PS 25 in 1905. I attended some 55 years later. The school is still there, on 811 E 149th St. NYC.gov
That diasporic feeling
There is no one place or time when diaspora occurs…it is a perpetual space of change and displacement. An awareness. It’s a process I share with many, whether by blood, place or experience, with locations linked by oceans and shaped by the relentless squeeze for money and power.
How we understand this process has a lot to do with the narratives fed to us as children. Here’s a memorable text whose social cues seemed sketchy to me in grade school.
Friendly Village
Dick’s vision didn’t include the South Bronx. Cover of Friendly Village, 1967.. Photo: Thriftbooks.com
As a child in the early 1960s, the most confusing book I’ve ever encountered was an assigned second grade reader by Mabel O’Donnell, entitled Friendly Village. I was switched into second grade mid-year, since I read at a 6 grade level thanks to my mom.
Nothing in the book seemed to jive with what I knew of the world in the south Bronx. For us, landscape vistas were restricted to a small outcropping of glacial rocks, some maple trees and wildlife— pigeons and the large rats in St Ann Park, all four city blocks of it.
Where we lived then was composed of blocks of tenements built at least a half century before my birth, dark narrow buildings whose stoops and entrances varied slightly from structure to structure — brick fronts, embellished by fire escapes above the street, each four to five floors tall, with four apartments to a floor. These buildings loomed before my small frame.
Buildings of memory
Most tenements were built in the first years of the 1900s, the metal ironwork that once flanked the stairs collected in the 1940s for the war effort. This left most buildings with a bare stoop in front.
Air shafts, then a recent innovation in 1900, defined the view in our apartment. from one window, one saw sets of white framed glass portals to other living spaces, surrounded by brick and crossed by laundry lines. Down below was the small concrete footprint of the space. Then, from early spring to late fall, these were full of bed sheets and tablecloths, shirts and underwear put out to dry. We never made any experiments to test gravity or my parents patience.
Yes, mami gave me a perm and already I wanted to wear pants. On the roof, 548 Fox Street.
Tenements on Fox Street
Tenements on Fox Street, Photo: NYC.gov
To my small body, this tenement and neighborhood that surrounded it on Fox Street it all seemed like an enormous urban site, full of adults and rooms with a million different stories. Manhattan was even bigger.
Once inside, to reach our apartment, everyone made their way over white stone steps, climbing while holding on to a painted rail, inset into the top of cast iron balusters. The rail was coated in layers of thick enamel paint applied over many years. This smooth yet pebbled texture melted on the surface of the rail that linked the building’s floors and landings.
Each step was made of pale, white-gray marble or soapstone, worn down at the center, a saggy appearance that testified to the movement of thousands of footsteps over its surfaces, a bit worn away with each step.
Every floor held a set of relationships, that ranged from the legal to inappropriate. parents, newborns, lovers, strangers who left traces on the pages of the 1920-1950 census. My paternal grandparents lived in another tenement nearby, finally being able to settle down after the multiple moves during the Great Depression, heralded by the birth of my father.
At my grandparent’s at 1022 E 156th Street, just blocks away.
Tenements were never part of the landscape of Friendly Village, and Alice and Jerry never went to such places, nor did they go to play in the trash strewn spaces behind them. The South Bronx was different then. The entrances of the buildings on each grey and grimy block had stoops once bordered with ironwork. This was removed, molten down for the WW2 effort, and never replaced, leaving large holes and orphaned bolts that told of phantom parts. The now plain steps lead to the doors, some of them arching over the entryway to a basement workshop or apartment and storage rooms that ran along the length of the building.
The Newsstand
On the corner, it seemed a sizeable amount of steel escaped the wartime scrap heap and was a featured element of the commercial space of the corner newsstand. The store sat atop a metal sidewalk, raised about 3-4 inches off the concrete, its surface pierced with small round glass disks trapped in the metal pentagonal grids, to provide light for a mysterious space underground. This dark, almost green black metal surface surrounded the store, and clanged as one stepped up and walked on it, its own alert system that let the owner know a customer approached.
The newstand rack was itself an accomplished bit of welded heavy steel plate with supports for shelves that held several daily and weekly newspapers just outside of its tiny space. inside the actual store was cramped and crowded with racks of magazines on its walls, comic books, boxes of cigarettes and chewing gum. Just enough space for one clerk to sit behind the counter, next to a heater in winter and a small fan in summer.
Gum of gums
Bazooka bubble gum. By Parka Lewis at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2939687
On the small counter next to the cash register, sat an open box of Bazooka gum for sale. For our two cents, we bought a piece of gum named for a rocket launcher, the brand name Bazooka revealing the proximity of recent wars to the lives of children who bought them, from World War 2 to Korea, and afterwards Vietnam. These small packets were extremely firm (the staler, the harder) a segment of sugary pink chewing gum with an indented line down the middle for sharing or apportioning. It made a dentist visit much more likely.
Its dusted sugar surface was bound by a folded Bazooka Joe comic in 3 colors, that to our young eyes featured seemingly adult men exchanging pointless, corny lines in several tiny frames on a small sheet of shiny waxed paper. This gift arrived under a larger red and white wax paper wrapper w diagonal lettering that announced ‘Bazooka’.
It took work to chew. it was a product that simultaneously allowed one to both blow bubbles and to dissolve one’s tooth enamel. If the gum was stale, masticating took twice as long to coax it into a bubble and create annoying, cracking noises.
