Mateo Pérez Sanjurjo was a black agricultural worker from Torrecilla Baja, known today as Piñones and located in the Northeastern coastal town of Loíza, Puerto Rico; home to a historically black community.Footnote 1 Since the late 1890s, Pérez Sanjurjo travelled every Tuesday and Thursday to the capital city of San Juan with his grandfather, Francisco Pérez Romero, to sell their farmland's produce at the Plaza del Mercado (marketplace). They arrived before the break of dawn and by noon packed unsold products to make their way towards the bay for their boat ride home. Yet, on a Thursday afternoon in April 1898, their routine was altered. They were approached by a tall white woman with a purple headscarf and a moño parao (hair bun). The mysterious woman asked Mateo's grandfather to take her with him. Astonished, he quickly replied, “Yo no ando con mujeres” (I do not stroll around with women). Instead of walking away, she insisted, got closer to him, and whispered a few words.Footnote 2
To Pérez Sanjurjo's surprise, his grandfather agreed to bring the stranger along. When they arrived home, Pérez Romero immediately talked to his wife Leocadia Ayala de Pérez in private. Instead of scourging him for bringing home a woman, she immediately brought a hammock and some blankets for the unexpected guest. The next morning, and as a symbol of hospitality, Leocadia filled the table with homemade cheese, sweet potatoes, water crackers, and coffee, “not by the cups but by the buckets (bombos).” The moño parao woman turned out to be a man. It was Santiago Iglesias Pantín, one of the nascent labor movement's leaders that had dressed as a woman to evade San Juan's municipal authorities.Footnote 3
After that morning, Pérez Sanjurjo and Santiago Iglesias Pantín developed a lifelong friendship. They referred to each other as “The Great Mateo” and “Maestro Iglesias,” respectively. Pantín went on to become a famed labor leader, presiding over Puerto Rico's Federación Libre de Trabajadores (Federation of Free Workers, hereafter Federacíon Libre) for over four decades. He also made a name for himself in the island's political scene, serving as senator and later, in 1932 until his death in 1939, as resident commissioner, then the highest elective office in Puerto Rico. His life was mythicized through worker's print media and historical narratives as “the creator of the labor movement.”Footnote 4 Yet, the same archives that created those myths were the ones that rendered blackness and women invisible. Thus, while Pantín was celebrated and immortalized through historical production, monuments, and labor rituals, others, such as his friend Pérez Sanjurjo, were strategically silenced.
Following Lorgia García-Peña's work on the Dominican Republic, this essay argues that in the late nineteenth century, Puerto Rican liberals built the “Archive of Puertorriqueñidad” through “historical documents, literary texts, monuments, and cultural representations sustaining national ideology.”Footnote 5 Integral to the creation of that national archive was the silencing of race.Footnote 6 Instead of challenging those silencing practices, the nascent labor movement and its cadre of intellectuals reproduced them through print media, cultural production, and history making. This article builds on previous Puerto Rican labor historiography but argues that those silences not only operated in the moment they were created but still do so with great transhistorical power. The first section presents the historical context of late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, from the abolition of slavery to the rise of the organized labor movement. It then turns to two case studies, the life stories of Pérez Sanjurjo and Juana Colón, two black illiterate labor organizers. Both were cherished members of their local labor communities but were eventually erased from working-class histories. Ultimately, this article seeks to create counterarchives by unearthing, imagining, and retelling the lives of those that were erased from history. As I argue in the conclusion, recovering people like Colón and Pérez Sanjurjo in the historical record entails different processes of knowledge archeology. However, affirming their presence can help us disrupt inherited fictions and violent erasures that have been crucial in sustaining discourses of anti-blackness in Puerto Rico.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a cluster of self-educated individuals that auto-identified as obreros ilustrados (most of them skilled workers from urban centers) effectively dominated the means of workers' knowledge production, reproduction, and documentation.Footnote 7 Labor leaders and obreros ilustados wanted to be incorporated into the national mythology. In Puerto Rico, as in other places, there was not one hegemonic national archive but other minor or marginal archives that served the structure and logic of the archive of puertorriqueñidad through the perpetuation and erasure of those deemed outside of the whitened, patriarchal national project. To be legible in the archive of puertorriqueñidad—an archive crossed by centuries of colonialism, slavery, and imperial violence—obreros ilustrados created an intellectual archive that silenced and erased those workers that did not fit their whitened and male idealized worker identity. However, the exclusion of blackness was not necessarily tied to black bodies, as black workers were allowed participation in different echelons of the labor organizations these workers created. Instead, obreros ilustrados affiliated with the Federación Libre and the Socialist Party sought to silence any racial discourse, as well as the histories of those that partook in practices racialized as black and, thus coded as backwards, foreign, and non-civilized.
