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| 1 |
ID:
109978
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The People of Puerto Rico is a comprehensive ethnography of major types of rural communities in pre-1950 Puerto Rico but was less successful in reconnecting those localities in a coherent portrayal of the island's social formation. A reexamination of this work's best-known subcultures, Santa Isabel (Sidney Mintz' "Cañamelar") and Ciales (Eric Wolf's "San José"), offers entry points to these communities, as well as to the key concepts that Mintz and Wolf constructed reciprocally through their research: rural proletarian and peasant, plantation and hacienda. Also present are the too-implicit spatial referents of these concepts-lowland and highland, foreland and hinterland-and their associated crop types, sugar and coffee. In this article, the historical space of Santa Isabel and Ciales will be reconsidered, in part with reference to often-overlooked nuances and caveats in Mintz' and Wolf's chapters. Foregrounding the spatial/ecological referent in "Cañamelar" and "San José" opens our sights to counterpoints between sugar and livestock, and to patterns of highland-lowland migration, kin networks, and social interaction. Familiar concepts take on new meanings as we discern supra-municipal, sub-insular, and intermediate island regions and move closer to specifying historical situations (Mintz) while renewing our theorization (Wolf).
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| 2 |
ID:
109982
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Those of us who participated as fieldworkers in the Puerto Rico Project gathered regularly at the University of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras) during the eighteen months we were in the field to compare notes, discuss our work together, and advance our research cooperatively. During that time a distinct difference between our integration in the communities where we were working and in the university community where we gathered became apparent to some of us. It was a coefficient of the class and other differences that separated the university faculty from the working men and women among whom some of us lived in the field, and it was reflected in political differences, among others. A substantial fraction of the university faculty was strongly committed to political independence, whereas a large majority of rural dwellers supported the Popular Democratic Party, then in power. It was not surprising that these differences were linked to others, such that some of us felt we were more fully accepted by the laboring classes among whom we lived than by the intellectuals whom we knew at the university. I try here to show how our fieldwork made visible (and troublesome) these sharp political divisions.
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