Bazooka was a different than Crawford’s Breath Gum, lovely purple pieces in a flat silver cardboard box with scrolling black letters. My mother loved them and almost always had a box in her handbag. Later we went for sticks of gum, peppermint but never spearmint. We left Bazooka behind.
Creative impulses
At school or near these institutions, we noticed that the uses of gum extended to cheerful decoration, witnessed on the undersides of chairs and desks or on the lengths of telephone poles that became colorful, textured repositories of various brands, processed by teeth of children and teenagers. Such sites were only to be augmented with one’s own bit of masticated gum, and not to be touched by fingers.
Return to the Friendly Village
But back to the Friendly Village, a book that only sowed more confusion as I read its pages. It featured puzzling details– Fathers who wore glasses, a suit and tie and carried a briefcase. I knew no one like that. My dad worked first as a baggage handler on the railroad and next for the Metropolitan Transit Authority when he finally passed the test for the MTA in ventilation and drainage. When we were little we only knew he was somewhere in the bowels of NYC, traversing endless miles of tunnels and small rooms crammed with the equipment that made it possible to see and breathe on the subway. He worked two jobs at one point, so he was hardly at home.
My grandparents lived just a few blocks away, my grandfather drove taxis or school buses for work and could barely read a newspaper. This was probably because of dyslexia, which added another layer of difficulty to everything he navigated stateside. He had a tremendous memory though for numbers and memorized lists of Bolita digits, no paper to find. My mother worked in various factories in Manhattan and Brooklyn in the 1940s to 1950s before she had us, and she was 14 when she got her first job.
Details details
As jarring a read as the Friendly Village was, there was no village, no cows and no farmers in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. instead, a steadily growing number of Puerto Ricans were packing a landscape created at least a half century before, at the turn of the century just after the Spanish American War.
We lived in a walk up apartment and there were no thatched roof houses anywhere nearby. The population of the Friendly Village was white and British, with pedigree dogs unlike the mutts that roamed our neighborhood in ragged packs.
Actually, we were the ones the locals feared, the Puerto Ricans born on the island and stateside, who occupied more and more apartments as the neighborhood aged and its former Jewish and Slavic inhabitants escaped to the suburbs. The book left me wondering about places like England, and what seems a high probability of being run out of a village if my family actually showed up there.
To School, PS 25
Each morning as my mother walked us to elementary school we were careful to step over the legs of the two young men of color, both junkies with their backs propped up against a building. As we walked, I stared at the thin stream of urine that led from between their legs down the sidewalk, over the edge of the milled stone curb and into the gutter. Occupied with their high, they failed to notice the proximity of the yellow water that stained their pants as it streamed out of them; neither did they acknowledge seeing us walk past. They didn’t go to school, nor did they appear in any school reader.
Fox Street became rougher by the year. When a man was shot in the head just doors away on the block, my father decided that was enough. He began searching for a house in another location, in Hollis, in the very distant and exotic borough of Queens.
We left the Bronx and the pages of The Friendly Village proved little help for understanding why I was called a Spic by whites fearful of our kind, nor of the girls who dropped an open container of milk on me on the stairs on Assembly Day, or those who decided to fight me in a group in the schoolyard. I was a white presenting skinny kid, a product of diaspora, settler colonialism & slavery, searching for a definition of self in books that didn’t acknowledge our blended existence. I kept reading.
Dick and Jane, the ideal white boy and girl featured in the reader’s pages taught me nothing about how the world worked, nor of the working class, or of the many peoples caught in the flows of diaspora that made up the city of New York in the early 1960s.
Decolonized spaces
Today we make our own villages, those safe spaces where we can reveal our fullest selves to survive and share our journey as best we can. It’s remarkable how one group’s joy can be rejected, but they can’t steal it. Brook Park, a place I visited in my childhood, is now the site where my Iukayeke holds its solstice ceremonies, and I connect, via technology.
We are still here.
Long gone, the buildings and streets of Mott Haven come back vividly in memory, places where my ancestors once tread as they made their way through the cycle of life.
Our cousin Allen passed this Monday 17 October, leaving us shocked that he is gone. Allen was funny, kind and generous, someone with a big heart.
His funeral will be held next Monday, 24 October at Blount & Curry Funeral Home at Garden of Memories, 4207 E Lake Ave in Tampa, FL 33610. Visitation 1-2PM, Funeral Service 2-3PM.
Born in the Bronx to Vivian Fernandez and Manuel Acevedo, Allen was the second of two sons. He leaves Nancy his wife of 42 years, daughter Ileana and a grandson, his brothers Manny, Javier, Papo, Rachel, their children. The network of family who loved him are saddened by his dying.
Allen was just a year older and in my life since I was born. Thanks to the tenements and cheap rents of the 1950s and 1960s, our extended family was just blocks away from each other in the South Bronx. This was a tough landscape, different from what is in Mott Haven today.
A birthday party ca 1964, Bronx, NY. L to R: Orlando, John, Rachel and Allen.
There are some fotos of early birthday parties, the apartments full of children at birthdays and Christmas holidays. By the 1960s we visited Vivian and Manuel in their apartment in the new high rise projects on Westchester Blvd, where Manny played basketball and protected Allen, his skinnier, paler brother.
