A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Originally published as the Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1907, this book was praised in an article in American Anthropologist as doing “more than any other to give a comprehensive idea of the archaeology of the West Indies.”
Until that time, for mainly political reasons, little scientific research had been conducted by Americans on any of the Caribbean islands. Dr. Fewkes' unique skills of observation and experience served him well in the quest to understand Caribbean prehistory and culture. This volume, the result of his careful fieldwork in Puerto Rico in 1902-04, is magnificently illustrated by 93 plates and 43 line drawings of specimens from both public and private collections of the islands.
A 1907 article in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland described the volume as “a most valuable contribution to ethnographical science.”
American Empire and the Politics of Meaning is an examination of how these efforts to provide the elite of Puerto Rico and the Philippines a practical education in self-government played out on the ground in the early years of American colonial rule, from 1898 until 1912. It is the first systematic comparative analysis of these early exercises in American imperial power. The sociologist Julian Go unravels how American authorities used “culture” as both a tool and a target of rule, and how the Puerto Rican and Philippine elite received, creatively engaged, and sometimes silently subverted the Americans’ ostensibly benign intentions. Rather than finding that the attempt to transplant American-style democracy led to incommensurable “culture clashes,” Go assesses complex processes of cultural accommodation and transformation. By combining rich historical detail with broader theories of meaning, culture, and colonialism, he provides an innovative study of the hidden intersections of political power and cultural meaning-making in America’s earliest overseas empire.
Ancient Borinquen is a re-examination of the archaeology of Puerto Rico, drawing data from beyond the boundaries of the island itself because in prehistoric times the waters between islands would not have been viewed as a boundary in the contemporary sense of the term. The last few decades have witnessed a growth of intense archaeological research on the island, from material culture in the form of lithics, ceramics, and rock art; to nutritional, architecture, and environmental studies; to rituals and social patterns; to the aftermath of Conquest.
It is unlikely that prehistoric occupants recognized the same boundaries and responded to the same political forces that operated in the formation of current nations, states, or cities. Yet, archaeologists traditionally have produced such volumes and they generally represent anchors for ongoing research in a specific region, in this case the island of Puerto Rico, its immediate neighbors, and the wider Caribbean basin.
Ancient Borinquen provides a comprehensive overview of recent thinking, new data, syntheses, and insights into current Puerto Rican archaeology, and it reflects and illuminates similar concerns elsewhere in the West Indies, lowland South America, and Central America.
An alternative view of Puerto Rico’s past, present, and future
How do we map the pathways to liberation where we have been taught to see only trauma, suffering, and lack? Melissa L. Rosario offers an alternative view of Puerto Rico, America’s oldest colony, removing readers from the framework of crisis to consider the deeper legacies of its current impasse. Beyond Disaster: Building Collective Futures in Puerto Rico is an intimate portrait, weaving insights from the author’s own life, research, and organizing work as a scholar in the diaspora who rematriated. Rosario bridges the genres of social history and memoir to unsettle the meaning of resistance and freedom, underscoring the deep wounds of colonialism while still uplifting the profound possibilities of embodied alternatives.
Beyond Disaster critiques the framework of debt and crisis by examining the psychological, emotional, and spiritual effects of colonialism. Rosario highlights key examples of organizing efforts to defend land and education against total enclosure, protecting life amid loss. This book offers a series of microhistories, vignettes, and prose poetry to foreground the daily practices necessary to anchor the ecological and political landscapes of our collective future.
In Carceral Citizens, anthropologist Caroline M. Parker offers an ethnographic portrait of therapeutic communities in Puerto Rico, the oldest colony in the Americas. As nonprofits nested within the carceral state, therapeutic communities serve as reeducation and recovery centers for the mostly male drug offenders who serve out their sentences engaged in manual labor and prayer. The most surprising aspect of these centers, however, is that their “graduates” often remain long after the completion of their term, working as self-appointed peer counselors in a mixture of volunteer and low-wage positions.
Parker seeks to explain this dynamic by showing how, in these therapeutic communities, criminalized men find new and meaningful ways of living in the shadow of the prison. Through their participation in the day-to-day functioning of the centers, they discover and cultivate alternative forms of belonging, livelihood, and citizenship, despite living within the restrictions of the carceral state. Situating her study against the backdrop of Puerto Rico’s colonial history, and with findings that extend across Latin America, Parker challenges common assumptions about confinement, labor, and rehabilitation. By delving into lives shaped by the convergence of imperialism, the carceral state, and self-help, she offers a fresh understanding of the transformations of labor and social life brought about by mass incarceration.
A high significant discussion of Caribbean archaeology and a fascinating introduction to paleodemography
According to the European chronicles, at the time of contact, the Greater Antilles were inhabited by the Taino or Arawak Indians, who were organized in hierarchical societies. Since its inception Caribbean archaeology has used population as an important variable in explaining many social, political, and economic processes such as migration, changes in subsistence systems, and the development of institutionalized social stratification.
In Caribbean Paleodemography, L. Antonio Curet argues that population has been used casually by Caribbean archaeologists and proposes more rigorous and promising ways in which demographic factors can be incorporated in our modeling of past human behavior. He analyzes a number of demographic issues in island archaeology at various levels of analysis, including inter- and intra-island migration, carrying capacity, population structures, variables in prehistory, cultural changes, and the relationship with material culture and social development. With this work, Curet brings together the diverse theories on Greater Antilles island populations and the social and political forces governing their growth and migration.
