The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction: Continuity and Reclamation in Borikén (Puerto Rico)

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10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

The My th of Indigenous C ar i bbean Extinction



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Continuity and Reclamation in Borikén (Puerto Rico)

Tony Castanha



The My th of Indigenous C ar i bbean Extinction

THE MYTH OF INDIGENOUS CARIBBEAN EXTINCTION

Copyright © Tony Castanha, 2011.

First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-62025-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Castanha, Tony. The myth of indigenous Caribbean extinction : continuity and reclamation in Boriken (Puerto Rico) / Tony Castanha. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-230-62025-4 (hardback) 1. Taino Indians—Puerto Rico—History. 2. Taino Indians—First contact with Europeans—Puerto Rico. 3. Indians, Treatment of— Puerto Rico. 4. Jíbaro (Puerto Rican identity) 5. Puerto Rico— Population. 6. America—Discovery and exploration—Spanish. 7. Columbus, Christopher—Influence. I. Title. F1619.2.T3C37 2011 305.868'7295—dc22

2010025263

Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: January 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.



For my parents, and the late Ronald Arroyo




Acknowledgments

ix

Preface: Still There, Always Have Been

xi

1

A New Version of History

1

2

Mythmaking in the Caribbean

21

3

Early Resistance and Survival in Borikén

51

4

Jíbaro Resistance and Continuity

67

5

The Modern Jíbaro

89

6

Cultural Survival and the Indigenous Movement

109

7

Conclusion

133

Notes

139

Glossary

169

Bibliography

171

Index

179



Contents




This book would never have been realized if it had not been for my interviewees and the Jíbaro I have spent countless hours with. I am grateful, for they often took me in and shared their food, homes, stories, knowledge, and lives with me. I wish to especially thank Margarita Nogueras-Vidal for her time, patience, and knowledge of the deep spiritual roots of our ancestors and people, and to the late Oki Lamourt-Valentín, whose push for the dialectic is unmatched. I am very appreciative of those who helped me in other ways such as lending moral, academic, or technical support. Muchas gracias to Ibrahim Aoude, Christina Arce, Kekuni Blaisdell, Guy and John Castanha, Jeff Corntassel, Lynette Hi‘ilani Cruz, Monisha Das Gupta, Masahide Kato, Vincent Kelly Pollard, Joanna Soto-Aviles, Dominga Trusdell, Leeta Wolfblack, Warren Nishimoto, Susan Schilling, and Ty Kawika Tengan. Special thanks to Lorena García-Alejandro for all her translations, and to Nelsonrafael Collazo for the use of the replicas of the petroglyphs from his book, Imágenes del Indio Puertorriqueño. I have had my eyes on these for a long time. I would finally like to thank the members of my dissertation committee at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa—Kathryn Takara, Lou Ann Ha‘aheo Guanson, Michael Shapiro, Nevzat Soguk, Leslie Sponsel, and especially Glenn Paige—for all their help and assistance along the way.



Acknowledgments




Still There, Always Have Been They are still there. The indigenous peoples of Borikén (or Puerto Rico) are still there and have been since time immemorial. Such a statement will elicit surprise and wonder from many and skepticism and scorn from others. But it is true, and it is what will be shown in the pages that follow. I sat down a couple of years ago with a 94 year-old elder who told me both her mother and father were “indio” and that she had struggled her whole life. She used to be a cuandera (medicinal healer) and was from a northern coastal town. This woman had lived a fairly traditional lifestyle with modern amenities. I met another native elder, 106 years old by his account. He said his mother used to tell him about the atrocities the Spaniards had committed in the nineteenth century and that a lot of Indian people had been fighting them at that time. Not formally religious, he considered himself a very spiritual man who believed in reincarnation. Now these sorts of testimonials are not supposed to occur if we are talking about a people who have been “extinct” for over four and a half centuries. But I have found these types of stories to be abundant on the island. It is as if only the people themselves would refrain from amazement regarding our statement, as if only they knew of their true history. And there are many of them. They populate the many barrios of particularly the rural and mountain regions of Puerto Rico, and coastal areas too. Whole communities of Jíbaro Indian people have survived the Spanish and American colonization process and continue to practice their cultural traditions today. Indeed, I was a little surprised myself to uncover the rich body of oral history and tradition from my latest trip to Borikén. I was already aware of and had revealed in my doctoral work a few years earlier the resistance and continued survival of the indigenous inhabitants.1 Much of this study focused on the fifteenth and sixteenth-century IndoEuropean contact era leading to the late-eighteenth-century native



Preface

preface

presence. The sixteenth-century extinction theory had been unraveled. A contemporary presence was also ethnologically provided, but more so in the form of a movement or revitalization process. However, my travels and findings in 2008 would uncover a very recent history. The oral tradition and memory exposed a vivid nineteenthand twentieth-century story. This filled in the blanks of the past two hundred years. The sixteenth-century colonial period was suddenly transported forward three centuries as this immortalized era became a nineteenth-century one, since the Spanish had not colonized many areas of the island until this time. For many Jíbaro, the intruders were previously nowhere to be found on account of their will, innovation, and love of freedom. So when I was told numerous times how the Spaniards would “throw the babies up” and let them “fall on their swords,” this was a gruesome tale of indeed a recent history told by the children and grandchildren of those who had lived during the time of “el componte.” This documented period of torture during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the colonizer went “door to door” raping and pillaging, came alive through the indigenous voice. Here, representation is important in accounting for one’s knowledge and experiences.2 Indigenous peoples3 share the common bond of having experienced and endured Western imperialism, so it is vital to develop voices within communities needing representation in order to address past and present grievances and issues. As the oldest colony in the hemisphere, Puerto Rico fits this description and model quite well. Therefore, this is a very serious matter. It is not a depiction of a “romanticized” past but of a people struggling right now under Puerto Rican criollo and American “gringo” domination and control. My own personal journey of struggle had led me to this point in time, and the telling of an alternative story of our people is the impetus for this writing. My family on my mother’s side, who emigrated from Borikén to work on the sugar plantations of Hawai‘i at the turn of the twentieth century, were Jíbaro or Boricua people. In 1996, as my brother and I were strolling through a store in the sleepy rural town of Yauco where our family is from, we came upon a children’s pamphlet of colored drawings portraying the Indian people of the island. We were quite surprised and excited to see such noble depictions of the indigenous peoples, since the objective of our trip was to find out more about our family roots and native ancestry. The pamphlet provided in pictures and simple captions brief lessons in village life and some cultural customs of the inhabitants such as the types of houses they lived in, the musical instruments they played, and their means of subsistent farming and fishing. It all looked very appealing—that is, 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


xii

xiii

until the arrival of the Spaniards. The people were enslaved and forced to work and pan for gold. They then reorganized and rebelled against the colonizer. This seemed accurate enough until the very last drawing. Here a conquistador triumphantly stands over a dead Indian. The caption read, “Exterminio De Nuestros Indios.” Behind the Spaniard stands a somber and attractive native woman, still very much alive, presumably to be assimilated into the Spanish patriarchic realm. Most Puerto Rican third graders browsing through this book would get the vivid impression that the indigenous peoples of the island were long gone, exterminated right after the Spanish coming. That final drawing would create an indelible mark not easily erased. And this is just about the way the history of indigenous Caribbean peoples has been meant to be portrayed for the past five centuries or so. The profound paradox is that this “extinction” has been so internalized that many descendants have been completely disconnected from their native ancestry and cultural heritage. This form of cultural genocide has been a trend for many indigenous groups, not unlike the ramifications of the boarding schools experience and enrollment policies for Native Americans in North America. These intended to transform the individual and in turn created a false image of the native. The Cherokee writer Thomas King explains that the idea of “the Indian”4 was “fixed in time and space,” and has been largely romanticized as an authentic view of the past.5 In his summary of that distortion, “In the end, there is no reason for the Indian to be real. The Indian simply has to exist in our imaginations.”6 The dominant public view of contemporary indigenous peoples automatically reverts back to this manufactured “Hollywood” type of authenticity. The fact that all peoples and cultures are vibrant and adapt and change over time has been particularly lost on many indigenous cultures. As a result, this has contributed to the false notion of a people’s extinction. But there have been dissenting voices. For instance, both my mother and grandmother had often reminded us children and grandchildren of our “Spanish-Indian” identity for as long as I can remember. This was always a curious thing to me, since there was really nothing more to the story than that. My grandmother had been separated from her Indian mother at an early age, so the cultural link to the family past had been severed. Yet, I was innately connected in some way, and growing up in a rural island environment helped. There was always a part of me that knew that things were not right, that something was missing, and this something tremendously influenced my outlook, thinking, behavior, and attitude toward life. I was shy but incredibly rebellious for some strange reason. This “missing link,” other 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


preface

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than “testing positive” for the “shovel-shaped” tooth, would come to explain who I was as a person, where I came from, my becoming and essence as a human being. Likewise, many Boriqueños have similar stories of being told of their Indian identity at an early age, and many have maintained an unbroken cultural connection to their ancestral past. In terms of identity and the diaspora, I think poet Juan Antonio Corretjer’s famous words, “I would be a Boricua, even if I were born on the moon,” sum up the connection and nostalgia many have for their native homeland. In Hawai‘i, the foods still eaten, Jíbaro music still played, and the characteristics of the people are testament to this. Myths, memories, and stories have been also kept alive. The Puerto Rican community in Hawai‘i has always maintained a traditional loyalty to Puerto Rico. This is typical of many diasporic communities. So while Hawai‘i is their adopted home where they came to be accepted by the host Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) culture, Borikén will always be the indigenous ancestral homeland of the Boricua, wherever they may be. I would also add that I believe there is an important inherent solidarity and sense of justice between my “native self” and my activism and support for Kanaka Maoli rights and movement for sovereignty and self-determination. My “rebelliousness” and thirst for freedom has been somewhat transported to Hawai‘i and has naturally driven me to help support this important cause. The full realization of my Boricua roots would not come about until my midthirties, when I was reading the introduction to my late cousin’s, Ronald Arroyo, doctoral thesis of 1977. Here I found out he was writing about the over five thousand Puerto Ricans who went to Hawai‘i between 1900 and 1901. This took place after the hurricane San Ciriaco had devastated the southwestern region of Puerto Rico in 1899, killing over three thousand people. Regarding the derogatory ways these people were portrayed after their arrival, he posed the question, “Who were these Puerto Ricans that they should incur the wrath of historians and writers?”7 Learning from the storytellers in his family and through interviews and information ascertained from the first generation of immigrants, at a time when it was still not quite “popular” to be “indigenous,” he wrote that they referred to themselves as “Boricuas” or “Boriqueños,” that they were people who were “Boricua indians,” and that they were “proud of their indian culture as inhabitants of the island of Boriquen.”8 They also identified as “Jíbaro,” whose origin is indigenous (“es de origen indio”).9 Arroyo wrote the Spaniards also called them “jibaros.”10 The Jíbaro are the people of the land, the campesino farmers who have tilled the soil forever. As the late Carib-Jíbaro linguist and scholar Oki 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


xiv

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Lamourt-Valentín explained, “We are the people who call ourselves the ‘Jíbaro’ and refer to ourselves as, within the context of a nationality: ‘Boricuas’, while our country is called ‘Borinquen’ . . . from which can be seen that these are native language terms.”11 I, too, have found that the indigenous peoples of Puerto Rico primarily referred to themselves as Jíbaro. This is the principal word, or form of the word as explained below, the people called themselves before the European arrival and the name they still call themselves today. They also identify as Boricua, as derived from the Indian name of the island.12 The names Boricua, Boriqueño and Boricano draw on a national sentiment, used with “a tone of intimacy and endearment” in speech, poetry, popular songs, and in “all that refers to the character, customs, and sentiments of the inhabitants.”13 Therefore, Jíbaro or Boricua are the main names I use in this book to refer to the Indian people of Borikén. I will also use the words “indigenous Caribbean” or “Carib” as general names for the indigenous peoples of the “Caribbean” or “Antillean” region. There has been considerable controversy about naming and the division of Caribbean peoples that should be touched on here, and of which I expanded on in my dissertation. The Spaniards, like other European imperial powers, were keen to divide the people they encountered out of their own moral, political, and economic interests. I believe this was also the case in the Antilles as eternalized in the largely imagined ethnical and cultural rift created between the “peaceful Arawaks” and “man-eating Caribs.” In contrast, many scholars have argued that indigenous Caribbean groups are “closely related.”14 As they “shared a common material culture,”15 the social and cultural customs and practices between the two main groups were very similar. This suggests that other than slightly varying socioeconomic conditions depending largely on island topography, those present in the region were essentially of the same family of people. What regional name did they call themselves, if any at all? Most scholars realize that the name “Taíno,” like the word “Arawak,” was not used by indigenous Caribbean peoples as a term of self-ascription. The word was used as an adjectival, taken from the word “nitayno,” which related to one’s rank within society, and is basically nonexistent in family histories. The name was first affixed to the people and language of Haití by Cornelius Rafinesque and others in the nineteenth century. It became popularized in the twentieth century through the anthropological works of Jesse Walter Fewkes, M. R. Harrington, Sven Lovén, Irving Rouse, and Ricardo Alegría. However, the name “Caribes” or “Caribs” was originally attributed to a people by the Indian people Columbus came upon on his first voyage as noted in 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


preface

preface

his journal.16 It is said they were referring to their “enemies,” but, as an apparent form of resistance, they were really playing jokes on the admiral and trying to get rid of him. Many scholars have attributed a Carib presence to the northern Antilles. Fewkes repeatedly does in his 1907 report.17 Eugenio Fernández-Méndez pointed out that it is evident to many writers that the Carib resided in the northern Antilles in ancient times.18 The Carib lived there, and the “men of Caniba,” who Columbus eventually equates to the “canibales,” or “man-eaters,” turn out to be the people on the unvisited island of Borikén.19 As noted by Lamourt-Valentín, and others, Caniba was indeed the northwestern territory of Puerto Rico.20 Expanding on the etymology of the word Jíbaro, the equivalent of the Indian name Guajiro in Cuba, Lamourt-Valentín explains that Jíbaro is “a native eponymous term for Carib (Caribbean: can/(j)íbaro - canibaro - Caribe).”21 There is also a discussion of the origin of the word Jíbaro (with a reference to the word “kanjibaro”) in the introduction to the 1992 edition of Manuel Alonso’s El Jibaro, but without consideration of the place name Caniba.22 So as can be seen above, the name Carib or Caribe emerged from Jíbaro (Canibaro), which, in turn, is derived from the place name, Caniba. When asked years later in the mountain town of Lares what name the indigenous peoples called themselves, LamourtValentín replied, “Jíbaro.” “We are Jíbaro.” “We are Indians.” “We are the Caribs.”23 The regional term, “Caribbean,” was further taken from the people who were living there. All in all, I therefore use the name Carib to denote the Indian people of the region. In terms of the identities of my oral sources, while I reveal the full names of most of my interviewees, I use only the native names of others. Indian names have continued to be used over time, often as a sign of resistance to the imposition of Spanish names. Many people in Borikén have formal Indian names and apodos (nicknames). These carry real life meaning and stories and are most appropriately utilized in this text. Three of my interviewees wished to remain anonymous, so I use the names the “Jíbaro man,” “Pepe,” and “Cuko” to identify them. They all have their own Indian apodos. Finally, I would like to explain the significance of the snake on the cover. In indigenous Caribbean tradition, the energy of the serpent represents the Earth Mother and the waters of life. It is a symbol of continuity, a main theme of this book, and unity of the female and male energies. The snake is also a symbol of awakening and the coming of a new era.24



xvi

A New Version of H istory

A radical history presenting a new version of the past will usually draw on new sources, even though those sources might well be “new” only in the sense that the dominant version had repressed them by never even considering them as sources. Within this model of radical history there are then two interdependent but separable moments: first, a critique of existing versions, partly dependent upon, second, the presentation of alternative and contradictory evidence. This model has its anti-colonial equivalent in the rediscovery of native sources that offer a different and revealing light on colonial events and issues.1

T

he “new version” of history presented in this book is indeed not new, but one that has been repressed and, for the most part, has only recently been publicly revealed. The history of the “West Indian” is neither brief, nor is colonialism “the very base and structure of the West Indian cultural awareness,” as has been said.2 The story of the indigenous Caribbean is incomplete for it has been primarily told from the point and perspective of European contact and colonial and neocolonial bias. Consequently, the most significant body of sources that have been repressed has been the indigenous peoples themselves. While I am partly dependent on mainstream sources, this work is an attempt to draw on alternative sources of written and oral information to allow, most importantly, the indigenous Caribbean voice to speak and to become better recognized, for this voice has remained silent for far too long. A Jíbaro campesino from Lares remarked to me awhile ago, “The history was not written by the Indians.” He said government officials have come to their communities and asked questions, but they don’t write down what the people say. If these officials gave the Jíbaro the 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


Chapter 1

The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction

notebook and pen, the history would be very different according to him.3 Another Jíbaro campesino affirmed, “The history that is written is not the real one. We know the real history.” He commented that he wanted to write down or get out what he knows because many people want to “take out” what they know. He seemed pleased to be able to share some of his insight and knowledge with me.4 One of the greatest myths ever told in Caribbean history is that the indigenous inhabitants of mainly the northern Antilles5 were extinguished by the Spaniards around the mid-sixteenth century. Many scholars have fallen prey to this manufactured ideology. This belief has been passed down through the centuries a priori and has dominated the mainstream outside perception of indigenous Caribbean peoples. I say “outside” referring to the dominant thought held by the outside world and by most who are non-native to the region. This is because many Indian descendents have in fact known who they are and have maintained and continued to practice their culture. Many others have had some knowledge of their background, and some are in the process of recovering their heritage. One might thus wonder how it was possible for the people who Christopher Columbus stumbled upon and subsequently committed ethnocide and genocide against to have survived the encounter.6 This book seeks to unravel this dilemma. With a focus on the island of Borikén, I primarily provide a political history and ethnological account of five centuries of Carib or Jíbaro Indian resistance and cultural survival and continuity within native communities or barrios today. To be clear, this work debunks the deeply held belief of indigenous Caribbean extinction. Cultural survival and affiliation are the bases of the contemporary indigenous presence in Puerto Rico. Some key questions addressed are the following: How were sixteenth-century theories advancing the “discovery,” dehumanization, and “extinction” of indigenous Caribbean peoples mythologically produced? What were the early forms of resistance and survival tactics used that contributed to the maintenance of one’s human dignity and sense of equilibrium? How did passive resistance transform the indigenous population from the seventeenth to late eighteenth century? How did the Jíbaro influence and shape nineteenth and parts of twentieth-century Puerto Rican society, and what does the contemporary native voice have to say about this? And what is the meaning of cultural survival, continuity, and the movement for independence among the Jíbaro-Boricua today?



2


3

To begin, it is necessary to understand three areas regarding some principal ideas surrounding the modern-day indigenous presence in Borikén. I will call them the “authentic past,” the “revitalization process and resurgence,” and “native continuity,” periodically discussing these themes throughout the book. These areas could also be and have been applied to other indigenous groups and peoples in general. The notion of the “authentic past” romanticizes and situates the “Indian” as a fixture of a long ago past. Time stands still, which disallows for change and fuels images and beliefs like of the “red man,” “cannibal,” “noble savage,” and of an inevitable extinction. These ideas began to develop in the sixteenth century and came to dominate the perception of the indigenous Caribbean world. The early Spanish colonizers and chroniclers were most responsible for perpetuating such stereotypes and erasing the people out of the history books. Since the epistemological and ontological boundaries of the early history and literature had been written through colonial eyes, key fallacies have been passed down and unequivocally accepted by many scholars and society in general. This is symptomatic of the colonial histories written about many indigenous groups, the myth of extinction being one of the most damaging aspects of this narrative. Ironically, the Spanish in Borikén had continued to measure certain segments of the indigenous population through census records, but the “racial triad” portrait of the “Puerto Rican” as a mixture of the Indian, African, and Spaniard effectively eliminated the indigenous presence by the end of the eighteenth century. Spanish censuses after 1799 removed the category “Indians” when the governor was “faced with the difficulty of fixing ethnic origins.”7 The birth of a Puerto Rican nationalist identity conveniently formed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Those who set the political boundaries of the national consciousness were the colonial Spanish and Puerto Rican criollo elite (or “locally born whites,” according to Adalberto López), who were socially and politically conservative and displayed a “fear of and contempt for the masses.”8 The “masses” here were primarily the tens of thousands of Jíbaro who remained a free people at this time, and the increasing number of African slaves being brought to the island. Not surprisingly, the push for national integration based on a capitalist-driven market economy often came at the expense of the economic, social, cultural, and spiritual values of indigenous societies worldwide. The Puerto Rican elite then came to expropriate the Indian as a national symbol and assertion against the Spanish 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


I ndig eno us P resence i n Bor i kén


authorities. This development would “consolidate the transmutation” of the native “from a recognized group and a living population into a symbol to be revived, romanticized and manipulated.”9 This cultural nationalist ideology promoted the image of the indigenous peoples as frozen in time, the link with the ancestral past now severed. This idea goes hand in hand with the anthropological concept of time in relation to the “Other.” According to Johannes Fabian, “The posited authenticity of a past (savage, tribal, peasant) serves to denounce an inauthentic present (the uprooted, évolués, acculturated).”10 For many Puerto Rican scholars today, this break in time means that while there may be “traces” of biological (or physical) and cultural characteristics, the indigenous peoples “themselves” are long gone, with no possibility or hope for continuity or recovery. It seems incredible to some how an Indian identity could be asserted within a multiethnic societal context. Archeologists are fond of displaying native skeletal remains in museums or from recently excavated sites, with big smiles on their faces as their photos are snapped. Yet when someone dares to make an ancestral claim to these remains, they are immediately dismissed and scorned in the process. “Our Indians” are “extinct,” the authorities say, but they certainly were here before! Richard Grounds points out how the adjective “extinct” in modern dictionaries commonly refers to animals, volcanoes, and species, but obviously not to the human species. The exception to the rule is how the meaning is applied to a certain group of humans, specifically “Native Americans.”11 The Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, which Grounds cites, seems to be keen to his next point, perhaps because of the possible consequences of acknowledging a contemporary native presence, in redefining the word. “Moving beyond the original meaning of dying out altogether, the dictionary has distilled the essence of one special use of the adjective. The new meaning registered in the dictionary refers to something ‘that no longer exists in its original form.’”12 Logically, this redefinition could be applied to just about everyone today, including the Greeks, Spaniards, and Americans. The idea is most relevant to our study. It is true that Indian people today no longer exist in their “original form.” As a consequence, they are often seen as nonexistent and, therefore, have no business making bogus claims and assertions. Perhaps this is one reason why the Puerto Rican elite have absolutely no respect for a people who continue to struggle and identify with their ancestors and native cultural heritage. The second category, the “revitalization process and resurgence,” pertains to the indigenous Caribbean and Borikén, but also to the many indigenous peoples around the world who through periods of 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


4

5

intense colonization lost, or nearly lost, their identity and connection to their cultural backgrounds. The global indigenous peoples’ movement propelled in the late 1960s signaled a reawakening or revitalization of native pride and right to reconnect with one’s traditional past. The contemporary indigenous Caribbean revitalization and “native continuity” (as discussed below) are interrelated in familial and ancestral terms and linked to this larger movement representing nearly four hundred million indigenous peoples worldwide. The movement can be seen as a challenge to the violent beginnings of the state system, perhaps analogous to what Pierre Bourdieu has identified as a “tool for rupture” in the “reconstruction of genesis.” By reexamining the confrontations of the past and, thus, discarded possibilities of the future, things could be otherwise.13 In challenging the norms of international state theory, the indigenous plight has also been described as a kind of “social revolutionary movement taking place on a global scale.”14 The Caribbean resurgence, spurred on by the quincentennial in 1992, follows a clear pattern of regional revitalization and activism beginning with the American Indian Movement in the United States. This helped spawn political and cultural revitalization efforts in the 1970s and 1980s in Scandinavia, Central America, parts of Asia, the Pacific region, and elsewhere. In 2007, the United Nations General Assembly finally came to recognize that indigenous peoples have “the right to the full enjoyment, as a collective or as individuals, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms as recognized in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law,” including “the right to determine their own identity.”15 In Borikén and the diaspora, the many indigenous organizations that have formed in recent years and cultural events that have taken place attest to this revitalization process and resurgence. As described in the following passage, the Caribbean movement is taking place on different levels: The notion of resurgence will involve different meanings in different local contexts across the region. In some cases resurgence only exists as an expression of renewed interest by scholars in the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, as they challenge their blinkered inattention to peoples who have never consented to the view that they either disappeared or were unimportant. Theses of extinction have been a hallmark of island Caribbean historiography more than is the case with the mainland. On the other hand, challenges to notions of disappearance, efforts to resist political and economic marginalization, the formation of new regional organizations, and the recent growth in a committed body of




6


“Native continuity” is the most important area explored in this book. It posits that Jíbaro Indian people have uninterruptedly maintained many of their cultural traditions and ways of doing things. I am talking about a people who were able to culturally adapt and change over time in order to survive until today. However, many have severed the cultural link between the then and now. For example, Ricardo Alegría has stated that the Indian population of Puerto Rico “disappeared as a cultural group in the first century of the Spanish conquest.”17 To him, a viable indigenous presence ceased to exist at this time. I dispute this. Although native continuity does refer to the physical and genetic survival of the indigenous population, it most importantly concerns cultural survival and continuity, or how all peoples over time have had to adjust in various ways to their particular circumstances and environments, or face possible extinction. Thus, while I have met many people over the years in Borikén who have strong Indian features, and some who were about as “full blooded” as you can get, this study does not rely on divisive Darwinian biological notions of “racial purity” and “blood quantum” measurements. The dominant scholarly interpretation of determining indigenous extinction has been based on the social Darwinian concept of “natural selection.” According to Grounds, “Rather than being a statement of fact or representing a scholarly analysis, the language of extinction is an expression of a social idea. This is the language of social Darwinism.”18 This helped allow for the justification of racist and genocidal enrollment policies in the United States, where American Indian groups and peoples would diminish in blood quantum to the point of no longer being viewed as a “real” people, and sooner or later be perceived as a remnant of the past. These thoughts have shaped and influenced general public perceptions of who indigenous peoples are, historically and within contemporary society. Therefore, when I refer to “blood” in this work, it is as a unifying principle. “Mestizo” Indian people, or “mixed blooded” Indian as is commonly known in the Spanish Americas, are to be considered no less indigenous than their “full blooded” brothers and sisters. Accordingly, this book is not meant to disparage the African element of our heritage, which has been influential and strong, but the story I 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


scholarship focused on these issues, collectively produce resurgence. In all cases, contemporary indigenous peoples of the Caribbean refuse to be measured by the relics of their past or to be treated condescendingly as mute testimonials to a disappearing history, or a history of disappearance.16

7

am telling here is of a people whose distinct history and being extend back thousands of years, long before the European arrival. African and Spanish people and traditions were essentially assimilated or synthesized into the indigenous lifestyle as survival strategies. As the Carib were exogamous, intermarriage did not “dilute” the culture and people but rather enhanced them and increased their chances of survival.19 This paradox is awfully difficult to grasp and accept. Western norms would generally have us believe that interracial “mixing” necessitates the diminishment of one’s identity and culture through assimilation. This concept was not a part of indigenous peoples’ worldview, where cultures were augmented by routinely accepting foreigners into their groups. Instead, the idea of blood quantum has been used as a colonial and neocolonial divide and conquer strategy against them. Outside heritages in Borikén, and others incorporated since ancient times, were included within the root culture. This process was akin to how many indigenous groups, like the Kanaka Maoli of Hawai‘i, took in or absorbed numerous foreign or immigrant groups and have thus been able to keep many of their cultural traditions alive. Samuel Wilson refers to the process of cultural survival in the Antilles. This is the way traditions have been passed down from generation to generation and how political thinking and environmental ways of doing things in the past still inform the present: “On many islands some people trace part or all of their ancestry back to those who lived here before Columbus’s voyages. On nearly every island, the modern inhabitants relate to the environment in ways they learned from the Indians: they grow some of the same plants for food and other uses, fish the same reefs in the same ways, and follow the same seasonal patterns. Also, on nearly every island—even those where none of the indigenous people have survived—the Indians are powerful symbols of Caribbean identity, national identity, and resistance to colonialism.”20 This description neatly applies to Borikén, except that many people there know of their Indian background, perform the same traditions as described earlier, and continue to resist colonialism. Cuko, the Jíbaro campesino from Lares, said the struggle for independence has existed for centuries. As in so many places, the fundamental issue for the Jíbaro in Puerto Rico is land acquisition. They are still fighting to get their land back.21 He noted that his grandparents on his father’s side of the family were both indio, and were victims of the Spaniards as workers in the hacienda system. By this he meant the Spanish, not by force but by tricks, took the land and arranged things so that people would labor for them. Even though they were not called “slaves,” the relationship established was one of slavery because, for 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




instance, they could “rape your daughters” and there was nothing you could do because the home where you lived was claimed by the Spaniards.22 Cuko knew his grandfather very well and learned much from him. When I asked him who was living in Lares at the time of the 1868 Grito de Lares revolution, he stressed that at the time of his grandfather’s birth, about 1880, “mostly everyone was indio in Lares back then.” I then inquired about the population of other mountain regions at the time, such as Utuado, Ajuntas, Jayuya, Orocovis, and Morovis, of which he replied that the population makeup was “the same” in these places, as well as in many other areas of the island.23 He said the community where he is from was an extended family who had had their own lands for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Spaniards seized them in the nineteenth century. When he was growing up, they had no electricity or running water and there were no roads. Of the little land they do have today, the people still plant and farm in the native way using conuco (multicropping) and erone (mound cultivation) techniques, the latter making it easier to pull out tubers like ñame, yuca, and big round batata.24 Mostly all Jíbaro continue to plant by the cycles of the moon, just as their ancestors did, and they use many of the same plants for herbal and medicinal purposes. These types of narratives are commonly told among an increasing number of people I have come to know. Finally, in terms of Jíbaro transformation and growth, my thesis is similar to the renowned Peruvian writer José María Arguedas’s concept of “cultural mestizaje” in Peru. Arguedas, who grew up speaking the native Quechua language, did extensive ethnological work among indigenous Peruvians. In contrast to historical scholarly discourses of mestizaje as a European “civilizing mission,” and a nostalgic “Indianist” rendering that sees change “as degradation and contamination of supposedly pure identities,” Arguedas viewed the idea positively.25 In his book, Formación de una Cultura National Indoamericana, he discussed the Inca capacity to change and assimilate foreign elements. For centuries the European and indigenous cultures strongly reacted to and influenced each other. Yet, through the many important changes undergone since the time of the conquest, the indigenous culture still remained distinct from the occident.26 This, too, speaks to how the Jíbaro reacted and were able to assimilate Spanish elements into their lives and communities but in the process remained culturally distinct from the imposed culture. Physically, this interaction came to produce the mestizo in both Borikén and Peru, but culturally the people retained many of their traditional ways, albeit often in synthesized forms, and connection to their ancestral roots. 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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A good example of this form of cultural adaptation and survival in Borikén is the use of the fogón. This way of cooking is based on the traditional Indian method of using a burén. A round plate made of clay, the burén was utilized low to the ground supported by stones or a clay support. Wood was then used to heat the burén in order to cook on top of it.27 Many of my interviewees told me when they were growing up their families used a fogón, and some still do today. They all described the cooking method similarly. They make a table and fill it with sand or dirt. They then place “3 stones” on the surface and put wood between the stones to heat them. Pots and pans are placed on the stones to cook. The smoke generated would be used to cure meat they commonly hang from above. As depicted here, the use of the fogón is clearly a similar but more modern adaptation of an older indigenous technique. This is the way the modern Jíbaro prepared their food. A native elder named Shachira told me the fogón they used when she was growing up was a wooden box filled with sand, where they would place three stones to cook on. She confirmed that the people of the distant past used the ground with three stones as a base for cooking.28 The Jíbaro man noted that when he was growing up they used a square table, filled it with earth, and put three stones on top. He knows of four or five families that still use a fogón in the area where he lives.29 Indeed, it is not uncommon for Jíbaro families today to have one handily available in the garage. Thus for Arguedas, the process of mestizaje is not about the concept of race but of cultural continuity. For example there are indigenous Peruvians, both dark and white skinned, who behave like “occidentales,”30 or those who have been firmly assimilated into the dominant culture. This assimilation process has, of course, also occurred in Borikén, and furthermore, according to Liko, “Many native people here don’t know that they’re native. They don’t know their real history because modernization overtook them.”31 As genes have an interesting way of playing games on us, there are also many light-skinned and “red haired” indigenous peoples in Borikén who know very well of their Jíbaro background and identity and are unceasingly culturally connected in their heart and soul. Some are descendants of the Irish that were originally brought to the Caribbean by the English in the seventeenth century as basically indentured slaves. Once more the dilemma here is that we have been so thoroughly conditioned to view the stereotypical “Hollywood type” image of the Indian that the multiethnic mestizo has been discounted and ignored both physically and culturally. Therefore this book takes it upon itself, in part, as I have attempted in the past, to do what Arguedas had argued for culturally 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




in terms of the mestizo. Amaryll Chanady summarizes his sentiment: “. . . the study of the mestizo should be one of the major tasks of contemporary anthropologists, who had always been more interested in native traditions. These traditions, he argues, are in no way ‘pure’. They frequently involve the creative appropriation of European elements, as in the case of the native ‘danza de las tijeras’ (scissors dance) which is ‘exclusively an Indian dance for an Indian public’. His argument that native cultures are not destroyed by change but retain their specificity in spite of important transformations will be echoed by major ethnographers many years later in other contexts.”32