Allen loved Bruce Lee and Kung fu movies, a love shared with my brother Orlando, figuring out the kicks and moves that sent people flying. Another love was watching Soul Train. Allen also told corny jokes, loved to laugh and was easy to get along with.
I remember Allen telling me about his first jobs in the Bronx, during the 1970s. Once he worked at an Alexander’s on Third Ave. where leather jackets hung with thin chains down one sleeve as an anti theft device. Addicts floated in looking for an easy item to shoplift. One man was so out of it, he slipped a jacket on and proceeded to drag the enormous rack behind him, wondering why he was only able to move a short distance before being swept off the floor by security. Working in department stores had its moments, so Allen got into computer programming very early.
Eventually he met Nancy, the woman he would spend the rest of his life with. His job sent them to Tampa. They were a perfect couple as her grounded strength balanced whatever doubts he faced. Allen could be a nervous guy, but Nancy affirmed him. He was a father to Ileana and a grandfather to her son, a granduncle, a brother and cousin to others.
Family meant a deep connection to Puerto Rico, Florida and other places. Allen was generous to a fault, helping out whenever he could. As other family did, we stayed with them when we visited Tampa, and when we first moved here. His mother Vivian lived with Allen and Nancy until the end of her life. He was a pallbearer for my father when he passed a few months later in 2017. This too is part of a migration south that went from the colony of Boriken a century ago, then north to the Bronx and New York metropolitan area and then south to Tampa Bay. Allen, Nancy, Dolly, Vivian, Tony, Papo, Margie, Armando, Orlando, Luddy, Rachel and myself made their way here, all of us descendants of Ramon Fernandez and Angelina Calo and Carmen Dorios-Picon, born 100+ years ago.
The past week has been intense, to stand with family and be there for his passing. We hoped he would get through 3 weeks of an induced coma for acute pancreatitis, and then witnessed a series of complications erode the possibility of his return. We prayed and asked for him to stay, in some ways I held a childlike hope that this would change. Instead, a part of my life has calved and fallen away, and he becomes an ancestor, someone I will see when my transition comes.
Lele, Pullo, Luis & Quirilo Hernandez, rear: Bilin, Barrio Pueblo, Moca, Mar 2007. Photo: EFS
Yams & communities
Roots like yams, yuca, yautia, malanga known by different names on different islands and continents are central to Puerto Rican foodways and are also tied to a larger history of the slave trade over several centuries. Come with me as I trace yams from the cooking pot out to the hills of Moca and across the oceans to Africa and from Puerto Rico to Cuba.
In March 2007, Lele set up a stand outside his grocery store in Barrio Pueblo, Moca, so that a group of friends could share in cooking and eating the delicious root they dug up in the hills the previous day. ñame (NyAH-meh), a variety of yam, grows to various sizes and has pale yellow or white flesh, or pith. Here Lele made a sancocho, adding oxtail for the broth the ñame cooks in, filled with other roots, herbs and boiled green bananas.
There are several varieties of yam some, like ñame blanco, Dioscorea rotundata is originally from West Africa; other kinds come from tropical Asia, Brazil and other areas of South America. Dioscorea and its varieties is a plant that’s been cultivated for over 5,000 years around the world.
West African Yam Belt, Fig. 2 from Dumont, Biodiversity, p.17
The centrality of yams to the diet in West Africa is reflected in the number of names each one has that gives technical and historical information- in the Cote d’Ivoire, this tuber has 166 names, and in Benin, it has 311. This is a large vine that can reach a height of and takes 6-8 months vegetative cycle with 3-5 months dormancy for the tubers to grow. [1]
Another key root is yuca, known as cassava. It’s one of the oldest crops on the island, grown in piles of earth called conucos. Grated, used to make cassava bread, flat and baked on hot stones, or, given it’s mild flavor, prepared with other ingredients, be used in stews, roasted or fried.
Ultimately, what’s in a meal made with yams, cassava, green bananas and plantains is a blend of ingredients and cultures brought to the Caribbean over thousands of years and hundreds of miles by different groups of people in systems of intercolonial trade.
Digging the Roots in Moca
Wild yam tubers in Barrio Cruz, Moca, 2007. Photo: EFS
I was able to go ñame hunting with my cousin Enrique Rivera in the hills of a farm that his friend owned in the hills of Barrio Cruz. We went down a steep edge, looking for potential spots where vegetation was already cleared. One person searched through brush for the right leaves, and with knives and machetes, we began to carve out the soil to yield the root. Large and heavy with moisture, these roots can easily weigh several pounds.
Enrique’s friend explains how the plant grows its tubers. Photo: EFS, 2007.
Peeled, grated, then fried, people make bunuelos de ñame, or have them along with other roots, as in the dish verduras con bacalao, which can include a selection of yuca, batata, malanga, yautia and guineos verdes (green bananas), simply boiled with prepared bacalao (dried cod fish) in or on the side, drizzled with olive oil.
Enrique carries section of yam in Barrio Cruz. Photo: EFS, 2007
Cook it!
Mash it, bake it, boil it or, sauteed, roots can provide a filling, tasty meal. Know that most of the corn, green bananas and plantain during the 18th & 19th centuries made up a large portion of the diet of our enslaved and impoverished ancestors in the Caribbean.
