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Puerto Rico 1898: The War After The War

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This is a very interesting book on a period of history that is poorly taught. The Spanish American War is often glossed over by writers and those who do write about it tend to focus firstly on Cuba and secondly on the Phillipines. Very little gets said about Puerto Rico. The impression is that all was calm. Instead, Mr. Pico shows a different side of the aftermath of the war where old scores were settled by those who had been previously oppressed. I would recommend this book for all serious students of the Spanish American War and of Puerto Rican history.

Press and Reviews for Puerto Rico 1898

In this book, Fernando Pico not only analyzes the nature of the violence that :

erupted in rural Puerto Rico following the island's invasion by the United States on July 25, 1898, but also calls into question the interpretations of earlier scholars.

Pico's much.moreexhaustive study provides new evidence with which to revise those interpretations. He demonstrates.,that, for several months after the U.S. invasion, workers and peasant farmers of the interior of Puerto Rico attacked first the businesses and haciendas of the Spaniards and later those of the local Creoles.

Pico argues that the groups involved, known in Puerto Rico's history as "par-tidas sediciosas," were neither solely in favor of annexation to the United States, as Mariano Negron-Portillo (1987) contends, nor merely anti-Spanish groups seek-ing independence for Puerto Rico, as Juan Manuel Delgado has suggested (1980). Although Pico found evidence that groups of Creoles, primarily from the urban areas and from the "better" families of the island, cooperated with the U.S. troops, lie rejects tlie notion that the pai~tidns can be dismissed as proannexationist. He is quick to point out that he found evidence that some Creole groups also cooperated with the Spaniards during the early stages of the Spanish-American conflict. Having studied the social and economic development of rural Puerto Rico for most of the nineteenth century, Pico offers the view that tlie partidas "constituted a vigorous popular reaction against the old order and a desire to settle old scores with the members of the system they were rejecting" (p. 201).

Pico's contribution rests in his ability to analyze the violent conflict in light of the deteriorating economic conditions of the 1980s and -the anarchy that resulted from the U.S. invasion. He explains that, in the rural economy of Puerto Rico, neither the workers nor the peasant farmers could escape the exploitation of the wealthier rural classes. This exploitation kept them in debt, paid them starvation wages, and often deprived them of their plots of land. Thus, he finds nothing un-usual about the fact that the poorer classes should revolt against their oppressors. That such attacks against the local property owners lasted at all is an indication that U.S. troops were willing to tolerate outbreaks so long as they served U.S. purposes. As Pico points out, once the U.S. forces took possession of the island they set up military garrisons in the troubled areas and arrested and imprisoned the partidas leaders.

In this as in his earlier works, Pico, following the method of the Annales school, has reconstructed a period of Puerto Rico's history in splendid fashion. It should be of interest to social historians and students of Puerto Rican, Latin American, and U.S. history.

-Hispanic American Historical Review

Rutgers University, Newark Campus OLCA JIMENEZ WAGENHEIM

Fernando Pico has made fundamental contributions to the history of Puerto Rico, from broad interpretive surveys to fine-grained studies of work, class, and politics in Utuado, a mountainous coffee district that underwent dramatic social and economic changes in the nineteenth century. Puerto Rico 1898 is the translation of a work that first appeared in Spanish in 1987. It is a study of how Puerto Ricans responded to the North American invasion of the island in 1898. Much of the analysis relies on police reports from Utuado. The author also incorporates press reports, novels, and memoirs that address other regions. Pico's study focuses on the armed bands of tiznados (men who blackened their faces with burnt cork) that sprung up during and after the American invasion. These groups carried out acts of rough justice, addressing grievances accumulated in the latter decades of Spanish rule. In the relative political vacuum opened by the imperial transition, the bands robbed and intimidated prominent landowners, many of them Spaniards.

Pico treats the actions of the tiznados as a window onto the tensions within Puerto Rican society in the closing days of Spanish colonialism and the opening of the United States occupation. In his judgment, "After the 1898 invasion, the 'seditious bands' were the broadest and most vigorous expression of popular sentiment as a reaction to the Spanish-American War in Puerto Rico. However, far from being a resistance movement against the invasion, the bands represented the repudiation of the previous economic and social regime, and a settlement of accounts with the most visible representatives of that

regime" (p-123).