Su rv iva l and the I ndi genous Voi ce I do importantly acknowledge that the destruction ushered in by the Spanish Crown and Roman Catholic Church was prevalent in the Caribbean region. The Spanish encomienda system, or institutionalized system of forced labor, akin to slavery, where native lands and people were apportioned to encomenderos (landlords or slaveholders), was based on both the “discovery” and “just war” theories. These concepts had established Christian dominion and called for the subjugation of non-Christian peoples and confiscation of their lands. This resulted in the massacres, burnings, torture, forced labor and, most prominently, diseases that killed off several million Indian people within the first 30 years. However, the Caribbean encounter was not as one sided as previously thought, and the depth of colonial contact and reaction to it differed from island to island. There was a tremendous amount of violent and nonviolent resistance to Spanish imperialism throughout the sixteenth century that is not well documented and often overlooked. The atrocities that occurred did not happen “overnight,” and many indigenous peoples survived and lived on. This survival was most prominent in Borikén. Many inhabitants had been living in the mountainous interior regions of the island, and in many other places, for thousands of years before the arrival of the Europeans. After the Indian war of 1511, many more fled to the mountains to escape the Spaniards. I have been able to interpret from late eighteenth-century Spanish censuses, and the European contact era leading up to this period, that thousands of Indian people remained throughout the mountains at that time, and in many rural and coastal areas too. Since Spain did not fully colonize the interior of Puerto Rico until the mid-nineteenth century, the Jíbaro had been present there virtually unknown to the outside world. 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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Since Western scholarship has greatly aided in the historical silence of the people concerned, I lend an important space for the indigenous Caribbean voice to be heard. The lack of indigenous perspectives in the telling of native histories is remarkably similar. In the Pacific, for instance, Hawaiian scholar Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa notes, “In examining the literature of Land tenure in Hawai‘i and the Pacific, and that of Pacific and Hawaiian history in general, the lack of the Native point of view is singularly striking.”33 The large majority of scholars and writers who have historically written about or mentioned the indigenous peoples of Borikén had either not been to the island or if they were there, did not consult with or bring out the views of those they were writing about. How could they with their preconceived notions that the people were “extinct”? Accordingly, non-Western thought and traditions have been typically discredited by mainstream science as “superstitious” or “myth,” in other words as fictions “created and sustained by undeveloped minds.”34 Thus, the indigenous voice and ancestral memory have been illegitimated as alternative sources of information. One rare instance when a writer did reveal a living indigenous presence by directly speaking to the Puerto Rican people about their Indian identity, culture, and traditions was as late as 1974, when Stan Steiner published The Islands: The Worlds of the Puerto Ricans. Through interviews with Jíbaros, he skillfully revealed the memory and modern-day indigenous presence. The man he called “the storyteller” had a lot to say about the information passed down to him through oral tradition: His remembrance of history was a tribal memory. The details he knew— “Guarionex was a man close to six feet,” he said—had come from the dim, unrecorded past, that was 460 years ago, almost to the day he told the old stories. “All these stories I heard from old people. Who are already dead. Who have died,” he cautiously said. “My grandfathers. I recall them. As a little boy I heard some of them. As a grown man I heard some. The old people used to tell legends and stories, I recall. From these things the old people tell me I gathered these stories about our history. “Our Indians did not die away the way some people think,” the storyteller said. “If you look in the faces of the jíbaros, you know somewhere the Indian history is living.”35

In indigenous societies, oral tradition has been a vital way of transferring information and stories from one generation to another. In Caribbean tradition, history was, for one, “transmitted orally, from 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




generation to generation, in the ceremonies called areytos,”36 or traditional ceremonial dances, recitations, or songs. These cultural ceremonies were performed for various occasions such as to celebrate a good harvest, observe the first moon cycle for young women, or to honor the Earth Mother, Atabei. The areíto is being revitalized and celebrated today in Borikén as I have witnessed and participated in at the ceremonial grounds in Jayuya and Utuado. Jan Vansina defines oral traditions as “verbal messages which are reported statements from the past beyond the present generation. The definition specifies that the message must be oral statements spoken, sung, or called out on musical instruments only. . . . There must be transmission by word of mouth over at least a generation.”37 This has been the case with a good number of my interviews as much of the data relayed to me has been passed down orally from at least one generation ago. The stories told have also been quite similar, and many of them relate back to ancient times and to the early Spanish colonial era of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.38 Oral tradition as a source of history has been academically substantiated and for indigenous peoples is paramount in terms of cultural communication. Vansina explains, “No one in oral societies doubts that memories can be faithful repositories which contain the sum total of past human experience and explain the how and why of present day conditions. Tete are ne nne: ‘Ancient things are today’ or ‘History repeats itself.’ Whether memory changes or not, culture is reproduced by remembrance put into words and deeds. The mind through memory carries culture from generation to generation.”39 Since the 1970s, oral history research gathered directly from Indian descendants by Lamourt-Valentín, Delgado, Steiner, Arroyo, and Martínez-Torres, among others, further reveals an alternative version of history that contests the “official” established Puerto Rican account. Through documental research and interviews conducted primarily with Jíbaros, for example, Puerto Rican historian Juan Manuel Delgado and Lamourt-Valentín have documented many Indian names (many officially registered in sixteenth and nineteenth-century Spanish documents) that have survived orally in family histories, from generation to generation, and are still used and known of today.40 Hundreds of Indian names and surnames were hidden or disguised as nicknames that survived almost exclusively among campesinos. A number of Indian apodos are used by my interviewees. This information has gone unnoticed in Spanish studies in Puerto Rico,41 which reveals a strong connection to native identity. I also found out that many stories had been kept within family histories, often having gone 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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“underground” as the result of an abusive past. Some growing up on the island in the first half of the twentieth century were made to feel ashamed of being Indian. This loss of self-esteem was an all too familiar phenomenon experienced by many indigenous groups around the world at this time. Activist and indigenous cultural practitioner, Baracutey, recalled that when he was growing up in Utuado in the 1960s, he had repeatedly been told, “Don’t be a Jíbaro.”42 Pepe, an activist and Jíbaro campesino from the island, told me that when he was in school, around the same time as Baracutey, he “didn’t want to look Jíbaro” because he felt embarrassed.43 As five hundred years is not a long time ago, collective memory, which is “activated when people perceive that the patterns of the past are being repeated in the present,”44 has been apparent throughout my travels as the colonial past is often reinterpreted through the colonial and neocolonial conditions existing in Puerto Rico today. Since 1998, I have conducted many interviews with primarily Jíbaro people in Borikén. My interviewees have been academics, activists, artisans, cultural practitioners, campesino farmers, elders, espiritistas, cuanderos, and others, all knowledgeable about the indigenous history and cultural development. In mainly rural and mountain regions, I have been fortunate to have spoken with them about the indigenous past and present and have established close relationships with some who strongly identify with their Indian heritage. Their voices are heard in this work, particularly in the latter chapters. Despite prominent Caribbean archeologist Irving Rouse’s claim that ethnology cannot be used as a basis of determining indigenous cultural ancestry in the northern Antilles,45 I have collected an abundance of ethnographical information from the time I have spent on the island. The familial stories of our ancestors have filled my recorder, and what I reveal here is merely a sampling of the rich body of knowledge still carried most importantly among elders. In addition, my interviews are often corroborated by written sources, and vice versa, and by native and non-native scholars alike. As exemplified in Steiner and Arroyo’s work on the Boricua exodus to Hawai‘i, some of my written sources already contained ethnological data. Parts of American anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes’s 1907 work elaborated on the “existing natives” and indigenous customs he encountered in his research: “The ethnological method considers the survivals in the bodily form and mental characters of the existing natives; their peculiar customs, characteristic words, music, and legends, all that is included in the comprehensive term folklore, the old-fashioned ways of life peculiar to the island.”46 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




Paradoxically, the very act of my writing contradicting extinction seems to be a part of what has been prophesied over time. The indigenous Caribbean movement today was prophesied at the height of the Spanish atrocities taking place in Borikén. The prophecy of Aura Surey (Morning Star), the daughter of the cacike (regional leader or chieftain) Jayuya, decreed that come the twenty-fourth generation the people would rise again.47 The prophecy is a sign of this time of reawakening and resurgence for Carib people. The innate ability to perceive is further directly related to an understanding of truth as recognized within all indigenous traditions.48 Our ancestors communicated through perception, observation, memory, gesture, oral tradition, and hieroglyphic and iconic (ideogramic) forms of writing. As artisan and indigenous cultural practitioner Margarita NoguerasVidal points out, “Our symbolism is conceptual and encompasses a series of expressions that tell a story. As stone people our ancestors inscribed messages on stone for a time when we would be ready to receive them. The time of awakening is in process and we are all being summoned to join in and be part of the circle of re-membering.”49

Th e Ac ademy and Ex ti nc ti on While the post-European contact historical and ethnical convergence of Caribbean groups is acknowledged, I reject the claim that then rationalizes and asserts that a continued Indian identity and cultural presence is no longer viable. Most recognized and unrecognized indigenous groups today are multiethnic and do claim a right to a distinct indigenous identity, or to just continue to live their lives in their own way. In 2006, elder Naniki Reyes-Ocasio contemplated how it was that of nearly all Native American groups, indigenous Caribbean peoples were still not taken seriously and routinely ridiculed and dismissed as a people.50 When they do act or speak out, their credibility is often immediately diminished because their extinction has been so historically rationalized. For example, in an informative but rather disparaging article titled, “Making Indians Out of Blacks: The Revitalization of Taíno Identity in Contemporary Puerto Rico,” Jorge Duany discounts the Indian presence by explaining how the cultural nationalist intellectuals, led by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, have often ignored African contributions to Puerto Rico while exaggerating and romanticizing the indigenous element of society. He notes, “the indigenista discourse has contributed to the erasure of the ethnic and cultural presence of blacks in Puerto Rico.”51 Hence, the irony of the title of his article and notion of “hybridity” in terms of the island’s “largely 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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mulatto population.”52 In contradicting this assertion, it should be pointed out that recent DNA results have shown that a majority of the population in Borikén today are of Amerindian descent, or mestizo.53 Duany, who as of 2006 was the Chairperson of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, is correct to point out that the African presence has been debased and ignored by the cultural nationalist ideology and discourse. This has not come about on account of the Jíbaro people or resurgence on the island, which acknowledges African contributions and influence. Arlene Dávila has noted that indigenous activists’ challenge to the mainstream establishment’s constructs of identity, with a stress on identity that is more cultural than biological, has indeed made indigenous Caribbean identification “more inclusive than exclusive,” and thus more tolerant than alternative interpretations of indigenousness.54 To state that “Indians” have been “made out of blacks” is intellectually irresponsible and offensive. In addition, as Duany himself subscribes to the “virtual extinction” of the indigenous population,55 his piece invokes an internalized neocolonial image of the “West Indian” and “West Indian novel” as predominately African, with the original inhabitants nowhere to be found. It is in the midtwentieth century when the West Indian writer emerged and “for the first time in writing related to the West Indies, the Black characters are not restricted to being peripheral or background figures.”56 As we will see, due to mainly topographical factors, the number of African people brought to Borikén was small compared to other parts of the northern Antilles. Duany also fails to see that the nature of “hybridity” is the production of colonial power to begin with. It is “the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority,” and is thus a “revaluation” of a discriminatory colonial identity.57 This phenomenon is replicated through academic institutions and theories so that questions of identity are made contentious within groups and communities seeking meaning and respect. Another instance of how academia has minimized or dismissed the indigenous presence in Borikén took place in 2005. A group of native people decided to occupy the Caguana ceremonial grounds in the high mountains of Utuado. Caguana was one of the most important and sacred gathering sites for Caribbean peoples. It is said to have been a major gathering place for Amerindians from South, Central, and North America. The group was protesting the government’s desecration of sacred sites and ancestral remains, and the lack of recognition of their identity and rights as indigenous peoples. The Puerto Rican Institute of Culture and its director flatly denied the 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




legitimacy of the group and even portrayed their actions akin to “cannibalism.”58 While such a belief is normally not so publicly paraded today, invoking the anthropophagic myth stirred an outcry from some supporters of the demonstrators. Coming from an authority figure like the director, these words would certainly invoke a negative image of the cultural past within the general public. As a result, three community leaders representing three indigenous organizations, Caney Quinto Mundo (Fifth World Learning Center), Consejo General de Taínos Borincanos, and United Confederation of Taíno People, were arrested after a 17-day hunger strike. The charges against them were eventually dropped. As we can see, the rationalization of indigenous Caribbean extinction has been so heavily permeated that academic institutions today are theoretically and practically obligated to uphold the thought. But why is this belief so strongly upheld if it is not true? In addition to the idea of a biological extinction that only sees supposed “pure” identities as credible, it was apparently done for several reasons as explored in detail later. Briefly, the early Spaniards often exaggerated the effects of colonization and impacts of the spread of disease to secure favors from the Crown. Population counts were routinely downplayed in order to booster the importation of African labor. Spanish chroniclers like Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, for all the important work he did do, also deflated the post-contact numbers to promote the argument for the “peaceful conversion” of native persons. In the aftermath of the invasion, and perhaps most importantly, European guilt, as in the Spanish denial of the “Black Legend,” minimized the extent of the terror and atrocities committed against indigenous populations, which would preclude issues for native land claims and reparation. The Roman concept and rationalization of “vacant lands,” or “terra nullius,” allowed for the justification of the seizure of territory through the granting of certain fifteenth-century papal edicts that viewed non-Christians as subhuman and therefore expendable. This ideology was passed down to other European powers and became solidified in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. The later American Republic would come to basically duplicate the Spanish model in interpreting a nonexistent native presence. As Grounds writes, “Even so, the notion of extinction, like a signed death certificate, was intended to release American society from a multitude of obligations, including political and economic commitments, but above all from the guilt and moral concerns associated with dispossessing the recognized owners of the land. The best way to ensure an extinct title for a Native land claim is to have an extinct Native tribe—even if the people themselves are still persisting.”59 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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Lamourt-Valentín had echoed this view in regard to Borikén. At the time of his death in 2007, he was the preeminent linguist of the native language on the island. He was an assistant to Richard Weisskoff while studying at Iowa State University in the late 1970s and corresponded with the former curator of the Smithsonian Institution, Clifford Evans. Commonly known among those who knew him well, Lamourt-Valentín believed the dominant institutions in Puerto Rico have continually rationalize the extinction of the indigenous population in order to maintain control and avoid having to deal with land rights issues and claims. Because his work and views did not conform to the mainstream academic line, he was basically ostracized by the academy. I know of other scholars who have also been marginalized because their views have challenged entrenched theories. As a result, they have lost opportunities for teaching positions and their works have sometimes gone unpublished. One of Lamourt-Valentín’s writings, called Cannibal Recipes, which provides an important indigenous interpretation of the work of Fray Ramón Pané, the Jeronymite missionary who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, falls into the aforementioned category. Cannibal Recipes is a sociolinguistic account of indigenous Caribbean culture and rebuttal of Pané’s Antiquities of the Indians, but has not been published. Lamourt-Valentín challenges the myth of Jíbaro extinction and the widely held scholarly view that the first alphabetical text written in the Americas was that of Pané’s. As he explains, the Carib people and cacike Guarionex, who provided Pané with all of the information needed in this transliteration, turn out to be the true authors of the book.60 Nevertheless, these types of sources are routinely dismissed by scholars as “revisionist,” and sometimes discredited as “illegitimate storytelling” manufactured by “wannabe people,” as I have been told. But these are the same old excuses indigenous peoples have been dealing with for a long time. In addition to attempting to debunk mainstream theories, these sources have sometimes never been heard of before. When asked years after authoring Cannibal Recipes why much of the information he has revealed is largely unknown, Lamourt-Valentín simply replied, “Because nobody has bothered to ask the Jíbaro . . . Everybody says the Jíbaro is extinct.”61 As to the accusation of “revisionism,” I would agree with the following statement: “When the dominant society tells its side of the story, it is called history. When we Indians tell our side of the story, it is called REVISIONISM.”62 For myself, while I have completed nearly all of my ethnological research in Puerto Rico, I was fortunate to have done my earlier 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




committee work and writing from afar since my study would never have been academically approved on the island. I would have had to take out “this,” “this,” “this,” and “this,” as I have learned about some who have experienced a type of unwarranted scrutiny in having their studies approved. The controversial nature of my work has already evoked a bit of resentment among the dominant academy. I have found that no matter what I write will be vilified by some, including what I have to say in this book. This is would be no surprise. However, the general sentiment among most scholars and particularly the Jíbaro people I have shared my writings with and given presentations to has been very positive. Mostly all have agreed with my historiography and main thesis dispelling extinction, which is merely an affirmation of what many native descendants already know. Perhaps the highest compliment came from Lamourt-Valentín himself. He once told me that an ethnology of this kind has never been written about Borikén and encouraged me in his own unique way to keep moving forward. It has truly been a long process of contemplative study and revelation.

What’s to C ome This book explores deeper and hopes to make more sense of the previously mentioned themes and issues. In the next chapter, I will discuss the meaning of mythmaking and how certain European myth models provided precedence for the creation of tales and fictions projected onto indigenous populations, with an emphasis on the Caribbean. The evidence supporting the foundational basis of these myths is essentially missing. Yet, through Western representations of power, these myths have been sustained as “truth” and continue to marginalize native peoples. In examining the early colonial era, Chapter 3 takes a look at various forms of resistance to the Spanish encroachment in Borikén. Resistance in the sixteenth century was both passive and active and helps us to better understand the long-term process of indigenous survival. An analysis is given of how important laws and doctrines were manufactured to justify the violence and enslavement of the Carib. This is juxtaposed to the intense resistance to Spanish colonization, which has been largely ignored as a factor contributing to changes in Spanish policy. Francisco Manuel de Lando’s 1530– 1531 census is also analyzed as it became a tool to rationalize the Indian population out of history. However, most indigenous peoples in Borikén were not a part of the census count to begin with, since 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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they were living in the many isolated areas of the island or had fled the encomienda system. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the Indian transformation from the seventeenth until well into the twentieth century. The Jíbaro presence in many regions of the island from the early 1700s to late 1800s could be described as a type of silence from the outside world. The African and Spanish people they came into contact with, who had themselves fled or relocated to the interior and elsewhere, had been largely assimilated and in the process the Jíbaro were able to keep many of their cultural traditions alive. Spanish population censuses taken in the second half of the eighteenth century reveal that hundreds of Indian people remained on the island at that time. This was a huge underestimation of the thousands and thousands of people who were actually there. As Spanish censuses throughout the Americas typically underestimated or minimized indigenous population numbers, the Jíbaro were present in much larger numbers than these censuses showed. Indigenous survival permeated throughout the nineteenth century as the Spanish did not fully colonize the island, particularly the mountain regions, until after the 1868 revolution. It was the Jíbaro or Boricua who kept up the resistance in the 1800s and was the main impetus for the revolts, revolution, and for helping to finally drive the Spaniards out of Puerto Rico at the end of the century. While a principal contributor to a Puerto Rican nationality, they had maintained an indigenous consciousness because that’s who they were. The final chapter examines contemporary cultural survival and continuity within Jíbaro families, communities, or barrios. The indigenous voice has a lot to say about customary, spiritual, and linguistic practices that continue today. The dynamics of the indigenous movement in Borikén is also looked at. Here we reveal the Jíbaro-Boricua meaning of the movement for independence and its potential future.







My thmaking in the C ar ibbean

M

ythology has been traditionally concerned with accounts of origins, creation stories, the emergence of deities, the supernatural world, all of which provide meaning to a people and can justify the bases of societies. A myth is said to be “the sum of the development of historical tradition.”1 For indigenous peoples, the world is viewed holistically, where everything is connected: “We are instructed to deal with the plants, animals, minerals, human beings and all life as if they were a part of ourselves.”2 Indigenous beliefs and myths often center around a connectedness, stewardship, and reverence for the earth, a responsibility to preserve for future generations. Male and female entities are also seen as dual, complementing each other and in balance. Indigenous Caribbean peoples believed in the Earth Mother–Sky Father duality between these energies. The Earth Mother, Atabei, Atabey, Atabex, or Attabeira, gave birth to Yúcahu Bagua Maórocoti, the Sky or Celestial Father. Yúcahu has no beginning, signifying the belief in a form of reincarnation and immorality. The male being is further not singular in Antillean tradition. This thought contradicts the European interpretation of the early chroniclers, who believed that Yúcahu was equivalent to a monotheistic paternal god in the Christian tradition. Caribbean cultural society and spiritual belief were matriarchal and polytheistic. Compared to Mesoamerican forces of nature, “the Antillean gods present resemblances which cannot be explained as mere casual coincidences . . . Such are the beliefs in the Fire-God, the gods of the wind and the hurricane, the mother serpent, etc.”3 Myths and their production can also be fictitious when they are out of touch with the facts or truth, such as the belief in the Orbis Terrarum (Island of the Earth) or that the sun somehow revolved 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


Chapter 2


around the earth. While thought to be fact, fiction was used here to explain the unexplainable of the time and has since been disproved. In contrast to indigenous thought, Western society’s ways of viewing the earth have been divisive and dominant and have exploited her for its own use and profit. In the fifteenth and sixteenth-century European expansion into the Americas, this meant using people as pawns in the colonial process and thus the need to invent certain myths in order to justify imperialism and one’s presence. Some of these myths are alive and well today. This chapter is primarily concerned with this strand of myth, which I view in the fictitious sense of the word as in tales passed down about indigenous peoples and societies in Western tradition, or mythmaking, with little or no historical basis of support. I’m talking about indigenous discourses produced from Western perspectives that came to count as “facts” and “truths.” As the first point of contact in the “New World,” the Caribbean came to be a launching pad for many of the myths, tales, and stories told about indigenous peoples as perceived through the European consciousness and canon. For example, the Carib funerary custom of hanging the bones of the dead from their houses was a sure indicator of anthropophagy. Of course one who eats human flesh has always been seen to be on the occidental edge of humanity. This initial moment in time came to symbolize an irreparable image of indigenous populations as reflected back to Europe and unfortunately still informs our thinking. I write aware of the game of debunking, or “the denunciation of myth as falsehood from the vantage-point of a rival myth.”4 However, if we keep in mind that the criterion in determining a fiction is measured in terms of its deviation from or approximation to fact,5 and what might count for “fact” or “fiction” can be subjective or misperceived, we may very well begin to resuscitate a “dead society.” In this case the core of the “rival myth” takes on a most personal nature. It begs the questions: Am I a myth? Are the Jíbaro and other indigenous Caribbean peoples myths, too? And are all “mixed-blooded” native peoples mythical beings? This was the dominant belief as late as 1968 when the first United Nations Conference on Human Rights was held. Indigenous peoples were generally considered “a remnant of the past,” inevitably assimilated into mainstream societies.6 They were gone and nowhere to be found. This was a fallacy. Indigenous groups and peoples had simply gone “underground,” and since then many have been reaffirmed and routinely recognized by governmental and nongovernmental bodies with a good number of international rights documents written in their favor. Just as importantly, it is the indigenous voice that has attempted to lend perspective in speaking 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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truth to myth. “Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, with the powerful and heartfelt Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee and films such as Soldier Blue and Little Big Man, a whole generation of books, films and TV series has tried, often very honourably, to set the record straight by giving a native perspective on the conquest of the West.”7 With a focus on the Caribbean, I will primarily explore how European mythmaking has been crafted since the late fifteenth-century clash of civilizations. There is also an important link to be made between the mythmaking process and notions of marginalization, irrationality, heathenism, savagery, and the erasure and ultimate “extinction” of indigenous populations. When we look at the myths to be described, indigenous peoples are almost always marginalized and reduced to a subhuman level. Those who “dared” to resist the colonizer were often demonized, too. Yet, the bases or underlying premises of these types of myths have often been created through fantasy and scholarly assumptions. For example, as seen with the dominant Bering Strait theory of American Indian origins, the renowned Standing Rock Sioux scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., in Red Earth, White Lies, meticulously and convincingly points out how theory with no foundational basis of support can be unquestionably passed down for unending periods of time and unwittingly accepted as scholarly fact. The basic assumption regarding the Bering Strait theory is that since Native Americans were thought to be incapable of traveling by water,8 they must have had to traverse the Bering Strait during the last ice age to have arrived in North America. This notion originally fulfilled the biblical belief of human origins and then mainstream scientific thought, but now falls flat on its face in terms of the increasing amount of archeological data of a hemispheric human presence dating back much further than the 12,000 or so years of the ice age period.9 Moreover, North American Indian people, in general, strongly oppose the idea as indigenous traditions and memory passed down over many generations do not corroborate such a migration and origin.10 However, as native stories and traditions are routinely dismissed by Western science as “superstitious” and “fictions” in themselves, the dominant theory is continually recited and upheld as Deloria found out firsthand: “Arriving at the University of Colorado, I was stunned to hear from my students that some of my history colleagues were beginning their courses on American history with a mindless recitation of the Bering Strait theory of the peopling of the Western Hemisphere. Basically, they were simply repeating scholarly folklore, since there is, to my knowledge, no good source which articulates the theory in any reasonable format. Indeed, this 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




‘theory’ has been around so long that people no longer feel they have to explain or defend it—they can merely refer to it.”11 As brought out in this chapter, this type of reference is also exemplified in the inventions of European apotheoses, the idea of discovery, and the practice of native cannibalism. These myths, most importantly, add credibility to how the myth of the extinction of indigenous Caribbean peoples came to be manufactured and produced. These types of legends have always come at the expense of the self-created “Other.” It has been to the political advantage of Western societies and governments to keep these myths believable in order to shield their own vulnerability and brutal past.

My th Mo del s and the S avag e M i nd Gananath Obeyesekere’s The Apotheosis of Captain Cook provides some insight into the European mythmaking process and underlying ideas that have made its production possible. Obeyesekere, a Sri Lankan native, poses a question he had asked himself in 1983 upon learning of Marshall Sahlins’s thesis expounding the Kanaka Maoli belief that the British Captain James Cook was their god, Lono: “Could it be that the myth of Lono was a European construction, attributing to the native the belief that the European was a god?”12 He was extremely curious because he could not think of any Sri Lankan or South Asian examples of when a European had been deified by their native hosts, and much less a premortem one. Obeyesekere attempts to disprove the long-held theory of Cook’s apotheosis by unraveling the dominant scholarly evidence and points out that European mythmaking was prolific in European thought, particularly in regard to ancestral heroes of which Cook might easily fit.13 By “myth model,” he notes that an important myth could serve as a model for the construction of other myths. He inquires if the Cook case could have been influenced by prior European models, such as Hernán Cortés’s supposed apotheosis and possibly Columbus’s, which themselves may have been based on other myth models in Europe’s past history.14 He points out how European explorers in the Pacific had a prior conception of the deification process before they even landed on shore.15 This was apparently a preconceived notion of Columbus, too, when he immediately assumed and later penned in his famed letter of 1493 that the Caribbean peoples he first contacted actually believed the newcomers were “divine.” His belief was undisputed as they ran around announcing his arrival wherever he went with loud cries of “Come! Come! See the people from the sky!”16 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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Interestingly, it is recorded that Columbus had previously written in his journal that he communicated by “signs” with the Indian people, “because I do not understand them through speech.”17 He would not have done even this upon his arrival in Borikén as it is said he thought the island was uninhabited, since the inhabitants had ignored him.18 Furthermore, there is a well-documented native prophecy that “bearded men” who were “wholly clothed” would come to wreak havoc on the people of the region.19 This would hardly be a cause for celebration, much less to see the Europeans as “gods.” Columbus apparently knew of this prophecy, yet his letter, which obviously “puts the best possible gloss” on the events of the first voyage,20 has been seen as a means of securing funds from the Spanish Crown for future voyages, in part, by giving the impression that the “peaceable” inhabitants were ripe for Christianity. These ideas were not only shipboard tradition but also ran deep within the European culture and psyche. According to Obeyesekere, “the very beginnings of the voyages of discovery carried with them the tradition of the apotheosis of redoubtable European navigators who were also the harbingers of civilization. This cultural structure occurs against a larger background of ancient Indo-European values pertaining to euhemerism, to gods in human shape appearing among mortals, to men becoming gods and gods becoming men and so forth.”21 In regard to the Hawaiian acceptance of the apotheosis of Cook, as noted in the following passage, Obeyesekere is primarily referring to those who had thereafter converted to Christianity. The contemporary Kanaka Maoli scholars and people I have discussed this topic with basically agree with Obeyesekere’s conclusion, and most view Cook’s legacy as one of death and destruction for their people. The author writes, I have suggested that the myth of Cook as the god Lono is fundamentally based on the Western idea of the redoubtable European who is a god to savage peoples. This was further transformed in European thought in the Evangelical idea of idolatry. The later Hawaiian acceptance of this idea is not proof that it was the Hawaiians’ idea in the first place. To put it differently, the divinization of Cook is a structure of the long run in European thought, inasmuch as his chiefly deification is a Hawaiian example of the same phenomenon. I am now suggesting that Sahlins’s anthropological narrative of the life and death of Cook is not only a theoretical vindication of structural continuity and conjuncture, as he claims, but it is also a continuation, albeit unwitting, of the European myth of the apotheosis of James Cook. Theoretical thought is often enshrined in nontheoretical traditions.22





Obeyesekere remarks that myth models more importantly refer to an established set of ideas utilized in various narratives that “get attached to larger narrative forms such as fiction, history, or biography.”23 For example, the production of mythical apotheoses and subsequent stories passed down can be seen to parallel European preconceptions and marginalizations of indigenous peoples as irrational, childlike, or savage beings. Obeyesekere uses the characters of Prospero and Kurtz to show how the “savage mind” as drawn from these personalities and legends is implicitly assumed to be illogical and irrational compared to modern ways of thinking. If native peoples think “mystically,” “prelogically,” or like children, they must assumedly lack developed ratiocinative abilities.24 He critiques Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America by showing how prejudicial myth models continue to be passed down today through the social scientists’ portrayal of the Other. In his work, Todorov proposes and then affirms that the Spaniards defeated the Aztec (Mexica) by “signs,” or “interhuman communication” as he says, where “we cannot be surprised that the specialists in human communication should triumph in it.”25 What he means, according to Obeyesekere, is how Cortés skillfully manipulated signs “in a pragmatic, rational manner so as to overwhelm the traditional, cosmologically bound Aztecs.”26 They are constricted by “ritual” and “collectivity” and thus not individuals as such capable of improvisation,27 or in other words incapable of derationalizing their own demise. One event Todorov describes showing Cortés’s ability to control information was his attempt to convince the Mexica of their apparent initial uncertainty that Spanish horses were immortal. He did this by burying their corpses the night after a battle, to make it seem like their disappearance was some sort of “magic art.”28 This mode of improvisation was meant to demoralize and scare his adversaries, notes Obeyesekere, but he points out it could easily be argued that Cortés misinterprets indigenous thought based on European biases, and that his assumed mastery of signs led him to perform a foolish act. “But were the Indians naive enough to believe that Spanish horses did not belong to the broad mortal class of the quadrupeds in their own midst? And did not the Aztecs see Spanish horses wounded, bleeding, and falling down, if not dead? And how did the Spaniards manage to bury their dead horses and then cover up the evidence of burial without Indians detecting them?”29 Todorov’s account does provide instances when the Mexica also appear to be masters of signs, but in their own cultural context. Their very different style of improvisation and rationality could have easily eluded 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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the early chroniclers.30 Obeyesekere writes how anthropologists today generally affirm the rationality of “preliterate societies” from within their own value systems. What he takes exception to, however, is the logic in the very attribution of rationality to begin with, which in its rigidity is “not all that far removed from prior notions of prelogicality.”31 Todorov’s well-intended “moralist’s” account32 of Spanish atrocities perpetuated against indigenous populations does not exempt him from this representation in relation to the stereotypical Other. Obeyesekere explains how he is apparently unaware of the bind he is placed in: He quotes extensively from Spanish texts that describe the brutalization of the Indians, but these are the very texts that represent the Indians’ stereotypic Otherness. The modern scholar accepts the accuracy of these older accounts of the Indian because they fit his theory of signs which tells us that the Indians are bound by signs; consequently they can be easily subjugated by the Spanish who have mastery over signs. Todorov does not recognize that his representation of the Aztec is a byproduct of sixteenth-century Spanish representations, meditated, however, by his theory of signs. In effect, the difference between the two is one of ethical orientation and not one of divergent representation. Todorov’s vision of the Other is a continuation of a major Spanish (and European) myth model dealing with the savage mind.33

Co rtés’s “Apotheo sis” and S ahag ún Cortés’s apotheosis appears to have been passed down in a similar mythical fashion as Cook’s masquerading as Lono. Todorov notes how Cortés exploited the myth of the return of the historical and legendary figure, Quetzalcoatl. According to “Indian accounts” collected by Spanish chroniclers, Montezuma supposedly identified Cortés as Quetzalcoatl, which was a main reason for his inability to resist the Spaniards.34 But the original version of the story does not emphasize Quetzalcoatl’s return, whose role is secondary and not of a dominant personage. Here is where Cortés inserts himself in transforming the myth, which becomes codified by the chroniclers. Todorov remarks, “The accounts we find in Sahagún and Durán present the identification of Cortés with Quetzalcoatl as occurring to Montezuma himself. But this assertion merely proves that, for the Indians after the conquest, the thing was likely; Cortés’s calculation must have been based on this possibility when he sought to produce an ‘authentic’ Indian myth.”35 So while the Mexica did see Quetzalcoatl as one divinity 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




among others before the Spanish arrival, he became more of a dominant “supreme being” as portrayed and used by Cortés. We need to be critical of these Spanish texts like the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex, even if they are embellished by native accounts. Instead, Todorov makes this sweeping and contradictory statement: “We cannot question the authenticity of accounts which report what the priests’ informants believed.”36 We should, yet it is actually not so much questioning what the informants believed but how the information they gave was interpreted, organized, and used. As alphabetical writing was thought to be a superior genre of organizing knowledge compared to Amerindian forms, the effective spread of language became paramount in the Christian conversion of indigenous populations. Gordon Brotherston notes that indigenous societies were, in fact, well aware of the potential impoverishment of the phonetic alphabet on their script-saturated texts.37 Thus the biblical version of history was philosophically challenged, which resulted in the burning of “whole libraries” of Mesoamerican texts by the first missionaries. The systematic erasure of texts occurred throughout the hemisphere, such as the confiscation of “pagan libraries” of Mide scrolls in northern Turtle Island.38 Ironically, European knowledge of indigenous peoples’ languages and religions were instrumental in reproducing “the word” of the Christian God. In the Philippines, Latin and Castilian were used to reconstruct Tagalog grammar into an effective tool for translating scripture and in turn converting the Tagalogs.39 Calvinist missionaries in Hawai‘i early on acquired and transformed the Kanaka Maoli language into an alphabetic script for the same purpose. The use of the alphabet was critical in México, too, as Sahagún’s sixteenth century work had begun as a project to convert Amerindians under the Franciscans.40 A point Todorov stresses about Sahagún’s research, motivation, and “desire to know and to preserve Nahuatl culture” preceding his writing of his history (in terms of conversion),41 is part and parcel of the writing process. These time periods are not exclusive of each other, as Todorov would have us believe, in regard to the ultimate goal. According to Walter Mignolo, Sahagún was attempting to know native souls through the ancient Mexica religion “in order to be more successful in their conversion.” He writes, “Sahagún referred continually to his writing as ‘this work’ (esta obra), implying ‘written work,’ and in the opening paragraph of his prologue, he compared his own work with that of the medical doctor. In the same way that the doctor has to diagnose his or her patient in order to reestablish the order in the body, the missionaries had to diagnose theirs in order to restore order to their soul.”42 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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Sahagún gathered an abundant amount of information in Nahuatl through oral contact with the Mexica. He began translating his work into Spanish upon the request of the governor and president of the Council of the Indies, Fray Juan de Ovando. His method of organizing knowledge was through an alphabetical encyclopedic genre based on a previous model accepted by medieval Christian scholars.43 Mignolo notes the 12 books he wrote (Florentine Codex) are assumed to be part history and encyclopedia, though this is not clear. What is clear is that Sahagún did not ask the Mexica how they organized their own knowledge and assumed it should be in “book form”: “What should hold our attention for the next few pages is the taken-for-granted belief that it was perfectly natural to organize all the information he gathered over the years into twelve books, without asking how the Mexicas themselves organized and transmitted their knowledge.”44 While the Florentine Codex helped to resuscitate the known of indigenous culture, Sahagún’s classification and reconfiguration of Mexica knowledge actually ended up repressing their ways of knowing.45 Cultural preservation at that time was clearly for the benefit of the non-Mexica to the detriment of the native population. Just because we now have these texts to analyze, study, and amuse ourselves with does little good for those who were relatively well off before the Europeans showed up. The complicity between alphabetic writing as believed to be a superior form of organizing knowledge and how it was then transmitted into a tool of conversion worked out quite well for the Spaniards. Sahagún’s work ended in 1578 as an official report of the Council of the Indies, at the same time the Council began to systematically collect and organize information in the “Indies.”46 Finally, as related to our main thesis, the long parade of twentiethcentury scholars’ view of indigenous Caribbean “extinction” is indeed a by-product of early Spanish representation. Todorov’s remark that “the sixteenth century perpetrated the greatest genocide in human history”47 speaks to this point. This statement basically totalizes the indigenous population out of existence, precluding any possibility for native representation. The contemporary scholar’s cultural worldview and objectives often disallow for tangible representation and perspective, just like in the past, and thus the continuation of a myth model. Deloria explains how secular science essentially came to view non-Western traditions as “folklore” and “myth.” He writes, “Many scholars will fudge this point, claiming that their definition of myth gives it great respect as the carrier of some super-secret and sacred truth, but in fact the popular meaning is a superstition or fiction which we, as smart modern thinkers, would never in a million 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




years believe.”48 The same thinking has been permeated on those who attempt to produce alternative narratives and expound on the intense resistances carried out against the Spanish colonizer countering this history of totalization. But this is a “revisionist” history, they say, that has no place within deductive scientific thought.

