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The North American rulers of Puerto Rico stockpiled knowledge of the island’s history and people. The government transferred the Spanish colonial archives from San Juan to Washington. The Saint Louis World’s Fair (1904) displayed Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans to the American public. Museums and foundations such as the Smithsonian dispatched anthropologists to the island to explore the historical roots of Puerto Rican culture and to gather collections for exhibit and study.1 Despite claims of American exceptionality, the U.S. government was comparable to the European colonial empires of the era in its use of anthropology, history, and other scholarly disciplines to consolidate control of Puerto Rico.2 Moreover, gathering knowledge about recently annexed territorial possessions was not new to the United States in 1898. These techniques were honed in another region once ruled by Spain, the American Southwest, in the decades preceding the occupation of Puerto Rico. To take but one example, the Smithsonian ethnohistorian Jesse Walter Fewkes began his career by studying the Hopi Indians of Arizona. After 1898, he moved to Puerto Rico where he carried out research on the history of the Taíno.3 He joined the numerous scholars and soldiers who made that peregrination. How Puerto Ricans responded to American efforts to comprehend and interpret their history is the subject of this essay. I will show that in opposing American visions of history, and the political regime legitimated by these historical perspectives, Puerto Rican political and intellectual leaders called on forms of public historical commemoration developed under Spanish rule in the late nineteenth century. I will also argue that, while there was continuity in the public use and representation of history, conflict over the justice of American rule forced Puerto Ricans to reconsider the nation’s historical origins. Finally, I will From Columbus to Ponce de León Puerto Rican Commemorations between Empires, 1893–1908 christopher schmidt-nowara 230 suggest that Puerto Rican affirmations of the nation’s origins and past forced subtle changes in how the American imperial state represented its own origins and lineage. Commemorating Puerto Rico’s Past before 1898 In the aftermath of the Spanish American revolutions of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, which led to the independence of most of the colonies, Spain struggled to reconstruct its authority in its few remaining overseas possessions , including Puerto Rico. These efforts involved forging national historical narratives that emphasized the essential unity of Spain and Puerto Rico. The island, in the metropolitan view, was not a colony or nation with a separate history but a piece of Spanish national territory bound not by force but by the historic ties of shared language, religion, law, and, in some renderings, racial mixture. To signify this unity, Spaniards dug deep into archives in Madrid and Seville, penned historical studies, republished old colonial chronicles, raised monuments, and planned public commemorations of major figures and events from the era of overseas expansion. The response in the colony rarely met metropolitan expectations. Puerto Rican patriots carried out their own research, looking for their national origins in the indigenous victims of conquest and those who rebelled against the first conquistadors.4 This divergence was apparent in the attempts to resurrect the memory of Juan Ponce de León, who conquered Puerto Rico in 1508. In 1863, Ponce de León’s remains were exhumed with little ceremony in the San José church, close to the cathedral in the heart of San Juan. In 1882, the municipal government raised a statue to the conqueror in the Plaza de Santiago with financial assistance from the metropole, including the monarch, Alfonso XII. The material for the statue was charged with meaning, at least for some: it was melted down from the cannon taken from the English during the successful defense of San Juan in 1797. This patriotic amalgam apparently failed to capture the local imagination. Later that year, the periodical of the conservative pro-Spanish party, the Boletín Mercantil , complained of the indignity done to the memory of the conqueror by surrounding his monument with a shoddy wooden fence.5 Puerto Ricans reaffirmed their low regard for Ponce de León during the celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the island in 1493. Local elites showed little enthusiasm for the metropolitan festivities of 1892 but in 1893 rallied to a key date in Puerto Rican history. Several municipalities, including Aguada, Guayanilla, and Mayag...

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