To abolish the law of castes: merit, manhood and the problem of colour in the Puerto Rican liberal movement, 1873–92

Abstract

This article traces the involvement of three men of low social rank and partial African ancestry in the evolution of liberal politics in Puerto Rico during the final decades of Spanish colonial rule. In both literary and political writings Ramón Marín, Sotero Figueroa and Francisco Gonzalo Marín argued that social equality should be at the centre of colonial reforms. Yet they construed the question of equality as a matter of unfettered manhood – all men to be judged on their merit not on their rank – rather than as a politics of racial solidarity. Rather than characterize this emphasis as ‘silence’ on matters of race imposed by elite liberalism, this article seeks to understand this egalitarian variant of Puerto Rican liberalism on its own terms. It situates these authors within three overlapping contexts: a colonial state that was ambivalent about race; a liberal movement built on fragile alliances that included artisans and men of lower-middle status; and complex local systems of social acceptance and exclusion that shaped these writers' own identities as men in public and private.