“Just War” and the My th of Discovery “He [Columbus] was to seize on the way anything that might belong to the ‘heathen,’ as a preliminary to their conversion, simply because the heathen were assumed to have no rights of possession, and not because the previous existence of the property was unknown. The socalled ‘right of discovery,’ as superior to the right of possession, was a peculiar conception of fifteenth-century Christianity. It was really the right to take by force whatever did not already belong to Christian nations.”49

Old habits are hard to break in terms of how falsehoods have been sustained as truths through assertions of power. As the myth of European apotheoses was used as a tool of colonization, the concept of discovery was promulgated to claim European “sovereignty” in the Americas. This fiction sums up the imperial enterprise of the early modern era initiated by the Papacy and Spanish Crown and forms the foundation of just about every other myth to come in the IndoEuropean clash of cultures. As spelled out in the 1493 papal bull Inter Caetera, “discovery” authorized the overthrow of “barbarous nations” and the seizure of their lands, and it set the basis for the purported establishment of Christian dominion over parts of the earth.50 The discovery principle essentially relegated non-Christian peoples to a savage and subhuman level in order to justify European expansionism and domination of the world. Christian European nations’ assumption that discovery conferred legal rights of title to lands found together with the diminishing of one’s humanity were the ideological keys to maintaining possession of those lands. For example, Spanish jurists and theologians like Juan López de Palacios-Rubios and Fray Matías de Paz met in Burgos in 1512 to further justify the legality of Spanish dominion in the Americas and form of “servitude” to be imposed on Indian inhabitants.51 Palacios-Rubios, who apparently authored the requerimiento of 1513 that said it was just to wage war against Indian people as a preliminary to their conversion, believed the grant of Pope Alexander VI affirmed the Supreme Pontiff’s spiritual and temporal powers as 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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“vicar of Christ,” and thus allowed the pope maximum authority and jurisdiction over both the faithful and “infidels.”52 The requerimiento explicitly presented one of the first instances of the “just war” theory as applied in the Americas. Accordingly, in his famous debate with Las Casas at Valladolid from 1550 to 1551 concerning the validity of the theory, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s approach to the matter relied on the Aristotelian “doctrine of natural slavery.” While Las Casas’s central argument was to peacefully convert the native population as it had been for years, Lewis Hanke noted that for the first time in modern history Sepúlveda attempted to brand a whole race of people as “inferior” in keeping with Aristotle’s theory.53 He explains, “Sepúlveda made plain in his treatise, despite its complex and often confusing argument, that he considered the Indians to be natural slaves according to the Aristotelian concept and the Spaniards amply justified in carrying on war against them as an indispensable preliminary to Christianizing them.”54 Here the notion of “natural slavery” relegated a people to a subhuman status as a means to convert them based on the “just war” theory. Sepúlveda declared that the Alexandrian “bulls of donation” authorized this policy,55 which were of course rooted in the concept of discovery. In contrast to these views, other figures and legal scholars invalidated such an idea that popes could unequivocally assert their power with legal impunity. Paul Gottschalk points out that Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius, both considered founders of modern international law, rejected the papal donation theory and “partition” of the world expressing their sentiment that even if the pope meant it: “he could neither dispossess the Indians of their property nor donate property which he had never owned.”56 While his Law of Nations ultimately justified “the extension of Western power over the American Indians as an imperative of the Europeans’ vision of truth,”57 Vitoria, like Las Casas, rejected the basic tenet of the requerimiento in critiquing a policy he apparently saw as inhumane. Hanke briefly summarizes his fundamental arguments: First, he appears to have been the first Spaniard to assert that the papal grant had no temporal value. Secondly, he emphasized the fact that certain titles were illegitimate and these he specified in detail. The emperor, he stated, was not the lord of the whole world and neither was the pope, who had no temporal power over the Indians or over other unbelievers. A refusal by the Indians to recognize any dominion of the pope is no reason for making war on them or for seizing their goods, nor are they bound to hearken to the faith. Even if the emperor




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What did the indigenous peoples have to say about this? They most importantly rejected the granting of the bull Inter Caetera. According to A. Garcia, the Indian statement from Cartagena was that, “The Pope must have been mad when he did so, for he was giving what was not his.”59 This repudiation of discovery meant that as far as the native peoples were concerned, the Papacy and Spanish Crown had no moral or legal right to take possession of their land, or to wage war against them for not converting to a foreign religion. Writing in 1519, Martin Fernández de Enciso explained in his Suma de geografía how the Indian people of “Cenú” reacted to his reading of the requerimiento. This reveals the true sentiment of some indigenous peoples to its reading, even if the account may have been exaggerated:60 They answered me that regarding what it said about there being only one God who governed heaven and earth and who was lord of all, that seemed fine to them, but in so far as what it said about the pope being lord of the universe in God’s place, and that he donated the land to the king of Castilla, they said the pope must have been drunk when he did that because he gave what was not his to give, and that the king who asked for and took the grant must have been crazy because he asked for what belonged to others, and that he should go there to take it so they could hang his head from a stick as they had hung other heads . . . belonging to their enemies . . . and they said that they were lords of their land and did not need another lord.61

We can see now that the “legal rights” promulgated by Inter Caetera were highly controversial. European nations also routinely violated their own laws in the colonial process, such as natural law and the right to possess property. The granting of laws to “protect” the rights of indigenous peoples didn’t really matter either as power politics usually prevailed. As Robert Williams, Jr. notes, “In the Europeans’ conquest and colonization of the American Indian, law and legal discourse most often served to redeem the West’s genocidal imposition of its superior civilization in the New World.”62 Furthermore, how could sovereignty have been legally established if its underlying principle was an absurdity to begin with? As well known among some scholars over time, the “European discovery” of unknown or “vacant” lands and peoples could not have happened for a couple of important reasons. First and foremost is the impossibility of discovering lands 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


were the lord of the whole world, that would not entitle him to seize the Indian provinces, erect new lords, or levy taxes.58

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that had already been inhabited for thousands and thousands of years. The “historical success” of Amerigo Vespucci’s label called the “New World” does not make sense when considering that indigenous peoples had been present in the hemisphere up to forty thousand years ago or more.63 To then coin the 1492 “discovery” as a time when the first European arrived and settled is ethnocentric and racist because it denies the prior American Indian presence and the people’s own rights and customs. The lands that come to be called the “Americas” were actually well known “to the millions of people who inhabited them and who had discovered them on behalf of the human species tens of thousands of years before.”64 Historically, many indigenous peoples have outrightly rejected the legal claim of discovery on the very grounds of a previous ancestral presence that dates back since time immemorial. A native elder from the coast of Quebradillas, Puerto Rico, simply said to me, “Christopher Columbus discovered America with lies.”65 The acknowledgement by numerous individuals, organizations, and international bodies of law that do recognize indigenous peoples as first peoples directly contradict the possibility of a European discovery. Luis Rivera expands on the myth of attributing the concept to lands already inhabited: “To speak of a discovery, in an absolute and transcendental sense, would imply the absence of a prior human and cultural history in the newfound lands. This is absurd and reveals a deep-rooted and anachronistic ethnocentrism.”66 To have traditionally believed or rationalized indigenous peoples as savage or subhuman does not make it so. This was a misperception. However, by the assertion of its power through the creation of such representations, the West has been able to sustain a falsehood depicted as “truth.” The concept of discovery is a myth in terms of presence because it widely deviates from fact and to continue to uphold its principle reveals this anachronistic belief at a contemporary level. Discovery is further an impossibility as predicated on Edmundo O’Gorman’s theory that European explorers who had supposedly discovered a hemispheric land base did not know of its prior existence. For O’Gorman, discovery requires the discoverer to be previously knowledgeable of the nature or existence of the being that is found.67 In reference to the Americas, both Columbus and Vespucci believed they had reached Asia on their voyages, and Columbus insisted on this view up until his death in 1506. O’Gorman writes the most important problem concerning this history, or “the history of America,” is explaining how “America” appeared on the historical scene. The dominant scholarly interpretation of the past has been that it was 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




discovered one fine day in October of 1492, on an island Columbus believed to be in the vicinity of Japan.68 However, instead of concentrating on the history of the “discovery of America,” O’Gorman’s work focuses on the “idea that America had been discovered.” He found the logical conclusion of this idea “implies a reductio ad absurdum, and therefore, that it is an inadequate way to understand the historical reality which it attempts to explain.”69 The evidence of Columbus’s intention to reach Asia and the belief he had done so is clear. Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli’s thesis of a western route to India (or the Indies) supported the Marco Polo story.70 Columbus received a copy of the Florentine scholar’s letter and chart of a shorter route to the east rather than the West African route being pursued by the Portuguese. This convinced him he could sail westward and is referenced in his journals.71 His Lettera Rarissima written to Ferdinand and Isabella on his fourth and final voyage insisted that “Cuba was part of the Chinese province of Mangi.”72 More convincingly, Bartolomé Columbus’s composite map depicts the belief surrounding the fourth voyage with the South American continent connected to southern Asia!73 (see Figure 2.1). Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Ferdinand Columbus thereafter misled the reader into thinking his father really knew where he was. Knowing full well his intentions, Ferdinand deliberately stated that Columbus thought he had made it to an unknown continent west of Europe.74 But it was not until Martín Fernández de Navarrete published his Collection (1825–1837) that the ambiguities of the early chroniclers and unequivocal intentions of Columbus were once and for all settled.

Figure 2.1 Composite of Bartolomé Columbus’s three sketch maps from c. 1503–1506.



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Navarrete’s work is based on the principal documents of Columbus’s voyages that prove he had “no other objective than to reach Asia.”75 Subsequently, Washington Irving, Alexander von Humboldt, and Samuel Morison agreed that the admiral’s goal and intention were specifically to reach Asia, yet they all (including Navarrete) managed in one way or another to rationalize Columbus as the “discoverer.” Morison’s rationale for the discovery of America was that it was purely by chance, an accident, since Columbus had no purpose of getting there nor the “faintest suspicion” of its existence.76 O’Gorman explains that this is the way the chance 1492 “discovery of America” is taught today, as the “irrefutable truth.”77 The extreme irony of the time is that neither Columbus nor anyone else, including the scholars, knew what had happened. Encouragingly, despite the fact that years later O’Gorman himself came to believe that the invention was “the decisive and irreversible step toward the fulfillment of the ecumenical program of Western culture,”78 an increasing number of writers today openly acknowledge the impossibility of a European discovery. As Kirkpatrick Sale says, “Whatever may have been in the Admiral’s mind . . . we can say with assurance that no such event as ‘discovery’ took place.”79 To conclude, there is an important observation needed to be made about the Spanish presence in the Americas. Throughout all of the debates of the sixteenth century, no theologians, scholars, government officials, or movements appear to have come forward to support the right of the Indian people to maintain their own philosophical or religious belief, or their right of self-determination.80 The only solution to the “pagan problem” was either through “peaceful conversion” or “by force.” Sepúlveda was certain that “the great mass of Indians would never voluntarily give up their own religion.”81 He was absolutely correct. Why would the Carib, Maya, or Inca surrender their belief systems and laws when they had already been living quite well for thousands of years? For the indigenous peoples of Borikén, it must have been difficult “to throw their traditional beliefs out the window and embrace an unknown religion—especially since its preachers had the intention of overthrowing the sovereignty of the country of the future converts.”82 Whether through peace or by force, the Christian conversion project based on the discovery principle was without a doubt legally and morally unjust to the indigenous peoples concerned, and a few scholars of the time. Indigenous descendants today overwhelmingly attest to this point, for example, through the support garnered by the movement to revoke the bull Inter Caetera. The Spaniards were merely occupiers of the lands they seized. The very 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




basis for the “legality” of Spanish sovereignty in the Americas was continually reinforced through the rationale that posited the belief in the “moral superiority” of the Christian faith over “idolatrous” native belief systems. This thought was used to dehumanize and subjugate the people and, ultimately, take possession of their property. As Rivera notes, the natural right of Indian self-determination was grossly violated in the process: “From this perspective, the act of taking possession of the indigenous peoples, of expropriating their lands, goods, and persons, violating their autonomy and self-determination, goes against all law and justice.”83

Th e “C a nnibal” and Res i s tance The myth of discovery weaves into the creation of other European fictions void of fundamental supporting evidence in relation to peoples and places encountered along the way. In the Antilles, the early images described and projected back to Europe by explorers and chroniclers would come to set the bases for deeply ingrained stereotypes and subsequent depictions of other indigenous groups. The image of and belief in the practice of native “cannibalism” was among the most prominent. According to Sale, reports of cannibalism for Columbus “provided the means of justifying the enslavement and deportation of those creatures so clearly beyond the pale of God’s favor that they could rightfully be regarded as beasts.”84 Again, by dehumanizing a people, this time as “man-eaters” in breaking European projections of natural law, legal fictions were used to dispossess native nations and, in turn, expand empire.85 The continual granting of papal edicts epitomized how a juridical need was repeated to gain and maintain control in the Antillean region and beyond. Columbus’s division of the people of the Caribbean as “peaceable” and “ferocious” is also symmetrical in terms of degrees of resistance to invaders and consistent with preconceived ideas based on other Western models. Regarding the latter point, Peter Hulme explains, “Indeed the radical dualism of the European response to the native Caribbean—fierce cannibal and noble savage—has such obvious continuities with the classical Mediterranean paradigm that it is tempting to see the whole intricate web of colonial discourse as weaving itself in its own separate space entirely unaffected by any observation of or interchange with native Caribbean cultures.”86 His in-depth examination of Columbus’s journal of his first voyage pinpoints two competing outside discourses: the “Oriental” discourse of Marco Polo and the Grand Khan and the “discourse of savagery” in the Herodotian 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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tradition. Both are competing for a single signifier, the word “canibales,” which Columbus originally believed referred to “the people of the Grand Khan” (“la gente del Gran Can”).87 The crucial moment signaling the defeat of the Oriental discourse takes place in Cuba, which Columbus thought was the province of “Cathay” because it was so extensive. However, his sudden shift from sailing northwest along Cuba’s northern coast in order to meet with the emperor, and an abortive “embassy” inland only to be met with deference by the Indian people there, were signs that his Oriental expectations were “becoming embarrassingly evident.”88 As the Marco Polo scenario fades away, the quest for gold took on a paramount importance. From this moment forward lands and peoples southeast simultaneously took on “savage” proportions: “. . . Columbus chose south-east because he was more likely to find gold in that direction: not of course the gold of Cathay, but exploitable mines of ‘savage gold.’”89 It is thereafter that the “canibales,” or the Carib “Other,” became equated to a consumer of human flesh. The maneuver obviously had an economic motive to assure the admiral’s future status and booster the coffers of the Crown. It is further interesting how so-called Arawak inhabited islands increasingly came to be peopled by “hostile cannibals” as slavery and the quest for profit grew.90 This was a main reason why slavery was legalized, but it also had to do with native resistance to outsiders where it was not supposed to come from, that is, from the “peaceable Arawaks” of the northern Antilles as we shortly see. While on Cuba, Columbus records that his Indian interpreters told him there were people on the nearby island of Bohío (“Espaniola”) who had “one eye in their foreheads” and others who “eat them” and to whom “they showed great fear.”91 José Barreiro alludes to this scene in his book, The Indian Chronicles, when a cacike of Cuba, Bayamo, jokes to Columbus about the “bad men” from the south. The old people had said to him, “Watch out when you see those uglies coming!”92 These were “a bunch of jokes” being played on the Spaniards in order “to get rid of them,” said Lamourt-Valentín,93 a form of passive resistance. It is important to stress here how two Caribbean Indian scholars draw analogies about “jokes” or games being played on the Spaniards with obvious implications that the practice of cannibalism was far-fetched, and that the people really just wanted to be left alone. This scenario is not unlike other fanciful narratives such as Bernal Diaz’s characterization of the Mexica diet of arms and legs mixed in with “a sauce of peppers and tomatoes.”94 Remarkably, a common thread of the cannibal myth relates to recurring themes of 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha



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I do not think that this statement of Bernal Diaz can be taken as proof of Aztec “cannibalism,” i.e., indiscriminate anthropophagy. The Spaniards, like some modern scholars, thought that the Aztecs ate human flesh as a food substitute. The Spaniards constantly expressed their fear and revulsion for human sacrifice and cannibalism, and the Aztecs exploited this by taunting them and saying that if they were captured they would be sacrificed and eaten. In the scenario quoted by Todorov, they ate the Spaniards with tomatoes and pepper or put them in their wild beast houses (or pretended to perform these actions by miming them) as a technique of humiliating and frightening the Spaniards. One cannot infer from this scenario that the Aztecs were “cannibals”; rather, they put their ritual cannibalism to new uses in the context of their conflict with Cortés and his men.95

Divide and conquer tactics deflected the consistently intense resistance to European colonialism in the Antilles making the violence look one sided. Degrees of resistance are how lands and peoples invariably came to be labeled as “cannibal.” Some who resisted were demonized, like the prominent Carib cacike Caonabó, similar to how Saddam Hussein was portrayed as a beast after his capture. While indigenous Caribbean peoples were a people of peace, they rightfully defended themselves at all costs. There were two important events that occurred early on in Kiskeya or Quisqueya (today Haití and the Dominican Republic) that exemplifies this. When Columbus returned on his second voyage in 1493, he found the 39 men left behind at “La Navidad” on his first voyage had all been killed. According to Las Casas, the men began to quarrel and fight among themselves. They “took women from their husbands and daughters from their parents, and they individually bartered for gold among themselves.” Caonabó was joined by others against the Christians who were then “separated in the country where they were killed for their offenses and evil doing.”96 When Columbus returned, the Indian people began referring to the names of the dead Spaniards. His surprise was “very great” when he realized that the indigenous peoples were referring to themselves by the names of the dead, mimicking them and speaking Spanish.97 Lamourt-Valentín points out that the Carib use of the Spanish names meant the two groups had gone through the native 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


resistance and instilling fear in Europeans, along with satisfying their expectations. Regarding the charge of Mexica “cannibalism,” Obeyesekere notes how the Mexica really used it as a political tool against the colonizer:

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ceremony called guatiao (the exchanging of names). He said, “We’re still doing that . . . everybody here [in Lares and other regions] has foreign names, the names of dead foreigners. In our own communities we have our own names . . . ‘Lamourt,’ for example, is the name of a dead foreigner.”98 The other event that took place concerned the cacike Guarocuya’s (Enriquillo) 14-year war against the Spanish Crown. After the rape of his wife by his encomendero and futile attempts at seeking justice in Spanish courts for other crimes committed, Enriquillo took to the mountains and “nearly paralyzed” the island because he and his many warriors could not be defeated.99 Commerce, too, was heavily affected. Enriquillo and his people won that war, negotiating directly with a representative of King Charles V, which “resulted in capitulations that constitute the first treaty between a European power and an American indigenous people,”100 signed in 1533. Thus, it should be emphasized that at least one segment of the population of Kiskeya was alive and well at this date. There were, in fact, other treaties made before this time in Borikén, such as the peace treaty entered into by the cacike Agüeybana and Juan Ponce de Leon in 1508. However, as Nogueras-Vidal stresses, Spain consistently violated these agreements and has masked this history: “They do not speak of the times when our people met in peace because our people were people of peace, and how many treaties were broken. They do not speak about the treaties that were written just like with the North American Indians. We had treaties with these people. They broke our treaties! There is documentation that verifies this. We had treaties written in Spanish language. Our cacikes, our leaders, signed. They [the Spaniards] broke all the treaties just like the North American government.”101 It was actually on Columbus’s second voyage when the belief in native cannibalism became solidified as highlighted in the 1494 report by the physician Diego Álvarez-Chanca. What he wrote for the municipality of Seville has been considered the principal account of the events that took place on the second voyage.102 Continuing where Columbus left off, Chanca proceeds to sketch a familiar story of the peaceful Indians he meets with the “ferocious man-eaters” he has heard about. The indigenous funerary custom of suspending the bones of the dead in houses or from trees was a sure sign of anthropophagy. When some Spaniards got lost on Guadeloupe, he surmised they had surely been “eaten” and was surprised and “rejoiced” when they returned.103 The slaughterhouse engravings in a book (1621) by Austrian Benedictine monk Caspar Plautius, Insulae canibalium 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




(The Islands of the Cannibals) and “A cannibal feast” (similar to the engraving in Figure 2.2), strongly reinforced the imagery of cannibalism juxtaposed to the mission of Christian evangelization as described in his text.104 This was another way such ideas and perceptions were projected and came to be unquestionably assumed as truth.

Figure 2.2 Seventeenth century image of “cannibalism” on the island of Kiskeya (Española). 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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With all the rich varieties of fruit, vegetables, and fish then available in the Caribbean, it is really a wonder how cannibalism as a “food substitute” or “staple” could have been exalted on such a grand scale. Former Carib cacike Irvince Auguiste of Dominica elaborates on the myth. He explains how in war, a piece of the enemy’s flesh might symbolically be eaten, but in terms of human meat consumed as a staple food, the charge of cannibalism against his people is “a very wicked lie. . . . It goes back to the Spaniards, to the English. Columbus came to the new world looking for gold . . . he met the people inhabiting these islands and tried to enslave them. And the Carib people had enjoyed centuries of freedom, making their cassava bread and catching fish. Naturally they would retaliate against anyone trying to enslave them.”105 In The Man-Eating Myth, W. Arens concluded his analysis of Caribbean anthropophagy by writing, “there is little reason to assume that the very aborigines whose name now means man-eaters actually were so.”106 Consequently, the many dictionaries and encyclopedias that still refer to the “Carib” and “cannibal” interchangeably do a great disservice in continuing to mock a people still present in much of the region today. Lastly, the renowned Cuban scholar Roberto Fernández-Retamar’s analysis of the making of the cannibal corresponds to the right wing of the bourgeoisie of the time and solidifies our point as to “the typically degraded vision offered by the colonizer of the man he is colonizing.”107 Though two sides of the same political coin, this view contrasted with the left wing bourgeois vision of the Americas as depicted in Thomas More’s Utopia. These competing ideologies informed Columbus’s thought: the indigenous peoples were at first seen as no less than angels but soon after came to be despised. For Fernández-Retamar, the European invention of cannibalism in the Antilles was essentially political: “That the Caribs were as Columbus (and, after him, an unending throng of followers) depicted them is about as probabl[e] as the existence of one-eyed men, men with dog muzzles or tails, or even the Amazons mentioned by the explorer in pages where Greco-Roman mythology, the medieval bestiary, and the novel of chivalry all play their part.”108 As it turns out, the ideological creation of the cannibal was largely a reflection of the European self, the flipside of the “Enlightenment” in the Herodotian tradition. Indigenous resistance was a byproduct of this illusionary and preconceived thought. Most importantly, though, its dehumanizing motive would allow for unspeakable crimes committed against indigenous peoples worldwide. 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha



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While some will undoubtedly continue to believe in and uphold the myths touched upon previously, to others they may seem to quite obviously be inventions. If this is the case, then the myth of the extinction of certain indigenous populations would be an invention too. Extinction and near extinction myths neatly overlap into the body of European ideas and stories meant to marginalize and dismiss indigenous peoples of any meaningful relevance or as no longer a living reality. Marginalization, as through low population counts, and erasure could also correspond to the presumed inability of native populations to improvise or rationalize techniques for survival. Likewise, indigenous peoples were and are often made to feel invisible within mainstream society and have pretty much been romanticized as a thing of the past. These beliefs are deeply instilled in the subconscious and difficult to dispel. James Wilson sums up the Amerindian experience: Why have these ideas about Native Americans—positive and negative— proved so difficult to dislodge? Partly, it is that they have very deep roots, reaching back to the first European attempts to make sense of the “New World” and its inhabitants in the period immediately following “discovery.” What unites them is the central belief that “the Indian” belongs essentially to the past rather than to the present. He (or she) is an exotic relic of some earlier stage that we have already passed through: either—depending on your point of view—a kind of primitive anarchy that we have overcome (in nature, in ourselves) or an innocent Golden Age that we have forfeited through greed and destructiveness.109

While the current plight of indigenous populations is a relatively dismal one from a mainstream societal view, there has been a considerable and vibrant indigenous resurgence in recent decades, and many native groups have lived on, reaffirmed themselves, and have been acknowledged as a people. However, one group that has been for all posterity relegated to the annals of the long distant past is the very people who greeted the Europeans on that memorable first voyage. The basic assumption is that since so many indigenous Caribbean peoples were killed off, then they “must have” inevitably become extinct, or nearly so. The key question to ask now is, were these inhabitants in fact extinguished, or did they actually survive? And if they did survive, how? It might seem surreal to some to think that they could have possibly survived the encounter. It’s as if this acknowledgment might put an uneasy damper on one of the said greatest feats of Western civilization, possibly adding unnecessary complications. It might 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


Th e My th o f C ar ibbe an Ex ti ncti on

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even throw into question the whole moral and legal framework of the imperial project to begin with. Imagine those who just about every historian has pitifully deemed as “extinct” coming back to speak about the experience and giving their take on the matter. This is phenomenal and those who might dare to make the attempt to lend clarity to this historicity are usually trivialized in the process. However, since indigenous Caribbean peoples have continued and reaffirmed their presence as a people, too, this issue is of great importance to them, and others, and requires some elaboration. It would first be pertinent to mention what “extinction” and its correlation to “survival” can mean. In his extensive study on the effects of intercultural contact, Bernard Hörmann pointed out that numerical growth and decay of native populations due to European cultural contact is “essentially a study of the extinction or survival of native peoples involved in the Europeanization of the world.”110 Writing in the mid-twentieth century, he noted the conflict between competing theories back then when some writers viewed extinction as “the fundamental process,” and others saw it in terms of the overall increase of non-European populations during the modern era. Hörmann attempts to resolve the theoretical problem arising out of these contradictions “with a unifying hypothesis in the light of which the diversities can be explained and the conflicts resolved.”111 He poses some important questions that are relevant to this study: “What are the chances for survival, the Lebenschancen as the Germans would say, of native populations as they confront European invaders? Under what conditions does extinction take place, and under what conditions does the native population survive, either as a pure or a mixed group?”112 He utilizes a combination of two rather distinct academic disciplines of the time, the then well-established demography or population studies and the newer field of race and “culture contacts.”113 His evaluation of the data and what is generally agreed upon by late twentieth-century scholars is that early estimates of non-European populations were inaccurate and often highly flawed. According to Hörmann, “We have seen that these data are in general very unreliable, more so for large than for specific small areas and for early dates than for recent dates; that they are often based, even today, on invalid or at least questionable assumptions which necessarily lead to invalid conclusions; that they seldom are adequate in detail, length of the series, amount of supplementary statistical information available, and amount of supplementary descriptive information available about environment, pre-contact culture, and the history of culture contact.”114 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




In Borikén, as in the rest of the northern Antilles, it is widely believed that the indigenous population was wiped out by the midsixteenth century. Our principal authority for this determination is Bartolomé de Las Casas, who Carl Sauer says “felt an obligation to keep the record straight for posterity,” and there was no one more interested in the Indian people or “knew their ways so well.”115 Las Casas was definitely interested in the general population and a tireless rights defender, but, in his classic text The Devastation of the Indies, he declared for all intents and purposes the native population to be essentially no more. Of the islands of “San Juan” (Puerto Rico) and Jamaica he wrote, “Before the arrival of the Spaniards there had lived on these islands more than six hundred thousand souls, it has been stated. I believe there were more than one million inhabitants, and now, in each of the two islands, there are no more than two hundred persons, all the others having perished without the Faith and without the holy sacraments.”116 In examining this two-hundred-person figure for Puerto Rico, Hörmann’s assessment of questionable assumptions and invalid conclusions come to be defining moments in historiography. Las Casas’s blanket estimate of the destruction of the island population was likely inferred from the abuses that had taken place in Kiskeya. He surmised in the early 1550s that the population there, which he originally estimated to be over three million, had dropped to “barely two hundred persons.”117 This is an astounding population drop for a relatively large island. For Borikén, Las Casas certainly did not conduct a viable study based on the available data as he presented no evidence to validate his claim. He further did not evaluate the environmental and cultural conditions of the island, nor consult with the “remaining” indigenous peoples, this latter point being rather mute as the native was rarely if ever consulted with anyway. This goes to show how this voice or aspect of the colonial process was effectively silenced from the periphery, the assumption that the European was the authority when it came to such matters. We can gradually see how broad generalizations from respected figures like Las Casas came to be unquestionably passed down over the centuries a priori. Thus, by the twentieth century, Sven Lovén confidently stated that the people of the region “long ago became extinct.”118 The well regarded Puerto Rican scholar Manuel Maldonado-Denis wrote this about Borikén: “The extinction of the natives around the middle of the sixteenth century made the introduction of a new type of labor—that of black slaves—indispensable.”119 Federico Ribes-Tovar noted the indigenous population there had “practically vanished” by the end of the sixteenth century.120 Irving Rouse has remarked that in the absence of 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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native survivors, “archeologists have had to assume sole responsibility for investigating the cultural ancestry” of the indigenous peoples of the northern Antilles.121 The supposed extinction of the inhabitants of Kiskeya is a myth in itself as there are still people on the island today (specifically in the Dominican Republic) who strongly identify with their indigenous heritage. On a trip I made there in 1999, I met a fairly large Indian extended family living in the far eastern province of Higüey. In my conversations with them, the people seemed to be quite aware of the colonial history to the point where one village elder was still cursing the Spaniards! The increasing number of indigenous Caribbean narratives being told contemporarily are not unlike the following passage by Jorge Estevez, a native person from the Dominican Republic: Many of us who, today, identify with the indigenous part of our multiethnic heritage, heard stories about a grandmother or other family member who was “a real Indian.” Some of us—like me—were told outright that we descend from indios. I became curious and began to look deeper into my history. Much to my dismay, I found notable contradictions between my family’s oral histories and the “official” history taught in schools and national museums. Most scholars claim that indios in the Spanish Antilles have long been extinct. I and the others with whom I began to compare notes discovered, however, that there were crucial inconsistencies in the extinction stories, so we began to investigate them. Among the inconsistencies we found in a multitude of books were the claims that the Taino burned their crops and ran off into the mountains in their desperate effort to escape Spanish domination. Supposedly the ploy backfired on them, because they were said to have starved to death in those mountains they had called home for thousands of years. Yet the African slaves who escaped into those very same mountains, terrain that was totally unfamiliar to them, survived in the thousands. The above is just one example of the senseless contradictions we have found. The more we research our history and the more we question our elders, the more perceptive we become. We know that the true story of our ancestors has not yet been told, but some scholars are finally beginning to ask the same questions that we have been asking, have finally begun to revise the inconsistencies and errors of the past.122

Historically, Enriquillo acquired a considerable amount of land in the treaty he signed with the Spaniards. Writing in 1907, Fewkes referred to this when noting that he was “never subdued” and 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