Winding through the streets of working-class San Juan with Cortijo’s funeral procession, Rodríguez Juliá’s autobiographical chronicle provides a rare portrait of the impoverished society from which Cortijo’s music emerged. Along with detailed renderings of grief-stricken mourners—including Cortijo’s childhood friend and fellow musician, the celebrated singer Ismael ("Maelo") Rivera—Rodríguez Juliá records his feelings as he, a light-skinned, middle-class writer, confronts the world of poor black Puerto Ricans. The author’s masterful shifting of linguistic registers, his acute sensitivity to Puerto Rican social codes, his broad knowledge of popular music, and his sardonic ruminations on death and immortality make this one of the most widely read books of modern Puerto Rican literature. Well-known critic and cultural historian Juan Flores has provided a scrupulous translation of Rodríguez Juliá’s text and an introduction situating the book in relation to Puerto Rican music and culture and the careers of Cortijo and Rodríguez Juliá.
Bringing together texts from Puerto Rican literature, history, and popular culture, Dream Nation shows how imaginings of national independence have served many competing purposes. They have given authority to the island’s literary and artistic establishment but have also been a badge of countercultural cool. These ideas have been fueled both by nostalgia for an imagined past and by yearning for a better future. They have fostered local communities on the island, and still helped define Puerto Rican identity within U.S. Latino culture.
In clear, accessible prose, Acosta Cruz takes us on a journey from the 1898 annexation of Puerto Rico to the elections of 2012, stopping at many cultural touchstones along the way, from the canonical literature of the Generación del 30 to the rap music of Tego Calderón. Dream Nation thus serves both as a testament to how stories, symbols, and heroes of independence have inspired the Puerto Rican imagination and as an urgent warning about how this culture has become detached from the everyday concerns of the island’s people.
A volume in the American Literature Initiatives series
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
The practice of reading aloud has a long history, and the tradition still survives in Cuba as a hard-won right deeply embedded in cigar factory workers' culture. In El Lector, Araceli Tinajero deftly traces the evolution of the reader from nineteenth-century Cuba to the present and its eventual dissemination to Tampa, Key West, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. In interviews with present-day and retired readers, she records testimonies that otherwise would have been lost forever, creating a valuable archive for future historians.
Through a close examination of journals, newspapers, and personal interviews, Tinajero relates how the reading was organized, how the readers and readings were selected, and how the process affected the relationship between workers and factory owners. Because of the reader, cigar factory workers were far more cultured and in touch with the political currents of the day than other workers. But it was not only the reading material, which provided political and literary information that yielded self-education, that influenced the workers; the act of being read to increased the discipline and timing of the artisan's job.
Fishers at Work, Workers at Sea describes Puerto Rican fishing families as they negotiate homeland and diaspora. It considers how wage work affects their livelihoods and identities at home and how these independent producers move in and out of global commodity markets. Drawing on some 100 life histories and years of fieldwork, David Griffith and Manuel Valdés Pizzini have developed a complex, often moving portrait of the men and women who fiercely struggle to hang onto the coastal landscapes and cultural heritage tied to the Caribbean Sea.
Some stories provide a distinctive Caribbean twist on classic tales including “Snow White” and “Cinderella.” Others fictionalize the lives of local historical figures, such as infamous pirate Roberto Cofresí, rendered here as a Robin Hood figure who subverts the colonial social order. The collection also introduces such beloved local characters as Cucarachita Martina, the kind cockroach who falls in love with Ratoncito Pérez, her devoted mouse husband who brings her delicious food.
Including a fresh English translation of each folktale as well as the original Spanish version, the collection also contains an introduction from literary historian Rafael Ocasio that highlights the historical importance of these tales and the Jíbaro cultural values they impart. These vibrant, funny, and poignant stories will give readers unique insights into Puerto Rico’s rich cultural heritage.
Esta nueva y emocionante antología reúne cuentos populares puertorriqueños que fueron transmitidos oralmente durante generaciones antes de ser finalmente transcritos comenzando en 1914 por el equipo del famoso antropólogo Franz Boas. Estos encantadores cuentos ofrecen a los lectores un vistazo a la imaginación y las aspiraciones de los jíbaros, los campesinos de Puerto Rico.
Algunas historias brindan un distintivo toque caribeño a cuentos clásicos como "Blanca Nieves" y "Cenicienta". Otros ficcionalizan la vida de personajes históricos locales, como el famoso pirata Roberto Cofresí, representado como una figura al estilo de Robin Hood, quien subvierte el orden social colonial. La colección también presenta personajes locales tan queridos como Cucarachita Martina, la amable cucaracha que se enamora de Ratoncito Pérez, su devoto esposo ratón que le trae deliciosa comida.
Incluyendo una nueva traducción al inglés de estos cuentos populares, así como las versiones originales en español, la colección también contiene una introducción del historiador literario Rafael Ocasio, quien destaca la importancia histórica de estos cuentos y los valores culturales del jíbaro que éstos imparten en los relatos. Estas historias vibrantes, divertidas y conmovedoras brindarán a los lectores una visión única de la rica herencia cultural de Puerto Rico.
Introducción en español (https://d3tto5i5w9ogdd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/03154419/Ocasio_Cuentos_Intro_Espan%CC%83ol.pdf)
Rafael Ocasio will discussing his book, 'Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico / Cuentos folklóricos de las montañas de Puerto Rico' at Biblioteca Juvenil de Mayagüez in Puerto Rico (https://youtu.be/o6Tub094EoI)
This volume helps fill the gap by presenting a comprehensive description and analysis of the animal community of the tropical rain forest at El Verde, Puerto Rico. Building on more than a decade of field research, the contributors weave the complex strands of information about the energy flow within the forest—who eats whom—into a powerful tool for understanding community dynamics known as a food web. This systematic approach to organizing the natural histories of the many species at El Verde also reveals basic patterns and processes common to all rain forests, making this book a valuable contribution for anyone concerned with studying and protecting these fragile ecosystems.