In the 1970s, Puerto Rican historians and social scientists led a historiographical revisionist movement that centered around workers and “los de abajo” (those from below). However, it was mostly done through the lens of class. Around that same time, feminist scholars began paying attention to workingwomen, but it was not until the 1990s that scholars like María del Carmen Baerga and Ivette Marie Rivera-Giusti began exploring the construction of feminity and masculinity in the organized labor movement by incorporating gender as a category of analysis.Footnote 8 Until then, scholars of the organized labor movement in Puerto Rico had also mostly overlooked blackness and race.
The pathbreaking works of Eileen J. Suárez-Findlay and later Ileana Rodríguez-Silva explored the intersections of race, gender, and class at the turn of the twentieth-century Puerto Rico. For Suárez-Findlay, labor leaders began articulating a discourse that denounced racial prejudice within the working classes. However, Rodríguez-Silva contested that while that was true of certain individuals, it was not representative of the labor movement as a whole. According to Rodríguez-Silva, the short-lasting Federación Regional de Trabajadores (Regional Federation of Workers) openly discussed race, while the Federación Libre sought to articulate a class-based trope that silenced race.Footnote 9 Both Suárez-Findlay and Rodríguez-Silva limited their analysis to the organized labor movement's early days. However, it is important to note that the Federación Libre came to dominate the world of labor unions without a serious rival until the 1930s when its hegemony began to shatter. The Federación Libre and the Socialist Party not only sought to control the organized labor movement but to also hegemonize the production of history. While crafting the first histories of the labor movement, obreros ilustrados affiliated to these organizations became the self-assigned interlocutors of the Puerto Rican working classes.
The stories of people like Pérez Sanjurjo and Colón were part of a “history silenced both as it was happening and as it was later narrated.”Footnote 10 The archive created by obreros ilustrados at the turn of the twentieth century became the blueprint used by radical historians in the 1970s to rethink Puerto Rican history. For example, Ángel Quintero Rivera published his massively influential edited volume Lucha obrera en Puerto Rico (Workers' Struggle in Puerto Rico) in 1971. The book became a turning point in Puerto Rican historiography. In the opening page, Quintero-Rivera made his political project explicit: “The history given to us as ours is not our history but the mythology of a social class.”Footnote 11 He was referring to the historical tradition his generation had inherited, mostly focused on the messianic histories of great men as women and the lower classes were largely absent. However, we need to resignify Quintero-Rivera's statement: “The history given to us as ours is not our history but the mythology created by the self-assigned interlocutors of the working classes.”
People like Pérez Sanjurjo are still absent because obreros ilustrados did not deem the many Pérez Sanjurjos and Colóns as worthy of being represented in the historical record at a moment when the majority of Puerto Rican workers were black, illiterate, and from non-skilled trades. Workingwomen, and more so if they were black, confronted multiple layers of oppression not faced by men while they asserted their voices in a male-dominated labor movement and a deeply patriarchal society. The first trade to allow workingwomen into workshops at the turn of the twentieth century was cigarmaking, but it will not be until the 1930s—when universal suffrage became legal—that women came to occupy leadership positions within the Socialist Party. While workingwomen began organizing militant unions and had been active participants in the labor movement since its early days, they were distrusted by obreros ilustrados and the Federación Libre's leadership.
Much like Pantín, who dressed as a woman to become invisible to the eyes of the state, workingwomen were erased from the historical narratives obreros ilustrados crafted and that laid the foundation for labor's intellectual archive. In the 1970s, feminist scholars succeeded in telling their stories and creating counterarhives that challenged male dominated historical narratives.Footnote 12 However, an undersrtanding of the multiple ways gender and race intersected in the construction of working-class historical narratives is still missing. “The archive,” argued Michel Foucault, “is the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.”Footnote 13 By telling the story of Colón, this article hopes to disrupt labor's intellectual archive and shed light on the ways it operates through the production and reproduction of systems of oppressions.
It is also important to note that in early twentieth century Puerto Rico, race was not static but actively produced through gendered understandings of social life.Footnote 14 The cultural elite feminized blackness and all traits they associated with it—“sensual” dancing, the use of ancestral medicine, and practicing non-Western religiosity, among other things. The labor movement and its cadre of intellectuals also excluded and feminized practices that did not fit their (white) Eurocentric project of working-class enlightenment. Ultimately, since the world of labor and its historical representation were imagined as male, those deemed outside of it—those considered too African, non-unionized workers, and peasants—were feminized. Nevertheless, these silencing processes were porous.
