So many Negroes were brought to Puerto Rico in proportion to the white population that in the seventeenth century runaway slaves and their descendants, who had settled near San Juan, the capital, alone were strong enough to repel a British attack on the capital. These blacks, who had organized themselves into a militia, known as Los Morenos, or Moors, drove off the British commander, Sir Ralph Abercrombie, who left behind 250 dead, many prisoners, and a large quantity of supplies.10
Small as the white population of Puerto Rico was it had a considerable degree of Negro strain. As in Venezuela and Mexico, many who were visibly Negro, had themselves declared “white” by the purchase of “white” papers. A white American who visited Puerto Rico in the 1850’s says, “During the years of neglect (by Spain) it had been the custom to allow the free mulattoes to purchase or otherwise obtain “white papers” and all such persons, with their descendants have since been reckoned as whites under the denomination of ‘blancos de tierra.’ More than one hundred thousand of these “whites of the country’ figure in these returns, and Schoelcher, from whom I obtained these facts, tells us in his ‘Colonies Etrangeres,” quoting the Padre Inigo, the historian of Puerto Rico, that the greater part of the population of the island is really composed of mulattoes.”11
According to figures given by Padre Inigo Abad, who wrote about 1780, there were on the island in 1777, 29,263 whites; 33,810 pardos, or mixed bloods; 2,803 free blacks; and 6,487 slaves, or 13,837 more mulattoes and blacks than whites. And as was said, many of the whites were of Negro ancestry.
TWEEDLEDUM AND TWEEDLEDEE.
XXVII. Three Puerto Ricans in New York—Two “colored” and one “white.” Suit was brought to take the “white” child from the adopted mother, on the ground that Negroes ought not to rear white children. Which is “white” and which “colored?”
During the years that followed more blacks continued to arrive in the island and few, if any emigrated, while there has been no great immigration of whites—in short, the population has been due largely to native increase—but now, according to the United States census, it has become more than 75 per cent white.
The percentage of foreign-born on the island is less than 2 per cent, being in 1917, only 1.1 per cent. In 1920, there were only 8,167 foreign-born, and in 1930, only 6017 in a total population of 1,543,913.
The 1920 census gave 948,709 whites, and 351,062 colored; the 1930 gave 1,146,719 whites and 397,156 colored. Thus there can be but one explanation, and that is, that mulattoes continued to be “whitened” not by royal decree, as in the past, but by social sanction in order to maintain the old slave tradition of superiority over the black, or nearly black man. One fact is certain: There could not have been such a great ethnic change in only three or four generations, unless white people had poured into the island, which, as was said, they did not.
In short, if we call the European white, then it will be certainly a stretch of the imagination to call the majority of Puerto Ricans white, also. As for the prediction so often made that the whites of Puerto Rico will before long absorb the blacks, that is wild optimism. Any New Yorker may have a fair idea of a cross-section of the real Puerto Rican population by going to Harlem where there are between 80,000 and 100,000 of them.
The American Guide Series; Puerto Rico, a United States government production, says as regards the “race” of the Puerto Rican population: “According to the 1935 census persons classified as ‘colored.’ that is, Negroes and persons of white mixed and Negro blood, numbered 23.8 percent of the total population. A decrease in the number of persons reported as colored is probably due not so much to interbreeding as to a change in the concept of the census enumerators. The remark has often been made that on the mainland a drop of Negro blood makes a white man a Negro; while in Puerto Rico a drop of white blood makes a Negro a white man.”12
Puerto Rico seems to have absorbed more Indian strain than did Cuba. There were Indians on the island as late as the early nineteenth century. A large proportion of the population is what is known as jibaro, the lighter-skinned members of which, like the poor whites of the South, than whom they are even poorer, boast of their Spanish blood. But the term, jibaro, itself, savors of Negro strain. The early Spaniards called the offspring of a mulatto and an Indian with another Indian, a jibaro. Rosario, in his excellent study of the jibaros, shows that they have much of the Indian and the Negro in their ways, especially in their music. The genuine jibaros are certain Indians of Peru.
The lighter-colored Puerto Rican is very sensitive on the subject of Negro ancestry. It is a skeleton in his closet, to which it is most impolite, if not insulting, to refer Perhaps nothing irritates the average Puerto Rican mulatto more than the thought that in America, he is called a Negro. In the Puerto Rican section of Harlem, there is little or no color prejudice between its members but there are mulatto Puerto Ricans who will rarely go to the white sections of New York because while they are considered white in their own quarter, in the white sections they are looked on as Negroes.
A case of how the American dictum about color may act tragically on Puerto Rican sensitiveness—a case much cited—is that of Albizu Campos, Puerto Rican Nationalist leader, and brilliant Harvard graduate, who wound up with a ten-year prison term in Atlanta penitentiary. Campos, son of a white man and a colored woman, while at Harvard claimed to be an Indian, it is said, and was accepted, or pretended to be accepted, as such at the university, but when his class honors entitled him to represent Harvard abroad, his “Indian” blood availed naught; then he was just a colored man for whom such an honor was too high. This incident is said to have fired Albizu Campos in his determination to win freedom for Puerto Rico. As a result of his activities several persons were killed, one of them, Colonel E. F. Riggs, an American, and island chief of police. Campos, implicated in the disturbances, was found guilty.
In the Selective Service Draft of 1940 to 1942, many Puerto Ricans, very obviously mulatto, were set down as white and drafted into the Army as such. As one draft registrant said, “Putting them down as what they really are would be dynamite.” Much of the same held true for other colored men from the Latin American lands.
Surinam (Dutch Guiana)
In Surinam, the Dutch mixed freely with the blacks, who were imported in such numbers from 1667 onwards that numbers of them living in the interior, the Djukas, or Bush Negroes, not only won their independence, but forced the whites to pay them tribute.
Of all the slave colonies, Surinam seems to have been the most cruel, no doubt because of the resistance of the blacks against slavery. The Dutch women especially were very harsh to the black women of whom they were jealous because of the manner in which their white husbands abandoned them for the black girls. Stedman, who spent five years in the colony, and himself took a mulatto mistress of whom he was dotingly fond, tells of one white woman, who seeing a very beautiful black girl belonging to her husband and “observing her to be a remarkably fine figure with a sweet engaging countenance, her diabolic jealousy instantly prompted her to burn the gir’s cheek, mouth, and forehead with a red-hot iron. She also cut the tendon Achilles of one of her legs thus rendering her a monster of deformity.”13
MIXED BLOODS OF SURINAM.
XXVIII. A mulatto girl and a quadroon of Dutch Guiana In the eighteenth century. (Stedman).
The white men made very free with the black women. Stedman says, “If a Negro and his wife have ever so great an attachment for each other, the woman, if handsome must yield to the loathsome embraces of an adulterous and licentious manager or see her husband cut to pieces for endeavoring to prevent it.”14
The English seized a part of this colony in 1803, and were equally free with the Negro women, thus increasing considerably the number of mulattoes. St. Clair, who lived in the colony says, “The first thing generally done by a European on his arrival in this country is to provide himself with a mistress from among the blacks, mulattoes,