More than four million U.S. citizens currently live in five “unincorporated” U.S. territories. The inhabitants of these vestiges of an American empire are denied full representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Focusing on Puerto Rico, the largest and most populous of the territories, Foreign in a Domestic Sense sheds much-needed light on the United States’ unfinished colonial experiment and its legacy of racially rooted imperialism, while insisting on the centrality of these “marginal” regions in any serious treatment of American constitutional history. For one hundred years, Puerto Ricans have struggled to define their place in a nation that neither wants them nor wants to let them go. They are caught in a debate too politicized to yield meaningful answers. Meanwhile, doubts concerning the constitutionality of keeping colonies have languished on the margins of mainstream scholarship, overlooked by scholars outside the island and ignored by the nation at large.
This book does more than simply fill a glaring omission in the study of race, cultural identity, and the Constitution; it also makes a crucial contribution to the study of American federalism, serves as a foundation for substantive debate on Puerto Rico’s status, and meets an urgent need for dialogue on territorial status between the mainlandd and the territories.
Contributors. José Julián Álvarez González, Roberto Aponte Toro, Christina Duffy Burnett, José A. Cabranes, Sanford Levinson, Burke Marshall, Gerald L. Neuman, Angel R. Oquendo, Juan Perea, Efrén Rivera Ramos, Rogers M. Smith, E. Robert Statham Jr., Brook Thomas, Richard Thornburgh, Juan R. Torruella, José Trías Monge, Mark Tushnet, Mark Weiner
Puerto Rican migration to the mainland following World War II took place for a range of reasons -- globalization of the economy, the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, state policies, changes in regional and local economies, social networks, and, not least, the decisions made by individual immigrants. In this wide-ranging book, Carmen Whalen weaves them all into a tapestry of Puerto Rican immigration to Philadelphia.
Like African Americans and Mexicans, Puerto Ricans were recruited for low-wage jobs, only to confront racial discrimination as well as economic restructuring. As Whalen shows, they were part of that wave of newcomers who came from areas in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia characterized by a heavy U.S. military and economic presence, especially export processing zones looking for a new life in depressed urban environments already populated by earlier labor migrants. But Puerto Rican in-migration was also unique, especially in its regional and gender dimensions. Many migrants came as part of contract labor programs shaped by competing agendas.
By the 1990s, economic conditions, government policies, and racial ideologies had transformed Puerto Rican labor migrants into what has been called "the other underclass." The author analyzes this continuation of "culture and poverty" interpretations and contrasts it with the efforts of Philadelphia's Puerto Ricans to recreate their communities and deal with the impact of economic restructuring and residential segregation in the City of Brotherly Love.
In this intimate ethnography, Raquel Romberg seeks to illuminate the performative significance of healing rituals and magic works, their embodied nature, and their effectiveness in transforming the states of participants by focusing on the visible, albeit mostly obscure, ways in which healing and magic rituals proceed. The questions posed by Romberg emerge directly from the particular pragmatics of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing), shaped by the eclecticism of its rituals, the heterogeneous character of its participants, and the heterodoxy of its moral economy.
What, if any, is the role of belief in magic and healing rituals? How do past discourses on possession enter into the performative experience of ritual in the here and now? Where does belief stop, and where do memories of the flesh begin? While these are questions that philosophers and anthropologists of religion ponder, they acquire a different meaning when asked from an ethnographic perspective.
Written in an evocative, empathetic style, with theoretical ruminations about performance, the senses, and imagination woven into stories that highlight the drama and humanity of consultations, this book is an important contribution to the cross-cultural understanding of our capacity to experience the transcendental in corporeal ways.
In showing how political projects and alliances in Puerto Rico were affected by racially contingent definitions of “decency” and “disreputability,” Findlay argues that attempts at moral reform and the state’s repression of “sexually dangerous” women were weapons used in batttles between elite and popular, American and Puerto Rican, and black and white. Based on a thorough analysis of popular and elite discourses found in both literature and official archives, Findlay contends that racialized sexual norms and practices were consistently a central component in the construction of social and political orders. The campaigns she analyzes include an attempt at moral reform by elite male liberals and a movement designed to enhance the family and cleanse urban space that ultimately translated into repression against symbollically darkened prostitutes. Findlay also explores how U.S. officials strove to construct a new colonial order by legalizing divorce and how feminist, labor, and Afro-Puerto Rican political demands escalated after World War I, often focusing on the rehabilitation and defense of prostitutes.
Imposing Decency forces us to rethink previous interpretations of political chronologies as well as reigning conceptualizations of both liberalism and the early working-class in Puerto Rico. Her work will appeal to scholars with an interest in Puerto Rican or Latin American studies, sexuality and national identity, women in Latin America, and general women’s studies.
Kicking Off the Bootstraps is a powerful case history of such an effort. It describes a grassroots activist movement that emerged in the Puerto Rican community of Salinas to counter the poverty and economic dependence experienced by its citizens in the wake of "Operation Bootstrap," a post-World War II industrial development program. Déborah Berman Santana examines the efforts of the community to develop its own economic strategy based primarily on environmentally and socially responsible uses of local natural and human resources.