Pérez Sanjurjo upheld, enacted, and was proud of his black masculinity, but he was, nonetheless, casted outside of history by those who, in the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, had the archival power “to define what is and what is not a serious object of research, and, therefore, of mention.”Footnote 15 Pérez Sanjurjo continues to be invisible, while the people of Comerío created a popular archive that was able to rescue Colón from the lingering penumbra of historical silence. As Saidiya Hartman has argued, “the history of black counter-historical projects is one of failure, precisely because these accounts have never been able to install themselves as history, but rather are insurgent, disruptive narratives that are marginalized and derailed before they ever gain footing.”Footnote 16 It is precisely within the insurgent and disruptive nature of these erasures that I locate my argument because, as María Josefina Saldaña Portillo has noted, “silence is the site at which alterity and universality converge.”Footnote 17 Using Hartman and Saldaña Portillo's approaches to silencing and epistemic insurgency, this article centers the voices, lives, and stories of Pérez Sanjurjo and Colón in hopes of decentering labor's intellectual archive.
From Slavery to the Organized Labor Movement
Ever since the early stages of Spanish colonization, chattel slavery became an integral part of Puerto Rican society as the conquest's genocidal impulse almost extinguished the island's indigenous population in just a few decades.Footnote 18 The conquest of Borikén (the archipelago of Puerto Rico's indigenous name) started in 1508, and it was fueled by indigenous slave labor. While the number of Taíno people that inhabited the archipelago remains part of a larger historiographical debate, historian Francisco Moscoso argues that there were about 110,000 indigenous people at the beginning of the conquest.Footnote 19 They were forced to work in goldfields and thousands died of fever, overwork, and undernourishment. Barely two decades after the conquest began, only a few dozen Taíno people were identified in Spanish official sources. However, scholars have demonstrated that those that survived fled to the mountains and created runaway indigenous communities, living beyond the limits of the state.Footnote 20
Throughout the following centuries, the flow of enslaved people imported to the Puerto Rican archipelago fluctuated and depended on local economic patterns. Historians have identified two major influxes of enslaved people from Africa in the sixteenth and the late seventeenth centuries.Footnote 21 By the nineteenth century, Puerto Rico was a slave colony. In 1866, there were 41,738 enslaved people, along with 241,037 free people of color and 300,406 whites. The number of enslaved people would have been certainly higher if it was not for the international political climate where England sought to abolish and police the slave trade, as well as the 1855–1856 cholera epidemic in Puerto Rico.Footnote 22
To counter international abolitionist impulses, the Spanish colonial government enacted a series of laws to control and redefine labor, oftentimes blurring the line between freed and forced work. The ghost of the 1791 Haitian Revolution haunted white elites, more so with an increasing number of slave revolts multiplying throughout Puerto Rico.Footnote 23 To add to the elite's anxieties, by the 1860s a third of the clase propietaria (landowning class) was composed of freed black men. The new regimes of labor criminalized vagrancy, heavily controlled mobility, and created multiple labor identities.Footnote 24
Building on an 1838 legislation, governor Miguel de la Torre established what became known as the Régimen de la libreta de jornaleros (the laborer's notebook regime), where non-property owning laborers needed to carry a notebook at all times signed by landowners as proof of employment. From a legal perspective, in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, race was neither static nor biologically bound; it was often negotiated through and tied to, honor, social status, and property.Footnote 25 However, although the libreta applied to people across races, “black skin and worker status [often] went hand in hand.”Footnote 26 After the abolition of slavery, the state consolidated various mechanisms of power to control laborers. For example, although the libreta system was abolished along with slavery in March 1873, most of the repressive logics that articulated these systems of forced labor were kept in place. In fact, racial slavery was not abolished immediately, but those enslaved had to work for their former masters, or arrange to work with a new master, for three years and did not receive citizen rights until 1878.Footnote 27
In the late nineteenth century, liberal intellectuals—mostly young white men educated in Europe or the United States and that belonged to the emerging professional classes—articulated their modernizing projects around abolition. Contesting discourses found common ground in the idea of mental emancipation and moral regeneration, locating their material expression in the abolition of slavery.Footnote 28 As Salvador Brau, one of the most important contemporaneous liberal thinkers noted, planters and landowners sent their sons to study abroad in Europe, and they came back with the most fervent anti-slavery, liberal ideas.Footnote 29
This new emerging class of liberal professionals reconfigured the country's political sphere during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, employing a discourse of gratitude in which former slaves were portrayed as morally indebted to liberals.Footnote 30 They also began crafting the archive of puertorriqueñidad, accompanied with the birth of Puerto Rico's historiography. National myths, origin stories, and a sense of belonging were imagined to be contained within historical records. This also gave way to a national trope that swiftly took over intellectual and political spaces, and still operates until the present day: The Great Puerto Rican Family.Footnote 31 This nineteenth-century trope, as Carlos Alamo-Pastrana has argued, “discursively constructs Puerto Rico as a patriarchal, inclusive, and mestizo nation.”Footnote 32