“the descendants of the early natives still live” there.123 Early on, the Europeans were a clear minority in the rural regions of “Hispaniola” (Kiskeya).124 Referring to this, Lynne Guitar demonstrates that it was “throughout the first half of the sixteenth century—a period of relative stability compared to the conquest, which was continuing elsewhere—that important patterns for daily living among Indians, Africans, Spaniards and mixed blood peoples were forged.”125 Indigenous survival took place within a synthesized cultural context. The census category “mestizos” was first recorded in the 1580s,126 proving that the indigenous element of society was present beyond midcentury. Indeed, writing about the island in 1586, Fray Juan González de Mendoza remarked that “most [residents] are mestizos, sons of indias and Spaniards, or negroes.”127 So regardless of “blood quantum,” the indigenous peoples of Kiskeya survived well beyond the period of their supposed demise. In addition, there has been a considerable indigenous survival in Cuba. Cuban Indian or guajiro resistance to the Spanish has been epitomized in the well-known story of the cacike Hatuey, a national hero. After being captured and sentenced to be burnt at the stake, he refused the offer of a Catholic priest to be baptized and become a Christian. This was after he was told that baptized Spaniards went to “heaven.” Hatuey therefore replied that he preferred to go to “hell!” rather than to go where Spaniards went. Numerous families on the eastern side of Cuba still practice their native culture. In the mountain village of Caridad de los Indios overlooking Guantánamo approximately 350 Indian descendants remain. Describing the survival of his people, cacike Panchito Ramirez points out, “[Our] survival is evidence of persistent indigenous resistance to invasion, conquest, colonization, and assimilation. It is evidence that assimilation cuts both ways—that our colonizers also learned much from us.”128 According to Barreiro, whose own indigenous roots are from a neighboring province called Camagüey, there are hundreds or “perhaps a thousand or more” native descendants in the mountain areas of GuantánamoBaracoa.129 They survived, in good part, due to the remoteness of the region and isolation from outside influences. Through academic research, both past and present, and the oral tradition passed down in native families, Barreiro has documented this part of Cuban guajiro continuity. In wanting to reveal his people’s survival and to retain their identity for future generations, elder Ramirez states, I want my folks to recognize who they are, some more and some less but all native people from here. It’s true we have marriages with



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different people, but the root remains here, so they can keep on loving the mountain, loving the forest, loving that wonderful nature we have, because the mountain is the real thing, everything comes from here. And we, the mountain guajiro, have our value. I have my community. It is not a developed one, but humble, yet we live as the fingers in a hand, together. We are not all the same, but we are all equal because of the blood that runs within us.130

Las Casas was, of course, not the first to write the indigenous population out of the history books. Extinction had been determined by some a generation before. This may have influenced Las Casas’s work. According to Sauer, both the Licenciado Zuazo and Gil GonzálezDávila calculated in separate evaluations that the Indian population in Hispaniola had essentially disappeared by the 1520s.131 The dilemma, again, is how this assessment is applied to other lands, but this time in a more contemporary light. Sauer utilizes these surveys in noting that “the end of the natives” was “apparently true also for Jamaica and Puerto Rico, and mainly as well for Cuba.”132 The main word here is “apparently” because, despite mentioning an “occasional remnant” of survival in mountain refuges, he does not provide a bit of evidence for extinction in these islands but merely assumes it to have happened based on accounts from another island. Thus he undoubtedly concludes, “In less than twenty years from the founding of Isabela the impending extinction of the natives was apparent and in another ten it had occurred.”133 Well there we have it, a definitive narrative to influence students, the general public, and for scholars to continue to quote on and on. Sauer seems so sure of his assessment that there is almost nothing left to say. Las Casas has been further criticized by some for presumably exaggerating his pre-contact population figures to make the destruction look as brutal as possible. He may have done this to booster his case for benevolently spreading the word of Christ. Regardless of the numbers, he does appear to have unwittingly erased from history those he was attempting to “save.” It is now important to point out that most scholars who have historically proclaimed indigenous Caribbean “extinction,” or near extinction, have not explained what they mean by the term. As touched upon earlier, it does appear to be largely a biological swipe as in the survival of only those of primarily “pure descent.” How many times have indigenous peoples entertained such comments like, “But you don’t look ‘full blooded,’” or “You’re not the Indian I had in mind,”134 minimizing them based on the idea of “blood quantum” or their physical look. This type of thought has been historically articulated and influential 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




both academically and on mainstream society. In Darwinian terms of intercultural contact, species extinction of native peoples is attributed to the biologically dominant race, or “modern civilised nations,” with virtually no room for “mixed blooded” indigenous cultural adaptation and survival.135 George Pitt-Rivers cites Franz Boas’s calculations of the lessening degrees of “pure descent” from interracial mixing over a number of generations. This factor is one of the ways “one race may extinguish another.”136 Likewise, Ángel Rosenblat’s indigenous population decline for the “West Indies” has also been attributed to “racial mixture” and assimilation.137 Rouse too infers this same type of extinction for the present-day northern Antilles when he writes that although persons claiming an indigenous ancestry “have survived” in these islands, the Indian people “themselves” are extinct.138 This statement is a contradiction because if the people of the past are “extinct,” how could their descendants have possibly survived as he adheres to? While “some traces” may have been left behind, for Rouse the “real” people no longer exist. He severs both the physical and cultural links by freezing or romanticizing the image of the original people into the distant past simultaneously discarding a viable contemporary presence. If we therefore use the aforementioned formula of biological extinction in defining a people, then the large number of indigenous peoples asserting a lineal ancestry worldwide today would inevitably be considered extinct, since most are multiethnic. Many simply cannot accept one’s right to self-identification and desire to remain connected to their native cultural heritage regardless of blood quantum. On the other hand, Hörmann defined extinction by allowing for “mixed blood” survival as a result of intercultural colonial contact and examined the process of how a people adapt and change over time. He asked the question, “Can a race, when threatened with extinction by contact, be saved only through the growth of a mixed-blood population?”139 He specifically provided evidence of this type of survival for Native Hawaiian, Maori, and certain American Indian groups, although “full blooded” people were still present within these societies. Likewise, Amerindian population estimates in H. J. Spinden’s 1928 study always made allowance for “mixed bloods at proportionate value.” He calculated at that time a “conservative minimum” of 26 million Indian inhabitants throughout the hemisphere, and two hundred thousand for the West Indies.140 While Hörmann does document degrees of assimilation into the dominant Euroamerican culture up until the time of his writing, indigenous groups and peoples were forced in some important ways to therefore go “underground” (e.g., in terms of speaking their own languages that had often been banned 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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or by practicing forms of spiritual healing or medicinal use seen as “taboo”). Subsequently, as highlighted by the large number of ethnic claims and conflicts, the assimilationist model of the first half of the twentieth century collapsed, both internationally and within the United States, from the post–World War II decolonization and civil rights era into the 1990s.141 Many “mixed blooded” indigenous peoples clearly survived the colonial process and still maintain an indigenous identity, while many of their cultural traditions had either continued to be practiced, have been recovered, or are in the process of recovery. Here is where culture has been shown to be mutable, opposed to biology that has come to be seen as largely static.142 It changes and adapts over time and is fundamental in relation to human survival. This point is crucial in terms of Jíbaro survival and continuity in Borikén as brought out in the coming chapters. We can see clearer now how the Caribbean extinction myth parallels Deloria’s comment about the acceptance of the mythical Bering Strait theory by merely referring to it. Most scholars have simply reinforced what they have previously learned. Like Estevez, I have ironically found in my research on Borikén many contradictions to extinction all along the way. For instance, the governor reported that by 1582 “not one Boriqueño remained on the Island.”143 But four years later, the bishop declared the Indian people to be “ill-concealed heathens” falling back into idolatry.144 There was, in fact, a tremendous amount of indigenous survival on the island, and throughout the rural and mountain regions. This is not surprising when considering that the Cordillera and Luquillo regions are extensive territories of mountains, caves, hills, and valleys. Indeed, 40 percent of Puerto Rico is covered by mountains and 35 percent by hills.145 A Spanish census in 1778 revealed 2,302 “pure blooded” (“de raza pura”) “Indians,” and 34,867 “Free Colored” people, or “pardos libres.”146 As I elaborate on later, “pardos libres” were primarily mestizo Indian people. This was actually a considerable underestimation of the total number of indigenous peoples in the mountains because the figure for “full bloods” was taken from but one region, and the category “Free Colored” pertained to only those areas that had established towns at the time. And when 61 percent of Puertorriqueños are testing positive for Amerindian DNA today (taken from the female line only), something strange appears to have happened that just doesn’t quite equate with the official version of history.




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The myths examined in this chapter fall right in line with the contradictions to the extinction theory. Though not immune to contradiction myself, the myths, beliefs, rationalizations, and portrayals of the indigenous “Other” were really falsehoods sustained as “truths” through Western representations of power. Power politics and brute force, grounded in largely baseless laws and doctrines, were the ultimate tools used to sustain these representations and a Eurocentric ideology. As Williams noted, “In Western colonizing discourse, the thin veneer of law and legal argumentation does not obscure so much as add value to what otherwise might be regarded as an underlying baseless substance.”147 There was a clear pattern of mythmaking created and relied upon by early colonists and scholars. The inventions of European apotheoses, discovery, and native cannibalism are examples to show that the thought of indigenous Caribbean extinction is also far-fetched. Nonetheless, these myths are still viably projected within the academy and onto the contemporary public eye. But as all peoples and cultures adapt and change over time, this was no exception for the Carib. Despite fictions that widely deviate from fact, the people are still there and many do know who they are. Let’s now see how the Jíbaro resisted and survived the Spanish incursion early on.



C o nc lusion

Ea rly Resistance and S urvival in Bor ik én

A man may not know that he is Indian. A man may know and may not admit he is Indian. “But it does not matter. The ignorance of your father and mother does not change who you are,” he said. “No matter what a Puertorriqueño decided he is, it already has been decided for him.”1

T

he Spanish chroniclers who originally erased the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean off the map had forgotten to do one important thing along the way. They forgot to ask the people concerned what they thought about “their extinction.” If they had asked, they would have likely been ridiculed in the process. This is the way it would have been on the island of Borikén, since everyone had agreed with this history except the Indian people themselves. Borikén was an indigenous stronghold of the Antillean chain long before the European arrival. The southwestern coast, known as Baneke, or the “territory of the sea iguana,” was the nucleus of the Carib hegemony led by the cacike Agüeybana.2 “This was the nucleus of the empire,” said LamourtValentín. “We were a great empire.” Loida Figueroa-Mercado writes that the indigenous culture “reached its zenith in Boriquén.”3 The island further comprised the northwestern territory called Caniba, or the “lizard,”4 from where the creation of the “canibal” came to be derived for the Carib or Jíbaro people living there. They fiercely resisted the Spanish encroachment so that cultural and oral traditions survived, have been passed down for generations, and are still preserved today. Cognizant of the indigenous influence and legacy in the 1970s, Steiner wrote, “Of all the islands in the Caribbean the 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


Chapter 3


influence of the Indians has been the strongest and most lasting in Borinquén. In the traditional words and music, dishes, and dances. And some say the ways of the Indians are visible in the easygoing way people look at the earth, the life of the family, and the life of the spirits of the dead.”5 This chapter takes a look at the sixteenth-century indigenous resistance to Spanish colonialism in Borikén. By examining some of the oral and written history and traditions passed down, we can better understand the long-term process of indigenous survival. As the dominant scholarly view had effectively suppressed the indigenous voice and presence over the centuries, the words and works of late twentieth-century writers like Steiner, Lamourt-Valentín, and Arroyo present a refreshing and very different perspective of the sociocultural development on the island. Steiner actually goes to the mountain regions to record the legends and stories of the Jíbaro, and LamourtValentín does not tell the story as an outsider, but as one who lived the culture and language of a region where the Indian words are still used. Steiner records the words of an old man born on a mountain from one of the oldest and most respected families in his village: “‘In the Institutes they do not know this history of the Indians,’ the storyteller said. ‘Who knows the history of the Indians? No one knows but the Indians.’ As long as the Indians lived, history was a living thing. He did not need books to know these things.”6 And Arroyo pointed out that for hundreds of years “it was thought that the Boricua Indians were extinct. But it was not so. The[y] believed in their own way of independence and paid little attention to the outside world. They were content to live poorly but free. However, each time their freedom was threatened, they would resist.”7 What we find is that the sixteenth-century Indian population was not at all extinguished. Despite the changes and hardship, the indigenous peoples persisted in retaining a sense of pride and dignity in their lives. Although the colonization and slavery process developed uniquely on each of the Caribbean islands, there are important parallels regarding resistance and cultural survival in Borikén that can be drawn from particularly the neighboring indigenous stronghold of Kiskeya. Guitar’s work on the cultural genesis among Indians, Africans, and Spaniards in rural Hispaniola is helpful to us in this regard. Contrary to common thought, things there did not happen overnight and the indigenous population did not become extinct. Although Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah have written that “all scholars” agree the indigenous peoples of the island became “extinct” shortly after contact,8 some scholars, at least in more recent times, do not 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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agree with this assertion. “The island did lose much of its indigenous population—but not all of it,” writes Guitar, “as well as much of its Spanish population—but not all of it.”9 While introduced diseases did devastate the population, she points out that the effects of epidemics were often exaggerated by the colonizers in order to secure positions, favors, and grants from the Crown: “It would not have been beneficial for the officials and encomenderos on Hispaniola to give an accurate count of the Indian workers who remained under their control or to admit how many had fled to regions outside their control; therefore, the documents exaggerate the effects of the epidemics and report that ‘less than one-third’ of the Indians survived, or ‘less than one-fourth,’ or ‘few,’ ‘an insufficient number,’ or even, in several cases, ‘none.’”10 Here, the Indian numbers are deflated or minimized in terms of status and primarily in an economic context.

War and Resi s tanc e Ever since the time Europeans first set foot onto indigenous soil in the Americas, degrees of animosity and conflict took shape in one form or another and on both sides of the spectrum. In such a clash of cultures, there would inevitably be for those whose lands were encroached upon an equal reaction or degree of resistance set into place. Resistance can manifest itself in many ways and is usually political. Political resistance can be either passive or active. Selwyn Cudjoe writes that active resistance involves “open revolts and rebellions,” while passive resistance can include “suicide, voluntary abortion, poisoning masters and sabotaging crops.”11 In his in-depth study of Indian and African forms of resistance in Caribbean literature, Cudjoe defines resistance as “any act or complex of acts designed to rid a people of its oppressors, be they slave masters or multinational corporations.”12 Resistance to European imperialism in the Antilles was essentially about human and cultural survival, but further concerned the maintenance of one’s dignity, spirit, and sense of equilibrium: “The corresponding resistance on the part of the Indians and the Africans in the New World was the necessary corrective to that expansion and dehumanization, one action bringing an equal and opposite reaction in order to retain equilibrium. Resistance, then, was the reaction needed to maintain the equilibrium, to preserve human dignity, and to ennoble the human spirit.”13 Resistance in Borikén took on both active and passive forms. The early war and rebellions were more formal organized campaigns to oust or injure the Spaniards, actions that gained attention all the way 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




up to influencing the policies of the Crown. The passive or everyday forms of resistance that occurred in the 1500s, such as establishing kinship relations, fleeing, hiding, suicide, and avoiding census takers, overlapped with the active forms. While these types of less organized forms of resistance “make no headlines,” they can be powerful and effective and in the end may “make an utter shambles of the policies dreamed up by their would-be superiors in the capital.”14 Passive resistance was also primarily practiced in rural and mountain regions of the island from the seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries, a period essentially void of an Indian presence in the literature of the time, when an ethnical transformation takes place in an indigenous cultural context. This period is explored in the next chapter. It was the tremendous amount of resistance in the sixteenth century that paved the way for this continuum. Columbus first landed along the western coast of Borikén on his second voyage in November 1493 and christened the island “San Juan Bautista,” supposedly taking possession of it. Although he may not have actually stepped ashore, it is said the inhabitants had so ignored him as mentioned earlier. This rebuff could be seen as one of the first acts of resistance to the Spanish arrival, a rejection of the idea that the admiral had somehow “discovered” the island, since the indigenous presence had been well established. When Ponce de Leon arrived in 1508 to begin the formal colonization of Borikén the principal cacike, Agüeybana (the Elder), who was well aware of Columbus’s arms and exploits in Kiskeya, prepared to accommodate him on his arrival. In the beginning, the two leaders entered into a “treaty of friendship and alliance.”15 This treaty was accomplished through the traditional Indian areito called guatiao, or the exchanging of names or mixing of blood in order to establish kinship relations, peace, and friendship. In order to make peace, Agüeybana opted to transform the Spaniards symbolically and physically into kinspeople, just like the Iroquois had done since ancient times and attempted to do with the Dutch and French settlers in Iroquoia.16 The Spaniards did not assimilate the indigenous peoples in Borikén. They did not and could not. While many never came into contact with the colonizer until much later, it was actually the opposite transformational process where Indian women often bore the brunt of Spanish impetuosity so that the children would survive and live on. Our grandmothers and grandfathers “blessed the alignment of the Spanish blood with the Indian blood in order for the children to survive . . . in order [that] the seed that the woman carried would not be eliminated,” explains NoguerasVidal.17 This form of passive resistance was also the standard response 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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in Kiskeya: “Instead of fighting, the standard reaction of the Taínos to their early encounters with Spaniards included attempts to adopt Spaniards into their cacicazgos [territory of a cacike or chiefdom] and to recognize their leaders as caciques in their own right. The Taínos’ aim appears to have been to join with the Spaniards in reciprocal kinship and trade relations, as they would have done with a powerful Indian group.”18 This was the aim of Agüeybana: “Agueybana, the great chief of Guaynia, had news of the devastation of the Tainos of Hispaniola. The historian Fernandez de Oviedo affirmed that in order to avoid such a fate in Puerto Rico, Agueybana opted to be a guatiao or bloodbrother, with Ponce de León. He agreed to make conucos to provide cassava bread to the Spaniards and instructed his subchiefs to assist the colonizers.”19 Agüeybana agreed to allow Ponce de Leon to set up a settlement of his choice on the island. This resulted in the founding of Caparra on the northern coast next to the bay that came to be known as “Puerto Rico,” or “Rich Port.” As designated by the name, Ponce de Leon chose the area because it was found to be abundant in gold. The Indian cacikes had provided naborías (a class of workers) to assist in its search in the northern rivers of Bayamón, Cebuco, Cayniabón, and Manatoabón.20 However the naborías kept fleeing from the mines, which soon after resulted in the implementation of the encomienda system to attempt to force them to work.21 Paradoxically, even though the Indian leaders were contributing to their own colonization, “these concessions do not signify that he [Agüeybana] was ceding any sovereign rights to the Spaniards.”22 The use of the guatiao meant the cacical system became secularized by the cacikes, and thus was not destroyed as it had been in Santo Domingo.23 “The cacical system persisted here. It was changed. It was secularized. Instead of cacikes, you had a lot of economic arbitrators. You had large landowners, large properties producing and exporting. This was always an exportation economy,” points out Lamourt-Valentín.24 Agüeybana knew of Spanish intentions so he attempted to mitigate or “buy time” in order to lessen the impact of the colonial process. Thus, it makes more sense to view these initial events in Borikén as tactical long-term survival strategies. At the same time, an active rebellion was brewing. The exploitation of labor and gold for profit was completely incomprehensible to the Jíbaro, who had only utilized the mineral for ornamental purposes.25 They resented their own labor being used to enrich the Spaniards and deprive themselves of their cultural ways and customs: 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha



The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction What they would not tolerate was that their own labor had to put the gold in the hands of the invaders. These realities and the belief of the natives that they could not have intercourse with their wives while working the mines, prolonged by many days when carried out by the Spaniards, began to create in the landowners a growing resistance to the demands of the invaders, in spite of the agreement with the Caciques, who were becoming more and more reluctant to lend laborers. The meaningless work in the mines; the insist[e]nce on the abandonment of their customs, such as the bathing and nudity; the changing of their diet of yuca derivatives for others requiring less time in preparation; the impeding of the celebration of the areytos and the missionary spirit of those who arrived as guests and now were converted into lords, began the slow incubation of the desire and the duty to throw off the yoke.26

The implementation of the encomienda led directly to the Indian war of 1511. After the death of Agüeybana, his nephew, Agüeybana (the Brave), led an uprising and destroyed the Spanish settlement at Guánica. This led to more battles. Of the initial rebellion, Francisco Moscoso writes, “More than 350 Spanish settlers were reported to have been killed in the towns or scattered in the haciendas in the countryside.” The war was meant to free the land from “foreign domination and exploitation.”27 According to Juan Angel Silén, “When the Indians began to protest, it was against a violence imposed by forced labor, against a religion which threatened their whole world, and against a European morality which threatened their legitimate customs.”28 Steiner also commented on the action: “The revolt of the Indians failed. Yet it was not a failure. Within a few days the Indians had killed ‘more than half of the Spaniards’ on the island. Led by the caciques Guarionex, Urayoan, and Agueybana the Brave, they burned not only the town of Sotomayor, but other settlements. The mines were halted. The battle reports of the Conquistadors boasted of no more than a few hundred dead Indians. Most had safely escaped.”29 Many fled to the mountains to survive the hard labor of the encomienda and the spread of diseases.30 Since very few Jíbaro had been killed in the initial uprising, the battle reports referred to by Steiner would have been in all likelihood the recorded deaths from the subsequent battles at Yauco, Culebrinas Valley, and in the Yagüeça province. Ponce de Leon went on the offensive and had supposedly pacified the island after the battle at Yagüeça. In initially writing that the revolt had failed, perhaps Steiner was referring to the fact that the indigenous peoples were unable to expel the Spaniards from the island. But the revolt was not a failure because they had formidably challenged the 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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colonizer and dealt them a severe blow. While a number of prominent cacikes were killed, injured, or surrendered, the mountain regions, and other isolated regions of the island, were definitely not “pacified” because the colonial Spanish did not settle there, except for having established a royal plantation in Utuado. In any event, the war of liberation continued until 1516.31 Thousands of Indian people attacked and destroyed Caparra.32 When Diego Colón established a Christian settlement near the “rebel center” on the eastern side of the island in 1514, it was reduced to ashes in a brutal attack before the settlement could be relocated.33 There were apparently many indigenous casualties in coastal areas. According to Moscoso, a thousand natives were reportedly killed in battle and hundreds of others made captives in the northern region of Amanio (Loiza).34 Indian losses were also severe in the eastern yucayeke (village or province) of Bieke (Vieques). Moscoso notes that during the war there, over five hundred warriors were captured and “hundreds of others killed.” Because of their supposed “negative” influence on the youth, many elders were also executed and “their bodies cut to pieces and scattered along the shore” as a form of intimidation.35

Re s is ta nc e to S panish Forei gn Poli cy Unbeknownst to most, the war in Borikén had a very significant impact on the theological and juridical debates taking place in Spain in 1512 and 1513. This influenced Spanish foreign policy. The first protests by the Spanish clergy of abuses against the indigenous peoples in Española and some dangerous uprisings taking place, specifically in “San Juan Bautista,” resulted in the issuing of the requerimiento in 1513.36 This document, as previously discussed, was “an attempt to give theological legitimation to the papal grant of the New World to the Castilian sovereigns for the purpose of evangelizing it.”37 It had become necessary to Spanish jurists and theologians to somehow require native peoples to consent to convert to Christianity. To this effect, Queen Isabella had issued an earlier royal decree in 1503 justifying the subjugation and enslavement of the Carib by authorizing war on them if they refused to convert.38 Not surprisingly, the decree was usually read in Spanish and often from a distance. This version is quoted from Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés: I beg and require of you . . . to recognize the church as lady and superior of the universe and to acknowledge the Supreme Pontiff, called pope, in her name, and the king and queen . . . as lords and superiors . . . by virtue




The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction of said donation; and consent to have these religious fathers declare and preach these things to you. If you do so, you will be acting well, and those who are over you and to whom you owe obedience, and Their Highnesses and I [whosoever leads the Spanish expedition in question] in their name would welcome you with love and charity. If you do not do it . . . then with the help of God I will undertake powerful action against you. I will make war on you everywhere and in every way that I can. I will subject you to the yoke and obedience of the church and of Their Highnesses. I will take you personally and your wives and children, and make slaves of you, and as such sell you off . . . and I will take away your property and cause you all the evil and harm I can.39

As a result, the Indian people naturally resisted a law they believed to be inhumane, unjust, and a violation of their own laws and customs. They did not willingly consent to such a proposition where Christian conversion amounted to cultural genocide, or the stripping of a people’s will and desire to live. As indigenous peoples have asserted for decades within the international community, and Canadian researchers Mark Davis and Robert Zannis sum up succinctly, “One should not speak lightly of ‘cultural genocide’ as if it were a fanciful invention . . . The cultural mode of group extermination is genocide, a crime. Nor should ‘cultural genocide’ be used in the game: ‘Which is more horrible, to kill and torture; or remove [the prime cultural symbol that is] the will and reason to live?’ Both are horrible.”40 Indeed, the option presented to many indigenous Caribbean peoples was either to be stripped of their cultural soul, or die. Many preferred the latter in hopelessness or as an act of defiance, which helps to explain the high rate of suicide among our ancestors. They obviously did not want to live under an abusive system like the encomienda, which was so antithetical to the good life they were used to. Moreover, while the forced conversion method of the requerimiento was detrimental to the population, indigenous resistance to Spanish colonialism has been largely ignored as a factor contributing to changes in Spanish policy. It is the clergy’s stance against abuses that has been acknowledged for policy change rather than the leading figures of the struggle—that is, the indigenous peoples and their wars and resistance versus the colonizer. Rivera explains that “Spanish scholars generally stress the first factor, neglecting the importance of native rebelliousness, especially in Boriquén. This is in line with the continual omission of the principal protagonist of the conquest—the subjugated native.”41 It was actually the shedding of Indian blood that 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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was the bottom line motivation for changes in policy, which set the stage for the Spanish chroniclers to assume their “immortal” roles. Ironically, as the indigenous voice was squashed throughout the process, these changes often turned out to be just as criminal as to what they were “well intentioned” to repair. The history of resistance to Spanish policy also effectively debunks the idea of Puerto Rican “docility.” Silén examined where this concept originated and how it was used as a scapegoat for colonialism and the native “acceptance” of the colonial regime. The Puerto Rican intellectual elite came to use the indigenous word tara “to describe an inherited sickness or weakness.”42 Somehow interracial mixing produced “taras,” which “deprived us of control over our destiny,” and so “we became ‘passive’ and submissive,” he wrote. Native rebelliousness has thus been minimized in the process, while the bourgeois leader’s lauding of docility turned out to be “no more than a wish that the worker and peasant be docile to them.”43 This history has been reproduced in the standard literature of the island and parallels how myths come into being. Responding to the charge, nationalist independence leader Pedro Albizu Campos once said, “This is a legend that frightened men have used to traffic with the life of the nation. Our people is an heroic people. Our people is courageous.”44 Silén essentially concludes that it was really the colonization of Borikén and exploitation by foreigners that fueled the anger and lament of the people, rather than an exaggerated weakness not to fight back. He takes on Antonio Pedreira, René Marqués, and others for their failure to understand the concept and colonial process in general: “Some of the Puerto Rican historians, writers, and essayists who believe this have been relying on a determinism produced by theories which modern man, through science and technology, has discredited. Others have failed to explore the past for evidence of the people’s victimization by a leadership which, because of its class origins, allied itself with foreigners to maintain its privileged ‘junior partner’ position.”45 This latter point is looked at more later and speaks to how the criollo elite today continues to maintain their privileged status and interests under the protection of the United States. They are more than happy to uphold the political status quo at the hands of the discarded native.

Or ig ins and Mo untai n S urvi val In Antillean tradition, indigenous Caribbean peoples believe they came from the earth or from caves and have always been present. This belief does not necessarily run counter to the theory surrounding the 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




lost continent of Atzantiha (or Atlantis). In Borikén, the “Caverns of Creation” in the mountain region of Lares are where all humans emerged from.46 When the people were asked why they venerate the cavern, “they answered seriously and sensibly because from there emerged the sun and the moon that were to give light to the world.”47 Anthropologically speaking, the evidence to date indicates that the first peoples arrived in the Antilles about six thousand years ago. They are believed by many to have come from the Yucatán peninsula or from other parts of Central America.48 In my research, I have been able to find a continuous native presence showing that the original peoples to populate the region (the so-called “Archaics”) survived well into the post-European contact era, thus rejecting Irving Rouse’s first “repeoplying” theory.49 Along the same lines as Alegría’s “conquest of the Archaics” theory,50 Rouse’s theory contends in large part that the original “Casimiroids” of Central America were “replaced,” or virtually eliminated, by a later South American group51 that had supposedly emigrated into the region. Needless to say, Rouse’s work has been controversial and as one scholar has noted, his “mechanical reductionism,” or near exclusive use of pottery typologies in providing a history of indigenous peoples, “prevents communication among most social scientists and runs counter to contemporary movements in both history and anthropology toward an integral understanding of the past.”52 The implications of continuity would mean that the indigenous peoples present in the fifteenth-century northern Antilles were likely of Mesoamerican origin, rather than the dominant scholarly view that has promoted South American origins. Among other scholars, Betty Meggers and Clifford Evans dispute the South American origin of the “Saladoid,” who are thought to be the ancestors of the “Taíno.” They favor an expansion from the west “because white-on-red decoration [ceramic type] is widespread in Mesoamerica and the Andean area, but has not been reported from central Amazonia.”53 There is much data to suggest a very strong Mesoamerican and Mayan cultural, philosophical, and anthropological connection to the Caribbean.54 Linguistic evidence of a Mesoamerican origin has also countered the dominant “Arawakan” basis of the indigenous language.55 Eugenio Fernández-Méndez’s in-depth and important work on Antillean art and mythology seems to have been pushed aside as it articulated theories of origins in contrast to the mainstream academy. His findings reveal that “certain ancient mythological concepts of the Antilles are definitely of Mesoamerican origin,” and “we may point out that the Antillean art forms and mythology of very remote times present many 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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similarities to the art forms and mythology of Mesoamerica, Mexico, Yucatán and Central America, but most specially to those of Yucatán, Costa Rica and Panamá, and seem to have been derived from these areas.”56 Regarding the ethnological data I have collected in Borikén, a significant portion of information regarding the Maya has been passed down from generation to generation. Aside from the philosophical and archeological records, I have often been reminded orally about “our Mayan past” and “our Maya ancestors” in my work and travels there. Elder Doña Herminia (Monsita) Vargas would say, “The clue is hidden in the Maya, but the key is in the Cemí.”57 The clue hidden in the Maya “refers to the experiences that have been occurring within Creation, the planet Earth, the Universe, and Humans up until the year 2012. The wisdom of the Mayan Culture presents these teachings as the culmination and beginning of a new life process.”58 Accordingly, some of the most revealing archeological data concerning the earliest indigenous presence in Borikén are the radiocarbon datings made at Ponce in the mid-1990s at the south coast site of Maruca. These show “Archaic” habitation dating back about five thousand years.59 Roberto Martínez-Torres, who is an expert on “Archaic sites” having completed his Master’s thesis on the La Tembladera site in Morovis, Puerto Rico,60 told me in 1999 that there had been about ten sites studied, and many more found on the island in the past decade, concluding, “There were a lot of Archaic people around the island living in a lot of places.”61 This evidence and other findings in the 1990s demonstrate that there was a very early indigenous presence in Borikén. More significantly, Martínez-Torres believes that the first peoples to populate Borikén controlled the whole island, and certainly the mountain regions, as they would have been well-established by the time of the arrival of other groups. Rouse also depicts the relative strength and conditions for survival of the original “Casimiroid” people of Kiskeya when he writes, “They could retreat into the interior of Hispaniola and use it as a base from which to defend their territory. Their larger population and more advanced culture must have enhanced their chances of success.”62 Ironically, he then goes on to provide a paucity of evidence for their virtual extinction. The indigenous peoples of Borikén had been living for hundreds if not thousands of years in the mountain yucayekes of, for example, Guama, Otoao (Utuado), Coabey (Jayuya), Jatibonico, Guaynabo, Turabo, and Cayeco. This is a very important point because it shows that the mountain regions, that bear Indian names, were already populated prior to European contact. Most scholars have typically failed to mention this, or that people had fled there after the war, leaving the 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




reader with the unwitting impression that the mountains were essentially “barren” of a human presence. Fernando Picó most recently writes that after the suppression of the Indian rebellion, many people either fled to the islands of the east or perished under the brutal system of servitude. Nothing is said about the mountain regions before or after the Spanish arrival so that by the 1520s, “it was evident that the population the Spaniards had tried to conquer had disappeared.”63 This emblematically ends the section as so many do. When I was in San Juan in 2006, the word going around was that Picó was a popular professor delivering a “nuanced” history. On the contrary, Fewkes had pointed out long before that the early repartimientos (distribution of native people) took “no account of those in the mountains who had not been conquered.”64 María Teresa Babín added, “The isolation of certain mountainous zones in Puerto Rico resulted in nuclei of Indian families that maintained consciousness of their origin till the end of the eighteenth century.”65 While Fewkes too somehow surmised an early native “extinction,” it appears to have been passed down a priori that the mountain regions were really not populated at all. In solidifying an indigenous mountain presence, there were always Indian bateys (ceremonial grounds or ball courts) near yucayekes. Oviedo noted that there was a batey near each village.66 Fewkes wrote of the many bateys and remnants thereof that he learned about in Borikén at the turn of the twentieth century. Most were evidently located along the coastal plains, but the best preserved sites were those “in the high mountains in the middle of the island” near Utuado and Ajuntas.67 Other mountain areas where ball courts and vestiges had been located include Jayuya, Corozal, on the border of Aguas Buenas and Bayamon, and between Comerio and Barranquitas.68 In addition, the size of the batey apparently correlated with the size of villages. “That is why the fields are here,” said the storyteller, in reference to the Caguana ceremonial grounds in Utuado. “That is why they built the batey so big. That is why there are so many Ceremonial Grounds here. How do I know this? I have been told this. This is why I know. Wherever there was a big batey, there was a big village.”69 Fewkes located “several large villages” in Utuado alone, with bateys nearby.70 Another point of significance concerns the burial mounds found near these sacred sites. “The discovery that these mounds are Indian cemeteries sheds light on the nature and use of the neighboring inclosures. The conclusions drawn from my excavations of the Utuado mounds are that large numbers of the dead were buried just outside the dance courts and that the elaborate areitos, or mortuary dances, were held in the latter,” exclaimed 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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Fewkes. He remarked that the majority of the “prehistoric” dead in Puerto Rico were “undoubtedly buried in the cemeteries” in this manner, while internments in caves were another plausible method of burial.71 We can therefore reasonably conclude this section by saying that there was probably a fairly large indigenous population residing in the mountains of Borikén prior to Spanish contact.