Berman Santana shows how local activists are seeking to empower the Salinas community to make decisions concerning economic development. She evaluates present-day efforts to develop positive alternatives, examining the motivations of the activists, the nature of their projects, their efforts to mobilize the community, their dealings with government and other organizations, and the obstacles they face. In a closing chapter, she addresses the potential roles of community leaders, outside activists, local businesses, and government in actualizing these alternatives.
A testimony to one community's efforts to determine its own future, Kicking Off the Bootstraps deals with real issues such as control over productive resources, quality of life, and environmental health. It also extends an examination of community-directed activism to an exploration of policy implications for sustainable development. While this concept is often too vague to be applied to real strategies, the Salinas experience provides a clear idea of what sustainable development can—and should—mean in actual practice.
Faye Caronan's examination interprets the pivotal engagement of novels, films, performance poetry, and other cultural productions as both symptoms of and resistance against American military, social, economic, and political incursions. Though the Philippines became an independent nation and Puerto Rico a U.S. commonwealth, both remain subordinate to the United States. Caronan's juxtaposition reveals two different yet simultaneous models of U.S. neocolonial power and contradicts American exceptionalism as a reluctant empire that only accepts colonies for the benefit of the colonized and global welfare. Her analysis, meanwhile, demonstrates how popular culture allows for alternative narratives of U.S. imperialism, but also functions to contain those alternatives.
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
The book provides detailed descriptions of the entire shoreline, noting the specific coastal hazards of each coastal reach. These hazards include coastal erosion, storm surge flooding, and potential damage from earthquakes. Where high-density development or significant roads and utilities are particularly at risk, these are also noted. The effects that sand mining, seawalls, jetties, and other attempts at coastal engineering have had on the island are examined. Finally, the authors discuss historical and legal aspects of coastal planning in Puerto Rico, presenting guidelines for selecting building sites.
Of interest to all concerned with protecting our shores and beaches and useful to the coastal planner and manager, Living With the Puerto Rico Shore contains an extensive bibliography and a list of agencies involved in coastal issues.
In Matters of Choice, Iris Lopez presents a comprehensive analysis of the dichotomous views that have portrayed sterilization either as part of a coercive program of population control or as a means of voluntary, even liberating, fertility control by individual women. Drawing upon her twenty-five years of research on sterilized Puerto Rican women from five different families in Brooklyn, Lopez untangles the interplay between how women make fertility decisions and their social, economic, cultural, and historical constraints. Weaving together the voices of these women, she covers the history of sterilization and eugenics, societal pressures to have fewer children, a lack of adequate health care, patterns of gender inequality, and misinformation provided by doctors and family members.
Lopez makes a stirring case for a model of reproductive freedom, taking readers beyond victim/agent debates to consider a broader definition of reproductive rights within a feminist anthropological context.
Residents of Vieques, a small island just off the east coast of Puerto Rico, live wedged between an ammunition depot and live bombing range for the U.S. Navy. Since the 1940s when the navy expropriated over two-thirds of the island, residents have struggled to make a life amid the thundering of bombs and rumbling of weaponry fire. Like the armys base in Okinawa, Japan, the facility has drawn vociferous protests from residents who challenged U.S. security interests overseas. In 1999, when a local civilian employee of the base was killed by a stray bomb, Vieques again erupted in protests that have mobilized tens of thousands individuals and transformed this tiny Caribbean Island into the setting for an international cause célèbre.
Katherine T. McCaffrey gives a complete analysis of the troubled relationship between the U.S. Navy and island residents. She explores such topics as the history of U.S. naval involvement in Vieques; a grassroots mobilizationled by fishermenthat began in the 1970s; how the navy promised to improve the lives of the island residentsand failed; and the present-day emergence of a revitalized political activism that has effectively challenged naval hegemony.
The case of Vieques brings to the fore a major concern within U.S. foreign policy that extends well beyond Puerto Rico: military bases overseas act as lightning rods for anti-American sentiment, thus threatening this countrys image and interests abroad. By analyzing this particular, conflicted relationship, the book also explores important lessons about colonialism and postcolonialism and the relationship of the United States to the countries in which it maintains military bases.
Rather than seeing U.S. empire in Puerto Rico during this period as a contest between two sharply polarized groups, del Moral views their interaction as a process of negotiation. Although educators and families rejected some tenets of Americanization, such as English-language instruction, they also redefined and appropriated others to their benefit to increase literacy and skills required for better occupations and social mobility. Pushing their citizenship-building vision through the schools, Puerto Ricans negotiated a different school project—one that was reformist yet radical, modern yet traditional, colonial yet nationalist.
Following a discussion of Puerto Rican racial prejudice in historical perspective, Kinsbruner describes residential patterns, marriages, births, deaths, occupations, and family and household matters to demonstrate that free people of color were a disadvantaged community whose political, social, and economic status was diminished by racism. He analyzes the complexities and contradictions of Puerto Rican racial prejudice and discrimination, explains the subtleties of “shade discrimination,” and examines the profoundly negative impact on race relations of the U.S. occupation of the island following the Spanish American War.
Looking behind the myth of Puerto Rican racial equity, Not of Pure Blood will be of interest to specialists in Caribbean studies, Puerto Rican history, and Latin America studies, and to scholars in a variety of fields investigating questions of racism and discrimination.
