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By most accounts, the United States’ occupation of Puerto Rico was a resounding success. Unlike the situation in Cuba, where expectations of independence after a long anticolonial struggle frustrated a complete U.S. takeover, or the Philippines, where a bloody resistance war ensued, the American takeover of Puerto Rico encountered few practical obstacles. For a short time, peasant insurgents threatened widespread unrest. The violence was directed mostly against Spanish merchants and landowners, however, and the U.S.Army and a revamped police force were able to subdue the soot-faced rebels (tiznados) within months. Elite reaction was, on the whole, much more favorable to the U.S. presence. Except for isolated cases, influential groups initially aligned themselves decisively in favor of annexation and eventual statehood, only to be frustrated later with the colonial framework created by the Foraker Act of 1900. But before this happened a honeymoon period would first run its course. In keeping with a military campaign that the Associated Press had called a “picnic,” the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico went rather swiftly for the new colonial rulers. In this essay I argue for an understanding of the transition that takes full account of the United States’ appropriation of institutions, modalities, and technologies of rule from the preceding Spanish colonial state. I wish to claim speci- fically that one of the most important mechanisms of colonial control passed on by the Spaniards was the practice of carrying out regular and, by nineteenthcentury standards, modern population censuses. As Benedict Anderson reminds us, in the nineteenth-century colonial world censuses and census taking were “institutions of power”that, along with maps and museums,“profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion—the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry.”1 The tallies taken in Puerto Rico in the nineteenth century had allowed Censuses in the Transition to Modern Colonialism Spain and the United States in Puerto Rico francisco a. scarano 210 the Spanish state, especially in its more liberal incarnation from the 1870s onward, to count,classify,and etch onto mapped space its colonial subalterns,placing them in a position of inequality vis-à-vis a peninsular Spanish population (peninsulares ) deemed more entitled to the blessings of liberal citizenship. Approaching the chronological apogee of scientific racism, these censuses produced bodies of quantitative data that lent demographic and economic data collection an air of scientific validity. When the Americans arrived and began to assume tutelage over the new colonials, the much practiced and deeply engrained practice of census taking helped provide an idiom of racial difference from the continental citizenry . In a critical way, this idiom supported the colonial project of exclusion and what Josep Fradera calls colonial “exceptionality.”2 In another way, however, it also was read by important American officials as a means of resolving the critical questions of the day: would the Puerto Ricans be entitled to ultimate assimilation ; and, if so, what would the path leading them there look like? The Colonial Transition In accounting for the relatively smooth transition from Spanish to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico, few topics have been more overlooked than the ease with which the new metropole appropriated the institutions, including the apparatus of rule, of the old. Instead of focusing on imperial continuities, historians have preferred to focus on innovation and change. This emphasis is, for the most part, warranted. The onset of American rule precipitated dizzying changes in all spheres of life. To the Puerto Ricans, it felt discontinuous with that of the former imperial power—for a people accustomed to (and born out of) an aged Spanish colonialism as different, no doubt, as the culture and language of the new metropolitan actors. The old metropole had proven unable to propel its Caribbean colonies quickly enough toward a modernity intensely desired by liberal elites. The United States, by contrast, moved promptly to open up conditions for economic and social modernization. Within a decade of the establishment of civil government in 1900, highly profitable sugar and tobacco industries had been founded; schools, including a university, were inaugurated; novel, and for the most part efficacious, health campaigns were launched; and laws to recognize workers’ and women’s rights were adopted. Thus, by 1910, in the new “American Porto Rico,”many key milestones on the road to modernity seemed within reach. At the same...

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