Shaping the Discourse on Space: Charity and its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico

Abstract

Teresita Martínez-Vergne is seeking to broaden the horizons of nineteenth-century Puerto Rican historiography with her new book. She has turned away from the social and economic history that has previously dominated approaches to this period, toward a post-structuralist-informed discourse analysis of liberal sensibilities and policies in the island’s capital. Martínez-Vergne traces the rise of a local liberal urban bourgeoisie and its efforts to define itself ideologically vis-à-vis shifting political currents in the Spanish colonial regime and the increasingly worrisome plebeian classes. Other historians of Puerto Rico have taken up this theme in the last 15 years, but none have yet examined its expression through the conceptualization and dispensation of charity. Thus, this book has the potential to provide illuminating insights into Puerto Rican class and gender relations, social mores, and changing political culture.Martínez-Vergne argues that during the nineteenth century, local liberals asserted their hold on new positions of political and social power opened by Spanish liberal colonial administrations, particularly local ayuntamientos and the boards of newly formed charitable institutions such as the Juntas de beneficencia. In the process, they also challenged the Catholic Church’s control over care for the poor. San Juan liberals constantly negotiated a fragile balance between their beliefs in free choice and the capacity for individual improvement and their desire to maintain social order. Hoping to foment and then safely channel the productive capacity of the popular classes, whom they alternately portrayed as lazy and threatening, the liberals enthusiastically regulated both public space and the “private” spheres of sexuality, family, and home through legislation and state philanthropy. Building off the vast European literature on the subject, Martínez-Vergne shows that “assistance and repression” were “the twin pillars of beneficencia” (p. 66). The scattershot training for trades and meager material aid offered to destitute men, women, and children were often overshadowed by the liberals’ criminalization of vagrancy and its feminine counterpart, prostitution, the effective re-enslavement of hundreds of free Africans shipwrecked on Puerto Rico’s shores, and the physical enclosure of unruly plebeian women. Alleged protection of vulnerable children also placed them under heavy-handed state surveillance. Early efforts to provide public education ultimately served the liberals’ goal of creating a docile, disciplined labor force.The most significant weaknesses of the volume seem to stem from overreaching the available sources. Despite Martínez-Vergne’s protestations to the contrary, the laboring men, women, and children of San Juan largely remain powerless figures in this historical narrative, as they often have in other post-structuralist-inspired histories. We get few examples of the pressures from below which she periodically insists fueled liberal bids for power. The exception is the chapter that examines women’s requests to the Junta de beneficencia for child support. Here, Martínez-Vergne begins to explore the contours of plebeian women’s discourse on motherhood. She concludes that both women applicants and officiating men “were participating jointly in a public performance in which both actors benefited” (p. 99); the women received material aid, and the male members of the junta confirmed their superiority to and power over others. For the most part, however, almost against the author’s stated intentions, Shaping the Discourse on Space paints a seemingly omnipotent picture of bourgeois agency. The men of the rising urban professional classes in Puerto Rico consistently create oppressive social mores, political policies, and economic options, which they successfully inflict on the poor, “infiltrating their psyches to embed bourgeois notions of social harmony and civic propriety” (p. 116). The dearth of plebeian newspapers from the nineteenth century, the complete lack of criminal records for this period in San Juan, and the apparent paucity of surviving petitions from inmates of the Casa de beneficencia led Martínez-Vergne to rely primarily on liberal regulations. Her treatment of such sources does not allow her to convincingly demonstrate either significant popular agency or the extent of liberal influence on plebeian worldviews and practices. This does not, however, invalidate the pioneering spirit of Shaping the Discourse on Space. In her emphases on discourse analysis, physical space as an analytical category, and public charity as a key to the formation of politics and class identity, Martínez-Vergne has set out to establish new methodological and theoretical precepts for Puerto Rican historiography. Despite the project’s shortcomings, I applaud her efforts.