La ndo’s Census and the F l ight o f the Jí b aro Indigenous resistance to the Spaniards continued throughout the sixteenth century. Taking flight to the mountains, avoiding census takers, hiding, and more physical rebellions were among the most prominent forms. Active resistance was recorded in the mountains in 1517 and during the 1520s72 and was stepped up in the 1530s against coastal settlements.73 Delgado mentions that with the assistance of African runaway slaves and the Santa Cruz Indians, “guerrilla” warfare organized in the Sierra de Luquillo lasted until the mid-sixteenth century.74 Since the encomienda system was never well established in Borikén, the Carib continued to freely revolt. Steiner noted the system was “doomed” in Borikén and exported to México.75 This was likely a partial result of the king of Spain’s freeing of Indian encomendados (those held under the encomienda said to be “free persons”) in Puerto Rico in 1520,76 although some scholars and many colonists strongly resisted and prevented actions to this effect. The instability of the encomienda helps to explain the extremely low indigenous population figure recorded for the island in the 1530–1531 census conducted by the governor, Francisco Manuel de Lando. By order of the Spanish Crown, the census measured two population centers, the then city of Puerto Rico (San Juan) and the southwestern settlement of San Germán.77 According to Moscoso, Lando reported that “there were less than 2,000 natives (many of whom had been brought from other parts of the Caribbean) registered in the last encomiendas in Puerto Rico.”78 Salvador Brau noted that Lando’s census calculated 1,148 total indios, both slaves (“Indios esclavos”) and “free people” (“Indios libres encomendados”) subject to the encomienda.79 Adolfo Pérez-Comas’s recent study measured 970 “Yndio” and “Yndia” slaves, with free people not counted.80 Regardless of the total, the dilemma with these census figures is that they have been interpreted by scholars over the generations to be an inevitable sign that the native population throughout the island had been wiped out. The idea that has endured “from generation to generation 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




is that the Spaniards exterminated the Indians in thirty-six years,” writes Figueroa-Mercado.81 This was an “idea” Spanish colonists sought to perpetuate in numerous places to rid themselves of the “Indian problem” by intentionally reducing indigenous population numbers. Regarding Kiskeya, Guitar points out that it was not in the interest of officials and encomenderos to give accurate counts of native laborers. In order to secure positions, grants, and favors from the Crown, documentation downplayed those who remained under their control and exaggerated the effects of epidemics.82 While the measles and small pox epidemics of 1518 and 1529 as reported by encomenderos in Borikén would have apparently reduced the indigenous encomienda population enormously, as Moscoso notes,83 the encomenderos there probably exaggerated their losses for other reasons. “It might also have been true that the colonists who held natives under the encomienda exaggerated the disappearance of the native element to force the limitless introduction of Negro slaves, which were not subject to the ordinances or scruples that impeded the exploitation of native labourers,” stated Figueroa-Mercado.84 Indeed, six years after Lando’s census Governor Vallejo found “a great number” of indios up for sale on rural farms together with African slaves. Some owners had been hiding them.85 Lando’s census figure would have also concerned a smaller number of the total encomienda population as niños (children) were not accounted for.86 More importantly, the census did not count the “number of natives not under encomienda.”87 As the encomiendas measured by the census were only set up near the gold mines on the northern coast in the vicinity of San Juan and near San Germán, the census did not take into account the large number of Indian people in villages, valleys, caves, and other places in the mountainous interior, nor those in other parts of the island. Delgado writes that the census of 1531 did not count the “hundreds or thousands” hidden in the mountains.88 This what Fewkes alluded to previously. Pérez-Comas confirms that in all probability those located in isolated areas of the island were not considered.89 Furthermore, it was not in the interest of the Jíbaro or Boricua to be counted by the Spaniards in their surveys anyway: “A man hiding in the hills from the swords of the Conquistadors was not likely to report his wife and his children to the census taker. The official censuses of the Indians grew smaller and smaller. Any count of the conquered by the conquerors was always about as meaningful as a census of rabbits made by wolves.”90 Writing about Kiskeya, Jerónimo de Aguero likewise noted, “Indians want very much never 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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to see Spaniards . . . so they frequently go to the mountains.”91 This pattern was duplicated in other Spanish colonial territories.92 Still, the indigenous peoples would continue to pop up in the sixteenth-century history. The bishop determined that landowners had lied about the quantity of natives under their control when they learned about King Carlos’s total abolition of the encomienda system in 1544.93 When General Don Francisco Coloma retook the city of San Juan in 1599, which had been captured by the English Earl of Cumberland, he was amazed to find the city “inhabited almost entirely by Indians. He reported that the settlers had fled to the mountains, from the city, and the Indians had fled to the city, from the mountains.”94 The Indian people came down from the mountains where they had been living since ancient times. Even more joined them after the Spanish coming. The post-war exodus of the Indian heading to high places is remembered as “The Flight of the Jíbaro”: “On the mountainous island there were hundreds of deep caves and hidden valleys. In these the Borinqueños hid and lived for generations. They became even then, as they were to become again, exiles in their own land. A writer of contemporary Puerto Rican history, Marianna Morris, has said: ‘They escaped by the hundreds, making their way into the hills at night.’ It was the fleeing Indians who were the ancestors of the jíbaros, the men from the mountains, she has written.”95

Co nc lusion This chapter has presented part of the evidence indicating that the indigenous peoples of Borikén had survived throughout the sixteenth century. I outline some of the active and passive forms of resistance that took place during this early period. The Jíbaro had fled the colonial Spanish in large numbers during and after the war, and many had not been a part of the encomienda system to begin with as exemplified by the regional mountain presence prior to European contact. Therefore, Lando’s survey most importantly dealt with a very small percentage of the total Indian population on the island from 1530 to 1531. Looked at closely, his census does not reflect that the indigenous population was on the verge of “extinction.” This becomes strikingly clear when we look at two late eighteenthcentury censuses. Lando’s underestimation is typical of Spanish census misinterpretations of lower than actual native population counts throughout the Americas. Finally, it is necessary to shed light on the point Moscoso makes about the Indian people brought to Puerto Rico from other parts of 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




the Caribbean during the early slavery era. Many scholars have acknowledged this history and that native slaves were brought in from other places, too. Of the early repartimientos, Fewkes writes, “The figures given in the enumeration of slaves sometimes include those introduced from other islands.”96 This point is undisputed. Yet, with the recent DNA evidence revealing a strong contemporary Amerindian presence, some have continued to uphold the extinction myth by now saying, among other spurious things, that because of the importation of Indian labor to the island a “distinct” Puerto Rican Indian presence cannot be determined.97 This is not surprising as the dominant establishment can in one way or another continue to sustain antiquated beliefs when seriously challenged. Those who were brought in as slaves were obviously subject to the limited areas and population sizes of the encomiendas. While some would have inevitably escaped, those imported would have made up a small number of the overall indigenous population as demonstrated from the gathering data. While I think it is a sad commentary that DNA testing has had to be resorted to in Puerto Rico to “prove” that a people still exist, to quell the skeptics who have feverishly maintained that the indigenous peoples are long gone, the findings by Juan Martínez-Cruzado and colleagues of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez that 61 percent of Puerto Ricans today possess Amerindian mitochondrial DNA are quite revealing.98 Mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the female line only. Thus, how many female Indian slaves were brought to the island during the post-European contact era? Indian slaves imported were in all likelihood male laborers, as inferred by Martínez-Cruzado, who also points out that slaves were brought in from the Circum-Caribbean and South America. He found that the diversity of Amerindian mitochondrial DNA taken from his samples was “not high, as may have been expected if the Amerindian predominance in Puerto Rico was the consequence of post-Columbian migrations.”99 As a strong matriarchal society to begin with, this would mean that Amerindian women from Borikén survived the early colonial era in large numbers. As a result, the women absorbed the men to a high degree in order for our people to survive in the long run. Further, the traditions and stories that have been passed down for generations corroborate a distinctly Jíbaro (Puerto Rican) Indian culture and metaphysics. Like other indigenous societies, the traditions related come from the land where the people originated and have been culturally established.



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Jíb aro Resi stance and Continuity

B

oth active and passive resistance to Spanish colonialism defined the sixteenth-century indigenous struggle in Borikén. The next two hundred years of history would see a form of passive resistance that could be described as a type of silence from the outside world. Aside from some census figures and their own inner selves, the Jíbaro Indian as a living reality is virtually nowhere to be found during this period. But this is precisely the way they would have wanted it, by not drawing attention to themselves. Their safety and survival would depend on their anonymity. As James Scott writes about resistance in peasantry struggles, “the self-interested muteness of the antagonists thus conspire to create a kind of complicitous silence that all but expunges everyday forms of resistance from the historical record.”1 The Jíbaro continued along their stubborn way not caring what anyone else would think as long as they remained free. Indigenous resistance and continuity from the seventeenth to late eighteenth century are examined in this chapter. The Jíbaro was actually “neither a peasant in the feudal sense nor landless in the modern sense.”2 Most were independent farmers, or campesinos. By the seventeenth century they had solidified their presence in the mountains, and in many rural and coastal areas too. Many had been intermarrying with runaway African slaves and Spaniards. This “blood mixing” was basically a continuation of the indigenous tradition of guatiao, utilized as a survival tactic like Agüeybana had done when meeting up with Ponce de Leon. In a sense, the Indian was in the process of being physically transformed. But they were still indios, just as brave and independent as their ancestors. Arroyo noted, “The mixing of these races may have changed the outward features of the Boricuas, 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


Chapter 4


but only strengthened the inner spiritual need for freedom.”3 They went “underground” in order to protect their cultural ways and customs. Thus, the mestizo Indian survived in large numbers and, more importantly, maintained a cultural consciousness. As Spanish population censuses imply and the dialectic would explain, they and many of their “full blooded” kin were present throughout the mountain regions and in many other places of the island at the end of the eighteenth century. The final section of the chapter discusses how both pre and post-European contact indigenous population figures were minimized for ulterior reasons. Recent studies show how factors such as altitude and climate conditions have helped to explain long-term indigenous survival in interior regions of the Americas and may neatly apply to our findings about Borikén.

S pa nia rds, Af r ic an S l ave ry, and the Jí baro It is somewhat ironic how the Indian population has been continually minimized when the populations of other major groups that went to Puerto Rico were actually quite small. While indigenous population figures have been underestimated, the Spanish and African populations were never very large. Moscoso writes that by the 1530s, “The Spanish population was small and most of the settlers were heavily indebted.”4 Many of the original settlers had died, returned home, or, as mining declined, moved on to more profitable pursuits in México and Perú. Figueroa-Mercado says it is very obvious from Lando’s census that whites made up a “dangerous minority.”5 Census data indicates that there were 369 married and unmarried Spanish colonists on the island in 1530, not including wives and children.6 Others have noted there were only 327 whites at the time.7 The Spanish exodus became so severe, according to Adalberto López, that the governor thought “unless it was checked all the Spaniards would eventually leave and the island would be lost to Spain. He issued an order that no one was to leave the island without written permission from him and he brought his point home by publicly cutting off the legs of two Spaniards who tried to disobey him.”8 Since gold mining was no longer economically viable, the Spaniards who remained took to agriculture and cattle raising. Sugar became a principal export product by the mid-sixteenth century as several sugar mills had been established in the 1520s, and cacao and ginger assumed an export importance in the early seventeenth century.9 The sugar farms were mostly small family-run businesses located along the northern coast. As Indian labor was fleeting due to factors previously 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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Since Indian labor was rapidly disappearing by the 1530s and since there were too few Spaniards available and willing to supply the necessary labor in the sugar farms and cattle ranches, Spanish landowners on the island turned to the importation of black slaves to meet their labor needs. Permission to import black slaves into its American possessions had been granted by the Spanish Crown in 1503, and in the years immediately following the Spanish occupation of Boriquén some slaves were brought to the island. However, it was not till the late 1520s and the 1530s, as a critical shortage of Indian labor developed, that black slaves assumed an economic importance on the island.10

The African presence and influence in Borikén has been significant ever since. In not minimizing the horrific effects of slavery, it is important to point out that in comparison to other Caribbean islands, African and Indian slavery were limited. Through information attained from Alegría, Steiner wrote, “Slavery in Puerto Rico had always been limited by the island’s geography. On the coastal plains there was little more than fifteen miles of flat, arable land. There was simply not the land for the vast slave plantations that were cultivated in the rest of the Caribbean, and in the Southern United States.”11 This curbed the number of African people brought in. Michael Conniff and Thomas Davis note that by 1530 there were 2,292 slaves on the island.12 Indian and African slaves were apparently included together in this figure as Lando’s census revealed a total of 1,523 African slaves at the time.13 However in Hispaniola, up to thirty thousand slaves were possibly brought in by 1565.14 Cudjoe says that by 1787, the French were importing over forty thousand slaves per year to Haití, and there were more than eleven thousand annual deaths.15 And Jamaica (Xaymaca) introduced more than sixty-three thousand slaves between 1801 and 1807.16 In sharp contrast, Alejandro O’Reilly’s 1765 census estimated a little more than five thousand total slaves in Puerto Rico.17 A 1778 census showed 6,603 “negro slaves.”18 While African slavery did increase in the nineteenth century, Figueroa-Mercado confirms that after a slave uprising was brutally crushed by whites in 1532, “the numerical superiority of the Africans diminished, and, apart from that early epoch, Puerto Rico differed to the other Antilles in that she never had great numbers of slaves.”19 As the Carib had rebelled against the encomienda, African slaves, too, resisted an inhumane system they were put under. They often 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


discussed, the planters turned to the importation of African slaves to fulfill their labor demands:


joined up with the Indian people along the coasts and in the mountains to battle the Spaniards. The political relationship was one emboldened by a love of freedom and fierce resistance to colonialism, like that of the Garifuna (Black Caribs) of St. Vincent who were ultimately exiled by the British to Central America at the end of the eighteenth century. In terms of intermarriage, Africans tended to intermix and marry with Indian and Spanish people along the coasts where most of the plantations were located.20 Many poor Spaniards who did not receive “the gifts,” or lands, went to the mountains to become subsistence farmers. They tended to intermix and marry with the indigenous peoples there.21 Rape and forced marriages by Spanish men with Indian women were also prevalent. According to Naniki, this is an important factor in the making of the mestizo as it reveals the abuse and hardship that women had to endure at the hands of the colonizer.22 It should be noted here that DNA evidence now showing proportionate Amerindian frequencies in coastal areas to mountain regions could be explained by more recent emigration patterns from the mountains to coastal centers.23 For example, the larger robust areas of Ponce, Arecibo, Aguadilla, and Mayagüez all had high DNA counts.24 However, the data also shows high frequencies in more isolated coastal regions suggesting high degrees of indigenous survival historically as these more secluded areas were less prone to European contact. Juan Antonio, the elder I met from the coast of Quebradillas, told me his family had been living there for as long as he could remember. When he was growing up, the surrounding area consisted of all Indian families, and many are still there today. They continue some of their traditional ways and practices such as the use of medicinal plants for healing and instruments to make music. In the 1950s, almost everyone in Quebradillas was living in bohíos (traditional Indian houses) made of yagua (the “boards” or tabla de palma from the native yagua palm tree), and the floors were made of bare earth. He said all of his family was indio, on both his mother and father’s side. Juan Antonio was addressed as “el indio” at times in the past and even today. “There are many indios because you hear many people calling others ‘el indio’ in many places if they look like me.”25 African slaves also often fled, alone or in groups, into the forests and mountainous interior.26 The Indian people in these areas would have been their best potential allies, like they had been in Brazil and Kiskeya, although they were effective opponents in these places too.27 Guitar writes that the indigenous peoples of Kiskeya “knew the island—the escape routes, the isolated regions, what grew where and how to find it or grow it, and how to best utilize the region’s 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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resources.”28 This knowledge would not be different for any people residing in a particular place for hundreds of years. Thus, the African and Spanish people who fled to isolated areas of Borikén were often embraced by the Indian people and culture and assimilated through intermarriage as their numbers would have been small compared to the native population. They inevitably became a part of the root indigenous culture, similar to the transformation process as described earlier by cacike Ramirez in Cuba. While foreigners in coastal centers tended to assimilate the Indian people there, it was the opposite transformational process when it came to the Jíbaro in many other places. Don Pedro Matos-Matos of Utuado said the Jíbaro has always resisted assimilation: “And that is why the jíbaros are so stubborn, so silent, so humble, and so independent. Because we are so Indian. That is why we resist assimilation.”29 He described the assimilation process and the heart and soul of the Jíbaro, a fiercely independent people whose cultural and spiritual roots and love of the land extend back since time immemorial: “If it were not for us, the jíbaros, there would be no Puerto Rico. The heart and soul of Puerto Rico is in the heart and soul of the jíbaros. “For hundreds of years we have resisted all the foreigners—the Spaniards and the Americans. You know how? It is no mystery. On the coasts, in the cities of San Juan, Ponce, Mayagüez, when the foreigners came, they assimilated the Puerto Ricans. Not here! In Utuado, in the mountains, the foreigners were assimilated by us. ¡Sí ! They marry our women. And our women they make Puertorriqueños out of them. The jíbaros are very stubborn. Especially if they are women. I think our women may be a little more Indian than our men. “Anyone who wishes to know the Puerto Rican must know the jíbaros,” said Don Pedro. “Or he knows nothing. We are Puerto Rico.”30

The social interrelationship that formed resulted in the continued political, social, and cultural development of the Jíbaro. The development of Jíbaro music, art, dance, poetry, and food crops, for example, provides important clues about the adaptation and growth of the Indian culture. Regarding the music, there were originally 18 instruments such as the drum, trunk, tortoise shell and string instrument.31 The gourds used for percussion instruments like the güiro, maracas, and early drum were of Indian origin. The African people introduced a certain drum and a one-string instrument like a harp, while the Spaniards brought over the six-string guitar.32 This synthesis forms 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




the basis of the Jíbaro music that lives on today. It is still popularly played in places as far away as Hawai‘i. Subsistence farming and particularly diversified agriculture in rural and interior areas are also uniquely Jíbaro. The people were expert agriculturalists carrying on in the tradition of their ancestors. A subsistence economy continued in the seventeenth century,33 and later. “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Puerto Rico’s chief characteristic was abundance, built on a diversified agriculture and an illicit trade—smuggling.”34 In 1788, a prominent priest noted the “bountiful nature” of the land that permits the many kinds of food crops that “reproduce themselves all year round.”35 Don Pedro elaborates on this history and how indigenous forms of planting such as by conucos continued in the mountains. Multicropping is still the norm among campesinos: It was the Indian way. And it was the jíbaro way. The colonization of the land by the Spaniards and then the Americans, into a one-crop economy, was resisted by the jíbaros. “At first, we grew cocoa beans for the conquerors, then we grew ginger, which grows wild along the riverbeds, then we grew coffee, then we grew sugar cane, and then tobacco,” said Don Pedro. “But in Utuado we always managed to grow many crops simultaneously—the tobacco, the coffee, and our own food. So, though in the lowlands they had a one-crop economy, in the mountains we boasted a diversified agriculture. That accounted for our more sound economy in our towns. In our land we raised corn, all kinds of beans, rice, and roots—the old Indian food. Even our land had an independent spirit.”36

Or ig in o f the P roletar i at At the start of the seventeenth century, a large cultural and psychological barrier between the towns and rural areas permeated the island until the end of the nineteenth century.37 Hundreds of subsistence farmers in rural and mountain regions were basically isolated from the sugar farms, cattle ranches, and towns. López notes that those in the interior were “the ancestors of the latter-day jíbaro,”38 of which a present and future indigenous continuum can be obviously inferred as confirmed earlier by Morris. In addition, the only municipalities set up at this time were San Juan and San Germán, both of which were small and sparsely populated. In fact, by the end of the eighteenth century, no roads had been built on the island.39 Sugar production and cattle exports grew slowly and so for Spain, Borikén was of minor economic importance marketwise 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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until the late 1700s.40 Thus, the Jíbaro were living independently at this time and doing things in their own way. They were cut off and ignored by the government and Spanish elite, and misunderstood by the dominant academy then as well as now. The renowned native Pacific scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa alluded to the general plight of grassroots indigenous cultures, which applies to the Jíbaro story: “The other level is that of ordinary people, peasants and proletarians, who, because of the poor flow of benefits from the top, skepticism about stated policies and the like, tend to plan and make decisions about their lives independently, sometimes with surprising and dramatic results that go unnoticed or ignored at the top. Moreover, academic and consultancy experts tend to overlook or misinterpret grassroots activities because they do not fit with prevailing views about the nature of society and its development.”41 Spain’s interest in Puerto Rico was essentially strategic in terms of maintaining control over the Spanish Caribbean and Central America. They could have cared less about the people. Internationally, it was “imperative that Spain hold on to the island, for should it fall into the hands of the enemies of Spain it could serve as a base of operations that could disrupt and even paralyze the entire Spanish-American commercial system.”42 Attacks by the English, French, and Dutch throughout the seventeenth century actually revealed Spain’s weaknesses and loss of territory, which resulted in the establishment of a permanent presence among its enemies in the Antilles and other places in the Americas.43 From a contemporary perspective Figueroa-Mercado concluded, “there was more smoke than fire and that Spain was not as powerful as was thought.”44 Lamourt-Valentín affirms Spain’s weaknesses, loss of influence in the Caribbean, and how the Spaniards were astounded at the major civilization they had encountered. The native account here runs counter to the history taught of Spanish dominance lending a sharp alternative perspective on events: “This [was] a major civilization. It freaked the Spanish out. The Spanish were not established in the Caribbean. They reestablished themselves on the continent. They lost the Caribbean . . . They were kicked out of all the major islands. They only had Havana and the western part of Cuba . . . In Santo Domingo, the only thing they had were two or three trade outposts. And the rest of Santo Domingo they never conquered, and they never conquered, definitely, never conquered Haití. The French were invited into Haití by the cacikes.”45 One of the interesting phenomena about Borikén was the large number of nonslaves who contributed to the labor force. This had also begun in the early seventeenth century. As the economy began 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




to grow in the eighteenth century, particularly the sugar industry, more slaves were imported to the island as a needed source of labor.46 However, as López writes, nonslave labor by the mid-eighteenth century had “assumed great importance in certain activities, and in some sugar and coffee farms non-slave laborers often outnumbered the slaves. These free laborers, however, constituted an unstable labor force since many of them would work only for part of the year, and others often left their employers and settled as subsistence farmers in the interior.”47 This situation resulted in the first appearance of the proletariat as recorded in Western history, notes LamourtValentín. The Frenchman André Pierre Ledru was sent to Puerto Rico in the 1790s where he recorded free laborers working “arm-inarm, shoulder-to-shoulder at the same work in the same way as the slaves. What he’s describing is the proletariat.”48 Marriages by slaves to Indian people compromised the slave owner to employ the free laborer. The slave would not be allowed to work if the owner did not also employ the free laborer because the slave belonged to the community, not to the owner.49 These “free laborers” were mostly “Free Colored” Indian people and “Free Negroes” as interpreted from the 1771 and 1778 censuses analyzed below. By the end of the eighteenth century, some important censuses had been taken and the population of the island had grown, with a good number of people located in the interior: “The population was over 150,000 and a significant proportion of it was now concentrated in the mountain chain of the interior. There were several dozen towns; Ponce and Mayagüez were expanding commercial centers, and San Germán had a population of several thousand. Town life throughout the island was livelier than in the past; contact between the towns and the rural areas was greater. More merchants now traveled through the interior and more people lived year round in the towns. San Juan, which still remained the commercial, administrative and ecclesiastical capital, was a bustling community of over 10,000 people.”50

L ate E ig h teenth-C entury C ensuses The written and ethnological narrative of a continued indigenous presence on the island of Borikén is corroborated by certain Spanish censuses that were taken in the second half of the eighteenth century. These unequivocally show that hundreds of Indian people were still there almost three hundred years after Spanish contact. This data in itself disproves the mid-sixteenth-century theory of indigenous Caribbean extinction. Given our discussion in the next section of typically 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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underestimated indigenous population figures in the Spanish colonies, and largely underestimated totals for the Americas as a whole, the censuses analyzed below, specifically the categories “Indians” and “Free Colored,” were also underestimations. I further importantly view both “full blooded” and mestizo Indian people in Puerto Rico as essentially one family, as they were closely related to each other culturally and biologically. The concept of distinguishing human beings based on “racial purity” and “blood quantum” measurements were racist European colonial inventions meant to separate native peoples from each other, whether for political, cultural, or economic reasons, in order to assimilate, marginalize, or slowly verify their extinction. Thus, the implications of estimating an overall Indian population count for the island in the late eighteenth century are huge. In order to get a better idea of the size of the population, I will examine two censuses taken. The figures brought out are arbitrary or rough estimates, but should give the reader an idea of the significance of the indigenous presence at that time. Most of the data from the censuses of 1771 and 1778 are provided here by Puerto Rican historians Salvador Brau, Loida Figueroa-Mercado, and Juan Manuel Delgado. The censuses were by order of King Carlos III51 and conducted by Fray Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra. Both reveal the category “Indians,” or “Indios” as written in Spanish. Regarding this category, Brau wrote, “These Indians, whose existence had been proven officially, were not the progeny of racial mixtures classified as pardos libres, but pure blooded [de raza pura] types, descendents of those emancipated by Charles V, who tried to distance themselves from their oppressors. Still settled in lands close to San Germán del Guadianilla in 1570, they migrated up to the harshest [agrio] mountain range, in a vicinity called La Indiera.”52 This group comprised “360 heads of family with 752 male sons and 1,190 women of every age and status,”53 for a total of 2,302 people as noted in the 1778 census. These censuses were taken in the region of Maricao, in the communities now known as Indiera Alta, Indiera Baja, and Indiera Fria, where the population had lived in isolation for over two hundred years.54 A census taken in 1799 showed that their numbers had remained virtually unchanged with 2,300 Indian people counted.55 The results of the 1771 and 1778 censuses noted in Table 4.1 are extracted from Figueroa-Mercado. It should be pointed out that Brau cites the years of these censuses as 1777 and 1787,56 with the exact same categories and figures as Figueroa-Mercado’s. I am using her dates, which are also cited by Arturo Santana and Rafael Torrech in their atlas,57 and as the 1778 census is commonly referred to today. 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha



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Whites

Year 1771

Year 1778

31,951

46,756

“Indians”

1,756

2,302

Free Colored

24,164

34,867

Free Negroes

4,747

7,866

Mulatto slaves

3,343

4,657

Negro slaves

4,249

6,603

Note: Figueroa-Mercado writes, “Please note that there was a majority of non-whites. In 1771, 38,259 compared to 31,951, and in 1778 56,295 compared to 46,756. Please note, moreover, that crossbreeds are not specified (native with White) or other mixtures, under the term ‘free coloured people’. If we compare this census with O’Reilly’s made in 1765 we note an increase in the number of slaves from 7,592 in 1771 and 11,560 in 1778, as compared to 5,037 slaves in 1765.”58

In an interview with Delgado, he made three important points clear to me regarding the data from the census category “Indians”: (1) at the time these censuses were taken and previous to that La Indiera (lit., “place where the Indian lives”) comprised the entire mountain region, not just the areas around Maricao as Indiera is known as today; (2) the censuses were conducted by the Catholic Church and the information taken from church baptism records, or from Indian people who had been baptized; and (3) the censuses did not take into account the many who had not been baptized. Delgado emphasized, “There were many more people there than the census indicates.” The census data actually revealed “10 percent of the reality.”59 This information can be corroborated through Delgado’s extensive research and knowledge of the subject matter since his childhood. In the mid-1960s, this educator began documenting the resistance and continued survival of the indigenous population through archival records and oral history.60 Some of his important findings reveal how the Jíbaro protested against abuse, discrimination, and the imposition of names by the Catholic Church,61 and how hundreds of Indian names or surnames were hidden or disguised as nicknames (apodos) that survived as actual names used mostly by campesinos.62 Much of this resistance came about in the nineteenth century in conjunction with the establishment of towns in central mountain regions. Prior to this time, there were no “towns” or churches set up in many places to conduct censuses and implement Spanish policies. In focusing on the 1778 census, since the category “Indians” only took into account those who were baptized, or 10 percent of the total according to Delgado, there would have been approximately 23,000 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


Table 4.1.

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“full blooded” Indian people in the vicinity where the census was taken, that is, in the communities now known as Indiera Alta, Indiera Baja, and Indiera Fria in the municipality of Maricao. Next, the general data for the censuses were extracted from numerous pueblos (towns) established at that time, primarily coastal and rural areas including the capital of San Juan.63 The light areas of Figure 4.1 indicate the pueblos from where the censuses were taken. The black areas of the municipalities of San Germán, Arecibo, and Coamo were also measured in the survey. Since the censuses only considered the category “Indians” from the region of Maricao, they did not take into account the Indian people living throughout the Cordilleras or other mountain regions, as La Indiera was known as back then, nor those in the Sierra de Luquillo. If we estimate the number of indigenous peoples in the interior regions of, for example, Las Marias, Lares, Adjuntas, Jayuya, Ciales, Morovis, Orocovis, Villalba, Barranquitas, and Aibonito, all of which were not a part of the census count as there were no towns established in these areas at the time,64 the population count becomes much larger. These regions and others that had yet to establish towns, with the exceptions of Guanica and Vega Alta, are highlighted in the gray areas of the map. If we multiply Maricao and the ten areas listed previously by the population count determined for Maricao in 1778 (11 × 23,000), we arrive at a tentative figure of 253,000 inhabitants. However, since indigenous survival “may” have been greatest in Maricao due to the remoteness of the region, we should reduce the 23,000 count for the other regions. If we halve this figure, which may be generous because

Figure 4.1 By permission and copyright of Editorial Cordillera, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1988.





other mountain areas were also very remote as mentioned below, we come up with an indigenous population count of about 11,500 people per region. In multiplying this number by the ten regions and adding the 23,000 figure for Maricao, we arrive at a total count of approximately 138,000 indios residing in these mountain areas in 1778. This number is still likely an underestimation, since the censuses did not account for the people living in other mountainous places such as Cidra, Aguas Buenas, Comerio, Naranjito, and Corozal, which too had yet to establish towns,65 or people in coastal and rural regions not measured in the censuses. Some have indeed questioned whether Maricao comprised the largest concentration of indigenous peoples in the mountains. Naniki says the Ciales and Orocovis regions were “just as remote” as Maricao, adding that the total count mentioned previously is a “minimum.” Back then, “all mountain regions were remote,” including the Sierra de Luquillo.66 This makes sense as, again, La Indiera comprised most of these regions and, as some who have been in the mountains know, you can get very lost up there even traveling by car today! For those who may be skeptical about the 138,000 estimate, this figure would no doubt include many “Free Colored,” or free “mixed blooded” people, the offspring of the racial intermixing that took place. They were also not counted in the mountain regions noted in the gray areas of the map. This category of the censuses is the other important area to consider, the data taken from the light areas of the map. “Free Colored” people, or “pardos libres” (“free browns”) in Spanish, comprised the largest population of nonwhites in the censuses who were not slaves, and their numbers had actually increased considerably from 1771 to 1778. In his research at the Catholic Church in Morovis, Martínez-Torres found out that Catholic priests had written in their baptism records that “pardos people were Indian descendants.”67 This is in spite of the fact that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Governor Toribio Montes “banded all the non-whites together under the title of free colored people (pardos),”68 and eliminated the category “Indios” in the process.69 He did this when “faced with the difficulty of fixing ethnic origins.”70 Thus, there was a strong Indian presence in Morovis at the end of the eighteenth century as this town was not founded until 1818. Martínez-Torres confirmed to me that “pardos people” were commonly descended from Indians. Federico Ribes-Tovar noted that pardos included “Indian halfbreeds.”71 And Picó also acknowledged that “part of the population then called pardo had Amerindian blood.”72 I have been able to determine from my research that the 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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category “Free Colored” primarily pertained to mestizos, or Indian people intermixed with Africans, or “native with White,” as FigueroaMercado indicated. When this author discusses “natives” in her book, she is specifically referring to the Indian population. This category would also include African people who intermixed with whites, or so-called “mulattos,” who were not slaves. However, Manuel Álvarez-Nazario wrote that prior to Montes’s grouping, the established use of the term “mulato” in Puerto Rico was without a doubt reserved for mestizos who were slaves, and pardo for mestizos who were free.73 So when Abbad y Lasierra penned in 1788 that “mulatos” on the island comprised the largest segment of the population,74 he was unwittingly referring to mestizo Indian people. This is apparent as Pablo Morales-Cabrera keenly revealed Abbad y Lasierra’s ignorance of the Indian population, and how he perceived them to have a very “limited mentality.”75 This was the thinking of the dominant establishment of the time as the Indian presence was minimized, and the people misunderstood and essentially perceived to be incapable of reasoning or abstract thinking. Given that the indigenous peoples routinely intermixed on the coasts and rural areas, where most of the census data were collected from, Indian descendants would have mainly comprised the second largest total in the censuses. The 34,867 count in 1778 is alone quite revealing for the purposes of our study. However, since the gray regions of the map were also not a part of the census count for this category, this group would have made up a considerably larger portion of the population through the intermarriage that had taken place in these areas. Lastly, I’m reminded of my talks with Cuko, who emphasized that “todo indios” had populated the Cordilleras at least until the time of the 1868 Grito de Lares revolution. Regarding the 1778 census, he agreed with Delgado’s assessment that only 10 percent of the Indian population in Maricao would have been counted.76 Of the Catholic Church, he said, “The people who didn’t go to church were nonexistent to them.” The Catholics were “the first intruders to destroy our past.” They did not come to help the native people but to help the Spaniards to establish themselves and to change the minds of the people. Liko remarked that if there were five thousand natives in a community but they had only changed the minds of a few, those few might be counted, but they would ignore the rest. As to the culture, he explained that all of the people in a great region, in maybe thousands of places, who had already died—all had lived the same Jíbaro lifestyle. This continuity applied to the whole island. He believed there were “much more people on the coast.” Because there are a lot 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




of rivers there, whole communities of indios remained for hundreds and hundreds of years. The only difference today, he added, is that they have become “modernized.” The government does not care that the people could be conscious of who they are.77 Given all of this, we can now estimate that there could have been well over two hundred thousand Indian inhabitants present in Borikén in the late eighteenth century. This figure does not contradict López’s statement that the population of the island was over 150,000, with a significant proportion in the mountain interior, or Pico’s comment about “the families of farmers and squatters who made up the mass of the population at the end of the eighteenth century.”78 This figure does not contradict the hundreds of Jíbaros who had fled to the mountains two hundred fifty years earlier, and who would have continued to propagate among themselves and with those who were already there. These people had maintained or synthesized into new forms many of their cultural traditions. The figure also takes into account indigenous survival in rural and coastal regions, which was probably much more widespread than previously acknowledged. When I gave this presentation of survival at an annual indigenous peoples’ festival in Jayuya in 2006 and 2008 (as colloquia), my findings were roundly agreed upon by those in attendance. The president of the Cooperative Center where the festival is held said a two hundred thousand population figure was “on the low side.”79 The main point to be made about the late eighteenth-century censuses is how they grossly underestimated the Indian population by not taking into consideration the Jíbaro (both “full blooded” and “mestizo”) residing throughout the island at the time. As to her research, Figueroa-Mercado concluded, “it is evident that the time has come to throw overboard the fallacy of the extermination of the native population.”80 In our search for the dialectical truth, the data revealed up to this point does indeed debunk the myth of the mid-sixteenth-century extinction of indigenous Caribbean peoples.

