TITI YEYA’S MEMORIES: A MATRIARCH OF THE PUERTO RICAN MIGRATION

Abstract

The “change of sovereignty,” the transfer of Puerto Rico to U.S. rule after Spain’s loss in the Spanish-American War of 1898, could not easily erase centuries of Spanish misrule of its island colony. Nor could it reconstruct an economy based on monocultural agricultural crops. For centuries, ranching and subsistence farming had lured settlers from the coast. Highland towns, founded in the eighteenth century under royal auspices but increasingly isolated and removed from imperial control came to define the peasant, the jı́baro, who though generally slight in stature came to loom large as the cultural backbone of Puerto Rico. Run by ministers of the Spanish monarchy and corrupt and sometimes tyrannical military governors, the island during the 1800s ineptly staggered through sequential agricultural monocultures. Sugar crops tended by coastal workers of mixed African and European backgrounds (with slavery and peonage existing side by side) yielded prominence in mid-century to large-scale coffee plantations in the mountainous interior, attracting capital and labor from the coast as well as from the Spanish homeland. By the mid-1800s U.S. interests had begun to pull on this strategically located military outpost – first through trade and then by conquest and new guardianship.

Citation

Badillo, D.A. (2004), "TITI YEYA’S MEMORIES: A MATRIARCH OF THE PUERTO RICAN MIGRATION", Krase, J. and Hutchison, R. (Ed.) Race and Ethnicity in New York City (Research in Urban Sociology, Vol. 7), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 137-158. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1047-0042(04)07006-0