Jets and Sharks

Westside Story does an excellent job showing us the state of race relations. It seems as the biggest difference between the Jets and the Sharks is race. The Jets are all white and American, but the Jets are all from Puerto Rico. Throughout the story we’ve been able to see just how tense things are between the two groups, with large fights becoming a possibility very often as a result of members feeling such strong hatred towards each other. The fact that there was such a strong division between the Jets and Sharks really shows how bad things between Americans and Puerto Ricans were at the time. With more and more people coming to America from Puerto Rico, some of us were not as welcome as we’d like to believe. There were many instances of Americans feeling superior to the Puerto Ricans, and some even questioned why Puerto Ricans were even coming to the United States. Sometimes, Puerto Ricans were blamed for in an increase in crime rate. It’s very interesting to see how all the Puerto Ricans come together to form their own group, the Sharks. Because Puerto Ricans weren’t very liked, and were all considered to be on the lower end of the social hierarchy, they all came together to form their own group and together, they didn’t let anyone tell them that they were better than them. Even the Jets, who were born and raised in New York, had to deal with the Sharks multiple times, and the tension between the two groups frequently resulted in large groups of members fighting each other. Despite their racial differences, the Sharks weren’t going to let anyone put them down, especially not the Jets.