According to legend, the Aztec people found their home of Tenochtitlán (Mexico City) when they spotted an eagle perched on a branch with a snake in its beak. A grassroots historian says centuries later, that eagle soared over to New England where Mexicans found a home two thousand miles away in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Abraham Lima is a Mexican American who was born and raised in Bridgeport. He’s studying architecture at Connecticut State Community College, but in his free time, he’s delving into the history of the city’s Mexican and Mexican American community for an ongoing project with the Bridgeport History Center.
Over the past two years, Lima has combed through research papers, census data and newspaper articles to learn when and how Mexicans migrated to Bridgeport.
To learn why, however, Lima took to the familiar streets of his neighborhood and conducted interviews with local Mexican residents and business owners to get their first hand accounts of how and why Mexicans first settled in the city.
The passion project originally started off as one article that the Bridgeport History Center would publish on their website, Lima said, but it quickly grew into an ongoing series.
The birth of a grassroots historian
“I wanted to know the origins behind my city,” Lima said. The city’s diversity was of particular interest to him. “I always thought it was really cool that Bridgeport was a melting pot. I just felt that no one had ever really written about that side of Bridgeport.”
However, Lima said once he started digging into the history of the Hispanic populations of the city, he found the information somewhat lacking.
“I had only found information on Puerto Ricans in Bridgeport, and I knew very well that there was a very sizable Mexican community in Bridgeport because I was part of it,” Lima said. “I grew up going to different businesses and bakeries and at church, almost everyone was Mexican, and in school, I had Mexican classmates, so I wanted to know why there were so many Mexicans in Bridgeport?”
According to Lima, when he visited the Bridgeport History Center in the public library, the people there didn’t have much information about the Mexican community.
“They said, well, that we know of, before [the] 1990s, Hispanic in Bridgeport meant Puerto Rican,” he said. They then offered to publish his findings, Lima said, taking him on as one of their grassroots historians.
The Mexican migration story
La Poblanita, a Mexican restaurant that pioneered Mexican-owned establishments in Bridgeport, is in a two-story home at an intersection on Park Avenue between the Hollow and West End neighborhoods. Lima sat down with the owners, Fernando Casiano and Rufino Flores, and heard them tell the story of how they opened up the restaurant in 1992 after selling tamales door-to-door.
“This is their legacy and no one has ever really written about it before. It's never been written to paper. So they were very interested,” he said. “And I thought it was really cool, because I had gone to these businesses as a kid.”
Their story was one example of a trend Lima found in his interviews and research, where Mexicans that lived in New York were moving up to Connecticut. That wave of migration really kicked off around the 1990s, he said, as the first Mexican businesses were opening up.
Puerto Rican Studies Initiative Director Charles Venator Santiago said he’s found this to be true in his own research. Based on anecdotal accounts, he said Bridgeport was an attractive place for Mexicans in New York because of the cheaper housing, the work opportunities and the family and friends that were already there.
A 1990 Census report of Connecticut’s population shows that Mexicans made up less than half of a percent of Bridgeport’s population.
Today, they make up about 5% of Bridgeport’s population overall, according to 2023 census data pooled by the Puerto Rican Studies Initiative at the University of Connecticut.
That makes Mexicans the third largest group of Hispanics/Latinos in Bridgeport, behind Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, and the second largest Hispanic/Latino group in the state.
Writing the histories of migrant communities in Bridgeport
As his research has grown, Lima has become more passionate about getting these stories out. He said he wants to write a book about all he’s learned one day. He’s even started thinking of making a documentary.
His drive to learn more, however, doesn’t end there.
“I focused on the Mexican-American community, but I want to write about the history of Bridgeport,” he said. “I've come to realize that actually most Bridgeport ethnic groups today don't really have any written history.”
Lima said he plans to write about the stories of Bridgeport’s migrants from countries like Peru, Colombia and Bangladesh, to name a few. It’s important, he said, to cover this history for people today and for future generations.
“The ethnic melting pot that is my generation of Bridgeporters will grow up, and they will have children, and their children will have children, and these stories will probably fade away,” he said. “The question of who we are and how we got here. That will never be written down, so to me, that was a matter of preserving history for posterity as well.”
Learn More
Lima’s series is available on the Bridgeport History Center website.
Part Four is expected to be published by May.
