimated that food valued at $10–$12 had been taken. No one arrested for looting was identified as having stolen goods from the store.

A reporter for La Prensa visited damaged businesses in the Puerto Rican areas of West 116th and Lenox Avenue the day after the disorder. Most of those identified in the story are west of the market, on Lenox Avenue and West 116th Street between Lenox and 7th Avenues, and most had broken windows without reported looting. The Mediaville Liquor store was the only damaged business located east of the market, at the other end of the block of West 116th Street. As with most of the attacks in the Spanish-speaking section of Harlem, La Prensa provided the only evidence of the looting of the market.



Given the limited damage and lost merchandise, the San Antonio market likely continued to operate after the disorder, but there was no clear evidence. A Hispanic-owned grocery store located at 71 West 116th Street was included in the MCCH business survey, but the owner was listed as Gregorio Troche, not Delfino Rosete. The investigators did sometimes record the name of the store manager rather than the owner. In this case, it was possible the men were related: the 1930 census recorded a household living at 122 West 115th Street headed by Defino Rosete, a twenty-four-year-old Mexican immigrant that included his father-in-law, a forty-nine-year-old Puerto Rican immigrant named Gregorio Troche. (At that time Rosete worked as a handyman in a metal factory, and his father-in-law as a dishwasher, so there was no direct link between those men and the San Antonio market.) The nature of the business at that location when the Tax Department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941 was not visible in the image.

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