In this book, Fernando Picó not only analyzes the nature of the violence that erupted in rural Puerto Rico following the island’s invasion by the United States on July 25, 1898, but also calls into question the interpretations of earlier scholars. Picó’s much more exhaustive study provides new evidence with which to revise those interpretations. He demonstrates that, for several months after the U.S. invasion, workers and peasant farmers of the interior of Puerto Rico attacked first the businesses and haciendas of the Spaniards and later those of the local creoles.
Picó argues that the groups involved, known in Puerto Rico’s history as “partidas sediciosas,’’ were neither solely in favor of annexation to the United States, as Mariano Negrón-Portillo (1987) contends, nor merely anti-Spanish groups seeking independence for Puerto Rico, as Juan Manuel Delgado has suggested (1980). Although Picó found evidence that groups of creoles, primarily from the urban areas and from the “better” families of the island, cooperated with the U.S. troops, he rejects the notion that the partidas can be dismissed as proannexationist. He is quick to point out that he found evidence that some creole groups also cooperated with the Spaniards during the early stages of the Spanish-American conflict. Having studied the social and economic development of rural Puerto Rico for most of the nineteenth century, Picó offers the view that the partidas “constituted a vigorous popular reaction against the old order and a desire to settle old scores with the members of the system they were rejecting” (p. 201).
Picó’s contribution rests in his ability to analyze the violent conflict in light of the deteriorating economic conditions of the 1890s and the anarchy that resulted from the U.S. invasion. He explains that, in the rural economy of Puerto Rico, neither the workers nor the peasant farmers could escape the exploitation of the wealthier rural classes. This exploitation kept them in debt, paid them starvation wages, and often deprived them of their plots of land. Thus, he finds nothing unusual about the fact that the poorer classes should revolt against their oppressors. That such attacks against the local property owners lasted at all is an indication that U.S. troops were willing to tolerate outbreaks so long as they served U.S. purposes. As Picó points out, once the U.S. forces took possession of the island they set up military garrisons in the troubled areas and arrested and imprisoned the partidas’ leaders.
In this as in his earlier works, Picó, following the method of the Annales school, has reconstructed a period of Puerto Rico’s history in splendid fashion. It should be of interest to social historians and students of Puerto Rican, Latin American, and U.S. history.