Puerto Rico, Hawai'i, and California share the experiences of conquest and annexation to the United States in the nineteenth century and mass organizational struggles by rural workers in the twentieth. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW offers a comparative examination of those struggles, which were the era's longest and most protracted campaigns by agricultural workers, supported by organized labor, to establish a collective presence and realize the fruits of democracy.
Dionicio Nodín Valdés examines critical links between the earlier conquests and the later organizing campaigns while he corrects a number of popular misconceptions about agriculture, farmworkers, and organized labor. He shows that agricultural workers have engaged in continuous efforts to gain a place in the institutional life of the nation, that unions succeeded before the United Farm Workers and César Chávez, and that the labor movement played a major role in those efforts. He also offers a window into understanding crucial limitations of institutional democracy in the United States, and demonstrates that the widespread lack of participation in the nation's institutions by agricultural workers has not been due to a lack of volition, but rather to employers' continuous efforts to prevent worker empowerment.
Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW demonstrates how employers benefitted not only from power and wealth, but also from imperialism in both its domestic and international manifestations. It also demonstrates how workers at times successfully overcame growers' advantages, although they were ultimately unable to sustain movements and gain a permanent institutional presence in Puerto Rico and California.
In the 1960s, when students everywhere were coming alive politically, and when the Latin American student activist in particular became as archetypal of radicalism as the Latin American dictator was of repression, Puerto Rican students remained strangely silent. With the exception of FUPI, a radical student group with only a small following, student political behavior conformed to that of Puerto Rican society in general—center to conservative.
Historically, Puerto Rico has been economically and politically dominated first by Spain and then by the United States. But unlike other colonial dependencies in Latin America, Puerto Rico has never rebelled. Puerto Rican politics centers on the status issue—independence, statehood, or association for the island. But no legendary victories, no heroic defeats offer a battle cry for nationalists, leftists, and independistas. Overwhelming foreign influence in the Church, the schools, the economy, and eventually the mass media deprived the island of any strong indigenous institutions that might foster nationalism. Militancy lies outside the mainstream of Puerto Rican tradition.
Against this historical and cultural backdrop, Arthur Liebman closely examines the social background and political activity of students at the Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico. Based on personal interviews with students, faculty, and administrators, as well as on a survey of the student body, his study reveals the strength of political inheritance among university students in Puerto Rico. The student left is small and weak largely because the left of the parents’ generation is small and weak. To date, Puerto Rican students have been the children of their parents and of their society.
Within a university that emphasizes practicality, the nonmilitant majority of the students study education, business, engineering, and medicine, being trained to participate in and to reap the rewards of the status quo. Student leftists, in the minority, generally study history, economics, sociology, and law—fields that open wider perspectives on their society and its problems and offer no immediate guarantee of its benefits. Brighter, less religious, and more dissatisfied with their role as a student, the student leftists stand apart from their cohort at the University of Puerto Rico. Like their adult counterparts, they are an anomaly in an acquisitive, relatively conservative society.
The Puerto Rican debt crisis, the challenges of social, political, and economic transition in Cuba, and the populist politics of Duterte in the Philippines—these topics are typically seen as disparate experiences of social reality. Though these island territories were colonized by the same two colonial powers—by the Spanish Empire and, after 1898, by the United States—research in the fields of history and the social sciences rarely draws links between these three contexts.
Located at the intersection of Postcolonial Studies, Latin American Studies, Caribbean Studies, and History, this interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from the US, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines to examine the colonial legacies of the three island nations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Instead of focusing on the legacies of US colonialism, the continuing legacies of Spanish colonialism are put center-stage. The analyses offered in the volume yield new and surprising insights into the study of colonial and postcolonial constellations that are of interest not only for experts, but also for readers interested in the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during Spanish colonization and in the present. The empirical material profits from a rigorous and systematic analytical framework and is thus easily accessible for students, researchers, and the interested public alike.
Puerto Rican Women and Work: Bridges in Transnational Labor is the only comprehensive study of the role of Puerto Rican women workers in the evolution of a transnational labor force in the twentieth century.
This book examines Puerto Rican women workers, both in Puerto Rico and on the U.S. mainland. It contains a range of information--historical, ethnographic, and statistical. The contributors provide insights into the effects of migration and unionization on women's work, taking into account U.S. colonialism and globalization of capitalism throughout the century as well as the impact of Operation Bootstrap. The essays are arranged in chronological order to reveal the evolutionary nature of women's work and the fluctuations in migration, technology, and the economy. This one-of-a-kind collection will be a valuable resource for those interested in women's studies, ethnic studies, and Puerto Rican and Latino studies, as well as labor studies.
As Puerto Rico rapidly industrialized from the late 1940s until the 1970s, the social, political, and economic landscape changed profoundly. In the realm of heath care, the development of medical education, new medical technologies, and a new faith in science radically redefined childbirth and its practice. What had traditionally been a home-based, family-oriented process, assisted by women and midwives and “accomplished” by mothers, became a medicalized, hospital-based procedure, “accomplished” and directed by biomedical, predominantly male, practitioners, and, ultimately reconfigured, after the 1980s, into a technocratic model of childbirth, driven by doctors’ fears of malpractice suits and hospitals’ corporate concerns.
Pushing in Silence charts the medicalization of childbirth in Puerto Rico and demonstrates how biomedicine is culturally constructed within regional and historical contexts. Prior to 1950, registered midwives on the island outnumbered registered doctors by two to one, and they attended well over half of all deliveries. Isabel M. Córdova traces how, over the next quarter-century, midwifery almost completely disappeared as state programs led by scientifically trained experts and organized by bureaucratic institutions restructured and formalized birthing practices. Only after cesarean rates skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s did midwifery make a modest return through the practices of five newly trained midwives. This history, which mirrors similar patterns in the United States and elsewhere, adds an important new chapter to the development of medicine and technology in Latin America.
