Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Santurce y las voces de su gente

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-7288446

1527-1900

Harry Franqui-Rivera,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Puerto Rico's most prominent historian, Fernando Picó, sets a simple goal in his last work: recovering the voices of the people of Santurce, San Juan's most populous borough, during the transformative period of 1930–50. To recover those voices, Picó explores the police logbooks, decennial censuses, and local newspapers. He warns us that his work may seem descriptive. Yet the descriptions are so detailed and his interpretations so deep that he ends up offering a very nuanced analysis of societal formation in Santurce.Picó argues that the poor and working classes of Santurce and those inhabiting an underworld existing in plain sight created a “social order based on equal opportunity,” which existed thanks to the popular sectors' ingenuity, as exemplified by ambulant commerce and the spontaneous emergence of new neighborhoods (p. 10). This world would come into conflict with legislators' and technocrats' bureaucratizing policies that minimized the spaces and options of the popular sectors (p. 10).Picó describes several historiographical representations of Santurce: a supposedly aristocratic neighborhood in 1906, a chaotic one in 1938, the most accessible and prosperous commercial zone of Puerto Rico's capital city. He concludes that these different versions of the city all existed simultaneously (p. 13). Santurce's neighborhood names show its diversity: Buenos Aires, Hoare, Shanghai. Picó explains that southern Santurce grew in the 1920s due to the many workshops (talleres), the large factories, and the Corona brewery. The southern barrios would hence have names such as Tras Talleres (Behind the Factories) or Barrio Obrero (Laborers' Neighborhood) (p. 24).The demographic explosion (predominantly a function of internal migrations) and the following urbanization led to conflict. The police logbooks report incidents in which the insult “negro sucio” (dirty Negro) is thrown at Afro–Puerto Rican men (cangrejeros), who in turn call police officers “jíbaro ignorante” (ignorant peasant) (pp. 24–26). These officers came mostly from the island's interior, which to this day metropolitan residents call “la Isla.” These interactions echo a colonial dichotomy tracing back to the first days of Spanish colonization.Picó offers a profile of the americanos by barrio. They came mostly from the Atlantic seaboard. The continental elite, los augustos at the top of the colonial administration, preferred Miramar and Condado (p. 27). There was another stratum of continental Americans (teachers, mechanics, electricians, pilots, skilled laborers, small-business owners, and former soldiers and sailors) that in a generation or two would join the criollo middle classes (p. 30). Caribbean and Latin American peoples were present in Santurce, but Dominicans, who comprise a large percentage of Santurce's current population, were not present in the 1940s. Santurce's population was further modified by a migratory wave from Spain from 1905 to 1922 (p. 35).Picó brings back the voices of sex workers (prostitutas), who seem to only get in trouble when cursing at misbehaving customers, and the domestic workers (criadas y sirvientas) brought from the interior at the age of 14 or 15, who had problems getting used to the city or were impregnated by their employer's son and thrown out (pp. 97–98). Picó's findings confirm the popularly known practice of male children from prominent families having their first sexual experiences with young domestic workers. Picó also depicts the “transgressors”: “unlicensed” musicians, those who offer to watch your car for loose change, young men sitting on fences, the ones who grab onto buses and trolleys to get a free ride, sleep in public spaces, run clandestine cockfights, search landfills for things to fix and sell (pp. 105–20). They are the poorest members of Santurce's society, who by trying to survive become transgressors of the always encroaching new social order.True to form, Picó engages socioeconomists to explain the nature of the market (plaza del mercado) in Santurce. Besides fulfilling its primordial role of connecting the fruits of the land and the countryside with urban consumers, the plaza del mercado was a social space where people ate, drank, and danced. It was the place for the encounter of urban and rural, poor and rich, where illegal and legal transactions occurred side by side, where policemen, prostitutes, boliteros (clandestine lottery operators), butchers, and political agitators met (pp. 157–58).The Santurce brought to life by Picó is one of solidarity, one that marks the beat of the island's socioeconomic, cultural, and political development. This is exemplified by the slogan used in the 1940s by Santurce's workers: “Bread, Employment, Freedom,” an urban version of the newly minted Popular Democratic Party's slogan “Bread, Land, Freedom” (pp. 159–60). Santurce is a plaza del mercado where the many Puerto Ricos meet.Santurce y las voces de su gente is an outstanding urban history. But it is more than that. It is an accessible book in which deep socioeconomic, gender, and racial historical analysis hide in plain sight amid straightforward yet elegant and powerful prose. This work is an intimate portrait of Santurce and, in many ways, the perfect work to crown a prestigious career. In his last work, Picó returns home, to the Santurce where he was born in the watershed decade of the 1940s.