Wild Yams & Other Naming Practices
“Man coming out of jungle with wild yam ‘cabezo de negro’. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Here’s a photo taken in the 1950s of a man coming out of a jungle carrying a large wild yam on his shoulder from the Library of Congress website. (This yam was not eaten, but used as a source for hormones.) Still, it gives an idea of the size these roots can often grow to- and they can reach 130 pounds. In this case, the local name of the yam, ‘cabezo de negro’ demonstrates how ideas around race and labor are linked to food, yet the location where the photo was taken, and the name of the person who appears in the photograph are not mentioned. Names can reflect the inequalities of power, just as the photograph hides the person taking the image and the organization that makes the image possible.
What’s in a name?
However, the terms cabezo, cabezon, can invoke images of retaliation by planters and resistance by the enslaved. In Guillermo A. Baralt’s Slave Revolts in Puerto Rico, African-born enslaved laborers called bozales, were those who “more than the other slaves, resisted the work regime to which they were subjected when they arrived on the island. [2] Those who rebelled in Bayamon in 1822 and in Ponce in 1826 had arrived only a few months before the conspiracy. The ones who fought most resolutely against their owners for over half a century were the “negros cabezones” [pigheaded blacks]. They included the leaders of the Ponce conspiracy of 1841 and enslaved Longoba nation members in Toa Baja in 1843, along with those in Vega Baja in 1840.”[3]
Quote on what it meant to be bozal from Ivonne Acosta Lespier, “Mujeres esclavas en Mayaguez.”
A bitter reality: sugar production & slavery
Portion of 1886 Map of PR Circled: Toa Baja & the free town of Cangrejos outside of San Juan. G.W. & C.B. Colton & Co, Mapa topográfico de la isla de Puerto Rico, 1886. Library of Congress.
This portion of the 1886 Colton & Co. topographic map of Puerto Rico gives a sense of how the proximity of waterways and the free town of Cangrejos to the east likely served as inspiration for those enslaved across Bayamon and beyond who sought self liberation before 1873. The names of wards that dot the map are also those of sugar mills (Ingenios), such as Media Luna in Toa Baja and El Plantaje in Palo Seco.
Sugar dominated the landscape outside of San Juan, a region that extended from Toa Baja and Palo Seco on the west and Loiza, Carolina and Trujillo Bajo in the east. This was the earliest monoculture region on the island, and as such confronted the problems of slave rebellions. [4]
As Guillermo Baralt notes, “From the time of the first sugar mills were established in Toa Baja, including that of the heirs of Juan Ponce de Leon, the sugar industry had been closely linked to black Africans and their American descendants. As this industry began to develop on a large scale at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the number of slaves almost doubled, from 208 in 1776 to 410 in 1827.” [5 ]
The increased numbers of enslaved Africans in the hatos of the surrounding area were in part due to Toa Baja’s open involvement in an illegal slave trade during the early 19th century. I delve into details in this blog because one may find their line leads to this region, yet a specific ancestor is not found. As my cousin, genealogist Teresa Vega notes, that today our DNA tests may show connections, yet those direct ties may be to an ancestor we may never know because of the social conditions of slavery. This cultural and economic arrangement aimed to define people as less than, just as in the American South and countries where slavery was legal. Still, small numbers of the enslaved managed to have their relationships and children recognized, and were able to buy their freedom (coartacion). As a result, they stand to appear in more documentation as once owned, as free, and as owners of property.
Spain ended slavery within its own country in 1836, while in the Caribbean, despite signing treaties with England, Spanish ships were liable to be seized and its human cargo confiscated by British patrols if they were determined to be slavers. Yet there were citizens who requested and recieved special licenses to import dozens, or hundreds of enslaved people at a time.
One was the planter and slave trader in Toa Baja, Francisco Soler, owner of Hacienda San Pedro and also Regidor (city councilman) of the Ayuntamiento (municipal government) of Toa Baja. In 1824, Soler had licenses to import 300 slaves and between 1830-1840, he was granted licenses for bringing slaves into Puerto Rico. The argument offered for importing enslaved people for the market was “because one could not depend on the free workers as they abandoned the preparatory tasks for the harvests..” [6] The lack of confidence in free labor was the explanation offered for why in Puerto Rico, the purchasing of slaves continued right up to the moment of abolition in 1873. [7,8]
As freedom in Cuba was a late arrival in 1886, I expect there were planters in Puerto Rico who took advantage of this situation to transfer their enslaved labor to plantations in Cuba via a network of family connections. As I review the documents tied to various ingenios (sugar mills) in the region, I also see surnames tied to my extended family in the north west- Salas, Quinones, among others.
The trade continued, with the origin of enslaved Africans hidden on documents. This official anti-slaving activity had only a partial effect on reducing the numbers of people transported during the Middle Passage. Afterwards, as availability of enslaved African laborers waned, the price of bozales increased considerably as a result. At the same time, sugar slid in value, and the process was only partially mechanized. To make matters even more pressing, different and more refined sugars entered the market, diminishing the value of Puerto Rican muscovado sugar. [9]
Interior view of a ‘trapiche de sangre’ in Martinique. From “La technologia antes del siglo XIX”.
Similar machines, literally ‘blood mills’ based on older technologies caused workers serious injuries. Notice the woman, who represents the fact that many enslaved workers male and female worked crops from planting to harvest.
