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Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico Paperback – November 21, 2005

by Luis A. Figueroa (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 48 ratings
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The contributions of the black population to the history and economic development of Puerto Rico have long been distorted and underplayed, Luis A. Figueroa contends. Focusing on the southeastern coastal region of Guayama, one of Puerto Rico's three leading centers of sugarcane agriculture, Figueroa examines the transition from slavery and slave labor to freedom and free labor after the 1873 abolition of slavery in colonial Puerto Rico. He corrects misconceptions about how ex-slaves went about building their lives and livelihoods after emancipation and debunks standing myths about race relations in Puerto Rico.

Historians have assumed that after emancipation in Puerto Rico, as in other parts of the Caribbean and the U.S. South, former slaves acquired some land of their own and became subsistence farmers. Figueroa finds that in Puerto Rico, however, this was not an option because both capital and land available for sale to the Afro-Puerto Rican population were scarce. Paying particular attention to class, gender, and race, his account of how these libertos joined the labor market profoundly revises our understanding of the emancipation process and the evolution of the working class in Puerto Rico.
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  1. Print length
    304 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    The University of North Carolina Press
  4. Publication date
    November 21, 2005
  5. Dimensions
    6.12 x 0.68 x 9.25 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0807829498
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0807856109
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Compelling. . . . Clearly provides important evidence to the hypothesis on racial/class exclusion of black Puerto Ricans.--CENTRO Journal

Review

An illuminating microinvestigation of the much wider and diverse phenomenon in the Americas of the transition from slavery and slave labor to freedom and free labor. This thoughtful analysis arrives at finely nuanced, textured, and empirically grounded conclusions by exploring the roles of such societal forces as class, gender, and race in shaping new contexts and environments after emancipation.--David Barry Gaspar, Duke University

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 080785610X
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ The University of North Carolina Press (November 21, 2005)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0807829498
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0807856109
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.03 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.12 x 0.68 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 48 ratings

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Luis A. Figueroa

Luis A. Figueroa

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Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
48 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Andres Sanchez
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente
Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2023
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Mercedes P. Brown
5.0 out of 5 stars Studying Puerto Rican history can be quite a challenge when ...
Reviewed in the United States on February 29, 2016
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Studying Puerto Rican history can be quite a challenge when there are minimal books on the subject. However, thanks to Luis Figueroa and Eileen Suarez (Imposing Decency) the history of Puerto Rico comes alive in a rich and historic narrative especially the internal racism. The book speaks of Ponce which is the birthplace of my maternal grandmother. This book is a must for serious students of Puerto Rican history.
8 people found this helpful
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Gracie
5.0 out of 5 stars Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteen Century Puerto Rico
Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2010
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As a student of history I am always interested on "how things started." As a Puerto Rican I wanted to learn more of life in Puerto Rico during the 19th century and in particular about slavery. This book certainly was beneficial in my search. I am still reading it and learning. Excellent choice!
13 people found this helpful
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LunaLady
5.0 out of 5 stars Great
Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2014
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I am doing some geneological research and this book was a must have. Great information
4 people found this helpful
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Nessadi
3.0 out of 5 stars Don't buy off the title alone
Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2014
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I recently found out that my ancestors who came from Puerto Rico were former slaves. Most of them including the ones that were not slaves all worked on sugar cane farms/ranches. I was really intrigued by this new info. & wanted to learn more about it. For this reason I purchased this book. However, I was mislead by the title.

Although there is a great deal of information on the sugar cane industry with the connection of slavery in PR. This book is more of a research book on the sugar revolution & how it impacted slavery. Loaded with statics & related research from other authors.

From now on, I will generally avoid books written by academicians because their writing style is usually turgid, wordy & devoid of life. This book gave some but little info. on the type of lives slaves lived back then in PR. It really didn't jump into what the life of a slave-holder or a slave back then, which is what I was looking for. I was kind of disappointed.
13 people found this helpful
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Dennis R. Hidalgo
5.0 out of 5 stars Revisualizing Black History in Puerto Rico
Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2013
In this book Luis A. Figueroa joins ranks with a select group of scholars who have been emphasizing the importance of slavery to the Caribbean, and to Puerto Rico in particular. I can see why such a reiteration is necessary. A couple of years ago I stepped into an unattractive and under-funded municipal historical archive in one of Puerto Rico's major cities. The then Archivist and director, who held the position because of political circumstances, showed me the many untouched and uncategorized historical materials available. As I delved with joy into the fragile early Nineteenth Century sources he alerted me to a problem in Puerto Rico's history. He said, "It seems that everybody these days is only interested in slavery. There are other subjects more important, you know, like politics and music." Because of his tone, I imagine he must have encountered inquisitive and pesky researchers like Figueroa. Historians like Figueroa do not let the issue of slavery and its relevancy to Puerto Rico's history die quietly. And that seems to bother people who prefer to remember a utopian and "pastoral" past that was hardly affected by the ungentle "accident" of slavery on the island.