The US occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898 did not provide an epistemic rupture, but there was a continuation of these discourses. In fact, after the occupation, most of the nineteenth century liberal intellectuals that built the archive of puertorriqueñidad were appointed to government offices and became elected officials; all while the state created new social and legal structures to control the island's populace.Footnote 33 Although urban workers and artisans had been organizing a loose network of mutual aid societies and casinos since the 1870s, the US occupation provided a legal structure for the creation of labor unions. Barely three months after the military had marched through San Juan, workers created their first labor federation, the Federación Regional de Trabajadores. Through its auspices workers organized strikes across Puerto Rico, celebrated May Day, and demanded the eight-hour workday.Footnote 34
The following year, in 1899, a group of workers split from that labor federation to create a new one, the Federación Libre. The latter became a longstanding organization that dominated the world of unions until the 1930s. Given its political networks, island-wide reach, and its institutional affiliations (joining the American Federation of Labor umbrella in 1902), the Federación Libre quickly overshadowed the Federación Regional, which by the 1910s became barely operational beyond San Juan.Footnote 35 In 1915, members of the Federación Libre got together in the highlands of Cayey to create the Socialist Party. The party became a force to be reckoned with during the 1920s, conquering electoral success in 1932 and 1936 after forging a political alliance with the Republican Party.Footnote 36
The world of labor, however, was not limited to unions and politics. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, a cluster of self-educated workers that called themselves obreros ilustrados (enlightened workers) began experimenting with different forms of knowledge production. In the margins of the island's cultural elite, a handful of workers published dozens of books, newspapers, and theatrical plays. In sum, they created a vibrant intellectual community that allowed them to craft notions of self, to affirm the idea of belonging to a global labor movement, and, ultimately, to produce their own historical narratives. It is important to note, however, that these clusters of self-educated urban skilled organized into labor unions were relatively small in comparison to most Puerto Rican workers at the turn of the century. The vast majority resided in rural spaces, were iliterate, and did not sing radical political songs.
The intellectual community created by obreros ilustrados emerged from a descentralized network of urban nodes connected through print media and labor unions. By the 1920s, the Federación Libre and the Socialist Party dominated labor's modes of knowledge production because of the vast economic resources they had amassed. For example, non-Federación Libre newspapers survived precariously for a few months at best, and most were not physically archived, thus disappearing from history. The early-twentieth-century labor histories we have inherited—most of which were produced after the 1970s historiographical revolution from below—are the product of a cluster of obreros ilustrados that imagined themselves as the working-classes' self-asigned interlocutors and carefully crafted labor's intellectual archive.
Ever since its foundation in 1899, the Federación Libre's cadre of intellectuals promoted a “raceless” discourse that favored “class” over other identities.Footnote 37 The Federación Libre also used these intellectuals to validate and spread these discursive tropes beyond the world of unions. While constructing an idealized worker identity as male and raceless, these obreros ilustrados tapped into contemporaneous patriarchal discourses promoted by the archive of puertorriqueñidad. Footnote 38 Ramón Romero Rosa, a black typographer that became the Federación Libre's first public intellectual, offers a clear example.
Romero Rosa edited various newspapers, published columns in the bourgeois and labor press, and published at least nine books from 1901 to 1906. The subtitle of his 1906 book, Musarañas (Vermin) summarized his opinion, “Brief Treatise About Certain Worries and Customs that Are Obstacles for Puerto Rican Workers' Understanding of Labor's Universal Redeeming Ideals.” For Rosa, the term “universal” was a synonym for Western civilization. According to him, women were more susceptible to superstition and religious indoctrination. Since workers received their first and sometimes only education from their mothers at home, Rosa argued that women perpetuated the social cycle of ignorance. He wrote, “Having their brains filled with such ridicule and fatal concerns, it is not possible for a country to walk towards the path of economic emancipation, which is the only way of establishing happiness and joy in this world.”Footnote 39
However, ignorance was not the only thing Rosa feminized; he did the same with blackness, which he equated with ignorance. According to Rosa, after the Spanish exterminated the island's indigenous population, they imported “the poor [African] black who was living in crass ignorance.” He continued, “It is known that countries that live in ignorance only produce stupidity. Everything that the wretched African black's brain produces has to be the daughter of fraud.” In ignorance and superstition, Rosa argued, “The white [man] was our father. The black [woman] was our mother.”Footnote 40
By equating blackness and femininity with ignorance, Rosa was not producing a deviant narrative. He was, in fact, reproducing Puerto Rican elites' conception of these two social groups. As Eileen Suárez Findlay argued, “The Liberals sought to free their island, their class, and implicitly themselves from the emasculating, all too African sensuality that they feared. Creating a civilized society and bourgeoisie required a disciplined march toward rational, de-Africanized virility.”Footnote 41 At a moment when a great number of Puerto Rican workers were black and women gradually entered the labor market, the Federación Libre used its cadre of intellectuals to downplay and silence both gender and race from their discourses. To challenge these erasures, the following pages emphasize, imagine, and historicize the names and lives of two workers that were supposed to remain unnamed: Mateo Pérez Sanjurjo and Juana Colón.