A focus on the economy only serves to hide human suffering involved in the production of materials for mass consumption. There’s a shift happening where la otra cara de la historia (the ‘other face of history’) is taking center stage in research and family histories of POC. The panelists on Black ProGen LIVE are part of this shift.
Y como me gusta mi historia negra, asi guanta la azucar.
And as I also like my history black, hold the sugar.*
Resistance and Retaliation: Toa Baja, 1843
The reduced availability of Africans, and the ensuing rise in the price of the enslaved did not mean slavery in Puerto Rico was benign, just as in other places, violence was seen as a means to gain profit. Work regimes were brutal with the rise in sugar, and many situations only became even more desperate. Toa Baja’s open investment in the illegal slave trade, the changes in its boundaries with the formation of the municipalities of Palo Seco on the east and Dorado on the west meant the ensuing loss of wealth was paired with the increased production of sugar with a price in free fall. The situation of the enslaved worsened. Revolt and resistance became a constant.
Historian Andres Ramos Mattei described the conditions the enslaved labored under at an Ingenio (sugar mill):
… and after the labor of cutting cane ended, they were sent to the factory where they were obligated to stay until almost midnight. The freed worked at night and less in the factory because, among other things, the infernal noise and intolerable heat of the same. The inhuman work conditions, the bad quality of life, the lack of infrastructure and the little security before accidents that occur while operating equipment and machinery, that made accidents possible and the deaths of sugar workers. [9]
During the harvest break, a group of enslaved Longoba men gathered to play nine pins at a farm in barrio Mameyal for their holiday. There, at the Cantero hacienda, an absentee owner, they quickly planned and executed their takeover of the town of Toa Baja. The group was led by Cornelio, alias Bembe, who complained of ill treatment and lack of food at his master’s hacienda, that of the widow Dona Maria de la Concepcion ‘Concha’ Pasalagua.
What ultimately ensued was the only slave uprising to succeed in its initial moments, yet ended with substantial difficulty by nearly a thousand people including several troops of militias. [10]
The death penalty in Puerto Rico, 1843
More on the consequences of these acts are discussed in Jalil Sued-Badillo’s La Pena de Muerte en Puerto Rico (2000). All cases of slave conspiracies were handled by military tribunals that condemned and executed those found guilty. In 1826, regulations were passed by Governor de la Torre and ratified in 1829. Punishments ranged from hanging and quartering from 1700s to the 1830s, then by firing squad, garrote and quartering or decapitation; or simply by decapitation, the sentence for three enslaved persons in Fajardo in 1843. [5]
Those involved with the uprising in Toa Baja came from dona Pasalagua’s hacienda, situated west of the town, a property managed by Pascasio Charbonieu, who married Maria de la Concepcion Pasalagua’s sister, Maria Belen Pasalagua Cordova. [6]
They were sentenced on the 18 May 1843.
Among the Longoba were:
Bembe (baptized Cornelio)
Enrique Longoba
Casimiro
Luis
Pedro
Lucas
and others from the hacienda owned by Francisco Cantero.
Five soldiers and Bembe were killed in the fighting. and soldiers were decorated, relatives of those who died received decorations from the government and for a few, even pensions. Below is a chart based on the list of the condemned in Sued Badillo’s La Pena de Muerte.
Chart of enslaved Longoba with charges and sentence. Sued-Badillo, “Condenados de la muerte, siglo xix.” La Pena de Muerte en Puerto Rico (2000).
This portion of the official report, Sintomas de sedicion de esclavos en un ingenio de Toa Baja – (Symptom of a sedition of slaves at a mill in Toa Baja) refers to the extensive networks among enslaved laborers:
portion of “Sintomas de sedicion de esclavos.” AHN 5066, Exp 19.
…Este Negro ha declarado estar en la conspiración varios Capatares de diferentes Haciendas de Naguabo, Caguas, Mayag.s, S.n German, Penuelas y Loiza, cuyos Priciones he mandado ejecutar por Comisionados especiales q.e les resiban acta continuo sus declaraciones inquisitiva…
..This Black has declared being in conspiracies versus various Overseers of different Haciendas in Naguabo, Caguas, Mayaguez, San German, Penuelas and Loiza, in shackles he sent orders by special Commissioners who received the acts continue their investigative questioning…
I expected to see extensive coverage of the insurrection given the number of persons involved. Yet this is the only notice in La Gazeta de Puerto Rico, the official newspaper of the Spanish government, tied to the uprising of 1843. It is short and simple, a request for bids for the repair of the Casa del Rey in the pueblo– the same building initially taken over by the enslaved laborers just days earlier.
Anuncios, Ayuntamiento de Toa-Baja, Gazeta de Puerto Rico, 1843.
Regardless of the state’s warnings and the penalty of death, resistance to enslavement continued. Executions were completed in public places or at the same haciendas, with enslaved brought from the surrounding area to witness the delivery of a tableau intended as a warning. As the price of sugar dropped, the added pressure placed by rebellion and escape by the enslaved did not end until the legal abolition of slavery in 1873.
The family who owned Longoba people
Persons owned by the viuda Pasalagua and her husband are listed in the Sociedad Puertorriqueña de Genealogia’s Collecion de Genealogia e Historia, Tomo III: Aportaciones de los naciones africanas a la familia puertorriqueña. They were divided by owner, with several enslaved people owned by the widow Pasalagua and the other those who stood to inherit from her deceased husband via the, ‘sucesión de la familia Hernandez.’