Raising the Living Dead is a history of Puerto Rico’s carceral rehabilitation system that brings to life the interactions of incarcerated people, their wider social networks, and health care professionals. Alberto Ortiz Díaz describes the ways that multiple communities of care came together both inside and outside of prisons to imagine and enact solution-oriented cultures of rehabilitation from the 1930s to the 1960s. Scientific and humanistic approaches to well-being were deliberately fused to raise the “living dead,” an expression that reemerged in the modern Caribbean to refer to prisoners. These reform groups sought to raise incarcerated people physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, and civically.
The book is based on deep, original archival research into the Oso Blanco (White Bear) penitentiary in Puerto Rico, yet it situates its study within Puerto Rico’s broader carceral archipelago and other Caribbean prisons. The agents of this history include not only physical health professionals, but also psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers, spiritual and religious practitioners, and, of course, the prisoners and their families. By following all these groups and emphasizing the interpersonal exercise of power, Ortiz Díaz tells a story that goes beyond debates about structural and social control.
The book addresses key issues in the history of prisons and the histories of medicine and belief, including how prisoners’ different racial, class, and cultural identities shaped their incarceration and how professionals living in a colonial society dealt with the challenge of rehabilitating prisoners for citizenship.
Raising the Living Dead is not just about convicts, their immediate interlocutors, and their contexts, however, but about how together these open a window into the history of social uplift projects within the (neo)colonial societies of the Caribbean. There is no book like this in Caribbean historiography; few examine these themes in the larger literature on the history of prisons.
Composed at the request of the Royal Spanish Chronicler of the Indies, Don Diego Torres y Vargas’s Report on the Island & Diocese of Puerto Rico was the first history of Puerto Rico written by a native of the Spanish island colony. Torres y Vargas, a fourth generation Puerto Rican and descendant of Ponce de Leon, records here the history of the Catholic Church in Puerto Rico as well as the political, social, military, economic, and natural history of the island.
This translation—the first ever into English—includes three historical essays by eminent Puerto Rican and Latino Studies scholar Anthony Stevens-Arroyo and extensive translator notes to guide the reader through the realities of seventeenth-century Puerto Rican culture and society.
The history of Puerto Rico has usually been envisioned as a sequence of colonizations-various indigenous peoples from Archaic through Taíno were successively invaded, assimilated, or eliminated, followed by the Spanish entrada, which was then modified by African traditions and, since 1898, by the United States. The truth is more complex, but in many ways Puerto Rico remains one of the last colonies in the world. This volume focuses on the successive indigenous cultures of Puerto Rico prior to 1493.
Active from the late 1960s until the mid-1990s, the U.S. branch of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) worked simultaneously to build support for Puerto Rican independence and to engage in radical social change within the United States.
Revolution Around the Corner chronicles this unique social movement, describing various mass campaigns and the inner workings of the organization. The editors and contributors—all former members, leaders, and supporters of the PSP—offer a range of views and interpretations of their experience.
Combining historical accounts, personal stories, interviews, and retrospective analysis, Revolution Around the Corner examines specific actions such as the National Day of Solidarity (El Acto Nacional), the Bicentennial without Colonies, the Save Hostos struggle, and the Vieques campaign. Testimonies recount the pros and cons of membership diversity, as well as issues of loyalty and compañerismo. In addition, essays describe the PSP’s participation in coalitions and alliances with Left and progressive movements. The book concludes with the editors’ reflections on the PSP’s achievements, mistakes, and contributions.
In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodríguez Juliá invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flâneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. "In Puerto Rico," he muses, "life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks." Through this book—available here in English for the first time—Rodríguez Juliá resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.
Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black.
Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.
As an inchoate middle class emerged in Puerto Rico in the early nineteenth century, its members sought to control not only public space, but also the people, activities, and even attitudes that filled it. Their instruments were the San Juan town council and the Casa de Beneficencia, a state-run charitable establishment charged with responsibility for the poor.
In this book, Teresita Martínez-Vergne explores how municipal officials and the Casa de Beneficencia shaped the discourse on public and private space and thereby marginalized the worthy poor and vagrants, "liberated" Africans, indigent and unruly women, and destitute children. Drawing on extensive and innovative archival research, she shows that the men who comprised the San Juan ayuntamiento and the board of charity regulated the public discourse on topics such as education, religious orthodoxy, hygiene, and family life, thereby establishing norms for "correct" social behavior and chastising the "deviant" lifestyles of the working poor.
This research clarifies the ways in which San Juan's middle class defined itself in the midst of rapid social and economic change. It also offers new insights into notions of citizenship and the process of nation-building in the Caribbean.
A tale of alienation, love, suspense, imagination, and literature set on the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Simone tells the story of a self-educated Chinese immigrant student courting (and stalking) a disillusioned, unnamed writer who is struggling to make a name for himself in a place that is not exactly a hotbed of literary fame. By turns solipsistic and political, romantic and dark, Simone begins with the writer’s frustrated, satiric observations on his native city and the banal life of the university where he teaches—forces utterly at odds with the sensuality of his writing. But, as mysterious messages and literary clues begin to appear—scrawled on sidewalks and walls, inside volumes set out in bookstores, left on his answering machine and under his windshield wiper—Simone progresses into a cat-and-mouse game between the writer and his mystery stalker. When the eponymous Simone’s identity is at last revealed, the writer finds in the life of this Chinese immigrant a plight not unlike his own. Traumatized and lonely, the pair moves towards bittersweet collaborations in passion, grief, and art.