The Life of Mateo Pérez Sanjurjo
Mateo Pérez Sanjurjo was born in 1881 in Torrecilla Baja, Loíza and died ninety-five years later in the same place. Born a generation away from slavery, he worked in his grandfather's farmland since his sixth birthday. His grandfather saved enough money to buy two hundred acres of land with his relative José Romero. Both families lived and worked the land. Pérez Sanjurjo started moving cattle but as he grew older, he harvested rice and corn. After 1893, at the age of twelve, Pérez Sanjurjo accompanied his grandfather on his bi-weekly trips to San Juan. Unlike most Puerto Rican working families, they lived well. They even handed out spare milk and homemade cheese to neighbors and workers passing by.Footnote 42
However, at a young age, Pérez Sanjurjo understood the dangers of being black in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Even though his family enjoyed a certain wealth, the Spanish civil guard constantly harassed them. On more than one occasion, they were stopped, humiliated, and beaten by guards who called them “mambiches.” The term was used to refer to members of the Cuban Liberation Army fighting against the Spanish government in the neighboring Caribbean island. Since many Cuban fighters were of African descent, the use of the term in Puerto Rico was racially charged. To stay safe, and building on a broader cimarrón (runaway) tradition, Pérez Sanjurjo and his grandfather memorized the guard's patrol times and dates. They developed alternative routes to evade guards on their way to San Juan, while also adjusting their schedules accordingly.Footnote 43
By 1899, the municipality of Loíza had a total population of 12,522. Out of those, the census identified 6,887 (55.7 percent) as “colored.”Footnote 44 Only 63 people (0.5 percent of the population) had received any form of higher education. Barely 937 of those over the age of ten could read or write.Footnote 45 Pérez Sanjurjo was not one of them; he was illiterate. The only formal education he received was from night schools, which he attended for a total of fourteen weeks.Footnote 46 Yet in a world were state education was scarce, workers used alternate ways of learning. Pérez Sanjurjo recalled absorbing everything he knew about Europe, history, kings, generals, and something about every single municipality in Puerto Rico from troubadours. Stemming from the medieval custom of writing and singing, these folk musicians were a significant component of Puerto Rican peasants' cultural worlds. Pérez Sanjurjo befriended many of them, including Cándido Parrilla. The latter became one of the most revered troubadours in Puerto Rican history, landing a government contract in 1929 and writing various books on the subject.Footnote 47
Pérez Sanjurjo also participated in Loíza's Casino de Artesanos. These were socializing spaces created by artisans during the last decades of the nineteenth century. There, members could mingle among people of “their own category.” Casinos, as some scholars have argued, emulated the elites' cultural organizations.Footnote 48 Nonetheless, they also served a key role in the creation of community. Although Pérez Sanjurjo was not an artisan but an agricultural worker, he was allowed in the Casino on certain nights when “people of his same category” could attend.Footnote 49
Since Perez Sanjurjo was illiterate and did not posses a skilled trade, being able to join a Casino de Artesanos also became a mark of status, distancing Pérez Sanjurjo from other agricultural workers. By 1909 he owned some land and had several agricultural workers under contract. He now was a patrono (boss), and this is perhaps why he was allowed into the Casino. However, he identified “with the humble class” and decided to join the Federación Libre. Pérez Sanjurjo recalled going to the labor federation's venue in Loíza and saying: “Comrades, I am a small landowner with 87 acres of land and after covering all related expenses I make about 3 to 4,000 dollars annually [roughly $90,000 to $106,000 in 2018; a hefty sum for 1909].”Footnote 50 During those years, the Federación Libre had very little success in organizing countryside workers. In 1907, two years before Pérez Sanjurjo joined, there were only 223 unionized agricultural workers. That accounted for 0.1 percent of the country's rural labor force.Footnote 51 The agrarian division of labor made unionization an uphill battle. Small landowners like Pérez Sanjurjo employed some workers, while others had direct contracts with US companies that owned large amounts of lands. Lack of formal labor unions or legislation often translated into perilous job conditions, unpredictable pay, and precarious lifestyles.Footnote 52