Merging of powers
Iglesia Parroquial San Pedro Apostol de Toa Baja. NPS photo, Wikipedia.
On the first of January 1833, dona Maria de la Concepcion Pasalagua and don Juan Zoilo Hernandez were married in the Iglesia de San Pedro Apostle de Toa Baja. The first of January was a time of celebration, a break between the end of harvest and the start of planting.
The Hernandez family had a tradition of producing sugar in Toa Baja and were connected to the Pasalagua Cordova bride by family, having a dispensation for “3er con 3er con 4to grado de consangunidad”, indicating the pair were second and third cousins with at least one great grandparent in common. [11]
Consanguinity in the Hernandez-Pasalagua marriage, 3er con 3er con 4to grado.
The parents of the bride, Capitan Infanteria d. Gil Pasalagua and da. Rosa de Cordova and those of the groom d. Francisco Antonio Hernandez and da. Maria de los Angeles Marrero was a union of power and commerce, representative of the island’s shift from military outpost to sugar based economy built on unsteady ground.
Even the notations on the marriage certificate point to uncertainty, observing that the marriage certificate of ‘one Jose Miguel Pasalagua and Regina Pinero were mistakenly entered in the Libro de pardos, and folio 10 corresponds to the present Libro de blancos.” (See below) [12 ] There is no date listed, and the entry bears the signature ‘Marrero’.
Edge note on Hernandez-Pasalaqua marriage, F57v 1833
The text of the edge note says:
Que la partida de Matrimonio de Jose Miguel Pasalagua y Ma. Regina Pinero queda equivocada ante halla en el libro de pardos el folio 10 corresponde al presente libro de blancos Anotado y debido ante [illeg.]
[firma] Marrero
The volumes for the Iglesia San Pedro de Apostol are not indexed. To be entered in the Libro de pardos (literally The book of browns) was to be officially marked as a person of color in society, so whether this was administrative error, or a corrective to a known situation isn’t clear. Perhaps other documents will shed more light on the situation.
As historians of slavery show, endogamy shaped the lives of the people held in slavery, particularly when small slaveholding is involved. Through marriage and inheritance, the enslaved and their communities faced any number of situations from transfer of household to outright sale and the sometimes lengthy process of potentially purchasing their freedom through coartación (self purchase).
Additional connections to the family were also created through coercion or consent. Either way, relationships were subject to an imbalance of power and the wishes of the slaveholder. More may be revealed through a combination of DNA and documentation, both oral and historical.
Notation on death of Juan Zoilo Hernandez, Toa Baja, Mar 1839, in 1833 marriage record. APSPATB F57.
Ultimately, the marriage between dona Pasalagua and her husband did not last long. Don Juan Zoilo Hernandez Marrero died in March 1839, leaving her in charge of running the property on behalf of the estate. She was a proprietor with links to family also invested in the production of sugar, and was one of numerous female slaveowners in 19th century Puerto Rico.
One of the interesting, yet at first puzzling detail is the activity of baptizing the enslaved in groups. The list of people referenced earlier in the SPG’s Tomo III: Aportaciones de los naciones africanas a la familia puertorriqueña show two clusters of people being baptized– one group that belonged to Juan Zoilo Hernandez and the other to his wife Maria Pasalagua.
Here are the baptisms of Antonio, Gabino and Loreto that took place 18 May 1842. The enslaved that belonged to the Pasalagua and Hernandez families appear in the pages of the Libro de Bautismos of San Pedro de Apostol, Toa Baja. They were baptized in groups, and are listed in Libros 8 & 9 of Bautismos; the enslaved were born in Africa, and ranged in age from 10 to 40.
Antonio, Gabino, Loreto, Baptismal record, San Pedro de Apostol, Toa Baja, L8 F251-252.
Why baptize adults? A page from Agustin Booth Corbin’s 1844 Book Second: The Spanish Colonies lays out the reasons for religious education and incorporation into Catholicism:
Agustin Booth Corbin, excerpt, Book Second: The Spanish Colonies, 1844
Limiting instruction, also meant to give teachings designed “to strengthen the authority of the masters by accommodating the slaves to submission and teaching them to endure the privations of their transient condition with the resignation that religion alone can inspire…. to encourage the religion which accustoms to submission…”
The 1826 slave code, passed in 1829, was instituted after a thousand people participated in uprisings in 1821 and more after. Article 2 of the 1826 Reglamento sobre la education, trato y ocupaciones que deben dar a sus esclavos los duenos y mayordomos en esta Isla states that the enslaved must be baptized within a year of residence or at most by two years of arrival.
This gives us a window for the purchase of the enslaved owned by the family of Juan Zoilo Hernandez and Maria Concepcion Passalagua.