Minimizing Po pul ati on Fi g ures Extinction myths and motives and rationalizations for them have of course not been limited to the Carib or Jíbaro. Low population counting and extinction and near extinction myths of many indigenous groups have been, at least until recently, the dominant trend of Western scholarship contributing to their marginalization. The Tasmanian and Yuchi had long ago been written off as “extinct,” yet the aboriginal Tasmanian voice still speaks today,81 and the Yuchi appear 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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to be alive and well.82 In Hawai‘i, the Hawaiian Homelands program was set up in 1921 because the Kānaka Maoli were, for one, thought to be on the brink of extinction and thus in need of “rehabilitation.” While most have not benefited from the program, the Kanaka Maoli population in the Hawaiian Islands today is approximately two hundred thousand, with another two hundred thousand or so people living in the diaspora. This is not unlike the high recovery rates and numbers of American Indian groups in the United States. By 1930, “a surge to 333,397 had occurred, and the Native North American population has grown every decade since.”83 It was simply inconceivable to many scholars in earlier times to believe that these populations could have survived such horrendous encounters with the European world. This survival and continuity clearly applies to the indigenous Caribbean and Borikén. Recent studies reveal that pre-European contact native population figures were deflated for various reasons. The general contemporary trend for the Americas, for example, is toward the acceptance of higher numbers of inhabitants having populated the region. What does this mean in terms of indigenous political, social, and cultural development? What might it mean in relation to extinction and post-contact survival? For social scientists, the size of the Amerindian population “directly affects their interpretations of New World civilizations and cultures.”84 Larger population sizes have been linked to degrees of socioeconomic and cultural sophistication. Regarding the numbers, William Denevan writes, “It would not be an overstatement to hold that almost every major investigation of pre-Columbian cultural evolution and ecology, of the European conquest, and of colonial social and economic history must ultimately raise the question of Indian numbers. Thus, the effort to determine those numbers continues, and as the quality of the research improves, the trend is toward acceptance of higher numbers.”85 The extensive studies conducted by researchers in the 1960s and 1970s reveal much larger indigenous populations throughout the Western hemisphere than initially thought. One estimate derived from a number of serious studies indicated a population total in 1492 of 57,300,000 for the Americas as a whole, including 5,850,000 inhabitants in the Caribbean.86 Cook and Borah calculated a midpoint range of seven to eight million indigenous peoples for Hispaniola alone.87 The single most important reason for the initial low figures appears to be because surveys did not consider the enormous population losses due to introduced diseases. Epidemics often arose decades and sometimes centuries prior to the first European censuses 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha



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Less than twenty-five years ago conventional scholarly opinion held— as it had for generations—that the pre-Columbian population of the Americas was somewhere between 8 and 14 million persons, with no more than a million in North America. Today’s historians and anthropologists now commonly accept figures up to ten times as high—as many as ten million in North America, twenty-five million in central Mexico alone, and 90 to 112 million for the entire hemisphere. If correct, such estimates mean that the population of the Americas in the 15th century was equal to that of Europe, including Russia, at the time. With every passing year vastly higher estimates appear in the scholarly literature of so-called “pre-contact” native populations, from the Canadian forest and lake regions to the mountains and coasts of Peru.89

Despite this, many writers have traditionally downplayed the evidence and meaning of higher population counts, and not all accept the recent figures. Borah points out that for particularly Spanish areas of penetration many researchers have tended to dismiss early high population calculations, such as tribute counts or Las Casas’s figures, or revised them considerably downward at will.90 For the North American continent, it has been “expedient for non-Indian ‘experts’ to minimize the size of aboriginal Indian populations, while denigrating the level of socio-economic attainment that presumably resulted in such sparseness of human presence.”91 This lessening can be applied to both pre and post-European contact indigenous populations. One implication for post-contact figures is that while Indo-European contact reduced indigenous populations at incredibly high attrition rates, scholars did not consider the different forms and tremendous amount of resistance that did occur. This point seems to be universally missing from the literature until recently. The conditions for survival to take place were also important factors as elaborated on shortly. There are other important reasons for discrediting high population counts. Borah affirms that varying interpretations of history related to population fuel disagreements of the past and present and the human condition. Accordingly, a smaller native population that experienced less or no loss of life, along with the belief in the more “primitive” nature of indigenous political and social structures, diminishes European guilt.92 Conversely, the destruction of large populations and sophisticated native structures are held to signify greater European guilt as a result of colonialism. This issue directly refers to reparation 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


taken.88 While these high counts were controversial when originally revealed, the numbers kept climbing:

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“for historical and material wrongs to native peoples.”93 The Spanish denial of the “Black Legend” of terrorism and genocide in the Americas would fit in neatly here because if few or no crimes were committed, there would be no basis for reparation, seeking justice and taking responsibility for policies and actions. This point could also explain why the theory of indigenous Caribbean extinction has been so vigorously upheld. If the people no longer exist, or if they have been “assimilated” into mainstream society, then the issue would be mute. Lewis Hanke mentions how many scholars, although seemingly biased, have linked Spanish guilt and conscience with its actions. What is lost in the following quotation is how the Spanish campaign was ultimately sanctioned by the Crown through royal letters, papal decrees, and subsequent European treaties. These historians appear to be correct, as Spanish “theories” to work out their “problems” did largely turn out to be just theory: “Historians, especially those writing in English, even when they have recognized the existence of Spanish theories dealing with Spain’s American problems, have usually confined themselves to pointing the finger of scorn to show how far Spanish practice in America departed from the theory elaborated by the crown in Spain. The Spaniards’ concern to work out a policy which they could justify to their own consciences has been dismissed as hypocritical religiosity akin to the spirit of the walrus in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who shed such bitter tears while busily assisting the carpenter to consume so many oysters.”94 The notion of “progress,” where the present is thought to be superior to the past, is also woven into the belief that earlier periods of history consisted of smaller populations, particularly if the population size was estimated to equate to a present-day one.95 This is a subjective response and plays into the belief that Western civilization and the development of state societies are more “advanced” than “stateless” political and social structures. However, stateless peoples as conceptualized as “primitive” are invented by intellectuals in relation to state societies and diametrically opposed to modernity,96 or to what is considered to be “civilized.” This bifurcation is a manufactured construct for it is scholars who have ethnocentrically defined the concepts and thus empowered them. Ashley Montagu points out that such terms can be damaging because they may “embody prejudices and pseudological rationalizations based on unanalyzed systems of values.”97 The negative notion of “primitivism” has been routinely employed in theory and practice against indigenous peoples precisely because native value systems have been either dismissed as “superstitious” or 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha



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So entrenched, however, have our beliefs become concerning the ortholinear evolution of man that our conceptions of “progress,” “development,” and “evolution” have rendered the assumption automatic that what developed later in time must therefore be more “advanced” and more “evolved” than that which developed earlier. From this the “logical” inference followed that what was less developed must be earlier than that which was more developed, and therefore the earlier was the more “primitive” and the later the more “advanced.” Furthermore, since straight-line evolution is taken for granted by so many, it followed that the more advanced developed from the less advanced, from the “primitive,” and that the former was “superior” to the latter.98

Another idea that the lands of the Americas were sparsely populated is derived from the Roman concept of terra nullius, or “vacant lands,” which came to be applied to the “doctrine of discovery” where non-Christian lands could be seized with impunity. Here it would be legally advantageous to Euroamerican nations to rationalize small native population sizes. For instance, while Emmerich de Vattel implied that Indian nations had rights of “occupancy,” he branded them as “wandering tribes” and “savages” whose “small numbers” could not possibly populate large territories of land, much less fulfill their “obligation of cultivating the earth.”99 He therefore “legalized” the taking of their lands: “Their uncertain occupancy of these vast regions can not be held as a real and lawful taking of possession; and when the Nations of Europe, which are too confined at home, come upon lands which the savages have no special need of and are making no present and continuous use of, they may lawfully take possession of them and establish colonies in them.”100 We should recall here that the bulk of the early English journeying to North America was to escape religious persecution, rather than being “too confined at home” in a territorial sense. Paradoxically, the need to “cultivate the earth” was merely an excuse to take it, for Indian people had long been fulfilling their cultural obligation as the first agriculturalists of the hemisphere as explained here by M. Annette Jaimes. This refutes the idea of the “primitive” in regard to Amerindian value systems and “sparseness” in populating the land: Upwards of 60% of the subsistence of most Native American societies came directly from agriculture, with hunting and gathering providing



misunderstood. Montagu notes how the concept is actually a myth of evolutionary theory:

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a decidedly supplemental source of nutrients (just as fishing did and does, throughout the world). This highly developed agricultural base was greatly enhanced by extensive trade networks and food storage techniques which afforded precontact American Indians what was (and might well still be, if reconstituted) far and away the most diversified and balanced diet on earth. In actuality, fully two-thirds of all the vegetal foodstuffs now consumed by humanity were under cultivation in Native America—and nowhere else—at the moment Columbus first set foot on Hispañola. An instructive, but by no means exhaustive, list of crops includes corn, potatoes, yams, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, most variety of beans, all varieties of pepper except black, amaranth, manioc (tapioca), mustard and a number of other greens, sunflowers, cassava, some types of rice, artichokes, avocadoes, okra, chayotes, peanuts, cashews, walnuts, hickory nuts, pecans, pineapples, bread fruit, passion fruit, many melons, persimmons, choke cherries, papayas, cranberries, blueberries, blackberries, coffee, sassafras, vanilla, chocolate, and cocoa. In order to raise this proliferation of food items, American Indians had perfected elaborate and sophisticated agricultural technologies throughout the hemisphere long before the arrival of the first European. This included intricate and highly efficient irrigation systems, ecologically integrated and highly effective planting methods such as milpa and conuco, and the refinement of what amounted to botanical experimentation facilities, among other things.101

Vattel’s justification for the confiscation of indigenous lands ultimately reverted back to the discovery principle.102 Similarly, U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall invoked terra nullius in the 1823 landmark case Johnson v. McIntosh, when the United States first established plenary power over Indian lands and affairs.103 In order to uphold the concept of discovery and avoid adjudication to the prevailing laws of the time, Stiffarm and Lane explain that “it was/is necessary to believe that there were very few native people prior to the onset of the European invasion of North America. A substantial precontact native population would imply that the land was for all intents and purposes not vacant. In that event, the supposed rights of discovery and conquest Marshall wished to rely upon would be governed, under the then prevailing Laws of Nations, by certain fairly strict criteria pertaining to prosecution of ‘Just Wars.’”104 Thus, along with the 1831 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia decision, where Marshall branded the sovereign and independently recognized Cherokee nation as a “domestic dependent nation,” based again on “discovery,”105 the United States, in its genocidal westward expansion, came to violate Indian law, the 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




Law of Nations, and the separation of church and state as written in its constitution. While the debate over the size of pre-contact native populations has not been fully resolved, the tendency is clearly toward the acceptance of higher figures, with more sophisticated and complex societal development than previously thought. This can be applied to the Caribbean and Borikén, too. Las Casas’s high Antillean population counts were probably tending closer to the reality than not and have been substantiated by recent studies. Aside from Cook and Borah’s more than doubling of his figure for Hispaniola, some of the earliest evidence and reports showing very large populations in Spanish occupied areas would support him. Fewkes confirmed this when he wrote about Puerto Rico: “The Europeans who first landed on the shores of Porto Rico [sic] reported the island to be densely peopled. The early Spanish voyagers state that the population was distributed over the whole island, but that it was thickly settled in the littoral tracts and along the banks of the rivers.”106 This corresponds to what Cuko said earlier. It should be pointed out that the mountain regions would not have been fully reported upon because the early voyagers could not have possibly traveled its vast and isolated terrain. The implication is that the overall population would have been even larger than reports suggested due to population concentrations there. Still, the initial high population numbers for Borikén, of two hundred thousand, six hundred thousand, or more than a million there and in Jamaica as reported by Las Casas,107 have been routinely rejected. Figueroa-Mercado notes that the six hundred thousand person figure given was “impossible” as a “rudimentary” agricultural economy could not have sustained such a high population.108 Brau reduced this figure to an incredibly low sixteen thousand.109 Alegría says that Las Casas’s figure “seems exaggerated” given what is known about the “native economy” and distribution of natives in smaller islands in the region.110 He calculated a maximum figure of about thirty thousand inhabitants.111 Unfortunately, these beliefs and calculations fall right in line with the concept of “primitivism,” which as we have seen is a myth of evolutionary theory. Alegría, ironically, goes on to support Fewkes in pointing out the “densely populated” islands the Spanish chroniclers documented in traveling along the Antillean coasts. “They write of valleys full of cleared fields and dotted with communities, many with ceremonial plazas.”112 Regarding the use of agricultural techniques in relation to population size, he affirms, “The use of conucos indicates that, as was the case with many other large and complex societies in the Americas, the Taíno needed to increase 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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agricultural production in order to support a large population on a limited amount of land.”113 Jaimes’s previous description of agricultural diversity, abundance, and sophisticated utilized techniques in the early Americas would support these statements. The very elaborate Antillean art, artifacts, and pottery found, along with the many ceremonial grounds crafted, are testament to a highly skilled culture. Since Borikén was a main cultural center of the Caribbean (along with Kiskeya), is it really inconceivable that the population there could have exceeded a million inhabitants at the time of European contact? Much higher population rates than previously known throughout the Americas would support this idea. Finally, given the right conditions, the chances for post-contact survival would also increase as a result of colonization. This survival appears to depend on factors such as climate conditions, topography, isolation, and the spread of epidemics. Studies have shown that “epidemics did not have a uniform impact within a region, depending on settlement pattern, degree of isolation, population density, climate conditions, and other factors.”114 These factors have helped to explain long-term indigenous survival in various mountain interior regions in the Americas. Cook and Borah’s methods and findings of demographic pre- and post-European contact population counts for central México and Columbia could have direct implications for the mountainous interior of Borikén. Indigenous survival is explained by the authors’ look at zonal differences and climate in relation to the destruction of population. Their inquiry into differences between plateau, intermediate zone, and coastal regions of central México led them to realize that “the higher the altitude the less the loss of population in central Mexico through factors introduced by the Europeans. Obviously the relation is one of temperature and humidity.”115 In Colombia, the variety of climate zones also exhibits a direct corollary between altitudinal differences and destruction of population. Like central México, “the areas studied in Colombia show destruction of population but with the same marked altitudinal differences in impact; that is, the higher the altitude and consequently the colder the climate, the less massive the operation of the factors and the greater the proportionate survival of the aboriginal population.”116 For instance, population loss for the Tunja and Pamplona living in the interior regions of Colombia was much lower than for the Quimbaya, who resided in the intermediate zone analogous to central México.117 The Tunja and Pamplona achieved equilibrium and began the recovery process near the mid-eighteenth century, whereas the Quimbaya are said to have become effectively “extinct” by 1650.118 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




The direct correlation made between altitude and climate in relation to survival means that the proportion or chances of survival in higher mountain areas, compared to lower zones, would likely be greater. Aside from the isolation of many rural and coastal areas of Borikén that contributed to survival there, this correlation could directly be applied to the mountain regions with altitudes extending up to four thousand feet and lower temperatures than in other parts of the island. In terms of disease, the reported measles and small pox epidemics of 1518 and 1529 took place among the encomienda populations along the coast. There is no indication that these epidemics effectively spread to the mountains. The ancient presence and postcontact flight of the Jíbaro occurred before these outbreaks. All in all, the conditions for survival—isolation, isolation from disease, altitude, and climate—were most conducive to the mountainous interior. The remoteness of these regions is substantiated from our previous discussions. This survival is confirmed by the late eighteenth-century indigenous presence.

Co nc lusion The Jíbaro continued to resist the Spanish presence in their own subtle way from the early seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Intermarriage and the absorption of the smaller African and Spanish populations enhanced the survival and growth of the indigenous culture. This type of synthesis has taken place within many indigenous societies worldwide. The late eighteenth-century Spanish censuses grossly underestimated the tens of thousands of Indian people residing on the island at that time as it measured “Indios” from only one region and did not consider “pardos libres” as indigenous peoples. This determination is consistent with deflated Spanish native population counts throughout the hemisphere. As to the pre-European population, the nonconsideration of epidemics that took place prior to surveys, European guilt resulting from the consequences of colonialism, the ethnocentric concept of “primitivism,” and justifications for the seizure of lands were main reasons for minimizing the numbers. As noted, isolation and altitudinal and climate factors likely increased the chances for postcontact survival in Borikén, particularly in the mountain regions. The passive resistance and continuity outlined in this chapter have proven to be successful, for this history has been passed down for generations and is still recounted by Jíbaro descendants today.



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The Moder n Jíbaro

The jíbaro and the slum dweller continue to tell stories orally, stories in which the experience of daily life and the nightmares and the dreams of bright nights sparkled by the coquí and the cucubanos awaken the imagination to invent the legends that beautify the historical reality of the island’s past and present life. This persistent trait seems to gain momentum instead of waning as the centuries pass, as if we had made a secret pact to communicate with each other in this search for our image in all the sources of our inner self.1

T

he Jíbaro man told me a story that profoundly influenced him and one he could never forget. His mother was ill and had been unconscious. His family had taken her to the hospital but because it was a Sunday, they would not receive her. Desperate, he began driving around and took a side road to the end where there was a two-story house. The man saw a woman on the second floor, who soon asked him what he wanted. He said his mother was sick, unconscious, and they could not find help. The woman told her daughter she was going to help them and to keep an eye on the beans on the stove. They carried the woman into the house, into what the man described as a “temple.” He remembered seeing candles and images of saints. The woman then did something he had never experienced before. She gathered a good bundle of certain plants and began to ceremonially wave them, as if to extract something out of the sick woman. The woman woke up and walked out of the temple on her own two feet. When they got home, she ate abundantly. She had been unconscious for a week and is still alive today.2 The momentum of the stories and experiences have indeed magnified as the Jíbaro has always existed in Borikén. The wife of Cuko 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


Chapter 5


expressed that her whole family has forever been from a certain mountain region of the island. They had no memory of being from any other place. She said they were Jíbaro because they culturally grew up that way.3 The Jíbaro influence in shaping nineteenth and parts of twentieth-century Puerto Rican society, along with their continued resistance to colonialism and fight for independence, are the primary focuses of this chapter. The voices brought out further reflect the attitudes, character, culture, and values of the Jíbaro, past and present. It could be said that the “modern Jíbaro,” who popular literature has portrayed, emerged in the early nineteenth century together with the erasure of the census category “Indios” and birth of a “Puerto Rican” nationality. Again, “Indios” became listed as “pardos libres.” This act came directly on the heels of the development of a Puerto Rican political and national consciousness. In other words, the creation of a Puerto Rican awareness came at the expense of the Indian or Jíbaro. This form of ethnocide negated or instantly wiped out the Indian presence from the record books, and since the category “pardos libres,” which we now know primarily pertained to Indian people, has not been interpreted this way in history, the job was complete. As with indigenous groups historically, this negation assumes a national consciousness to be superior to, and thus takes precedence over all things indigenous, particularly one’s identity. Franke Wilmer explains that the push for national integration was a phenomenon that came at the expense of indigenous peoples and was encouraged by a world system primarily centered on economic benefits: “Indigenous peoples belong to the non-European, decentralized local communities that resisted the process of assimilation, national integration, and incorporation into areas of the world colonized and now controlled by descendants of Europeans. Because incorporation into the world system is largely, but not exclusively, an economic process, claims to resources (land and subsurface minerals) occupied or used by indigenous peoples are often made by the modern state on the grounds that indigenous peoples are morally incompetent to make the so-called best use of resources.”4 As it turns out, the modern Jíbaro of the nineteenth century were (and still are) Indian descendants. The name “Puerto Rican” came to apply to the general population, or ironically, the majority Jíbaro people of the island. Made invisible and not given the credit deserved, they became a principal contributor to a Puerto Rican nationality. The politically and socially conservative colonial Spanish and Puerto Rican criollo elite of the early nineteenth century set the political or neocolonial boundaries of the Puerto Rican 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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national consciousness. Their strong ties to Spain contributed to their fear of “the masses.” López notes that at no time “did these groups develop a program of socio-economic reform beneficial to the masses to go along with their political demands.”5 The ruling class fear of revolution, as was taking place in South America and México, together with the importation of conservative French planters escaping the revolution in Haití, contributed to their stringent policies. As agricultural production increased, slavery grew and so, too, the number of African slaves brought in. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also saw an increase of immigrant groups to the island such as Corsicans and the Irish. All of this does not detract from the established indigenous presence, which has been consistently underestimated. High birth rates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed substantially to the natural increase of the total population. As touched on later, for instance, Jíbaro women in the old days bore many children and often did not register them.

An I ndigeno us C o n sc i ousness Despite the push toward a national awareness, the Jíbaro maintained an indigenous consciousness because they were the native people. This is a very important point because nearly all writers have not acknowledged or drawn this ethnical and cultural link as the Indian for them has been a memory of the past, or the Jíbaro cannot possibly fit that “image.” For example, in his book on the development of the Jíbaro in 1935, José Rosario noted that the indigenous peoples were “practically exterminated” and then makes the incredible statement that the large majority of Jíbaros are of “pure Spanish blood.”6 Although physical traits remained in some inhabitants in the countryside, “The Indians disappeared too rapidly to leave marked traces of their features in the present-day Puerto Rican.”7 This is the sort of double talk that has been continually recycled, but, as we have shown, the Spanish population in Borikén had always been limited. Thus, the Jíbaro has been typically portrayed as “country folk” wandering around aimlessly, rather than a people grounded in the earth as the first agriculturalists. Also, since the name “Jíbaro” is ethnically Indian in origin, why would Spaniards collectively call themselves something they were not? Some sort of deep transformation must have occurred for “Spaniards” to become Jíbaro. Indeed, the Indian and Jíbaro are both culturally and genealogically linked. The Jíbaro man whose mother was sick told me both of his 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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grandmothers were india. Many people addressed him as “el indio,” and he thinks he is of “90 percent” native blood in reference to the DNA testing that has taken place.8 In reference to time, marriage, and survival, an elder from Yauco replied, “We keep being indios.” As to his rebellious youth, he stated, “When you have the Indian blood, I can tell you, the Indian blood is too hot—very hot.” He said he was “Jíbaro,” and felt “more than proud to be Jíbaro, than Puertorriqueño.” In the community where he lives now, everybody’s Jíbaro. “Everybody who lives in the [countryside] like us . . . is Jíbaro.”9 Another person I interviewed, named Uahtibili, wanted me to know that since he was four years old his mother would tell him, “Nosotros somos indios.” He said his whole family is Jíbaro. His grandfather on his mother’s side of the family was “indio” and his grandmother was “mestiza,” of both Indian and African descent. He noted that his father was a part of the DNA study. He tested “100 percent”—“indio completo.”10 Uahtibili’s grandparents on his father’s side were from Utuado. According to the oral history told to him by his uncles and the rest of his family still living there, their family has been native to the Caguana area for hundreds and hundreds of years. The lands of barrio Caguana around the ceremonial center were a part of his family’s land before the government took it. Until that time, the last grandmothers to do traditional ceremonies there were his grandmother and aunt. His grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother were all comadronas (midwives) and cuanderas. His family continues to carry on what traditions they can today.11 Despite Rosario’s claim, these are the types of testimonies commonly told by Jíbaro people contemporarily as to their ethnic makeup. The distinction between the Jíbaro and the Puerto Rican criollo or “blanquito” (whites) has also been one of culture, values, and character. Pepe said they have always known this because “in our communities people are always criticizing the values and behaviors of the blanquitos . . . They have power and money, but they are not us.” He added that everyone is conscious that the criollo as a socioeconomic class has control over the land and businesses they stole from them. “The criollos have developed a Puerto Rico in the image of the European, not a product of the natives.”12 Even though they may have been born in Borikén, they are still foreigners to the Jíbaro because they keep stealing and oppressing them. “Our values are good,” he continued, because they are values that give them a good spirit and make them happy. “The values that the people express constantly are more of a spiritual thing . . . We have happiness.” He said the Jíbaro work hard, have a good meal, and then go to rest. They are not so 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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concerned about the value of money. The challenge for them is to preserve their happiness, despite adversity.13 On the other hand, the ruling class has looked at the Jíbaro with disdain. Steiner noted that the “scholarly scions of the older colonialism of the island—the wealthy criollos—viewed the jíbaro more solemnly, but no less contemptuously.”14 He referenced Rosario, who had written that the Jíbaro “is ignorant and sickly, superstitious, and as a producer, he is dreadfully inefficient.”15 He also wrote that “since the jíbaro comprises nearly three-fourths of Puerto Rico’s population, he constitutes the island’s greatest social problem.”16 Rosario does not understand the Jíbaro because he is obviously not one of them. What he wrote would be laughable to them. He only sees color, not realizing that there were and are many “white Indians” on the island, as well as throughout the Americas (both pre- and post-European contact). As the indigenous peoples, the Jíbaro had a different worldview from the settler and criollo and, hence, were misunderstood and looked down on. Ironically, Rosario unwittingly infers that in the 1930s the Jíbaro Indian comprised the majority of the population. This is indeed true. Culturally, according to him, “the Indian was as potent in forming the social inheritance of the jíbaro as the Spaniards themselves.”17 But if the Indian was practically extinct, how could this be? His “explanation” is that the Spaniards “adjusted themselves to the environment,” and inherited the indigenous culture before the Indian people disappeared!18 This is a most remarkable tale as this would have had to have happened over the course of about a single generation. However, the reality as we know was that the Indian women, in large part, endured and absorbed the Spaniard, the two groups intermixing and marrying from the beginning of contact, and, as already noted and expanded on shortly, many Jíbaro did not come into contact with the Spanish until the nineteenth century. While some Spaniards, no doubt, became Jíbaro through inheriting the indigenous culture, or ways of doing things, the large majority of Jíbaro people are of Indian blood. Most today are mestizo. All of this goes to show how potent the Indian aspect of society has been in comprising the physical, cultural, and social inheritance of the Jíbaro.

An At titude o f Freedom Pepe’s description of a more contemporary cultural rift can be easily transported back to the early nineteenth century. Up until this time, the Jíbaro in the mountains and many isolated areas of Borikén had basically remained free. Aside from a couple of established settlements 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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and towns such as Utuado, the Spaniards did not move to colonize the mountain regions until the early 1800s, and they did not have full control over the island until after the 1868 Grito de Lares.19 According to Lamourt-Valentín, “We were a free country up until 1812. This is the same history as any of the African and Asian countries when European expansionism explodes after the Napoleonic wars, and they [the Spanish] take over Puerto Rico . . . Historically, the Spanish supposedly had sovereignty here over all that period of time previous, but that was only an economic arrangement. What they had was San Juan. They didn’t have the island.”20 Picó essentially confirms LamourtValentín’s statement in writing about the eighteenth century: “The daily life of the vast majority of Puerto Ricans who lived outside the walls of San Juan was organized in a different manner from that provided for in the laws and regulations. If one reads the reports of the bishops’ pastoral visits or the accounts of eighteenth-century travelers, one can detect that, in the workplace and in social activities, there was no constant presence of the state or of its ideology.”21 Life was organized differently based on the values, culture, and character of the people. Those in San Juan sought power, money, and public esteem, while those in the country were generous, humble, and wished to be left alone. They were also strong when their freedom was threatened. The Jíbaro has always made a point of this. William Feliciano, the elder from Yauco, said, “Everything is okay . . . We don’t have no problem with nobody.” But if somebody has a problem with them, “then they have a problem” in dealing with the Jíbaro.22 The typical character of the Jíbaro or Boricua, highlighting those who went to Hawai‘i over a century ago, is depicted here by Arroyo: They were proud of their indian culture as inhabitants of the island of Boriquen. Their heritage was based on a love of freedom and independence. The Spaniards called them “jibaros” which meant men of freedom. They were also called “Los Macheteros” for their use of cane knives as weapons in the fight for freedom and independence. An early commander of the island’s Spanish regiment referred to the jibaros as “the free coloured inhabitants of Porto Rico” [sic]. So the most significant aspect of the Porto Ricans who migrated to the plantations in Hawaii was that they were free persons. Their attitude of freedom was to determine their behavior in a slave-like environment on those plantations. The haol[e] (white) landowners, in their ignorance of culture and history, seeking laborers for their sugar cane, sent agents to Puerto Rico to recruit to a slave condition a group of people who had historically fought for and fiercely protected their freedom.23



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In the workplace, the Jíbaro had been farming the land as their ancestors had done. They were a self-sufficient people. “On his small plot of land, that was his not by deed but by inheritance, the jíbaro grew all the food he needed for his family. He freely picked the wild tropical fruits growing about his bohío, or hut, to sweeten his diet. On the island there were no droughts, no crop failures, and the growing season lasted all year. The jíbaro had little money. But he was a free man,” remarked Steiner.24 This comment is aside from the great storm, or huracán, which would destroy crops, take lives, and was critical in bringing the Jíbaro to Hawai‘i in the first place. Cuko noted that in the “old times of the ancestors,” the land was to be worked and used to provide for the people. They had no “papers.” He said the outsiders invented the papers of private property to steal the land from them.25 Lipio, an old and wise Indian elder from Isabela, expressed that when he was growing up in the early 1900s they grew “more than enough” of the native foods such as yuca, yautía, ñame, batata, maíz, beans, and fruits. He said his father owned a store and was a campesino who owned a lot of land in the area. Many people were living in the vicinity and a lot of them were living in bohíos made of yagua and madera.26 The Jíbaro man told me that when he was growing up in the 1950s, they would produce everything they consumed. In the conuco gardens they would plant many different things. In the area where he lived, everybody had fields and produced. When you harvested you would share with the neighbors, and they would likewise share with you. At one time in his youth he did not believe in the relationship between the stages of the moon and planting. But as he began to observe and ask questions of people in the community, he came to believe in the process because you do not produce the same results if you do not follow the rules. If you do not plant at the right moment, the greatest yield will be lost. He said this makes you believe in the stages of the moon. The man still grows all types of fruits and other essentials such as yuca, yautía, batata, and maíz.27 It is, therefore, most inaccurate to say that the Jíbaro was “dreadfully inefficient” when they had been growing and eating everything they needed. They did not meet the colonizer’s pretentious “expectations” but certainly met their own. Given the sheer isolation of so many communities and places, the influence of the state ideology on the masses was indeed minimum. It would of course increase as the Spaniards colonized and established more towns in the nineteenth century, but still did not extend to many isolated areas of the island. The impact of the ideology of Catholicism on the masses was also not as influential as has been 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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commonly thought. As the official religion of the state, López noted that the Catholic Church essentially functioned as “another branch of the government, loyal to, controlled by and dependent on it for a good proportion of its income.”28 Many Jíbaro were nominal Catholics in order to please the authorities and avoid their wrath. While the church was very apparent in terms of its religious dogma, “The jíbaro came to church only two or three times during the year. On the other hand no chapels were established in the country, so that there was no influence which could start a process of evolution in the religion inherited at the beginning of the settlement.”29 The church’s influence did not reach into the cracks and crevices of the countryside and mountain regions. This point harkens back to the large percentage of Indian people who had not been baptized and counted in the late eighteenth-century censuses. Cuko expressed that he does not believe in censuses because in those days, at the time of his father and grandfather, the women would bear 10 or 12 children and not go to register them if she was not a participant of the church. He said everything happened in the community away from the church. He pointed out that the native people would baptize their children on their own without the presence of the church, so they wouldn’t know anything of their existence.30 Déborah Berman-Santana adds that rurally people were “most often married not by the church but rather by local customs, such as going away together and then setting up housekeeping.”31 The Jíbaro had their own traditional form of “baptism,” as expanded on in the next chapter. Cuko explained that when the census people would come, if there was a difficult dirt road to maneuver, they would not go there. But if you were to walk to the end of the road, you would find 40 houses that might have eight children in each house. These people would not be counted in the census, he said. This is traditionally why the people went so far away: so they would not be identified, have to deal with the government and church, and remain a free people. This is also a very recent history as the time period Cuko is referring to was the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The people in these places had been well established having resided there for centuries. Cuko then told the story of what he witnessed when the census people came to his house to talk to his grandfather, who was very old at the time. They asked him what his “race” was of which he replied, “I am trigueño” (brown skinned). The census taker said, “No, no, what I want to know is what race you are.” His grandfather then remarked, “Well, I am Puertorriqueño.” The census man again said, “No, I want to know your race.” His grandfather never did reveal his “race,” or that 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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he was indio, so the census person wrote down whatever he wanted to.32 Perhaps the census taker’s curiosity would have been satisfied if he had revealed his true identity. But this was the pattern, and the indio was once again not counted, nor wanted to be counted. This experience speaks to the Jíbaro’s independent spirit by not wanting to associate with or be dependent on outsiders.