Pérez Sanjurjo understood the contradictory nature of being a small landowner affiliated with the Federación Libre. He argued, “I struggled against the capitalist system and against myself, because I was but one of them.”Footnote 53 In terms of organizing rural workers, Pérez Sanjurjo was an asset for the labor federation. He served as a direct link between the island-wide federation and workers in the countryside. At times of labor mobilizations, he put his horses and cars at the federation's disposal. Likewise, every Monday he travelled throughout municipalities in the Eastern district, such as Ceiba and Río Grande, to agitate and propagate unionization among sugarcane workers. And he was somewhat successful. While not many joined the Federación Libre, when sugarcane workers needed to negotiate with their bosses, he was called to intervene.Footnote 54
Pérez Sanjurjo dates his first successful strike as an organizer to 1907. Although he was not even a Federación Libre member yet, the local labor community trusted him enough to sit the negotiating table. Workers demanded a raise in their salaries. They called a strike, stopped working, and marched through the countryside proudly carrying their red flags. Soon, their event was abruptly disrupted, not by police officials or rompe huelgas (scabs), but by oxen. The red flags triggered the animals and workers had to run away to safety.Footnote 55 Meanwhile, Eduardo Conde and Rafael Alonso Torres, two members of the Federación Libre's executive committee, joined Pérez Sanjurjo and negotiated with several landowners to put an end to the strike. To appear sympathetic, one landowner argued: “We understand that workers are right but they cannot be so demanding …” Pérez Sanjurjo interrupted him and said: “Well, you know about sugarcane, right? Good. I do as well but so it happens that you are all vulgar and lambíos (suckups).”Footnote 56 He recalled: “I was a negro parejero (sassy negro). I was a tyrant; I was not going to present myself as a saint. No!”Footnote 57 Thus, while blackness was feminized by some obreros ilustrados like Rosa, Pérez Sanjurjo upheld and was proud of his Black masculinity.Footnote 58
As historian Suárez-Findlay has demonstrated, where people lived was a marker of social status and was also racialized. Suárez-Findlay argued, in relation to the Southern town of Ponce, “The lower middle classes—shopkeepers, clerks, accountants, and the like—counted many people claiming to be white in their ranks. These men and women … lived and worked in close quarters with Afro-Puerto Ricans and impoverished whites, sharing neighborhoods and similar living conditions.”Footnote 59 Although Pérez Sanjurjo did not consider himself white, he did live in Loíza in close proximity to members of the lower classes. This posed a problem for Pérez Sanjurjo because, as Suárez-Findlay also argued, “Their close proximity to the poorest and darkest sectors of…society made their social position quite fragile.”Footnote 60 Thus, Pérez Sanjurjo used his clothing to transgress the era's racial stereotypes and to show off his economic success. He recalled, “There are times when I do not have anything to eat but I always have extra suits and shoes. People usually think that I have a laundromat because I have a different suit for every day.”Footnote 61 Being well dressed was a constant source of anxiety for labor leaders. For example, the already-mentioned Rosa wrote about how after being elected to Puerto Rico's House of Delegates, he was mocked for not having appropriate clothing.Footnote 62 “I was Black,” Pérez Sanjurjo recalled, “but I was always well dressed.”Footnote 63
In 1914, Pérez Sanjurjo ran for mayor of Loíza through the Partido Obrero Insular, accruing only six votes.Footnote 64 Notwithstanding his electoral defeat, he befriended many labor leaders like Santiago Iglesias and Rafael Alonso Torres that became key players in Puerto Rican politics. However, Pérez Sanjurjo was excluded from any leadership position within the Federación Libre or the Socialist Party. Furthermore, Pérez Sanjurjo was not part of the historical narratives working-class intellectuals created about the labor movement. Perhaps it was because he was proud of being a negro parejero at a moment when the island's leading labor federation silenced any racial discourse among its intellectual ranks. He was wealthy and well dressed—two socially respectable traits—but he was still black, unskilled, and illiterate, which rendered him invisible within the archive of puertorriqueñidad and labor's intellectual archive. Ten years before Pérez Sanjurjo's passing in 1977, workers in the northern town of Comerío mourned the death of another local leader, Juana Colón. Like Pérez Sanjurjo, she was black, illiterate, and an arduous labor organizer. However, being a woman added another layer of oppression to navigate.