Hardened beliefs versus flexible realities, denial versus possibility
However, looking back to 1806, self liberation was already a tradition of sorts, that emphasized survival and self preservation were fundamental values, and is part of the larger history of Marronage. Marronage existed in various forms in every slaveholding society in the western hemisphere, with Indian peoples forming the earliest Maroon communities in the Caribbean. As twenty to twenty-five people could run away in a single night, planter families argued they were being ruined by the loss of their human property. [14]
10 July 1806, Notice of Runaway slaves, Document XIII.3, Nistal-Moret, Esclavos profugos y cimarrones
Document XIII.3 shows a list of 18 individuals who ran away one night in June 1806 from the haciendas of Santiago Rios and the heirs of the Irishman David Quinlan. Among them were men women and children, and they took a piragua or small canoe from Rios’ plantation and made it out by the Boca havana (Mouth of Havana), with machetes and two shotguns. Two had different origins as suggested by their surnames, Manuel Congo and Miguel Franses. [15]
From Rios Plantation:
Vicente, his partner and Francisco Roman and his partner Manuel Congo, his partner and two children Zeferino Miguel Franses Ignacio Atanacio Juan de la Cruz Juan Pedro
From Quinlan’s Plantation Francisco Juaquin Francisco
By 1812, Santiago Rios was first among the main producers of sugar, together with Juan Ramos, Pablo and Santiago Cordova, Francisco Nevarez, Fernando Davila, Silvestre Roman, Francisco Antonio Hernandez, Jose Rodriguez, Francisco Salas and Jose Garcia. All were prominent political citizens who held posts in Toa Baja’s Junta de Visita, and in 1813, the Town Council comprised Francisco Hernandez as Alcalde (Mayor), Santiago de Cordova, Jose Narcisco Salgado and Francisco Marrero were Regidores; Francisco Salas as Sindico Procurador and Jose Maria Ramirez as Caballero Regidor. They were also important hacendados, (plantation owners). [16]
One can see that the Hernandez-Passalagua marriage involved Francisco Antonio Hernandez, as father of the groom, and Santiago Cordova, who is likely related to the bride via her mother; Francisco Marrero may have still been Regidor of Toa Baja in 1833.
This union translated into a level of power over those who toiled the land. Despite the interwoven nature of power and sugar production over the lives of the enslaved, they continued to resist.
Calling their names- Restoring the visibility of resistance
Wikipedia; By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55162574
Earlier histories of Puerto Rico do not mention the 1843 uprising. Loida Figueroa’s History of Puerto Rico [17] made an effort to acknowledge the African presence in PR history by designating a separate chapter to cover the history of resistance and racial categorizations, along with the legal structure of the Slave Trade. She provides one of the earliest challenges to the nascent historiography of slavery prior to the work of historians during the 1980s, when the first studies began putting slavery at the center of research.
Loida Figueroa on the 1843 rebellion, History of Puerto Rico, p.449
Yet here, the slave revolt of Toa Baja receives a few sentences noting that “the necessary solidarity did not exist among them all.” Figueroa Mercado adds the observation by historian Luis Diaz Soler, author of Historia de esclavitud en Puerto Rico, who made the remarkable claim that “no racial hatred existed on Puerto Rico.” She strove to point to the paternalistic view that colored some of Diaz Soler’s Historia, which for over 40 years was the only extended work on the history of slavery in Puerto Rico.
Silence on the continuous history of slave resistance in Puerto Rican historiography began to change after the 1960s, in part of public calls for recognition through civil and human rights movements that emerged in the wake of world wars, Jim Crow and mass industrialization. These connections are is what we in BlackProGen are actively working through in our respective blogs.
Enslaved workers unloading ice in Cuba, 1832
They Are We: Sierra Leone – Cuba … and Puerto Rico ?
Screenshot from They Are We site: “Yandrys, Alfredo and Cuco at the obelisk marking the site of the ingenio Santa Elena, where their ancestors were once enslaved. Matanzas, Cuba, December 2011.” Image: Unshackled Media PTV LTD, They Are Us.com
The descendants of the Ganga-Longoba in Cuba kept their traditions alive. Australian historian Emma Christopher filmed the celebration held by descendants whose enslaved ancestors labored at the Santa Elena plantation in Perico. She then screened the footage in various sites in Africa, trying to determine the origin of the traditions, sung in Banta, a language almost extinct nearly two centuries later.
Map of Perico within Matanzas Province. Wikipedia.
This led Christopher to film the documentary They Are We — the title based the words uttered by the villagers in Sierra Leone upon seeing the film of Afro-Cuban community members and their traditions. Eventually, a small group of descendants was able to travel to Mokpangumba, Sierra Leone to confirm family ties and celebrate their return home some 170 years later.
The ancestor who carried the tradition to Cuba was stolen from a village in Sierra Leone and arrived in the 1820s. Josefa Ganga lived to see the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886. She brought with her songs and dances in Banta, traditions for a secret society devoted to healing, on to her daughter and granddaughter. The centrality of music, oral poetry, literal and oral history in maintaining memory exists across the Caribbean, with opportunities to reconnect these ties. As with other communities in the New World, African and Indigenous women transmit values through story-telling, poetry, song and dance. [20] For Josefa Ganga, formerly enslaved on a sugar plantation early in the nineteenth century, cultural practices offered the gift of resilience. The site these ancestors worked was known as the Ingeniero Santa Elena.
Could this community in Perico, Cuba have connections to the Longoba nation members who were bought and sold to planters in Toa Baja? While the Longoba in Puerto Rico are mentioned in the historical record, their place of origin is not named. As I noted earlier in the article, ‘Longoba’ is used as a descriptor and for one man involved in the uprising, as a surname, Enrique Longoba.
Also in Toa Baja is the Ingeniero Santa Elena, which operated from 1790. Made of pink brick, the buildings are part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, as the only surviving 18th century sugar mill on the island.
