Historia de Puerto Rico ed. by Luis E. González Vales and María Dolores Luque and Consuelo Naranjo Orovio (review)

This is the fourth of the five-volume collection of Historia de las Antillas being put together by Consuelo Naranjo Orovio. Preceding it were Historia de Cuba (2009), Historia de la República Dominicana (2010), and Historia de las Antillas no hispanas (2011). A fifth volume on Historia comparada de las Antillas is to come out later this year. Never before has there been such an ambitious, comprehensive, broad-based, and—especially—comparative project on the history of the Caribbean or Antilles Islands. As Naranjo Orovio points out in her preface, this is a geography often neglected in the general histories of the Americas in spite of the profound influence the region has exercised over the entire continent and beyond. She and her team envision the Antilles as a cradle of the Atlantic World, a platform of modernity and a precursor of today’s globalized world. They make no apology for a fragmented Caribbean as they set out to bridge the knowledge gap upon which such tragic visions are predicated.

Put together by Luis E. González Vales and María Dolores Luque, this volume, Historia de Puerto Rico, contains fourteen single-author essays and five collaborative ones divided into six parts that closely follow the contours of the first two works in the collection: population, economy, society, politics, culture and science, and contemporary Puerto Rico. The volume editors managed to secure contributions from the most diverse group of authors in terms of geographic, disciplinary, and institutional provenance. Indeed, they should be commended for bringing together for the first time in a single volume the most celebrated representatives of different and often competing historio-graphic schools spanning three generations and covering at least five different countries.

The book opens with an article on population form the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries by Francisco Moscoso, a top authority on the pre-Columbian and early formative periods of colonial society. Jorge Duany traces the progress of the population explosion from 1815 to the present. Duany, who is of Cuban origin, has a most significant contribution at the end of the work in which he tries to explain the nature of the formidable political mutation known as the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico—disconcerting as it has been for many foreign observers and nationals alike—as a “postcolonial colony.” Moscoso is also the author, together with González Vales, of the chapter on economic history from 1492 to 1816. The challenge of carrying that narrative from there to the present falls upon a team composed of the Spanish historian Antonio Santamaría García and the long-standing collaborators César Ayala and Rafael Bernabe. The section on social history is divided along a similar chronological tandem and graced by an equally productive engagement between generations of local historians, in this case the young Josué Caamaño-Dones and the celebrated Fernando Picó.

González Vales is at his best describing the strategic military importance of the colonial enclave as a most determinant factor in the country’s history, a controversial thesis that is buttressed by the editor’s choice of the subsequent chapter, otherwise a sound institutional history of the presidio of San Juan to the end of the Mexican situado by José Cruz de Arrigoitia. The politics section is capped by two substantial contributions from Picó and María Dolores Luque, the first one spanning the entire nineteenth century and the second, a broad panorama by Luque of what she and others term colonial reformism, culminating with the Tugwell regime and the electoral victory of the Popular Democratic Party in 1944.

These first ten chapters lay the foundations for a broader and dynamic discussion of the cultural and intellectual patrimony of Puerto Rico. This was presaged by the quote from Arturo Morales Carrión that launches the work; it celebrates the obstinate will of the...