Juana Colón: Comerío's Joan of Arc
Like Mateo Pérez Sanjurjo, Juana Colón was born a generation away from slavery on March 27, 1886. All of her relatives from great-grandparents to her parents had been enslaved. As William Fred Santiago, former president of Puerto Rico's Bar Association and a neighbor of Comerío once said, “Juana Colón had the carimbo [slave mark] in her four sides. She was Black, poor, slave descendant, and illiterate.”Footnote 65 Her last name, Colón, was that of her family's former master, Julián Colón Rivera; a reminder of a slave past that accompanied her throughout life.Footnote 66 At the turn of the twentieth century, women—especially black and mulatto women—often worked in agricultural fields or were employed as servants, laundresses, and steamers.Footnote 67 Back then, women held various jobs, often simultaneously. In Puerto Rico, there was a total female population of 480,982, and only 21.3 percent (around 102,449) were employed in what the 1899 census considered “gainful occupations.” Out of those, 78.4 percent of the women that worked in domestic and personal services were their household's primary breadwinners.Footnote 68
Colón came of age working in a coffee plantation in Comerío. After she married, she earned a living as a laundress and planchadora (steamer). She charged twelve cents for a dozen pieces of clothing. Every morning, Colón arrived at the river to start her work along with other laundresses. Each woman previously agreed to bring something to eat, sharing lunch collectively. Since factory work in tobacco manufacturing only took place three or four months a year, women had multiple jobs, often as laundresses or planchadoras.Footnote 69 For laundresses, their workplaces became spaces where they could get to know each other, create community, and build solidarity across trades. At noon, Colón went back home to cook for her family and those in her barrio that lacked food, before spending the rest of her day ironing until five or six in the evening.Footnote 70
Having worked since childhood, Colón never attended school or learned how to read or write. Nonetheless, she possessed other types of knowledges that were not legitimized by the intellectual elite or the educational system. Throughout Comerío, she was known as a santiguadora or barrio healer. One of her neighbors recalled, “She was a healer, like her brother Pablo Colón (known as Mechor), she tenía el conocimiento (had the knowledge) on how to prepare potions for different illnesses, including venereal. Santiguando (healing) she was a professional.”Footnote 71
At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States sought to institutionalize medical practices to modernize and civilize the country.Footnote 72 Yet, Colón continued using alternative medicinal methods, probably handed down from her enslaved ancestors.Footnote 73 She had a room to receive patients in her house and did not formally charge for her services, only accepting donations that did not exceed five cents. Those who could not pay brought produce from their farmlands or chickens as a way of bartering for services. Despite her illiteracy, her practice was legitimized by the townspeople who consulted her or brought their children when they lacked access to doctors.Footnote 74
While the scarcity of sources does not allow us to look deeper into Colón's spirituality and how it connected to her medical practice, she frequently treated neighbors that claimed they had been hexed.Footnote 75 Thus, her practice was not limited to the physical world but also had spiritual coordinates that were illegible to medicine's scientific approaches and to our historical eyes. While resisting state-sponsored medicine, Colón's healing praxis challenged working-class intellectuals' silencing practices. For example, the already-cited Rosa lashed out against religion and spirituality. He wrote, “witchcraft, spells, curses, and the evil eye, among other nonsense,” are “‘products’ imported to Puerto Rico through the poor African's brain, brought by colonization.”Footnote 76 These practices were looked down upon as mere superstition and symbols of backwardness. On the contrary, for Colón, the practice of santiguar perhaps was a way to connect with past ancestors, to give back to her community, or maybe it was simply a way of being in the world. Whatever her reasons, it functioned as a site of resistance against civilizing agendas from both the state and the labor movement's intellectual elite.
While Colón never worked in a tobacco factory, she befriended many female tobacco strippers, probably because they also had to be employed as laundresses to generate extra income. Thus, when cigar workers organized two major strikes in 1917 and 1919, Colón was at the center of the action. She is remembered for bravely fighting against police officers with rocks. Afterwards, the townspeople started calling her Comerío's Joan of Arc. The nickname highlighted Colón's daring audacity of putting her body on the line for her cigarmaking comrades even when she did not work in the tobacco industry.
Those strikes also launched Colón's activism in local politics, particularly through the Socialist Party, which she help found in Comerío.Footnote 77 It was perhaps Colón's participation in the party that allowed her to become one of the town's most prominent socialist leaders. She collaborated with Perico Santiago, Manuel Arroyo, and Antonio Alvelo, as well as workingwomen such as Malela, Cayita, and Yuya.Footnote 78 Unfortunately, we only know the first names of these workingwomen, as their lives have eluded historical records and are absent from the labor movement's histories.