Author Arlene Davila focuses on the Institute for Puerto Rican Culture, the government institution charged with defining authenticated views of national identity since the 1950s, and on popular festival organizers to illuminate contestations over appropriate representations of culture in the increasingly mass-mediated context of contemporary Puerto Rico. She examines the creation of an essentialist view of nationhood based on a peasant culture and a "unifying" Hispanic heritage, and the ways in which grassroots organizations challenge and reconfigure definitions of national identity through their own activities and representations.
Davila pays particular attention to the increasing prominence of corporate sponsorship in determining what is distinguished as authentic "Puerto Rican culture" and discusses the politicization of culture as a discourse to debate and legitimize conflicting claims from selling commercial product to advocating divergent status options for the island. In so doing, Davila illuminates the prospects for cultural identities in an increasingly transnational context by showing the growth of cultural nationalism to be intrinsically connected to forms of political action directed to the realm of culture and cultural politics. This in-depth examination also makes clear that despite contemporary concerns with "authenticity," commercialism is an inescapable aspect of all cultural expression on the island.
Sponsored Migration places Puerto Rico’s migration policy in its historical context, examining the central role the Puerto Rican government played in encouraging and organizing migration during the postwar period. Meléndez sheds an important new light on the many ways in which the government intervened in the movement of its people: attempting to provide labor to U.S. agriculture, incorporating migrants into places like New York City, seeking to expand the island’s air transportation infrastructure, and even promoting migration in the public school system. One of the first scholars to explore this topic in depth, Meléndez illuminates how migration influenced U.S. and Puerto Rican relations from 1898 onward.
This important study of Ponce, a major sugar-producing district in Puerto Rico, examines in detail the processes by which a predominantly peasant economy an society was transformed into a plantation system. Scarano’s work, one of the first full investigations into Puerto Rico’s nineteenth-century economic history, dispels the long-held belief that slavery was an inconsequential factor in this society; indeed, he finds that the new plantation system was fully dependent on African slave labor, and that the initial stimuli for economic change came from immigrants.
In Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Karen F. Anderson-Córdova draws on archaeological, historical, and ethnohistorical sources to elucidate the impacts of sixteenth-century Spanish conquest and colonization on indigenous peoples in the Greater Antilles. Moving beyond the conventional narratives of the quick demise of the native populations because of forced labor and the spread of Old World diseases, this book shows the complexity of the initial exchange between the Old and New Worlds and examines the myriad ways the indigenous peoples responded to Spanish colonization.
Focusing on Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, the first Caribbean islands to be conquered and colonized by the Spanish, Anderson-Córdova explains Indian sociocultural transformation within the context of two specific processes, out-migration and in-migration, highlighting how population shifts contributed to the diversification of peoples. For example, as the growing presence of “foreign” Indians from other areas of the Caribbean complicated the variety of responses by Indian groups, her investigation reveals that Indians who were subjected to slavery, or the “encomienda system,” accommodated and absorbed many Spanish customs, yet resumed their own rituals when allowed to return to their villages. Other Indians fled in response to the arrival of the Spanish.
The culmination of years of research, Surviving Spanish Conquest deftly incorporates archaeological investigations at contact sites copious use of archival materials, and anthropological assessments of the contact period in the Caribbean. Ultimately, understanding the processes of Indian-Spanish interaction in the Caribbean enhances comprehension of colonization in many other parts of the world. Anderson-Córdova concludes with a discussion regarding the resurgence of interest in the Taíno people and their culture, especially of individuals who self-identify as Taíno. This volume provides a wealth of insight to historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and those interested in early cultures in contact.
As a young anthropologist, Sidney Mintz undertook fieldwork in Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Fifty years later, the eminent scholar of the Caribbean returns to those experiences to meditate on the societies and on the island people who befriended him. These reflections illuminate continuities and differences between these cultures, but even more they exemplify the power of people to reveal their own history.
Mintz seeks to conjoin his knowledge of the history of Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico—a dynamic past born of a confluence of peoples of a sort that has happened only a few times in human history—with the ways that he heard people speak about themselves and their lives. Mintz argues that in Jamaica and Haiti, creolization represented a tremendous creative act by enslaved peoples: that creolization was not a passive mixing of cultures, but an effort to create new hybrid institutions and cultural meanings to replace those that had been demolished by enslavement. Globalization is not the new phenomenon we take it to be.
This book is both a summation of Mintz's groundbreaking work in the region and a reminder of how anthropology allows people to explore the deep truths that history may leave unexamined.
The prehistoric civic-ceremonial center of Tibes is located on the southern coast of Puerto Rico, just north of the modern coastal city of Ponce. Protected on two sides by a river, and on the other two sides by hills, this approximately 10.5-acre site remains as fertile and productive today as when first occupied over 2,000 years ago. Such a rich region would have been a choice location for native peoples because of the diversity in all resources, from land, air, and sea--and also symbolically crucial as a liminal space within the landscape. It may have been regarded as a space charged with numen or cosmic energy where different parts of the cosmos (natural vs. supernatural, or world of the living vs. world of the dead) overlap. Archaeological evidence reveals a long occupation, about 1,000 years, possibly followed by an extensive period of sporadic ceremonial use after the site itself was practically abandoned.
