Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico by Luis A. Figueroa (review)

The Latin Americanist, June 2008 take place throughout Memoirs of Darién, 1514-1527, forcing us to rethink the image of Oviedo as straightforwardly imperialist or anti-indigenist. By making at least some of Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias accessible to non-Spanish readers, G. F. Dille makes an important contribution to scholarship on Oviedo and early American history more broadly. The material included in these chapters is wide-ranging and would be of interest to scholars from a number of disciplines, including history, anthropology, and literature. The translation itself is engaging and fluent . Although Dille admits to taking some liberties with the original text (paring down endlessly repeated adjectives; restructuring material; dividing sentences) this does not diminish one of the most striking features of Oviedo’s work, which is the author’s wonder at the newness of the Indies—a place full of “strange people, diversities, customs, ceremonies, and idolatries alien to everything that was written from the beginning to our times, so much so that a man’s life is too short to see it all, much less ponder or understand it” (17). Memoirs of Darién, 1514–1527 also captures an important transitional moment in the history of the Spanish colonization of the ‘New World’ – the point at which Spanish explorers and settlers began to conceive of themselves as residents. In these memoirs Oviedo laments that “in these parts men do not put down roots, they only pass through with the intention of leaving the territory and returning to their homelands to buy estates as soon as they make some money” (177). Such a charge could not be levelled at Oviedo, a man who sailed for ‘the Indies’ in 1514 and who remained there for the rest of his life, save for a few brief visits to Europe, dying in Santo Domingo in 1557. As Official Chronicler of the Indies from 1532, Oviedo was one of the primary commentators of the ‘New World,’ but as Dille’s translation of Memoirs of Darién, 1514–1527 makes clear, he was also a resident and a citizen of the Americas—a man who took part in history as well as writing it. Lesley Wylie Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies University of Essex SUGAR, SLAVERY, AND FREEDOM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PUERTO RICO. By Luis A. Figueroa. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005, p. 304, $19.95. Until recently, most studies of Puerto Rico during the nineteenth century have ignored or negated the importance of slavery to the development of Puerto Rico’s cultural, political, and economic fabric. Luis A. Figueroa’s interest in the impact of slavery in Puerto Rico during the nineteenth century was piqued by José Luis González’s El paı́s de cuatro pisos y otros 92 Book Reviews ensayos (1980), which attempted to interpret Puerto Rico’s cultural identity . Figueroa, an associate professor of history at Trinity College, agrees with González’s interpretation that the first three centuries of Spanish colonialism in Puerto Rico (1500s-1700s) were conditioned by the presence of black Africans, which profoundly influenced Puerto Rican identity and culture—an assertion that many Puerto Rican intellectuals found unacceptable . The author, however, disagrees with González’s assertion that the nineteenth century in Puerto Rico was primarily a period in which white immigrants—especially Spaniards, criollo loyalists fleeing the wars of independence in Latin America (1814-1824), and French colonists who escaped the slave revolt in Saint Domingue [Haiti]—were responsible for “whitening” Puerto Rican society and making Puerto Rican culture more European. Figueroa, who emphasizes the thousands of enslaved Africans and black Caribbean people who immigrated to Puerto Rico during the nineteenth century, is dismayed by González’s dismissal of the historical impact of blacks on the development of Puerto Rican cultural identity during the nineteenth century. Figueroa claims that González and most Puerto Rican intellectuals, who “often mythologized [the] Puerto Rican past,” deliberately ignored Puerto Rico’s African heritage (2). Although the author fails to consider the possibility that previous scholars of Puerto Rico’s nineteenth-century historical experience were merely uninformed, confused, or lacking quantitative historical skills, it does...