Ruins of Hacienda Santa Elena, built ca 1790. Rt.165, Toa Baja, P.R. Wikipedia
“Hacienda Santa Elena, Toa Baja, P.R.” Ferreras Pagán, José: Biografía de la Riquezas de Puerto Rico Riqueza Azucarera, 2 tomos, San Juan, s.e., 1909. 1:17.
This description from 1902 provides insight into the workings of the mill. Perhaps the map of the property lends an idea of how overwhelming the site was, and the ease with which those who wished to steal themselves could plan their escape by reaching the waterways. And they did.
Site plan, Hacienda Azucarera Santa Elena, Toa Baja. NPS
Given the proximity between Cuba and Puerto Rico, and Toa Baja’s open involvement in the illegal slave trade, it’s likely they shared the families and traditions ripped from Upper Banta Chiefdom of Mokpangumba, Sierra Leone over 170 years ago.
Worlds in a bodega
Many in Moca know how to differentiate the leaves of different varieties of plants and roots and where they grow. As a small child in the South Bronx, I learned the varieties from the refrigerated bins in bodegas, with my mother teaching me which root was which from the different shapes and skins. We bought cilantro, recao and tiny sweet red bonnet peppers, all packed in tiny brown paper bags to carry home for her sofrito for our next meal.
Embedded within the foodways that cross our paths are stories of healing and survival, carried by voices over time. [20]
Listen.
References
* “I like my history black… hold the sugar” A shout out to Joseph McGill, of The Slave Dwelling Project whose organization works to preserve slave dwellings across the US. Part of this work takes a simple visceral act of sleeping in extant slave dwellings with a group of people to connect with this fundamental and foundational history.
[1] Biodiversity and domestication of yams in West Africa: Traditional practices leading to Dioscorea rotundata Poir. Roland Dumont et al. 2005, CIRAD-IPGRI; Also see the entries on the Plant List for various agricultural references: http://www.theplantlist.org/tpl1.1/record/kew-239950
[2] Guillermo A. Baralt, Slave Revolts in Puerto Rico: Conspiracies and Uprisings, 1795-1873. Translated from Spanish by Christine AyorindeT., Marcus Weiner Publishers, (1982) 2007, 143.
A good overview of resistance in the Caribbean can be found here in Joseph Hollister’s essay http://www.slaverebellion.org/index.php?page=slave-resistances-in-latin-america
[3] Jalil Sued-Badillo, La Pena de Muerte en Puerto Rico: Retrospectiva histórica para una reflexión contemporánea. Puerto Rico: Editorial Centenario SA, 2000, 46-47
[4] Fernando Pico, Al filo del poder: Subalternos y dominantes en Puerto Rico, 1739-1910. Puerto Rico: Editorial UPR
[5] Francisco Scarano, “En peligro la libertad de todos.” Puerto Rico: Cinco Siglos de Historia, 414.
[6] Baralt, Slave Revolts in Puerto Rico 60
[7] Scarano, “En peligro la libertad de todos.” 414; Baralt, Slave Revolts in Puerto Rico.
[8] Scarano, “En peligro la libertad de todos.” 414.
[9] Quote from Andres Ramos Mattei Ramos,
“…y después que terminaba el corte diario de caña, se dirigían a la fábrica en donde los obligaban a permanecer hasta casi la medianoche. Los libres rehusaban trabajos de noche y menos en las fábricas debido a, entre otras cosas, el ruido infernal y el calor insoportable en las mismas. El trabajo inhumano, la mala calidad de vida, la poca infraestructura y la poca seguridad ante los accidentes en el manejo de los equipos y la maquinaria, hacia posible los accidentes y las muertes de los trabajadores del azúcar.”
Andres Ramos Mattei, La hacienda azucarera: su crecimiento y crisis en Puerto Rico (Siglo XIX), San Juan: CEREP, 1981. Quoted in German Diaz Maldonado, “Rebeliones de negros esclavos en Puerto Rico durante el primer tercio del siglo XIX: ensayo historiográfico.” 20 May 2016. Academia.edu.
[10] Scarano, “En peligro la libertad de todos.” 414
[11] APISPA, Toa Baja. Libro de Matrimonios, F57
[12 ] APISPA, Toa Baja. Libro de Matrimonios, F57
[13] APISPA, Toa Baja. Libro de Bautismos, 8B (1835-1843) 251v
[15] “10 Julio 1806, Noticia de esclavos profugos.” (10 July 1806, Notice of Runaway slaves), Document XIII.3, Benjamin Nistal-Moret, Esclavos profugos y cimarrones: Puerto Rico, 1770-1870. Editorial UPR, 1984, 242-243.
[16] Baralt, 90
[17] Loida Figueroa Mercado, “Chapter XII 1. The negro element in the formation of the Puerto Rican nation.” History of Puerto Rico: From the beginning to the 1892. NY: L.A. Publishing Company, Inc. 1977, 247-275.
[18] Sociedad Puertorriqueña de Genealogia’s Catalogó de Africanos
[20] Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, “An African View of Transatlantic Slavery and the Role of Oral Testimony in Creating a New Legacy.” Anthony Tibbles, ed. Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity. National Museums and Galleries of Derbyside, 1994, 105-110.
Note: This is an updated version of an earlier blog post on El Orgullo de ser Mocano.
