The Port Of San Juan Puerto Ricos Dominant City

Van Middledyk's work was the first major historical study of Puerto Rico in English. Van Middledyk advanced Puerto Rican historiography by building on the works of Brau, Coll y Toste, and Acosta, and by consulting early Spanish chronicles. A librarian at the Free Public Library of San Juan, Van Middledyk possessed knowledge of and access to considerable primary source material. His history is sympathetic to the Indians and highly critical of Spanish colonial administration. Coming in the wake of American military occupation, the book sought to explain and justify control of the island by the United States.

Van Middledyk's work was the first major historical study of Puerto Rico in English. Van Middledyk advanced Puerto Rican historiography by building on the works of Brau, Coll y Toste, and Acosta, and by consulting early Spanish chronicles. A librarian at the Free Public Library of San Juan, Van Middledyk possessed knowledge of and access to considerable primary source material. His history is sympathetic to the Indians and highly critical of Spanish colonial administration. Coming in the wake of American military occupation, the book sought to explain and justify control of the island by the United States.

"A potential watershed in Puerto Rican historiography. . . . the only women's history work which investigates the full sweep of the tumultuous 19th century in Puerto Rico, and thus the only one which has the potential for providing true historical depth to the study of women's experience."--Eileen J. Findlay, American University Dispelling the common perception of Puerto Rico as a male-dominated society, Women and Urban Change in San Juan examines the roles of women in the economic and social changes that affected the Puerto Rican capital during the mid-19th century. F�lix V. Matos Rodr�guez studies the full mosaic of Puerto Rican women during this period, examining the ways in which the women of San Juan reacted to the pressures of race and class on their lives. Matos Rodr�guez discusses attempts on behalf of colonial officials and the local elite to modernize the city by emulating the development patterns of other American and European cities. For this effort, they enlisted the help of elite women, specifically in the areas of education, child rearing and public morality. While the women of the upper classes may have wielded more influence, working-class women, whose lives are vividly described in this book, actively participated in the process by resisting and reacting to official efforts at social control. The only book that examines 19th-century Puerto Rican women's history, this work places the experiences of urban women in San Juan within the larger framework of Caribbean and Latin American 19th-century life. Because it offers a solid foundation for discussing race relations in Puerto Rico, it will begin important conversations about broad questions of identity in the island's history. F�lix V. Matos Rodr�guez is assistant professor of history at Northeastern University. He is the author of several articles on Puerto Rican history and the co-editor of Puerto Rican Women's History: New Perspectives.

As an inchoate middle class emerged in Puerto Rico in the early nineteenth century, its members sought to control not only public space, but also the people, activities, and even attitudes that filled it. Their instruments were the San Juan town council and the Casa de Beneficencia, a state-run charitable establishment charged with responsibility for the poor. In this book, Teresita Martínez-Vergne explores how municipal officials and the Casa de Beneficencia shaped the discourse on public and private space and thereby marginalized the worthy poor and vagrants, "liberated" Africans, indigent and unruly women, and destitute children. Drawing on extensive and innovative archival research, she shows that the men who comprised the San Juan ayuntamiento and the board of charity regulated the public discourse on topics such as education, religious orthodoxy, hygiene, and family life, thereby establishing norms for "correct" social behavior and chastising the "deviant" lifestyles of the working poor. This research clarifies the ways in which San Juan's middle class defined itself in the midst of rapid social and economic change. It also offers new insights into notions of citizenship and the process of nation-building in the Caribbean.

San Juan: Memoir of a City conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture. In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodríguez Juliá invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flâneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. "In Puerto Rico," he muses, "life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks." Through this book—available here in English for the first time—Rodríguez Juliá resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives. Best Books for Regional General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians and the Public Library Association