Puerto Rico’s most prolific historian, Professor Lidio Cruz Monclova of the University of Puerto Rico, set out to “do” the nineteenth century. During the past decade tomos and partes of his large scale history and corollary works have fairly gushed from his pen. The first two volumes (in three parts) took the story to 1885, and these two parts of volume three carry things to 1897 and the pacta sagastina (or as his infuriating method of citing newspapers puts it, to the 59th year of the Boletín Mercantil).
These dozen years of Puerto Rican history abound in significant events and attractive personalities. The island’s political consciousness, stirred for a couple of decades, pulsed mightily in its restricted sphere, as Puerto Ricans sought identity, but with each faction advocating differing formulae. The stuff of this process is here, but in almost raw form. Every move and countermove of the political travail occupies the spotlight for its allotted time and then some. Cruz Monclova is addicted to long quotations from his source material, which consists principally of newspapers, Muñoz Rivera’s La Democracia especially, and the Spanish archives in Madrid. This semi-documentary approach, better suited to the multi-volume Obras de Muñoz Rivera which he is editing, irreparably damages his narrative as a work of art. These two parts have no index, seriously curtailing their value as reference works; presumably the third part of this third volume (which I have not seen) will include a cumulative index for the entire volume. Nor, as I see it, is there an overview beyond the obvious theme of the search for status, which permeated all insular politicking (and survives to this day). Recent scholarship on the 1890’s, such as the works of Barbosa de Rosario and Díaz Soler, has not been utilized.
Given the paucity of scholarly material in Puerto Rican history in any century, such a project as Cruz Monclova’s must rank high. So much for relative status. What about absolute standards? This neither-fish-nor-fowl approach to a people’s history is not the way to historical understanding. Instead of a systematic attempt at analysis, we get an overdose of indefatigable but raw research which subsequent generations of Puerto Rican historians will have to refine and categorize. A historian’s first duty is to learn all he ean about his subject. But his next and equally important responsibility is to tell us about the five per cent of his data which are relevant, and to do so at the highest intellectual and literary level he can command.