R evo lts and Atroc i ti es In these mountain towns lived the guerrilleros and macheteros who had fought the Spaniards in the revolts of the early 1800s. On the Plaza of Lares it was the jíbaros (many had come from neighboring Utuado) who raised the flag of Puerto Rico in the Revolution of 1868. When that revolution was lost after the Spanish repressions of 1887, the ‘Terrible Year,’ many of its intellectual leaders had to flee the country, but it was the illiterate but knowing jíbaros who kept the independence movement stubbornly alive. By 1891 they had become so strong that the colonial police arrested seventy members of the Asociación Liberal Separatista de Utuado on the charge of ‘conspiracy’ to drive the Spaniards out. They were defended by the statesman and poet José de Diego. Not even his eloquence could help them, though, for several of the accused proudly proclaimed their guilt in court.33

The many revolts and attempted revolution of the nineteenth century, all the way up until the 1950s, and exemplified today by the continuing struggle in Bieke (Vieques) versus the U.S. military, were continuations of the sixteenth-century revolts and war of independence. The Jíbaro was the primary impetus of these struggles, while slave uprisings were also significant. Their plight and condition, along with the push for abolition, were motivating factors for some Puerto Rican criollo elite to assume their leadership roles in supporting these causes. “And the revolts of the jíbaros, both of overt and passive resistance, were now eulogized, and often led, by the Creole intellectuals,” wrote Steiner.34 The more progressive leaders born in Puerto Rico had developed a nationalist identity, and increasingly yearned for autonomy or independence. They viewed themselves apart from the Spaniards, often resenting their imposed dictates. With the need for more labor, repressive laws and policies implemented in the first half of the nineteenth century greatly affected the grassroots general population. Subsistence farmers, now called “squatters,” were often evicted from their own lands that had been seized by large landowners. The goal, states López, “was to create a landless peasantry who would be forced to seek 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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employment or sharecropping agreements in the sugar, coffee and tobacco establishments in order to survive.”35 The landless were compelled to work and forced to register on rolls. As used in South Africa, “work books” (libretas reglamentarias) were distributed to workers to update their employment service. These were maintained by employers, who imposed strict penalties if the books were lost.36 The Guardia Rural (rural police) and Spanish Guardia Civil were established to enforce labor laws and protect landowners: “On the whole, the rural population remained poor, illiterate, isolated from the main urban centers, exploited and abused and often brutalized by the Guardia Rural and the Guardia Civil.”37 These factors contributed to the revolts of the 1860s culminating in the 1868 Grito (“the Cry”) de Lares, or when “the people rose against injustice,” remarked Cuko.38 This attempted revolution of independence was meant to free the people of Borikén from Spanish rule, abolish slavery, and “represented the interests of most of the population.”39 It was orchestrated and led by revolutionary figures like Ramón Emeterio Betances, Segundo Ruiz-Belvis, Mariana Braceti, and a number of foreign hacendados (landowners). While much credit has been rightfully attributed to these leaders, the revolution would never have been possible if it were not for the unacclaimed masses. Picó notes, “some 600 or more people armed with shotguns, revolvers, and machetes entered Lares,” and “551 people were arrested in connection with the Grito de Lares.”40 Women, like Braceti, also played important roles as Figueroa-Mercado alluded to: it is “a fact that many of the leaders were related through the women, who were one hundred percent behind the revolution.”41 Lares was one vital link (or cell) in the larger takeover, so there were many people in other parts of the island ready and involved in the action. Along with Lares, most of these places such as San Sebastián, Camuy, and Utuado were Jíbaro strongholds. Silén describes the profound meaning of the event: “The Grito de Lares marked the birth of our Puerto Rican nationality. It was the voice of a Puerto Rico that had its own interests and its own consciousness. . . . The revolutionary nucleus was recruited from among our campesinos. The jíbaro, as the man who produced the coffee on the hacienda, was cast in the leading revolutionary role of the anonymous hero fighting for the demands of his class. In joining the revolution he put his protest on the line against the privileges and luxury of a tiny minority. From that day on, the jíbaro was the people.”42 The grandfather of Cuko’s grandfather was a fighter at the time. He was a tiznado, or “native warrior.” Through the oral tradition 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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passed down to him by his “fathers,” Cuko told me that native warrior groups would paint their faces with ashes and go out for a few days at a time to sabotage the Spaniards. When I asked him of those who were fighting at the time of the revolution, he said everybody (“todos”) was Jíbaro and tiznado. He likened their role to a soldier or army looking for the victory for “one people.” Cuko recalled learning that a group of tiznado had gathered in his community during the Grito. They went down to the border area of San Sebastián to try to prevent the Spaniards from getting to Lares. Their success was partial. Commenting on the overall outcome of the revolution, he expressed that they “neither lost nor won.” While the Spaniards made it into Lares, their success was not so strong because if you go to Lares today you find native communities everywhere. In this sense, the Grito was a victory because you don’t see many Spaniards there, but there are many barrios of Jíbaro people carrying on their traditions. Cuko said that this side of the history is not told in “the books.”43 Another part of the event that has been largely left out of the narrative is how the people continued to fight the Spaniard afterward. Pluma, a Jíbara cultural practitioner born and raised in Lares, pointed out that a lot of fighting continued in the mountains. As she has learned through her family history, native revolts also continued in the town. The people burned down many of the stores owned by wealthy Spaniards and criollos.44 She then began to sing a song that was composed to signify this turn of events. So despite MaldonadoDenis’s comments that the revolution was “snuffed out immediately,” and there was “no revolutionary consciousness” to sustain the revolution,45 the resistance continued well after the initial uprising had been put down. It would be more accurate to say that there was no leadership remaining to sustain the revolution as most leaders had been arrested, fled, or were not there to begin with. But the revolutionary consciousness of the Jíbaro, which had been instilled since the early 1500s, remained. While it certainly did not produce the desired results, the Grito de Lares lives on historically in the consciousnesses of many as the event is annually commemorated. Steiner recalled his journey to Lares a century after the Cry: “It was like that all day on the road to Lares. On mountainous slopes so steep they would have defied goats, in the bateys of jíbaro huts, and on the verandas of country houses, thousands and thousands of people sang and shouted and waved Puerto Rican flags and happy clenched fists at the passing cars; while the young people danced to the tune of patriotic and revolutionary songs on the loudspeakers. Even ‘La Borinqueña,’ the national anthem, was sweet on the lips.”46 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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While the revolution from Spain was apparently lost, it became a catalyst and reference point for subsequent liberation efforts. “When a revolution is not won, it has no end.”47 The movement had become, more or less, an indigenist nationalist struggle for social, cultural, economic, and political independence. This coincided with the continuation of repressive policies against the masses. “From 1875 to 1885 a procession of ten Spanish governors heaped new persecutions and limitations on top of the old tyrannies,” wrote Silén.48 With Spain close to losing all of her “possessions” in the Americas, and the then governor’s fear of losing control, they clamped down even further. The infamous torture era, or “el componte,”49 was ignited after the formation of the Autonomist Party in 1887 and influences of underground separatist societies. Extremist conservative propaganda aimed at “separatist” autonomists, many of whom were actually quite conservative, led to a flood of Spanish atrocities committed throughout the island. The atrocities would periodically continue until the Spaniards were finally expelled from Puerto Rico in 1898. When I first began hearing stories of the acts that were carried out against the people at this time, I thought for sure these must have been descriptions of the crimes the Spaniards had undertaken in the sixteenth century. However, I soon learned that what I was hearing were accounts of a very recent history. Elder Lipio’s mother, who had lived during el componte, used to tell him about what happened. When the Spaniards and the government came, they would follow “los indios” around and kill the men and rape the women. They would also throw the babies in the air and have them fall on their swords. When the people would run away and hide in the woods, the Spaniards would then burn down the forest.50 Surely, I thought, these must have been of the descriptions of Las Casas’s time and witness! But Lipio said that a lot of Indian people had been fighting the Spaniards in the area where we were. This was going on shortly before he was born. In speaking, he was actually referring to his own people as elder Lipio is about as “full blooded” as one can get. I then met another elder, named Domingo Guzman, from the same area of Isabela as Lipio. He was about 108 and born in the “suburuko,” or deep forest. His daughter was told that there were many families that lived back there in those days. She had “strong Indian features.” I highlight this because a good number of the faces I have seen in Borikén over the years remind me of the faces I have viewed paging through North American Indian picture books. Both of elder Guzman’s parents were born in Puerto Rico, and he said his son had the blood of an “indio.” When talking about el componte, he was told by elders and his parents 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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that the Spaniards came “two years” before he was born. This would have been right about the time of the Spanish American war. He said the Spaniards would “throw the babies up” and stick them with their knives. They did this to make the “Boricuas” “respect them,” he added. Again, this happened at that moment, two years before he was born. The elder uttered that the Boricua were fed up with the Spaniards. There was too much poverty, so they began the uprisings and upheaval. Thus, the Spaniards brought el componte to them.51 The Jíbaro man said he learned a lot about this era from his grandmother. She was born about 1838 and lived until she was 127. She died in 1965. Her name was Catana; her mother’s name was Calaya; and her grandmother was Naina. His grandmother told him about the torture and internment of el componte. When the Spaniards came, they were not good. They would “pull out” the fingers of the natives and, for those who resisted, they would break their central spine. The people used to flee to the forest. He said his mother knew some of those who had their fingers broken and went through this experience. The man then noted that Borikén was in a difficult situation because of the Spanish American war. When the Spaniards were retreating from the Americans, they would inundate the countryside, stealing and looting from the people. They had to bury their goods and money to prevent them from being taken.52 Lastly, Cuko confirms for us what elder’s Lipio and Guzman had said. He was told by his grandparents that the Spaniards would tie a belt around the waists of women who were pregnant. Then, after forcing the babies out, they would throw them up and catch them with their knives. Cuko pointed out that his grandparents did not talk much about the time of the early Spanish coming, but they spoke about what was happening in their lives and what they personally knew.53 As a consequence of these brutal actions, it would be very interesting to see the reaction of King Juan Carlos of Spain, who only a few years ago downplayed the negative effect of the colonial Spanish presence in the Americas! The repression and atrocities heaved upon the population were, in large part, in relation to the resistance perceived or carried out. Separatists societies like the Asociación Liberal Separatista de Utuado, as mentioned previously, and Club Borinquen, were prominent. These pro-independence types of groups continued in the 1890s with Cuban influence: “The Separatist activities gathered force in the decade of the ’90’s [sic], due to the influence Cuban Separatism had on Puerto Rican Separatism, this time under the leadership of José Martí.”54 There were more uprisings of significance like the one attempted and put down in Yauco in 1897. So many grassroots 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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people in particularly the rural and mountain areas of the island had resisted the Spanish presence until the very end. The autonomous status granted to Puerto Rico in 1898 lasted only a short time, until the Americans crushed it. After fighting for nearly four centuries to expel the Spaniards, it must have been truly demoralizing to the Jíbaro when the Americans moved in. The reluctance of the autonomist leadership to heed Betances’s repeated calls to take up arms before it was too late meant they went from puppets of one regime to another. Still, the Jíbaro was ready: “As late as 1901, when ‘Premier’ Luis Muñoz Rivera was threatened with death by proAmerican mobs, he was secretly visited by independentista leaders who told him that a guerrilla army of eight thousand jíbaros was waiting ‘to march on San Juan’ to defend him. Muñoz refused the offer. ‘There must not be bloodshed,’ he said. In the mountains the jíbaros waited for another day and another leader.”55 The U.S. military presence in Puerto Rico also came at the expense of the general population, despite their pronouncements of “benevolent intentions.” The Americans invaded out of their own political, economic, and moral self interest, like they did in Cuba and numerous Pacific countries like Hawai‘i, and as they had done in their wars against North American Indian nations. The first thing they did in Borikén, said the Jíbaro man, was to devalue the currency. The dollar became the official exchange to the advantage of American businesses. The period of military rule was “particularly harsh,” writes Picó. “In the countryside there were still bands of tiznados who attacked Spanish property. The military government repressed these with a heavy hand, but in some parts of the island it took time to reestablish the institutional order.”56 The Americans were apparently committing similar atrocities like the Spaniards in “reestablishing order.” When he was a young boy, elder Lipio personally witnessed American troops going into homes where they would rape the women and kill the children. They would wait for the husbands to come home and then kill them. Some would take the women and the land. My initial surprise led me to confirm if it was really the Americans he was talking about in revealing this oral history. Elder Lipio expressed that he saw this, and it was the “gringo.” He said the gringos came to take the land from the people.57 Pepe told me of testimonies he has learned about from mostly elders that tell of American massacres and assaults on native communities through information attained from the Spaniards. The two sides were apparently collaborating. He said the Americans knew they had to crush the native people in order to take the island, and there are a lot of oral accounts to support this.58 These actions 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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by the Americans are, in fact, not surprising given their track record and that they were carrying out similar outrages at this time in Cuba and the Philippines, both of which were very bloody affairs. Torture such as “waterboarding,” then known as the “water-cure,” was used by the Americans during the Philippine-American War. The following sentiment displayed during the northern Luzon campaign could be applied to Borikén, especially to those who resisted: If the people sympathized with and supported the guerillas, and if, indeed, this was a “people’s war,” then the only solution was war against the people . . . An American congressman who visited the Philippines, and who preferred to remain anonymous, spoke frankly about the results of the campaign: “You never hear of any disturbances in Northern Luzon,” he reported, “because there isn’t anybody there to rebel . . . The good Lord in heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under ground. Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country and wherever and whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him.”59

Resistance to American and criollo rule would continue throughout the first half of the twentieth century. At one point in 1936, after the Nationalist party was established and had gained strength, New Deal strategist Earl Hanson wrote, “The majority of Puerto Rican voters are now committed to independence.”60 For the Jíbaro, nationalist hero Pedro Albizu-Campos was a leader they supported. His unequivocal stand for the independence of the country and the struggle he endured meant he was one of them. Uahtibili’s father was an admirer of Albizu-Campos, and a descendant of native warriors who fought for the land. He had said Don Pedro was indigenous and following the native way. He was a part of the nationalist movement since he was 15, a cadete of the Republic. Uahtibili has a fond memory of when, as a boy, his father took him to see Don Pedro at the plaza in Río Piedras. He was an electrifying speaker and great leader.61 When Pepe was very young, he remembers his father and those around him talking about the nationalist movement and Albizu-Campos. Pepe would always think that this was something about their lifestyle and struggle as native people. His family was living at that time in the swamps of San Juan, so he felt the movement had to do with “us,” or “the people that lived the way we lived.” He was told that Albizu-Campos “fought for our liberty” and was a victim of the government because he was doing the right thing. His family and close friends strongly identified with the values of Don Pedro and his fight for the people, opposed 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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to the ruling class. When Pepe would see him in the news, he would think, “Our own people can do this, put up a fight.” He used to feel very frustrated when people would talk about the defeat of the nationalist uprising.62 Carlos Feliciano, a leader of the Cadet Corps who was imprisoned with Albizu-Campos for several months, noted, “The struggle for independence begin when Columbus landed. And the first Indian fight against him.”63 He spoke very highly of Don Pedro: “Oh, he was a beautiful man. He was the most beautiful man I ever know. Never in my life I see a man like Albizu Campos . . . If I tell you this, you won’t believe it. But in the five years I was in prison, I never was so free as the time I spent with Albizu Campos. I feel free. That was the truth.”64 Feliciano also commented on the revolution of 1950, which he said was provoked by Luis Muñoz-Marín’s government to “break down” the Nationalist party. “After that, in Jayuya, in Utuado, in Arecibo, in Río Piedras, in San Juan, in Mayagüez, in many other towns we begin to fight. It’s true the Lares revolution was big; but that was just in Lares. This time, in a dozen towns we start the real struggle for independence and open revolution.”65 Muñoz-Marín later said the Nationalists were “just a minority lunatic quirk,”66 a reference to “the armed jíbaros of Don Pedro,” according to Steiner. Yet, the government had to use the five thousand soldiered U.S. 296th Infantry to suppress the revolution!67 Perhaps the following act of Bolívar Marquez during the Ponce Massacre epitomizes the Jíbaro or Puerto Rican spirit and tenacity for freedom in a long struggle: “On sunny Palm Sunday afternoon, a young Puerto Rican dragged his dying body over the hot pavement of a Ponce street. It was March 21, 1937. Summoning all his strength, he reached the sidewalk. His finger moistened in his blood, he wrote, ¡Viva la República! ¡Abajo los asesinos! Long Live the Republic! Down with the assassins!”68

Fina l R ef l ec tio ns o f C onti nui ty After the American takeover in 1898, the construction of cemeteries was directly related to the indigenous presence. “Even after the conquest of the island by the United States, the religious rites of the Borinquén Indians seemed to have survived at Caguanas, near Utuado. The ‘pagan rituals’ of the dead caused the first American 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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Governor to order the immediate building of modern cemeteries,” explained Steiner.69 He remarked how certain religious offerings continued “well into the twentieth century,” referring in part to Fewkes’s findings.70 In the section of his study titled, “Present Descendants of the Porto Rican [sic] Indians,” Fewkes repeatedly noted the “Indian features” of people he came across “everywhere,” and particularly in isolated mountain areas.71 Of the bohíos the inhabitants lived in, he compared the modern “cabins” he encountered in his research with the more traditional Indian bohío. As with the modern incorporation of madera and tin roofs in the building of bohíos, the following passage provides a good example of how the people retained their traditional ways, in synthesized forms, in adapting to Western culture: “The houses of the aboriginal Porto Ricans were like those of the Haitians and not very different from the cabins of the poorer people of the island to-day [sic], especially those in the mountains, where old types of construction still survive. Naturally modern cabins present many modifications, as the use of iron nails in fastening the beams, but the materials used in construction are practically the same, and the old architectural types are still followed in modern dwellings.”72 Martínez-Torres noted that people were still living in bohíos in the mid-twentieth century. Regarding present-day descendants in the town of Morovis, he said, “There are a lot of families here in Morovis who are Indian descendants,” including his own.73 People were also living in caves before and after European contact. Martínez-Torres showed me the Indian pictographs he had found in the caves of Morovis. Some of these pictographs are of horses that were drawn after the Spanish arrival, since the horse is not endemic to the region.74 The then director of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture suggested to him that they might have been “dogs,” to which Martínez-Torres replied that dogs didn’t have reins.75 He has further conducted oral interviews with some of the “old people” of Morovis. These elders revealed stories about their Indian grandparents being captured by Spaniards with their trained dogs. One woman he interviewed, named “La India,” said her grandmother was captured and made to be a wife. MartínezTorres found out that La India’s grandmother had been baptized in 1842. He stressed that these types of stories are still told in the center of the island, with many of these events happening in the nineteenth century. When he first heard these testimonies, he thought these people were perhaps “dreaming with fantasies” and remembering old stories of a very long time ago. But through his research, he came to 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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realize that “these people were talking about their real grandparents that were [there] three generations ago.”76 Another family I had the opportunity of meeting is the Chéverez family. They still live in a fairly isolated area of Morovis and have continued to maintain certain cultural traditions such as the making of ceramic pottery. Elder and matriarch, Doña Varín, told me their family has always lived there, referring to the mountain regions. She confirmed that people were living in the mountains prior to the Spanish presence, and that people had lived in caves, too.77 Delgado comes to let the cat out of the bag in his research by most significantly revealing that thousands of people were living in caves, especially before 1830 up until the mid-twentieth century. They went there to escape from the Spaniards. The oral history of the Jíbaro constantly refers to the memory of this era as the “año de las guácaras,” or “the time we lived in the caves.”78 This was the most important time of these people’s lives. We can say with utter assurance that those who were living in these caves were Indian descendants. Delgado states that the Puerto Rican academy does not acknowledge this era in the official history of the island.79 This is basically just another way the academy has attempted to “whitewash” the Jíbaro out of existence and has failed to tell the truth regarding the native plight. Finally, Angel Santiago-Cruz, Boricua and president of the United Puerto Rican Association of Hawai‘i, recalled that when he was growing up in Bayamón in the 1960s and 1970s, bohíos were still being used, and, while most people were not living in them, there were Indian families scattered throughout the area.80 He also told me there were a lot of native families present in many other regions of the island at the time. Santiago-Cruz said many of the things his mother and grandmother did were not introduced by the Europeans. For instance, the way they prepared their foods and the ingredients and utensils they used were indigenous in origin. Those around him specifically grew plants for medicinal use, and they always planted by the cycles of the moon. He pointed out that during his mother and grandmother’s generation, it was not popular to talk about these things because they had been made to feel ashamed of their Indian background. This was due in part to the American takeover of Puerto Rico and the foreign cultural influences that had been introduced. Nevertheless, they still did things in the native way.81



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As the population of the mountain regions of Borikén at the end of the eighteenth century was primarily indigenous, this was largely the case throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. At the end of the 1800s, there were “entire villages of Indians in the mountains.”82 The Jíbaro largely comprised the population of the rural areas of the island, too, and many were living in caves. They had in one form or another continued to resist Spanish imperial policies in the nineteenth century, endured the “el componte” torture era, and has been a main impetus in ousting the colonizer. This resistance has persisted during the American occupation era. While an important contributor to the formation of a Puerto Rican nationality, the Jíbaro maintained an indigenous consciousness and many of their social and cultural traditions, albeit often in synthesized forms. As revealed in this chapter and the next, I have learned through my experiences and sources that a strong native cultural identity and distinct values and characteristics have been passed down through many many families over generations. The oral history and voices brought out reveal intimate testimonies that contradict and add life to accepted historical accounts.



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he first sections of this final chapter expand on and go into detail about certain customary and spiritual areas of cultural survival in Borikén. The testimonies are powerful and help us to see clearer the extent of the Jíbaro presence. The shamanistic practice that came to be known as “espiritismo” (spiritualism), essentially predicting the future, spiritual healing, or assisting one on a spiritual level, has deep roots on the island. Over time, some important aspects of the Christian and African traditions were adopted and syncretized into the indigenous belief structure. I will comment on the meaning of this syncretism and how it pertains to certain spiritual traditions, such as the Rosario Cantar. I’ll further draw on analogies of how these practices relate back to ancient times and a general indigenous philosophy. Espiritismo was widely used in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, and is still practiced today. Medicinal healing and linguistic survival are other significant areas that are looked at. These forms of survival are testament to degrees of resistance that were set into place over time. It should also be noted that espiritistas and cuanderos were prevalent and widely used among the early Boricua who went to Hawai‘i. This is documented by Arroyo, who tells numerous stories of different forms of healing performed and of telepathy. He wrote, “The espiritista was usually a good person, but could also put a curse on someone. Even though the Borinkees were religious, mostly Catholic, they all believed in the old ways, sometimes referred to as voodoo.”1 The latter parts of the chapter explore the role of the Jíbaro-Boricua in influencing the twentieth century independence movement on the island. I look at the indigenous meaning of the contemporary movement 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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and struggle and how breaking the cycle of dependency could create a more sustainable and just future.

The practice of espiritismo has been passed down since ancient times as our ancestors routinely evoked the spirits to assist them. The most sacred and cherished spiritual symbol of indigenous Caribbean peoples is the cemí. Made of stone or wood, cemís are not “gods” or “idols,” as they have often been interpreted to be, but personal or familial guardians representing various spiritual entities and a link between the physical and ancestral worlds. They may be compared to the functions of Christian saints.2 The cemí, whose powers were often evoked through the cohoba (a native plant that is inhaled) ceremony, was used as a means to, for example, heal the sick, assist women in childbirth, help bring about an abundant harvest, achieve victory in war, and make prophesies about the future. Although Pané, Peter Martyr, and Las Casas all equated the tradition with “devil worship,” they recorded numerous functions of the cemí. Las Casas observed, “When I would ask the Indians at times: ‘Who is this zemi you name?’ they answered me: ‘He who makes it rain and makes the sun shine and gives us children and the other benefits we desire.’”3 The powers drawn forth by the modern-day espiritista are basically a continuum of the spiritual practice of the ancient behike, similar to a shaman. A woman I met in her seventies told me that when she was growing up everybody believed in espiritistas. Her Indian apodo is “Güiya.” When she was young she lived with her aunt in a bohío made of yagua. The floor was made of earth. She recalled that when she was pregnant with her son, one of his feet became positioned improperly. She was in pain and knew it would be dangerous if she went into labor. She consulted an espiritista, or “a man who worked with spirits,” who helped her and solved the problem.4 Güiya said her mother was india. She never ate on the table or sat on a chair. She always squatted and ate with her fingers. She ate from dita (a bowl-shaped calabash made from the native higüera tree), as most did in the old days and some still do today.5 The people back then also commonly drank from coca (a cup made from coconut that is African in origin). The use of the calabash of course relates back to the story of Yaya and Yayahel in the creation myth of the sea. Güiya expressed to me what her mother would do if she wanted it to stop raining. She would use a piece of stick, wrap one end with cloth, and light it on fire. She’d then wave it and say, “Santa Clara, make the rain go away,” repeatedly. “Clara,” or “claro,” 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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means to clear. It would work. Güiya would do it, too. Her daughter, Migui, remembered one time when it was “raining really hard,” and her mother “did it.” Five or ten minutes later, “the sky cleared up, and the sun came out.”6 Here, a Christian saint’s name was adopted to fit an indigenous practice in adapting to the times. The use of the stick and fire was strictly a native way of carrying out the act. Migui also recalled that if her grandmother felt that something was going wrong, she would wave her arms and say, “Espiritumado get away from me!”7 It still gave her the chills to reflect on this. Pepe, who is the son of Güiya, said his grandmother strongly believed in espiritismo. “She believed that everything was due to spirits.” His mother used to sew for a living. He remembered one day when the sewing machine broke. His grandmother rushed into the room and got out a bottle of “alcoholado” (alcohol distilled with plants). She then sprinkled the alcoholado over the machine and began to talk to the spirit that was causing the damage. She would say, “Get out of that machine and go to where you should be! Go to where you belong. You don’t belong here anymore.” She was adamant about this because the family depended on the money generated from her daughter’s work. Pepe said he was always frightened whenever she would do these types of things. For his grandmother, there was “always the presence of spirits in any happening.” For instance if there was a social problem with the neighbors, she would immediately evoke the spirits to resolve the conflict. While she was not “formally” an espiritista, this is the way she lived her life.8 Her speaking to the sewing machine is a good example of how indigenous peoples believe that all things are alive and communicate. When I entered the kitchen of Isabel Serrano, the wife of elder Feliciano, she was in the process of peeling about six hundred bananas. She said she had peeled fifteen hundred the other day.9 She and her husband were in the process of making some of the most delicious pasteles I have ever tasted. They did this every week and sold them as their business. She was born in Arecibo. Her mother, who I met, was originally from Utuado and had strong Indian features. She told me her mother’s mother was “india.”10 Back then, they lived in a barrio far from town. Their house was made of yagua and the roof of tin. Everyone had tin roofs where they lived, instead of traditional thatched roofs made of yagua or enea leaves, in adapting to the use of metal. She noted that they cooked with fogón and used dita and coca. They also raised animals and cultivated crops. She then said, “In those times, we lived better than now.” One dilemma today is that everything is too expensive. They didn’t have to pay very much for things 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




before, and life was more community oriented. She also talked about the times when there would be a drought, which usually lasted for six or seven months. As a remedy, they would go down to the river where she would pray the rosary and the young people behind her would put statues under the water to make it rain. It would work because it would rain after that, she said.11 We see here how Christian statues became substitutes for the cemí, which was associated with water and used to make it rain in ancient times. The Carib also buried them in the earth in seeking assistance from the ancestral world and later to keep them away from the Spaniards. I came to ask Isabel if there was African ancestry in her family because she was very dark skinned. She answered, “I suppose, yes, but I don’t know them.” I then had the pleasure of viewing her family photo album. The multiethnic makeup of the many members of her family clearly revealed African, Indian, and mestizo influences. She actually looked more “indio” when she was younger. In terms of the root culture of her family, she commented, “All of them are indio, no matter what.”12 I asked Uahtibili the same question because one of his grandmothers was mestiza of African descent. He replied that he does not know of his African cultural background.13 That part of his family history was lost. He did not know of his family from Africa similarly to how most African Americans in the United States were removed from knowing about their African ancestral roots. What he knows is immediate, or what he learned about when he was growing up. And that is that the cultural base of his family is indio. This experience is no different for many indigenous groups or peoples who are accustomed to knowing about the places or lands where they are from. This point also speaks to the critics who are constantly remarking about how the African aspect of the Indian “revival” is ignored and disregarded. But this is not an issue of disregard but one of familiarity. Uahtibili said he knows of many people who look African on the outside but their culture is of the Indian of Puerto Rico. They may refer to themselves as “Afro-Boricua,” because they are of mixed African and Indian descent.14 Isabel told me she had cooked with wood and used dita her whole life. She was about to make more dita as the higüera fruit in her yard was ready to harvest. They also used spoons made of the maya leaf. Isabel used to be an espiritista. She said she was “born” an espiritista and did it for many years, but not any more. Elder Feliciano intervened saying he did not believe in espiritismo. “I never see nothing,” he replied. “They make you a fool.”15 My immediate thought here drew back to the way Pané’s religiously biased and mocking narration 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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of the philosophy made the Indian people look rather silly. He was the one who originally portrayed the practice as foolish and “deceptive.”16 Isabel tried to explain that people used to be more espiritista than Catholic, seeming to imply that the belief and practice back then were more respected, as well as widespread. The main point to keep in mind here is not whether espiritismo “works,” but that this belief as a form of spiritualism still exists and was well practiced until recently. It has survived in Borikén for centuries. When Isabel said they also used to look more to curanderos and comadronas, elder Feliciano agreed and added, “The people who come from the Indians” use plants to get better.17 Curanderos were and are sophisticated in their knowledge of medicinal herbs. Since doctors and hospitals in the nineteenth century were normally located in the main urban areas caring primarily for the elite, rurally, according to López, “the vast majority of people usually turned to home remedies or local curanderos when ill.”18 As documented in interviews with contemporary practitioners by María Dolores Hajosy-Benedetti, a scholar and practitioner of traditional folk medicine, healing through traditional medicinal plants and herbs was still being practiced in Puerto Rico in the late 1980s.19 And there are many curanderos on the island today. Hajosy-Benedetti writes about the many benefits and healing power of wild plants and how they have sustained our species for thousands of years. In addition, using wild plants affirms “our connection with our ancestors, and thus with the traditions that sustain and define us as a people . . . and as natural beings.”20 One of her interviews was with Bárbara Rodríguez, a practitioner from the central mountain region of the island, who shared some familial background of what she knows about native plants: My great grandmother always had all kinds of medicinal plants growing in her garden. She never ran to the doctor for pills or injections. In those days, everyone used the medicinal plants growing in their gardens; they knew how to prepare them because their parents and grandparents and their great grandparents had done it. The knowledge passed from one person to another, from one generation to another. Every jíbaro household had its garden, and every garden had its red mint (yerba buena), marjoram (mejorana), rosemary (romero), peppermint (menta), lemon grass (limoncillo), rue (ruda), fragrant geranium (geranio oloroso), paletaria. They were an important part of the household. In what looked like an ornamental flower garden, you could find medicine for just about everything.21





Isabel and elder Feliciano also began talking about the benefits and cures of using medicinal plants. He said aspirin only “blocks” your headache but plants heal you. She added, “When the cuanderos give you plants, you get better.” They were both critical of Western medicine, especially how the industry makes a profit off of patients. He named plants that cure strokes, while she talked about preventing cancer. Once, when Isabel was having her breasts examined, some nodules were found. She healed herself. She made a prescription using the plants anamú and yantén from her book on natural medicine. When she went back to be checked, the nodules were shrinking, and they disappeared in a year. Regarding her own experiences, HajosyBenedetti writes, “Personally, I can attest to the efficacy of many of the remedies described in this work: aloe (sábila) for bronchial complaints, burns and constipation, wild balsam apple (cundeamor) for skin problems, chicken bone broth for chronic fatigue, rue (ruda) and broadleaf coriander (recao) for menstrual irregularity, and herbal baths for physical and spiritual renewal are among them.”22 Elder Shachira is an espiritista. She was born in San Sebastián de Pepino and partly grew up there. When I met her she was wearing a cotona, or a dress like a tunic. Her grandmother wore one and older women still do today. It was traditionally made from the native maguey and sarobei (algodón or cotton) plants.23 Contrary to popular utopian belief of the people “running around naked,” native peoples made their own clothing and married women in ancient Caribbean times would always cover themselves, especially in colder climates. Though most of the cloth is imported today, Shachira told me that the use of the cotona is an unbroken indigenous tradition that has been passed down by our ancestors.24 According to Uahtibili and his wife, Huana, the cotonas of the past were dyed of two basic colors from the seeds of certain plants. The woman’s color was yellow and the man’s blue, and when mixed, the two produce green representing mother earth.25 Shachira then gave another example of an indigenous custom still practiced today. She said that if people think it might rain, they automatically look up and smell for water, rather than turn on the news, and if they smell “wet earth,” it means it is going to pour.26 Both Shachira’s grandmother and godmother strongly influenced her childhood and development. Her godmother was an espiritista, who began teaching her at the age of four. She said her godmother took her into a closer connection with the spiritual world, or the spirituality of the indigenous peoples. When I asked about the syncretizing of the various traditions in Puerto Rico, she first said the Indian, African, and Spanish traditions all used spirituality. For instance if the Christians say 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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that Christ is the spirit, then they are spiritualists. She then expressed that “in this time” the three traditions have been syncretized. She knows this to be true because, for better or worse, she is influenced by all three herself.27 As to the African tradition of espiritismo, it was substantial and survived mainly on the coasts, particularly in the area of Loíza where many African people settled. Espiritsta Doña Bolina of Loíza told Hajosy-Benedetti that she practices the “palo monte— palo mayombé” tradition of the Congolese Bantu-speaking people.28 She has statues of saints and busts on her altar representing the three traditions of the island. Describing Afro-Christian syncretism, HajosyBenedetti writes, “During slavery, African people were forced to worship Christian saints. Thus their own pantheon of spiritual beings was syncretized with Christian saints according to the symbolism accrued to those saints in devotional works of art. Thus, for instance, Changó—a male deity associated with lightning—became Saint Barbara, whose visual representations always included a bolt of lightning, and so on.”29 Shachira stressed that espiritismo is not a “religion,” or a “way of the doctrine” as she put it, but a form of spirituality. She said that since people today are so influenced by the doctrine of Christianity, and in order for them to not be afraid and be able to understand the native concepts, she guides them in a way they understand, for example, by using the terms “father,” “son” and “holy spirit,” or by drawing a parallel between the Christian “father” and indigenous “sky father” in terms of creation and the celestial world.30 In other words, she is often compelled to help people learn about the Indian way in a sort of Christian context. Shachira’s grandmother taught her how to love the earth and defend the land. She was rebellious and very patriotic because, as Shachira noted, “They had taken everything from her.” Her grandmother told her, “You are not going to sell this land,” and she’d tap the ground three times, saying, “This is your land.” She showed her how to connect with the energy of the land through the tapping of the earth. She’d tell her the land is going to feed you, loves you, and, when you feel sad, speak to her. Her grandmother also taught her how to understand the vibrations of the stones—how to speak to them, which is an Indian tradition. Shachira said that the ancestors used the stones to send messages. Now, in this time, we can read the stones to learn about the messages they sent. She said the most important things to the ancestors were the ceremonial objects and stones they were using. The cemí was the most sacred of these. It’s the contact with the stones that shows us how the indigenous peoples of the past had a connection with everything that was celestial. She is sure this is 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




the message the ancestors left for her grandmother and her, that is, to prepare her for the times to defend the land and to use the stones as a means of communication to the most sacred.31 Shachira was one of the leaders of the occupation of the Caguana ceremonial grounds a few years ago. This was to call attention to the desecration of sacred sites and excavation of ancestral remains around the island. In reference to the recent excavation of the Jacana site near Ponce, she asked, “Why do we have to take out the remains of the ancestors?” In 2007, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers uncovered a major indigenous site while in the process of building a dam. After they unearthed a good portion of the area, “Some 75 boxes of skeletons, ceramics, small petroglyphs and rocks were sent via Federal Express in two double-boxed shipments for analysis” to the state of Georgia.32 In speaking on this issue, Shachira was very passionate and forthright. She exclaimed that if Christ came down at this moment and saw how they were profaning the tombs, there would be a great problem because these are his children, too. She added that if she went to a Christian cemetery and took someone out, she would go to jail. The authorities have told the people the “biggest lie” in saying they did not previously know about the location of the site. In planning for the route of the dam, they knew of the location through their aerial photographs and infrared technology, according to her. The Army Corps had already made some initial findings some time before the main excavation. The plundering of the site was only exposed after workers on the project started to sell artifacts to stores in the area!33 That is how the community figured out that the Jacana site had been dug up. Uahtibili is also an espiritista. He was one of the leaders arrested at the end of the occupation at Caguana. His father used to be both an espiritista and cuandero, who passed the teachings and traditions down to him. When he was five years old, he started to dream about things that were going to happen. He told his mother, and she told him he had “the gift.” His father, in time, began to teach him how to evoke the spirits, or to give and offer things to the spirits in a reciprocal relationship. He doesn’t go out looking to help people. People come to him asking for help. At that time, he will feel nausea or have a negative feeling inside himself as a way to identify if there’s a bad energy and if someone needs assistance. This is reminiscent of how the behike of the past would purge themselves, by fasting or with a vomiting stick, before embarking upon their work. Uahtibili said people still go to “espiritista centers” today. When I asked what percentage of the population believes in the practice, he replied, “mucho, mucho.” 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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People from the different Christian faiths go there, too. He noted that he has a lot of anecdotes to tell. Once, a political candidate from a major political party came to him seeking help. Uahtibili saw him and felt very bad physically. He told the man he would have problems and would not win the upcoming election. Later on, the candidate was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for a federal offense. In this case, Uahtibili obviously could not help the man but could make a prediction about his future.34 When I asked him if the Rosario Cantar (the singing of the rosary) was a Catholic tradition, he answered, “No.” I asked this because I had learned from others who believe the ceremony is actually grounded in the indigenous tradition. While he also believes it is the continuation of a native tradition, Uahtibili added that it can be seen in a different way depending on one’s perspective. For example, a Catholic may see it exclusively as a way of giving thanks to the virgin mother, while Uahtibili’s father, who rejected everything Christian, liked the Rosario Cantar very much and used to sing it. Uahtibili said the Jíbaro in the mountains would do the ceremony after a harvest, giving thanks to the earth mother as an ancestral tradition. He said the Rosario Cantar is “the stone,” or “made for all of those things that people tell.” Those things include asking for nature to heal children, or for a good harvest or weather, so they do the ceremony every year to give thanks for these “promises.” A member of his family still guides the celebration where they are from.35 When I followed up later asking why his father “rejected everything Christian,” Uahtibili explained that he believed “those people” were not telling the truth and were trying to trick them into doing something they did not want to do using fear tactics. His father resented that the Catholic Church rejected other people who believed something different from them.36 Uahtibili reiterated that the Rosario Cantar is not Catholic. It is not celebrated in the church because they do not want it. It is celebrated in the houses of the people or in the plazas. While the native aspect of the tradition is not apparent on the surface, perhaps giving the church the impression they had tamed the flock, the belief is deeply embedded in the Jíbaro soul. Lamourt-Valentín draws an analogy between a contemporary game played in the countryside with the native tradition of the ceremony. During a critical moment in the game, “the light goes out!” while the Rosario Cantar “must end at the point of sunrise when the victorious Sun drives away the cold darkness of the night and conquers the sky . . . for otherwise the world would end if it did not do that.”37 There is a direct reference here to the native story of people emerging from caves during sunlight and being turned into 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha



