Not of Pure Blood: The Free People of Color and Racial Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico

Abstract

This is a most welcome addition to the still relatively limited literature on the free persons of color in the slave societies of America and should be required reading for all those interested in these themes. The free colored of Puerto Rico were a very large part of the total insular population from the earliest eighteenth-century censuses onward. They were three to four times greater than the slave population and reached 127,000 by 1830—by then representing almost 40 percent of the total population. Out of this group the author has selected those who lived in the city of San Juan—a sample of probably less than 5 percent of this total class—to study in detail. While this sample eliminates the majority of free persons of color who were rural residents and farmers, Kinsbruner nevertheless compensates for this with a wealth of archival detail on the life of this urban minority. He very skillfully uses the property and population census in the first quarter of the nineteenth century to explain residential patterns by color, occupational mobility, and marriage arrangements among the free colored. The resulting picture is quite remarkable and complex: a group of persons just one of two generations out of slavery who already were active and competitive members of the society and economy. They were a significant group of property owners and could be found in all skilled occupations; in fact, there were even two free colored women master silversmiths working in Ponce and San Juan. He shows in great detail the remarkable lack of housing segregation which existed in early-nineteenth-century San Juan. His analysis of housing segregation, in fact, is quite original and is one of the very few such studies to be found in the literature.On the other hand, his study of the selection of marriage partners shows the strong role of prejudice in the resulting high endogamy rates by race. He also finds relatively low rates of marriage for free colored and relatively high ratios of free colored families headed by single women, though whites also were well below traditional norms. From mid-nineteenth-century data for the island as a whole, he also shows the expected finding that the free colored had both higher birth and death rates than the richer white population among whom they lived. Finally, these same mid-century insular data shows modestly high and relatively equal rates of literacy for free colored women and men in several municipalities in the island.In this otherwise admirably written, analyzed and argued book, there are a few issues that other historians will debate. The rather broad usage of the term “caste” is confusing. Since the author does not put the term in quotes or use the Spanish term casta, he seems to suggest that this is a classic Indian-style caste system, which is definitely not the case here. He also tends to ignore the slave origins of this class of free persons and their much lower rates of initial capital and savings compared to whites, which may account for some of the differences he encounters. His attempts to use the unbalanced sex ratios of this small urban population (common to all urban populations in Latin America) to discuss economic inequalities due to prejudice, is not convincing. The same may be said for his attempts to generalize from the very small differences of average age by sex. Finally he ignores the fact that the whites often are as different from the norm he holds of marriage organization as are the free colored, which suggest some special patterns within the island’s own social structure. Despite these reservations, the data and analysis of this important study provide one of the few well grounded portraits we have of the urban free colored under slavery for any area of Spanish or Portuguese America and will be much used and appreciated by all scholars working on African slavery and race relations in the Americas.