Caste and Capitalism in the Caribbean: Residential Patterns and House Ownership among the Free People of Color of San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1823-46

Abstract

HIS essay attempts to infer the economic performance of the free people of color of San Juan, Puerto Rico during the nineteenth century. There is no direct way to determine such performance, because of the absence of appropriate documentation. The activities of the many who served as domestic servants, for instance, were not recorded systematically. The area of the economy where free people of color functioned most effectively was crafts, but there appear to be no guild records extant, and censuses normally did not record occupation. The study emanated from a larger inquiry into the relationship between racial discrimination and the dynamics of the Spanish American market economy. Free people of color of San Juan, a large and almost completely unstudied segment of the population, comprised a legally disadvantaged caste that was required to function in an economy of commercial capitalism. The caste system may have ended in Mexico City, as Dennis Valdes argues,' or was irrelevant in Guadalajara, Mexico, as Rodney D. Anderson has shown,2 and perhaps was on the wane