Nation: NEW YORK

Most of the 1.3 million Puerto Ricans in the greater New York City area live in the grim, crumbling tenements of Manhattan's East Harlem and Lower East Side, or in Brooklyn's Williamsburg ghetto, or in the burned-out wasteland of the South Bronx. For them, life is mostly a grinding struggle for survival.

But then there are the festivals, especially Puerto Rican Day in June, when some 250,000 members of the community parade up Fifth Avenue and turn Central Park into a joyous 840-acre cookout. It is then that Puerto Rican exuberance blossoms. Hotels and nightclubs rock to the three-two rhythms of salsa. Hot dog vendors watch forlornly as their all-American offerings are spurned in favor of bacalaitos (codfish fritters), alcapurrias (plantain-meat rolls) and tostones (fried plantains). The community comes ablaze — forgetting for a while the gritty realities of its plight.

Puerto Ricans are the largest — and most beleaguered — national group among the estimated 2.6 million Hispanics in and near New York City.* They are, of course, not ordinary immigrants but U.S. citizens, as are all 3.3 million inhabitants of the Puerto Rican commonwealth. Despite that advantage, the Puerto Rican experience today is all too often one of blighted hopes. Says Carlos Garcia, 20, a school dropout and part-time carpenter on Manhattan's Lower East Side: "I expected a West Side Story, and never got it."

Puerto Ricans are even more hard pressed than New York's ghetto blacks; 48% earn less than $7,000 a year, compared with 42% among blacks. The proportion of Puerto Ricans on welfare is 34%, vs. 32% for blacks. Among Puerto Ricans over 16 years old, only 6% have completed any job training; the rate for blacks is twice as high. With 14% of New York City's population, Puerto Ricans hold only 3.1% of police department jobs and 1.3% of those in the fire department.

With Puerto Rican youngsters now making up 25% of the pubic school population, one of the community's highest priorities is education. But according to New York's deputy mayor for education, Herman Badillo, the city's efforts on behalf of Hispanic pupils are a "disaster in all areas." Says Badillo, a Puerto Rican: "We have plenty of jobs in the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan; the problem is that kids can't spell."

After heavy prompting in the form of a judicial agreement signed in 1974, New York grudgingly began providing bilingual education for Spanish-speaking youngsters. By the New York City board of education's most recent estimate, there were only 2,333 Hispanics among the city's 48,813 teachers.

Meantime, Badillo estimates the Puerto Rican school-dropout rate at 85%. Discouraged youngsters are almost natural prospects for membership in the city's underclass, quickly contributing to the ghetto plagues of violent crime, drug use and arson. Says one Lower East Side youngster: "A lot of kids want an education to get out of here. But in order to survive, they're dealing [drugs]. Kids ten and eleven make more money than their old man in the factory." Says another: "I saw some pictures of this place 20 years ago, and it had benches and trees. We took it over and we burned it up."