Indeed, like Rebecca Scott's 1985 "Slave Emancipation in Cuba," in this major work Figueroa purposely steps on the toes of many people, dead and alive. His is a painstaking study of Puerto Rico's Nineteenth-Century experiences with slavery and emancipation, through the eyes of the key municipal district of Guayama. It is a revised version of his dissertation written under noted historians of Latin American and Caribbean History. Senior undergraduates and graduate students concerned with the African experience in the Americas and all Puerto Rico's archivists should make it part of their required reading.

Apparently, this study was originally a regional investigation that, according to the area-study attitude of the time, would have shed light on the larger history of the island. After several years of teaching and conscientious reexamination of the sources Figueroa has presented us with more than that. This book under review is the most current, engaging and significant study of the peak and the rather sudden decline of Puerto Rican slavery, and the Nineteenth Century murky transition to "free-labor." Simply bringing the African story of Guayama, "Ciudad Bruja," (Shamans' City) to the forefront of historical studies at a time when some people are voicing discomfort with its African descriptive name, should bring havoc to the traditional sensibilities of Puerto Rico's polite society. Figueroa's illustration of how central slavery, with all its social, economic and cultural implications, has been to the formation of Puerto Rico as a nation is surely more shocking.

Figueroa went through an extraordinary array of sources from Guayama's archives and compared it to those from other districts. He connected his findings to previous historical investigations done in Ponce, and positioned his ideological stance within the progressive revisionist strand, but with a rather fresh twist. His conclusions were that even though Guayama, with its unshakeable Afro-Caribbean heritage, is not necessarily representative of Puerto Rico's slavery in general, it is yet an indispensable part of the island's legacy. It would be a mistake to think this book is just an enlarged regional history of the island. Figueroa finds his work relevant also to the history of Latin America and the Atlantic World as he links it up to other notable works of slavery and emancipation in the Western Hemisphere.

Through Guayama's historical sources we learn with Figueroa about the liberal debates over the future of Puerto Rico at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, and how the "Black Party's" desire to increase African slavery, in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, took precedence as it acted in coordination with other types of immigration projects. The swelling ranks of slaves, in turn, helped increase police and the emergence of a militarized society that was a characterizing trait of the late Spanish colonial administration. As Figueroa carefully examined the slave records, he found that they were actually not "socially dead" as it has been proposed so convincingly in the past. Slaves, Figueroa argues, developed a cunning yet remarkable social network that challenged the colonial and the repressive slavery system in which they lived.

Conventional thought dictates that Puerto Rico had a short and mild history of slavery and was a model for a benign abolitionism. Figueroa shatters those myths with an admirable crusading spirit. He not only shows the long history of slavery in connection to Jorge Chinea's works, but how illusory is the image of a compassionate slave master. He deconstructs the masters' ideologies, while also revealing how slaves and libertos (freed) were active agents of their history. Contrary to common belief, during the transition period, before the non-gradual emancipation, slaves were only infrequently freed by their masters. On the other hand, we can see how slaves found ways to buy their own freedom and in this way could assert an unusual degree of control over their lives. Probably most importantly, Figueroa confirms revisionists' accounts that rather than wanting to modernize voluntarily, international and colonial conditions forced planters to abandon slavery against their will. It was then, when they had no option, that "The planters wished to become `capitalistas azucareros' (sugar capitalists) while remaining `amos y señores' (masters and lords of their class and race inferiors)," (199).

To these doubtful steps toward proletarianization, the libertos reacted with an assortment of resistances and strategies that mirrored those they used during slavery, like arson and post-slavery marronage. Chapter seven, which is concerned with the libertos' adaptation to the post-emancipation society, is the most interesting and the one with the most promising future. Here Figueroa reveals from the sources the persistent colonial government attempts to impose social conformity upon the libertos with vagrancy laws, prohibition of Bombas, and the enforcement of coercive labor contracts. The records, Figueroa shows us, are full of evidence on how the libertos responded with their own subtle yet powerful weapons of resistance. I believe that to a large extent these tensions of assimilation have profoundly shaped Puerto Rico's self-identity and culture. More than ever, however, we need to find out why the erroneous idea of an unimportant Puerto Rican slavery and a benevolent abolitionism has successfully persisted for so long.
15 people found this helpful
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Shanill Ramos
5.0 out of 5 stars Great read!
Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2020
Interesting facts about my country's history. Looking forward to read more in the subject. It talks about ither historical facts that i want to further learn about.
One person found this helpful
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Rob
3.0 out of 5 stars Okay Read, look elsewhere for something more comprehensive
Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2017
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First off the title of this book is a bit misleading. It's about the sugar and slavery industry in a specific part of Puerto Rico, not the island in general. The book itself is okay but i found the author tries way too hard to sound intellectual and over-analyze and compare to other authors of this topic. would prefer if he just stated the facts.
Overall the book is a decent read.
3 people found this helpful
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