Reconstructing the history of the tiznados has other ends, as well. In the author's view, capturing the violence of late-nineteenth-century rural life in Puerto Rico is a way of debunking the nostalgic yearnings for the era of Spanish rule that sometimes crop into Puerto Rican views of the past. As scholars such as Arcadio Diaz-Quinones and Silvia Alvarez Curbelo have shown, for many Puerto Ricans since 1898, the days of the Spanish colony have represented an attractive alternative to the present of North American rule. Pico, however, insists that under the Spanish regime life was brutally hard, especially for workers in the agrarian economy. Many lived on the edge of penury and starvation (pp. 1-10). Besides challenging hispanista nostalgia, Pico highlights the axes of conflict at the end of the nineteenth century. Separatism was not the major source of political opposition, as it was in the other Spanish colony, Cuba; the labor movement was (others might emphasize the Partido Autonomista, founded in 1887). Here, like other Puerto Rican historians such as Astrid Cubano-Iguina and Gervasio Garcia, Pico argues persuasively that the absence of a robust separatist movement did not indicate a harmonious colonial world. The history of the tiznados reveals instead a contentious society, rent by conflicts between Spaniards and criollos, workers, and hacendados: "To remember the bands is, first of all, to reveal the conflictive character of the old economic rule in the mountains. Likewise, it is to acknowledge the fighting capacity of the people of the mountains against those who had dispossessed them by subjecting them to the work regime of the haciendas and the indebtedness to the hacienda stores" (p. 126).

Though Pico focuses on the conflicts brewing under the old regime, he also provides fascinating insights into the early days of the United States occupation. Though penned in 1987, the 2004 translation of Puerto Rico 1898 will strike the reader as uncannily resonant with war and occupation in the twenty-first century. The transition of empires led to a breakdown of social order that allowed the tiznados to flourish. The new occupier began to undo the Spanish colonial state and only slowly replaced it with new institutions: "[D]ifferent regions of the island experienced a political vacuum. The Spanish State, which had, with much difficulty, managed to rule in the farthest and most troublesome areas of the country, was dismantled. The new American political and military apparatus replacing it, however, started off by wielding its power in a hesitant, uneven manner" (p. 43). An example of that hesitancy was the American military's attitude toward the tiznados. Only over time and with much imploring from landowners did the military come to see policing rural areas and maintaining social order as a necessary facet of war and occupation (pp. 60-62).

I recommend this book to several reading publics. For the scholar of the Caribbean and Latin America, Puerto Rico 1898 is a fine example of trends within Puerto Rican social and political history. It is also a concise depiction of one aspect of the transition of empires in 1898. In that sense, it should be of strong interest to historians of Spain, the United States, and other modern colonial regimes. Finally, while closely researched, this excellent translation is easily accessible to the nonspecialist. I myself would eagerly include it in undergraduate classes. Markus Wiener Publishers are to be congratulated for making available this important work, along with other first-rate works in Puerto Rican and Caribbean history.

- Hispanic American Historical Review

"The book is essentially the story of partidas sediciosas, armed groups that terrorized the Puerto Rican countryside in 1898 and 1899. Chiefly active during and after the invasion (July to October 1898), the partidas focused their anger on peninsular Spanish merchants and landowners. The bandits battered or killed their victims, and almost invariably destroyed property... Picó's thoughtful typology of the partidas sheds light on the tensions that undercut Puerto Rican society at the end of the nineteenth century. The author reconstructs, with the help of U.S. military records, previously unexplored aspects of the invasion." -American Historical Review

"In this as in his earlier works, Picó, following the method of the Annales school, has reconstructed a period of Puerto Rico's history in splendid fashion. It should be of interest to social historians and students of Puerto Rican, Latin American, and U.S. History."

-Hispanic American Historical Review

Fernando Picó, University of Puerto Rico, is the leading authority on Puerto Rican history and the author of seven books, including Historia general de Puerto Rico.

Hardcover Info:

ISBN ISBN 1-55876-326-0

200pp

$68.95

Paperback Info:

ISBN ISBN 1-55876-327-9

200pp

$22.95