Bound to History: Leoncia Lasalle’s Slave Narrative from Moca, Puerto Rico, 1945

Ellen Fernandez-Sacco

doi:10.3390/genealogy4030093

Abstract

The only slave narrative from Puerto Rico is included in Luis Diaz Soler’s Historia de la esclavitud negra en Puerto Rico (1953; 2002). This article considers this embedded account as part of the literature of slave narratives to address a gap in the literature; this is perhaps due to the account’s singularity and brevity. Beyond this, the other source for understanding the experience of enslaved women in Puerto Rico is through legal and parish documents, generated by a colonial government and church supportive of slavery. As a result, lives under enslavement are quantified statistically, and the lack of oral history or personal accounts hampers understanding of the effects of enslavement from an individual perspective. Documenting such a life comes with its own set of issues, as shown here by demonstrating the limits of various archival resources. There is no one methodology to follow to reconstruct lives and family histories under slavery, an institution designed to prevent the formation of a historical sense of self and agency. Factoring in familial connections makes my own location as a researcher visible, as knowledge is not neutral. Despite its brevity, considering Leoncia Lasalle’s account, and that of her daughter, Juana Rodriguez Lasalle, in terms of its multiple contexts—microhistory, similarities with U.S. and Cuban slave narratives, family histories, and the archive—reveals the constructed nature of the idea of historical knowledge, which also has implications for genealogical practice involved with slavery and life post-emancipation.

Highlights

In 1945, the historian Luis Diaz Soler interviewed Dionicia Leoncia Lasalle, 112 years old, and her daughter, Juana Rodriguez Lasalle, age 85, in Barrio Pueblo, Moca about their experiences under bondage
This oral history of slavery in Moca survives within the pages of Luis Diaz Soler’s Historia de la esclavitud negra en Puerto Rico, the first extensive study focused on the history of slavery on the island
Life a site devoted to raising coffee, and was later devoted to sugar; women and children were involved in Leoncia Lasalle mentioned being enslaved on a Lasalle plantation in Moca, which was a the early phase of planting sugarcane

Summary

Introduction

In 1945, the historian Luis Diaz Soler interviewed Dionicia Leoncia Lasalle, 112 years old, and her daughter, Juana Rodriguez Lasalle, age 85, in Barrio Pueblo, Moca about their experiences under bondage. ” (Diaz-Soler 2002) is how Leoncia Lasalle begins her account of enslavement in Northwest Puerto Rico, which for her began well over a century before. What I set out to do in this article is to trace the family history of Dionicia Leoncia Lasalle and her daughter, Juana Rodriguez Lasalle, and offer a context for the account, along with details from archival records that fill in additional details. The intent is to help descendants to connect with enslaved ancestors (Fernandez-Sacco 2019a) These small records for Leoncia Lasalle and Juana Rodriguez Lasalle were not in this set of documents. Leoncia Lasalle and her daughter Juana, like many freedmen and women, worked the same jobs as when they were enslaved They were required by law to supply three years of free labor to their former employers as a term of emancipation in 1870. As is true for much work on the enslaved, the records of the slave holder need to be reviewed for clues on the people they held in bondage

The Landscape of Enslavement

Hacienda

Municipality

A Question of Maternal Connections

15 January

Conclusions