In this volume, nineteen Caribbeanists, across a wide academic spectrum, examine the geophysical, paleoethnobotanical, faunal, lithics, base rock, osteology, bone chemistry and nutrition, social landscape, and ceremonial constructs employed at Tibes. These scholars provide a concise, well-presented, comprehensive analysis of the evidence for local level changes in household economy, internal organization, accessibility to economic, religious, and symbolic resources related to the development and internal operation of socially stratified societies in the Caribbean.
Translocas focuses on drag and transgender performance and activism in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Arguing for its political potential, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes explores the social and cultural disruptions caused by Latin American and Latinx “locas” (effeminate men, drag queens, transgender performers, and unruly women) and the various forms of violence to which queer individuals in Puerto Rico and the U.S. are subjected. This interdisciplinary, auto-ethnographic, queer-of-color performance studies book explores the lives and work of contemporary performers and activists including Sylvia Rivera, Nina Flowers, Freddie Mercado, Javier Cardona, Jorge Merced, Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, Monica Beverly Hillz, Lady Catiria, and Barbra Herr; television programs such as RuPaul’s Drag Race; films such as Paris Is Burning, The Salt Mines, and Mala Mala; and literary works by authors such as Mayra Santos-Febres and Manuel Ramos Otero. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a drag performer himself, demonstrates how each destabilizes (and sometimes reifies) dominant notions of gender and sexuality through drag and their embodied transgender expression. These performances provide a means to explore and critique issues of race, class, poverty, national identity, and migratory displacement while they posit a relationship between audiences and performers that has a ritual-like, communal dimension. The book also analyzes the murders of Jorge Steven López Mercado and Kevin Fret in Puerto Rico, and invites readers to challenge, question, and expand their knowledge about queer life, drag, trans performance, and Puerto Rican identity in the Caribbean and the diaspora. The author also pays careful attention to transgender experience, highlighting how trans activists and performers mold their bodies, promote social change, and create community in a context that oscillates between glamour and abjection.
Drawing on interviews, participant observation, archival research, and textual analysis, Rivero considers representations of race in Puerto Rico, taking into account how they are intertwined with the island’s status as a U.S. commonwealth, its national culture, its relationship with Cuba before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the massive influx of Cuban migrants after 1960. She focuses on locally produced radio and television shows, particular television events, and characters that became popular media icons—from the performer Ramón Rivero’s use of blackface and “black” voice in the 1940s and 1950s, to the battle between black actors and television industry officials over racism in the 1970s, to the creation, in the 1990s, of the first Puerto Rican situation comedy featuring a black family. As the twentieth century drew to a close, multinational corporations had purchased all Puerto Rican stations and threatened to wipe out locally produced programs. Tuning Out Blackness brings to the forefront the marginalization of nonwhite citizens in Puerto Rico’s media culture and raises important questions about the significance of local sites of television production.
Krause posits that the careful study of an archaeological site’s ceramics can be used to formulate a step-and-stage theory of pottery production for the area. Krause’s work suggests that by comparing the results of inquiries conducted at different sites and for different times, archaeologists may be able to create a general ethnographic theory of pottery production.
Krause demonstrates this process through a comprehensive analysis of potsherds from the highly stratified Puerto Rican site of Paso del Indio. He first provides a comprehensive explanation of the archaeological concepts of attribute, mode, feature, association, site, analysis, and classification. Using these seven concepts, he categorizes the production and decorative techniques in the Paso del Indio site. Krause then applies the concept of “focal form vessels” to the site’s largest fragments to test his step-and-stage theory of production against the evidence they provide. Finally, he assigns the ceramics at Paso del Indio to previously discussed potting traditions.
Unlike other books on the subject that use statistical methods to frame basic archaeological concepts, Krause approaches these topics from the perspective of epistemology and the explicatory practices of empirical science. In A Universal Theory of Pottery Production Krause offers much of interest to North American, Caribbean, and South American archaeologists interested in the manufacture, decoration, and classification of prehistoric pottery, as well as for archaeologists interested in archaeological theory.
What It Means to Be a Man begins with a discussion of machismo set in the context of the social construction of masculinity. Ramírez presents his interpretation of what it means to be a Puerto Rican man, discussing the attributes and demands of masculinity, and pointing out the ways in which strength, competition, and sexuality are joined with power and pleasure. He examines the erotic relationships between men as part of the expressions of masculinity, and analyzes how the homosexual experience reproduces the dominant masculine ideology. Finally, Ramírez draws on the literature of the recent men's movements, offering Puerto Rican men the possibility of constructing a new masculinity, liberated from power games, to provide them with a chance to not only be better understood by others, but also to better understand themselves and their place in society.
Persecuted as evil during colonial times, considered charlatans during the nation-building era, Puerto Rican brujos (witch-healers) today have become spiritual entrepreneurs who advise their clients not only in consultation with the spirits but also in compliance with state laws and new economic opportunities. Combining trance, dance, magic, and healing practices with expertise in the workings of the modern welfare state, they help lawyers win custody suits, sick employees resolve labor disability claims, single mothers apply for government housing, or corporation managers maximize their commercial skills.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork among practicing brujos, this book presents a masterful history and ethnography of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing). Raquel Romberg explores how brujería emerged from a blending of popular Catholicism, Afro-Latin religions, French Spiritism, and folk Protestantism and also looks at how it has adapted to changes in state policies and responded to global flows of ideas and commodities. She demonstrates that, far from being an exotic or marginal practice in the modern world, brujería has become an invisible yet active partner of consumerism and welfare capitalism.
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