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chapter 10 Libertas Citadinas: FreeWomen of Color in San Juan, Puerto Rico Félix V. Matos Rodríguez In 1824 Balbina Alonso, a liberta (free woman of color) who lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was accused of having an illicit love affair with Don Antonio Cordero. Church authorities complained that although she had been banned to the small town of Patillas on Puerto Rico’s southeastern shore,Alonso was still in San Juan, enjoying the company of Cordero, who was married.1 Alonso wrote to the governor to defend her innocence, honor, and good name. She demanded that her ecclesiastical accusers take her to court to substantiate their claims. The trial never materialized. The governor instead asked Cordero to behave in an honorable way,and he exiledAlonso to the nearby town of Loíza. The governor’s rationale for this action was based on the fact that Cordero had fathered Alonso’s son. Thus, although Alonso’s presence was a scandalous nuisance ,placing her in Loíza allowed the father to be nearby to help raise the child. This proximity, however, angered church officials, who claimed that Alonso’s exile to Loíza only forced Cordero to travel a few additional miles to continue to engage in the sinful practice of concubinage. The incident illustrates some of the realities that free women of color faced in nineteenth-century San Juan. First, Alonso embodied the stereotype of the seductive temptress, the mulatta. She should therefore be driven away or cast aside so that the honorable marriage of Cordero and his wife could be protected. The presence of this woman of color in San Juan caused fear. Both church and state joined forces in upholding gendered and racist notions of public morality .2 Alonso, however, fought against her unjustified exile with all the resources available to a woman of her class and race. That a woman of color wrote to the governor and challenged the powerful dean of the Cathedral Chapter, Don Nicolás Alonso de Andrade, to take her to court so she could defend her good Free Women of Color in San Juan 203 name publicly was a strong indication of Alonso’s resolve and courage. Denied that legal recourse, she then relied on an alternative strategy: She resisted and defied the law and continued to see Cordero and care for their son. As a result of the attention scholars in the Americas have given to women’s history in general and the history of colored women in particular since the 1980s, stories such as Alonso’s are being brought to light.3 Who were the free women of color in Puerto Rico? How many of them were there in mid-nineteenth-century San Juan? How important were they for the city’s socioeconomic development ? Other questions emerge as well from the social,political,and economic context of the lives of free women of color in mid-nineteenth-century San Juan. How did changes in the slave trade, in slave prices, and in overall labor supply affect the lives of urban free women of color during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s? How did the abolition of slavery in other parts of the Caribbean affect the treatment that elite sanjuaneros and sanjuaneras and government officials gave free women of color? What roles did libertas play in such changes as emancipation that the city experienced in the second half of the nineteenth century? This essay will focus on the period between around 1800, which marks the emergence of large-scale, slave-run plantations in Puerto Rico, and 1873, the year of the abolition of slavery there. Most demographic data come from the 1833 and 1846 manuscript censuses available for San Juan. Libertas in the City San Juan was the administrative and military center of Spanish colonialism in Puerto Rico. Founded in 1521 on the westernmost third of a little barrier island at the entrance of a well-protected harbor, San Juan was always a small city. By 1782 the city proper was completely surrounded by a defensive wall and by several fortifications. The intramural sector measured 682 meters long and 430 meters wide and was divided into four barrios—Fortaleza (also called San Juan), Santa Bárbara,Santo Domingo,and San Francisco—using Luna and Cruz streets as the dividing markers.4 A fifth barrio,Ballajá,was created by the mid-nineteenth century. By this time, the city was compact, with few open spaces available for...

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