Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cayeyanos: Familias y solidaridades en la historia de Cayey

2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-066

1527-1900

Christopher Schmidt‐Nowara,

Cuban History and Society

In the preface to his book on the people of Cayey, Fernando Picó quickly traces the economic changes that have shaped the town since its founding in the late eighteenth century. Cayey was a center of coffee production and cattle ranching under Spanish rule. The U.S. invasion and the 1899 Hurricane San Ciriaco wiped out the coffee crop, but local planters rebounded by converting to tobacco and sugar. The wars fought by the United States also shaped the local economy, as an army base was located nearby from World War I until the end of the Korean War. Finally, Cayey became a bedroom community for coastal cities and converted to a service economy after the opening of a university campus. What interests Picó is not these broad economic contours but “the human element, cultural creativity, the social solidarities and fissures” over the centuries (p. 10). The author addresses a range of subjects as he explores the human element, including the dynamics of slavery and freedom, relations between creoles and immigrants, and local responses to imperial politics and the transition to U.S. domination.Most of the early settlers of Cayey were creole families from Coamo and Guayama, but Cayey was strikingly cosmopolitan like many colonial Caribbean settings. Among the first two generations of Cayeyanos were immigrants from the Canary Islands, France, and even Sweden. Settlers came from other points of the Caribbean, including St. Domingue and Caracas; enslaved men and women from St. Eustatius and Guinea came with the free, slaveholding planters and ranchers. In the early decades, the number of slaves in Cayey rose significantly, from 92 in 1780 to 465 in 1807, accounting for 15 to 20 percent of the total population in those years (p. 22).Picó’s extensive research into ecclesiastical and administrative records sheds considerable light on aspects of slave life in Cayey. His findings resonate with those of historians such as María Elena Díaz in her study of El Cobre in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cuba. The author shows that slave mortality rates were considerably higher than those of the free population. He also finds that marriage rates were quite high. In 1817, fully two-thirds of the enslaved children baptized in Cayey were born of parents married in the Church. Baptism and god-parentage linked free and enslaved Cayeyanos over the decades. Enslaved people appear in local records as owners of property and as lenders to free people. Manumission and self-purchase were common. Picó concludes that these data demonstrate that “the enslaved man or woman was not isolated when confronting the slave system; they had networks of family relations, godparentage, and solidarity that allowed them to overcome the daily challenges of their condition” (p. 27).The Spanish American revolutions were felt in Cayey in a variety of ways. One was through increased immigration from Spain and the colonies in revolt. The peninsulares were largely Catalans, part of a flow of immigrants to both Puerto Rico and Cuba well documented by several historians. Fleeing from the turmoil of revolution in South America, immigrants especially from Venezuela and Nueva Granada made their way to Cayey. So did French planters, encouraged by the 1815 Cédula de Gracías that facilitated the entrance of Catholic investors from outside Spain. Relations were often tense between creoles and immigrants in the nineteenth-century Antilles. In Cayey, this division would shape local politics, particularly in the last third of the century, when the rivalry heated up between Autonomistas, the dominant creole political affiliation, and Incondicionales, pro-Spanish conservatives.The U.S. invasion in the summer of 1898 and the devastating Hurricane San Ciriaco in 1899 radically changed the political and economic landscape in Cayey. The hurricane destroyed the coffee economy and forced a transition to tobacco and sugar. The U.S. presence changed political alignments. Conflicts between pro-statehood Republi cans and advocates of autonomy became violent in the first years of the occupation. By 1906, however, the pro-autonomy/independence Unión Puertorriqueña had gained the upper hand in Cayey, as elsewhere in Puerto Rico (though the pro-statehood party did well in the 1904 local elections).The remainder of Picó’s study is less trenchant than the chapters that encompass Cayey’s founding to the first decade of the U.S. occupation. Nonetheless, the author provides us with suggestive insights into the social history of Cayey, especially in chapter 8, where he contrasts the formal history narrated in newspapers with the hidden history reported in police records in the 1920s and 1930s. This chapter indicates the richness of local archives in Puerto Rico, explored with verve not only by Picó but also by many Puerto Rican scholars. Picó argues that the stories that he retrieves are urgent “so that the margins do not remain invisible, the perpetual temptation of all civic history. That which remains hidden loses explanatory power and the resulting history becomes thin and hollow” (p. 129).