Restudying Cañamelar of The People of Puerto Rico

Abstract

This article discusses an unknown restudy of one locale of the People of Puerto Rico Project–my own. From 1980 to 1982 the author did ethnographic fieldwork in Bo. Jauca, Santa Isabel, the research site of Sidney Mintz. Building on Mintz's work, my goal was to take our shared historical materialism further, into a broader analysis of capitalism, colonialism, class, politics, and power. Where Mintz framed his study within production units, such as Colonia Destino and Central Aguirre, my study began with analysis of the oligarchic structure of the United States sugar industry as a whole, and how it shaped colonial policy. Where the People of Puerto Rico Project reconstructed insular class and political patterns as context for local studies, the restudy took islandwide class structure and political positions as a focus of analysis in itself. Where the earlier work chronicled the rise of a plantation system and rural proletariat, the later study explored their decline—why did the Puerto Rican sugar industry collapse, and how did seemingly homogenous Jauquenos differentiate into a graded system of stratification? The years from 1948 to 1982 saw other class transformations, as the rural proletariat was recast into the larger, more diffuse, and less politically potent category of “the poor” and life circumstances of all Jauqenos became more individuated and dependent on state power centers in San Juan and Washington.