In the following decades, Colón frequently used the tribuna (soapbox) to support labor struggles, as well as to promote the Socialist Party's agenda. She actively participated in the party's 1932, 1936, and 1940 electoral campaigns.Footnote 79 William Fred Santiago remembered her as “a natural orator, witty, profound, and logical. Her grammar, diction, and rhetoric were obviously flawed, but her power of convincing and persuasion, as well as her sincerity, captivated her public and the stage.”Footnote 80 Oral histories also attest to her participation in other municipalities' mítines (political demonstrations), such as Bayamón, San Juan, Barranquitas, and Cayey.Footnote 81
The cultural and spiritual practices that contributed to her grassroots popularity in her hometown of Comerío also (re)affirmed her blackness, and thus rendered her invisible within labor's intellectual archive. Epifanio Fiz Jiménez's books are perhaps the clearest example. Fiz Jiménez was born in Comerío in 1886 and started working as a cigarmaker at a young age. In 1915, he joined the Socialist Party and escalated its ranks quickly, becoming its second president (1916–1917), an elected member in Puerto Rico's House of Representatives (1920–1932), and later a senator (1932–1940).Footnote 82 After retiring from public and political life, Fiz Jiménez published two books: Comerío y su gente (1957) and Bayamón y su gente (1960). In its pages, readers can find historical notes from the two towns that had served as the authors' home. He also included lists of important people in the towns' annals. Notwithstanding having shared the tribuna with Colón many times, and despite her unbreakable support for the Socialist Party, which he led for some time, Colón is not mentioned once.Footnote 83 And while it is true that she was ignored by working-class intellectuals, the town of Comerío never forgot her.
The Counter-Archives of Everyday Life
When Iglesias Pantín met Mateo Pérez Sanjurjo, he dressed as a woman to evade authorities. That is, Pantín made himself invisible to the eyes of the state. This law-evading transformation is also absent from labor's intellectual archive. For example, it is not mentioned in Pantín's 1929 semi-autobiographical book Luchas emancipadoras (Emancipatory Struggles), which became one of the pillars for the consolidation of such archives. Perhaps the event did not fit into the (masculine) mythology that Pantín wanted to construct.Footnote 84 The anecdote was recovered from a rare interview given by Pérez Sanjurjo. Perhaps he recounted the story to reiterate his proximity to the “creator of the labor movement,” as the Pantín myth claimed. Most of the information about Pérez Sanjurjo used in this article stemmed from that interview's transcript. Not much is known about the interview itself, but it was conducted in the 1970s by the late labor historian Kenneth Lugo del Toro, or by one of his students. It was part of a series of interviews that were the basis for a posthumous book in which there is only a fleeting mention of Pérez Sanjurjo and, not surprisingly, blackness is completely absent.Footnote 85 Having dedicated his life to both the Federación Libre and the Socialist Party, Pérez Sanjurjo was erased form the archives that preserved these institution's histories and their political legacies. Although labor's intellectual archive was created in the early twentieth century, it was reproduced (and still is) by later labor historiographies that have built on it.
Unearthing the voices of Pérez Sanjurjo and Colón entailed two very different processes of knowledge archeology. Pérez Sanjurjo's interview transcription was hidden between other documents in a dusty university archive awaiting to be discovered. The interview was untapped by historians, perhaps because Pérez Sanjurjo did not fit the idealized whitened worker that still populates (albeit, fictionally) labor's intellectual archive. Colón's myth and memory, on the other hand, was kept alive by her hometown's folktales and corner conversations. In fact, in 1972, five years after her passing, a group of young socialists from Comerío and affiliated to the recently formed Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño (Puerto Rican Socialist Party) published a pamphlet seeking to preserve (her)story. It was only decades later, after acts of community remembrance like naming their local elementary school after their black Joan of Arc that Colón entered the guarded citadel of academia through the work of scholars such as Wilson Torres and Bianca Medina.Footnote 86
Historicizing their erasures from labor history, then, gives us the opportunity to explore the unimaginable and test the limits of our historical imagination. By telling the stories of Colón and Pérez Sajurjo, I do not want to simply add their names to a working-class canon. Neither am I seeking to incorporate them into labor's intellectual archive. Instead, documenting their positionalities and everyday lives seeks to challenge the epistemic erasures produced by the archives of puertorriqueñidad and of labor. Ultimately, the lives of those that remain unnamed can become counterarchives that can allow us to dismantle the archives created by a handful of men that imagined themselves as self-assigned interlocutors of the rest, of the unnamed. These counterachives, along with all their contradictions and complexities, can help us understand (in order to subvert) how anti-black narratives have operated for centuries and that still do so with great transhistorical power and violence in present day Puerto Rico.