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The ceremonies called “Rosario Cantao”, correspond at present as the nearest tradition to the “areyto” ceremonies. The last of the older ceremonies to have taken place occurred in the indieras region of Lares, the 23 of September 1868, accompanied by a human sacrifice . . . the local town priest who was immolated at the head-waters of a river called “The river of the departure of the Twin” (“Guaribinjá” or “Culebrinas”) which happened to be the place where the last titled Cacique of the Ban Dynasty was sacrificed . . . in 1511 . . . the Lord Ah Uaay Ban-ah Cacique, whose family continued to reside in that region after the abandonment of the old cacical capital “Guanica”. The [S]panish Chroniclers occasionally mention the celebration of these “areyto” preceding war expeditions or other great enterprises. The Spanish Regime came to occupy the indieras regions in question after that date [1868], which is why these things are remembered from that time by the members of the families participating in them and who are native to that region.38

He further elaborates on the significance of the “santo de palo” statue, or the “guest of honor” during the ceremony: “‘Santo de palo’ is a direct translation of the term ‘ceminche’ or also termed ‘cemi’ . . . but after the introduction of [C]hristianity they were conventionalized as representations in polychromed wood sculptures (triangular in form) of ‘saints’ but with a particular native iconography in rebus.”39 Here we see again the significance of the native cemí and how it comes to be represented through Christian saints and statues. Thus, the Jíbaro have been actually using the Rosario Cantar as a sort of “camouflage” to uphold their own tradition. Their expression of native spirituality has continued through the celebration of the ceremony. Huana, who was with Uahtibili and me, clarified that the Rosario Cantar was a way of perpetuating an areíto, but the words of the songs they sing are in the Catholic tradition. The traditional areíto could not be done because of the imposition of Christianity. So it’s like a “masquerade,” she stressed. People started doing the Rosario “using their words” so that the Catholic Church and priests would think, “Oh, those are Catholics.”40 When I noted that I thought most Puertorriqueños believed the Rosario Cantar was Catholic, Uahtibili said he had something important to say. There is something in the subconscious, he explained, where we say, “Oh, that’s a Catholic thing.” But 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


stone or trees by the Sun if they were not careful. Below the surface, the ceremony of asking for promises appears to be the continuation of a traditional Indian areíto. As Lamourt-Valentín explains,

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in reality “what we practice is not a Catholic way.” The reality of the ceremony carries a native meaning in the subconsciousness.41 Finally, Uahtibili and Huana went on to give another example of a tradition that may “seem” to be Catholic but is, once more, the apparent perpetuation of an indigenous tradition. It is called “Noche de San Juan” (“The Night of St. John the Baptist”), which is celebrated on the night of the twenty-third of June until the next day. They said it was originally observed during the summer solstice around the twenty-first of June, but, because the Catholics “run the time,” the date was moved back. The name of the ceremony was adopted from the native name “Xuan,” which in the Indian tradition refers to the “gran lagarto” (great lizard), or the first ancestor of the island. The tradition is to go to any place where there is water, whether a beach, river, or swimming pool. They wait until midnight and then jump into the water backward, seven or nine times. It is a way of cleansing themselves of negative things and to bring them good luck or a new life. It is a big celebration they do every year. There is obviously a parallel here to the Christian significance of the work of John the Baptist. This is how the name and practice of using water became associated with or incorporated into the native tradition. But the origin of the ceremony is a tribute to the first ancestor, Xuan, who is the one that came from the waters to the earth. So the Noche de San Juan is really to honor the great lizard. Huana concluded saying, “This is an espiritista ritual.” Jumping backward into the water “is not a Catholic thing.” The ceremony had been performed long before the Spanish arrival.42 We can see clearer now how the incorporation of these Catholic traditions were used by the indigenous peoples as survival strategies in order to maintain their own cultural identity and traditions.

Linguistic S urv i val Language is a vital element in the transmission of culture. Over a century after Antonio de Nebrija published his Gramática de la lengua castellana (1492), when he claimed that “language is the perfect instrument of empire,” native linguistic survival in the Antilles was still apparent. An important thesis of a work by Spanish scholar José Bernardo de Aldrete, called Origenes de la lengua castellana, concerned how conquerors throughout history inflicted their language on those they conquered.43 One of his chapters, titled, “The Vanquished Receive the Language of the Vanquishers, Surrendering Their Own with Their Land and People,” elaborated on this argument as applied to the Iberian Peninsula and the Antilles. However, Aldrete’s 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




arguments did not always hold up as Walter Mignolo revealed certain contradictions in his thesis, such as how the Visigoths as vanquishers actually “adopted the language and culture” of the Iberian Peninsula during their conquest there in the fifth to seventh centuries.44 Aldrete was primarily concerned with spreading the Castilian language over newly organized territories. Territorial organization to him was not only tied to geographic boundaries but also intimately linked with language, which “comes with memories shared and stored in a common language,” as Mignolo writes.45 Yet Aldrete observed that “los Indios,” other than some of the nobles (Indios principales), did not speak much Spanish as they preferred speaking in their own language. He is critical of his Spanish peers for their lack of interest and not being efficient enough in the teaching of Castilian in the “Indies,” though he is confident that God and the Crown would in short order succeed in the task.46 What is important to note here is that Aldrete was writing in 1606. Not only was there still an indigenous presence, but the indigenous Caribbean population also preferred speaking in their native tongue. This is a strong sign of resistance to the Spanish occupation and contradicts Aldrete’s thesis. From the aforementioned description, the “vanquished” had yet to receive the language of the vanquisher, although the Indian people did acquire the Spanish language when circumstances necessitated it and when it was to their advantage, like when Columbus left his men behind at La Navidad on his first voyage. There is then a question as to how far Spanish imperialism really spread in the Antilles if the colonial language had yet to be acquired by the seventeenth century. As we have seen, Spain was not as powerful in the Antilles as commonly thought. This certainly applied to the mountain regions and many isolated areas of Borikén. An analogy could be drawn here from the Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. While the Moors imposed their language and religion in some territories, they left alone “significant portions of the peninsula in which people were able to preserve their sense of territoriality by preserving their religion, Christianity, and their language, Castilian.”47 The Spaniards were simply not present in many areas of Puerto Rico to impose their cultural will. The imposition did not begin to take effect on the island as a whole until the nineteenth century. As language is a transmitter of religion, that did not happen to a large extent either as previously discussed. When they were working in the haciendas in the late nineteenth century, Cuko’s grandfather, who had also been a tiznado fighting against the Spaniards and Americans, used to tell him how they would 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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plan to create problems for the “bastard Spaniards” right in front of them. The Spaniards would not know what they were talking about because they were speaking in their native tongue. The way Cuko explained the acquisition of the Spanish language into indigenous communities made a lot of sense. In essence, the more the Spaniards encroached upon them, the more they would learn the language. In the same way someone might learn a second language, they acquired Spanish. But he emphasized that they also continued to speak their native language. That’s how they were able to plan their actions in front of the colonizer. Uahtibili explained the acquisition process similarly. Because his parents and grandparents did not go to school, they did not have much of an opportunity to learn Spanish. Thus, they spoke more of the native language back then, which was a mixture of Spanish and Indian. He said they still speak a mixed dialect today, especially in the mountains.48 Cuko sincerely believes that the indigenous language was the spoken language of communication at the time of the Grito de Lares, and certainly the language spoken by the elders. He thinks that half of the native population never came into contact with the Spaniards until “recently,” or toward the end of their presence in Puerto Rico. He asked, “Why are there indios in the mountains? Los indios or los Jíbaros were not extinguished. We changed. We evolved.”49 Lamourt-Valentín helped to explain the process of how the Spanish language became naturalized into the indigenous tongue. The Indian language spoken was “an ‘original’ native discourse in a ‘naturalized’ language . . . which happens to be Spanish, but with a native frame of reference which does not qualify Spanish as a pre-American language, nor the native language with a colonial identity.”50 So over time, Spanish words became adopted into the Indian language, but kept in a “native frame of reference.” He said the commercial language in Borikén was never Spanish. Spanish was a secondary language. The first social language of the masses at the time of the Grito de Lares and 40 years before then was a regional dialect or the native vernacular.51 Accordingly, many years later the Commissioner of Education in Puerto Rico, in making a contradictory statement that Puerto Ricans were not very devoted to their native language, reported to the U.S. Congress that a “majority of the people . . . do not speak pure Spanish. Their language is a patois, almost unintelligible to the natives of Barcelona and Madrid.”52 “Patois” is defined in Webster’s as, for one, “A regional dialect.”53 Further, the ethnological methodology employed by Fewkes at the turn of the twentieth century dealt with “survivals of language in names of places, animals, plants, and objects, 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




including all aboriginal and many dialectic names peculiar to the modern islanders.”54 Pepe told me his grandmother spoke a strong Jíbaro dialect. In those days, most people in their community spoke the way she spoke. This was in Vega Baja, where his grandmother was from. He emphasized she would use names for different items of clothing with words that are not used today (e.g., she would call skirts, “saya.”) Pepe recalled that when he was in school, he was not supposed to speak like her. Otherwise, he would be scolded and would have failed. So like his mother, he had to change the way he spoke.55 His sister confirmed that the words their grandmother used were not understandable and added that she still hears people using those kinds of words today.56 Through my interviews and the people I have met, I have also found the tradition of indigenous name giving to be common today. The scholarship and oral history revealed by Delgado and Lamourt-Valentín show how native names continued to be used over time, often as a sign of resistance to the Spanish imposition of names. Uahtibili began to run off a list of Indian apodos commonly used: Cuki, Cuko, Cano, Cana, Chan, Chico, Chino, Yuyo, Yayi, Yayo. All of the members of his family have an apodo. Huana said it is typical today for parents to give their children non-native names at birth but then start calling them by a native apodo when they are young. So the birth name of one of Uahtibili’s sons, Francisco, is transformed to “Chico.” Another son’s given name is “Yumac,” who was the principal cacike of Camuy. He was the commander of the Boricua naval forces and helped to win the war of Daguao against the Spaniards. Uahtibili then went on to list a number of native apellidos (surnames) still used: Caban, Cuba, Camuy, Abey, Ejin, and so on. He said there are “muchos.” Some of them can be found by browsing through the local phone book. Lastly, many Jíbaro people still utilize a lot of Indian words in common speech. There are at least two hundred words in use in Puerto Rico.57 The Jíbaro also speak with a kind of mixed “Spanish-Indian” accent. For example, since there is no “s” sound in the native language equivalent to the Spanish, a word like “tostones” (flat plantain) is commonly pronounced as “totone,” and the town of “Lares” sounds like “Lare,”58 or sometimes “Lari.” When I was speaking to Güiya, she distinctly pronounced the town of “Morovis” as “Morovi.” Pluma recalled that when she left Lares to live in Mayagüez and other places, her accent changed. She had been gone for eight years and when she returned, she couldn’t understand many things her sister, brothers, and grandmother were saying. Her grandmother would get upset at 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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her because Pluma kept asking her, “What?” “What?” She remembered her friends in the city used to tease her, saying, “Oh, you are from ‘Lare?’” making fun of her for not pronouncing the “s.”59 Likewise, since there is no distinct “r” sound in the Indian language, “carro” (car) comes to sound like “cao” or “caho,” and “arroz” (rice) is pronounced like “aho,” as there is no “z” sound in the language either. The “r” sound at the end of words sounds like an “l,” so “doctor” comes to be “dotól.” And words with an “e” at the end are commonly pronounced as “i,” so “leche de pote” (a jug of milk) becomes “lechi di poti,” and “¿De donde tu eres?” (Where are you from?) sounds like “¿Di dondi tu eri?”60 Thus, the added “s,” “r,” “z,” and “e” sounds are Hispanicized versions of words. So as exemplified in this section, the use of indigenous words, sounds, and language still continue to be used in one form or another, and particularly in the mountain regions of the island.

Th e J íbaro and I ndependence You will not find a more extreme case of colonialism in these past 500 years than that of Puerto Rico. —Ramsey Clark, 1989

“Jíbaro, Sí! Yankee, No!” “Jíbaro, Sí! Yankee, No!” Those were the cries coming from the independence crowd gathered at Guanica during the event observing the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico a century before. This refrain has been a common one over the years and speaks to a resistance that has now lasted five centuries. It was July 25, 1998. I had made the drive down from Utuado with some friends to witness this history. Cars and cars from miles away converged on the port city. The traffic jam became so bad that many people simply parked their cars on the side of the road and walked. The three main political entities on the island—statehood, commonwealth, and independence— were highly visible and had their staging areas to air their political views. It was both a festive and somber occasion revolving around a date in history long remembered. I have previously shown that the Jíbaro or Boricua have been primarily independence supporters, and many are still fighting for the independence of their homeland. Most of my interviewees favor this political option for the future of the island. As during the Spanish colonial era, the twentieth century independence struggle was adamant in its demand for freedom. Many Boricua have unjustly spent 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




years in U.S. prisons fighting for the cause of independence. A 60-year battle to halt the American military bombing of Bieke finally ended in 2003. Because the United States has consistently kept a firm grip on Puerto Rico, violent and nonviolent action has been wielded by Puerto Rican nationalists as tools of liberation and self-defense. This final part of the chapter will elaborate on the indigenous meaning of the movement for independence in Borikén and its potential future. I attempted a similar analysis in a chapter of my dissertation, titled, “The Borikén Indigenous Movement,” so this is an update or revision of that writing. I have importantly found that the indigenous movement is inclusive of the larger Puerto Rican population and is, indeed, made up of this group. It seems as though most of the Jíbaro angst is directed against the approximately 1 percent criollo or blanquito elite, who control the island under the American wing. As a long-held colony, albeit with a degree of self-governance as a “Commonwealth” of the United States, there are no “quick fixes” to resolving the colonial dilemma for independence advocates. However, for many, Puerto Rico undoubtedly has an international right of self-determination to be a free and independent nation like any other on the planet. I see the plight of Jíbaro Indian communities in Borikén today along similar lines as indigenous communities in other parts of Latin America. These are often disempowered, impoverished, and unrecognized places. For example, centuries of injustice and poverty in Mayan communities in Chiapas boiled over in 1994 when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. NAFTA and the thirst for profits by corporations in both the United States and México were at the heart of the Chiapas uprising. It is widely believed that NAFTA was the impetus for the Mexican government to amend laws that now allow foreigners and foreign corporations to buy up communal land holdings and exploit resources where indigenous peoples live.61 At the time Evo Morales became the first indigenous president of Bolivia in 2006, he referred to how the indigenous population of his country had been subjugated and disrespected for hundreds of years. He also said, at least for Bolivia, that five centuries of resistance had ended and Amerindian people of the hemisphere ought to be ready to “take power for the next 500.”62 In adding to those words, he insisted that indigenous peoples were “not rancorous,” implying in part that vindictive “cut throat” politics would no longer be the norm. Interestingly, as a majority of the population in Bolivia is made up of indigenous peoples, this is also the case in Borikén. Many eyes will widen by the audacity of such a statement, but this is only because the Jíbaro have never been considered as an indigenous group. To have 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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admitted otherwise would have squashed the idea of extinction, and exposed this history and its meaning. But a majority of the population is mestizo Indian as elaborated on in this work, and many have maintained an indigenous cultural consciousness. Cuko noted that if the native people of Puerto Rico were to unite, they would make up about 65 percent of the total population. When I asked him how many people on the island think like him, or are culturally conscious as he is, he replied, “thousands,” even though he doesn’t know them.63 Pepe said a native consciousness has been transmitted from one generation to another. It has always been there, although people today are more positive about their identity. He explained that when the Boricua and Jíbaro people speak, what they say has a deeper meaning beyond the words they use. “When we say ‘indio,’ immediately people think fight for resistance or independence, or a lifestyle of selfsufficiency, not adoring foreign things.” Every time the topic of the native or nativeness is brought up, people relate this to “living a good life, of being good and sharing with others, or of being self-sufficient, of being skilled . . . making your cultivation, producing food, being happy and independent.”64 Naniki pointed out that many Boricua are “silently independent” because of the intense repression against independentistas and nationalists in the past. Being vocal about independence can mean losing employment or being jailed.65 Isolina Rondón, a former secretary of Albizu-Campos, said a number of years ago that she believed “seven-eights of the Puerto Ricans are for independence, but are afraid to express themselves openly.”66 With this kind of support, it is amazing that Borikén has not thrown off the yoke. These narratives certainly do not reflect the substantial “poll numbers” among Statehood and Commonwealth supporters in past elections, or the dim support of one of the most prominent independence organizations. In the early 1990s, the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) maintained only 5 to 7 percent of electoral support on the island.67 During the twentieth century, the independence movement was strongest in the 1930s under nationalist leader Albizu-Campos and in the 1970s when nationalist and socialist ideologies merged. According to Pepe, the PIP does not represent the masses because they do not understand and take into consideration the native aspect of the movement. The values of the PIP leadership, which he says are Eurocentric and based on pleasing the current system of power politics, are not the values of the native people, as he has referred to.68 Pepe told me he does not belong to any political organization but strives to assist everyday 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




people struggling to make ends meet. Still, while politically waning, cultural nationalism remains strong in Puerto Rico.69 J. Benjamín Torres is paraphrased as having said, “Learning of Puerto Rican cultural values will help develop a national consciousness necessary in the struggle for emancipation from colonial domination.”70 For many, this has been the belief for a long time as the Jíbaro culture is the heart and soul of Puerto Rico. The cultural importance of the movement is looked at closer shortly. Now that the myth of indigenous extinction has been dismantled, it is clear that an indigenous cultural identity and the fight for independence have gone hand in hand in Borikén and cannot be separated. A similar impetus has driven the various social and liberation movements in Bolivia, México, Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia. In Bolivia, the battle against neoliberal economic policies is what brought Morales to power. Issues such as the privatization of resources, like water, and land redistribution are what sparked “the consciousness of the Bolivian people.”71 This was the climax of a long struggle. I keep hearing similar complaints in Puerto Rico about privatization, unsustainable development projects, and land claim issues. How do resolving these types of concerns relate to the Borikén movement? Berman-Santana is correct to point out how indigenous identity and culture “hold more than merely academic significance, for they may speak to ownership, not only of identity but also of legitimate control over land and other resources—which are the material foundations of ‘sovereignty’ and self-determination.”72 While Berman-Santana pretty much sees the indigenous movement or “revival” in Borikén on the fringe of society, her article is significant because it is an academic piece written by a scholar that at least acknowledges and takes somewhat seriously the indigenous presence as an entity or movement. She asks some important questions: “how might recovery of indigenous, non-Eurocentric perspectives and practices not only help break Puerto Rico’s colonial dependence upon the United States but also form a basis for a noncapitalist and sustainable Puerto Rico? More broadly, how might recovering indigenous values help rescue a people from destructive Western values such as separation from nature, individualism, and pursuit of profit? How might indigenous revival help reconnect people with nature and with one another and promote meaningful self-determination?”73



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Though not well documented, I was fortunate to have addressed these types of questions and issues in my dissertation. Many indigenous groups and organizations have formed over the years in Borikén and have attempted to build an awareness and sense of solidarity among the general population. One of the first and most important organizations inspiring the more recent “formal” indigenous movement is the Consejo General de Tainos Borincanos, founded in 1979. According to Elba Anaca Lugo, one of the group’s founders and current director, the organization’s central purposes have been to recover indigenous cultural values and to unify other groups in Borikén and the diaspora.74 The organization comprises three circles. The nucleus of the First Circle is the Council of Arocoels (Elders) and those who first started the movement. They established the bylaws and fundamental principles of the organization, and provide spiritual and cultural guidance and knowledge to members. The Second Circle is made up of professional resource people like writers, historians, anthropologists (“humanistic archeologists”), and businesspeople who work to promote the culture in areas such as research, economics, and resource management. This circle also comprises professional artisans, poets, and musicians. The Third Circle primarily consists of the people, or those who are interested in learning about the culture and in recovering their indigenous heritage. The elder’s council oversees all three circles. “We have elders representing every part of the Antilles,” said Anaca Lugo, who “as grandfathers [and] grandmothers are the ones who through experience can give us the guidance and the orientation” to make the proper decisions in our future quest.75 Another significant organization established in Borikén around 1993 is Caney Quito Mundo. Founded by Naniki, Nogueras-Vidal, and others, the Caney seeks to unify and maintain indigenous cultural traditions through spiritual gatherings and community work. The recovery and reinterment of human ancestral remains and cultural artifacts have been one of their most important tasks.76 A more recent group to form is called Otu-kan. Founded in 2003 by Nogueras-Vidal, Christina Arce, and Nelson Monge, Otu-kan is a nonprofit organization dedicated to traditional, spiritual, and ancestral native education. Its purpose is to practice and teach spiritual and ancestral wisdom of the Native American people of Borikén. According to Nogueras-Vidal, those who came together are artisans and people grounded in spiritual teachings and dedicated to living an Amerindian way of life.77 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


The Bor ikén Indigenous Movement


Nogueras-Vidal has also remarked to me that the indigenous resurgence on the island is a political movement. She “see[s] this as an embodiment of a political force” that has to do with all facets of the movement whether it concerns identity, recognition, cultural protocol, or political activism. She says the movement is about the restoration of political independence, which means ending colonialism and dependency on the United States. Nogueras-Vidal added, “It just so happens that one hundred years of colonization by the North American government is in alignment with the awakening of the people of this land . . . The people who are grassroots and awakened and know that the North American government has exploited this land know that this whole mentality that we cannot live if they are not here is totally untrue.”78 She says the people have always been knowledgeable about their Indian identity and traditional ways. Yet, while the sense of being was always there, the past two or three generations did not openly express their identity and remained very silent because societal forces of the time did not allow for it.79 The people “who are conscious of the fact that we are a people, we are a nation . . . are planting our seeds. We are planting the seeds for this generation and all generations to come.” The main objectives of the artisans, for instance, are to perpetuate the cultural traditions and to educate. Sharing and teaching the children are also an important part of the process. In keeping with the mandate that the “Puerto Rican Indian” be honored on August 12, which was passed by the state legislature in 1970, cultural practitioners opened a batey in Jayuya in 1997 and performed a ceremony in honor of the ancestors. This is now an annual event.80 Nogueras-Vidal stressed that the movement is really about a change in lifestyle or consciousness—for example, by becoming more selfsufficient as Puerto Rico imports 90 percent of its food products.81 One strategy then is an attempt to break the cycle of dependency on particularly the United States through more localized economic self-sufficiency models. Elaborating on the dependency model, Naniki noted how Boricua need to economically take matters into their own hands. She points to the work of Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee) in helping her people break the cycle of dependency on the United States. In constructing a needed well system, for instance, Mankiller hired outside expertise to train her people to acquire the skills needed to construct and maintain the system. This allowed them not to have to lease help from an outside entity after the system was completed.82 Naniki said, 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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They [the Unites States] have created for us so many dependencies that we as people feel that we can’t do it. We feel that we need to hire them, and we need to lease land to them to do for us because we are unable to. Wilma decided somewhere along the line that she wanted to break with dependent models, and she wanted to create self-sufficient models so that her people could once again take pride in themselves, not just as human beings, but as being able to sustain themselves, being able to provide for their own people . . . The model must be that the arrogant North American technocrats need to let go. They need to come in, provide our training and go back home. And allow us to maintain and keep our own systems going. Often times what we see is that they come and they want to do the training, but then they want to stay as the teachers and the keepers. And so Wilma said “no way.” That’s just not going to be what happens here.83

For Naniki, economic self-reliance through the education and training of businesspeople and technicians is a key to breaking the cycle of colonialism. One important area where Boricua can become more self-sufficient is through agriculture, she said. The ancestors, who passed down their knowledge, were expert agriculturalists highly knowledgeable of the symbiotic relationship among plants. But doing agriculture alone is not enough in today’s world. Naniki pointed out that in selling these products and meeting consumer demands, you need to set up a system in order to market, transport, and eventually export these goods. Many Boricua are already knowledgeable and skilled in these areas, so the question is how to pull the people and resources together. A chain of self-reliance can be created “when we begin to look within to see the skills that each of us have that comprise the totality of that particular venture.”84 This is a model of self-suffiency and a “steppingstone for independence . . . breaking colonialism must come from within us. We must begin to break and shatter that illusion of dependency and reliance upon others . . . and if we can do this we can break with that colonial mentality and therefore break with colonialism,” she expressed.85 Therefore, we can see from the discussion thus far that the indigenous movement in Borikén concerns cultural, spiritual, political, and economic dimensions. Cuko expanded on the “gringo system” of dependency by saying it is designed to keep the people “quiet.” He said the government gives poor people food stamps, subsidies, and leaves them watching television. If the food stamps and subsidies were removed and the people given land to work on, they would become independent and have their money. But this is what the government and Puerto Rican elite do not want because they would lose control. This is what they 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




are worried about, he noted. Everybody would be independent, not needing to receive little bits of subsidies.86 When I followed up later asking him what percentage of the population he thinks falls within the aforementioned category, Cuko replied that 70 to 75 percent of the overall population on the island are “poor” and dependent on “aid.”87 This figure matches Liliana Cotto’s analysis of the results of the industrialization process of the mid-twentieth century and “paternalistic political system based on social welfare and patron-client relations.” She wrote, “Around 70 percent of the island’s families remained under poverty level.”88 Pepe added that the American government is set up to give the Puerto Rican people subsidies so that U.S. businesses and corporations can export their products to the island at cheap prices. Local businesses suffer in the process.89 This is a classic example of the function of globalization in relation to the dependency model, akin to how intergovernmental organizations like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank often function with their “structural adjustment policies” putting small or “developing” nations deeper into debt and poverty. Regarding land, Cuko said the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources took his family’s land and declared it a “wildlife zone.” He cannot build a home on his land. He can farm there but if you do not have a home, how can you watch over your crops? He staunchly replied, “My land is mine, and I control my land. That’s the way it should be.”90 He pointed out that only about 15 percent of Jíbaros control their own land today, though many live on lands they consider to be theirs through inheritance. This harkens back to the nineteenth-century theft of lands in that most Jíbaro do not have the “documents” “to prove” what they believe to be rightfully theirs as passed down over time. They are thus sometimes called “squatters.” Cuko said that while Muñoz-Marín’s “land reform” of the 1940s gave back “a little bit” of land to the people, his overall reforms did “more damage” in the long run. He was referring to the industrialization process and subsequent urban migration for jobs that ended up removing people from their land.91 In support, Morris Morley writes that the abolition of the “corporate latifundio,” or large land estates, “had not taken place, and was not about to occur.” He indicated that as a result of the 1941 Land Law, “government aid to the agricultural sector was being directed toward the landowner rather than toward the landless agricultural laborer.”92 Cuko said his goal is to take back what belonged to “our ancestors.” He proposes a community-based indigenous model for the future not unlike the means of governance being proposed and implemented in 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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places like Latin America. This model of indigenous sustainability is being resurrected and is partly in response to the negative effects of neoliberal capitalist policies. He said the schools, hospitals, and justice system would be directed by the communities. Government leaders would be from their respected communities and selected by the people who live there. Foreigners or outsides who do not know the community and the oppression of the people would not be allowed to run for office. The leaders must be intimately tied to the life of the community. Regarding agriculture, the people would produce what they consume and sell it right here in Borikén. Ownership of the production system and control of factories would be by the community so they would directly benefit and improve their standard of living. International trade would be done “product for product,” or at a fair exchange where one is not taken advantage of. When I asked Cuko how many people would support what he is saying, he provided this explanation. He said if he, or someone who thinks like him, went into a store in a community and talked about these ideas, a good number of people would agree with him. He then magnified that number by saying that this support would be the same in hundreds or thousands of stores around the island. He therefore calculated that there would be a great amount of people who would support these ideas and model. This is not a hypothetical assessment as he concluded that these types of issues are often discussed in stores and that the leadership is already there.93 Pepe said the people need to unite because many communities are under assault and being destroyed by big costly development projects being promoted by the rich. The people in these communities are aware of this and very worried about their futures. Part of his work entails going into communities to talk to people, especially the elders, to find the native leadership that is in every community, or those who are the most conscious of the indigenous plight. He said he finds that people in these communities are often waiting for the help of activists like him. Pepe emphasized that the people have a right to choose the forms of development they feel is best for them, not foreigners. The communities should be able to control their schools and what their children are taught and how to deal with the social problems that plague them, like high crime rates, drug use, and unemployment. His aim is to help the people take back control of their lives.94 Finally, Cuko gave me an example of how “people power” can have a tremendous effect on the Borikén movement. He said there were some people under great oppression and when they got fed up, they rose up and expelled the most powerful military in the world. He was 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha




of course referring to Bieke. After the killing of civilian worker David Sanes by an errant bomb, he expressed that a few revolutionary leaders were soon after able to arouse thousands of people from around Borikén to support the cause against the U.S. Navy. Cuko noted that these thousands were “quiet” beforehand. The community of Bieke is an analogy for communities across Puerto Rico in that the Boricua are ready to rise up when the circumstances warrant it.95 There is also a strong and longtime native cultural attachment to the land of Bieke by the people who live there. This connection combined with its political activism, which for Viequenses has also been a five-hundredyear resistance, has indeed been seen as a model on a larger scale. As Berman-Santana writes, “In dozens of support groups throughout Puerto Rico, people discussed how to use Vieques as a model for recovering their sense of connection to their own home territories and communities and for throwing off the yoke of dependence. The realization is growing that the struggle against navy occupation was only one chapter in the much longer story and greater challenge of truly liberating Vieques—and Puerto Rico.”96

Co nc lusion This chapter has shown a prevalent Jíbaro cultural continuum through customary, spiritual, medicinal, and linguistic practices. These practices and the stories surrounding them relate back to ancient times and traditions. Christian traditions were most prominently adopted or syncretized into the indigenous belief structure and practices as survival strategies or in adapting to the times. The Indian cultural element has survived in Jíbaro families and the subconscious because this is what the people know and are most familiar with in growing up on the island. The Jíbaro-Boricua has also continued to be the impetus in the political struggle for independence. Since the initial uprising against the Spaniards in 1511, they have consistently put their lives on the line in valiantly protecting their freedom. The indigenous voice speaks out today in everyday lives and through the contemporary movement of attempting to provide a more viable and just future for Borikén.



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have attempted in this book to give voice to the voiceless by providing a platform for the Jíbaro to educate and tell their story. I have most importantly done this by drawing on alternative sources of oral and written information to shatter a deeply embedded illusion. The story told is largely unknown because it has been suppressed for centuries by dominant Spanish and Puerto Rican institutions. The most important things to say in concluding are that the indigenous peoples of Borikén are still there and still struggling under a two-tiered colonial and neocolonial system. The fact that Puerto Rico has not exercised its international right of self-determination speaks to this point. Thus, this narrative is not one of a “romanticized” past but of an immediate history and presence. The Jíbaro man painfully said that this nation does not have self-control. It is controlled by others who dominate and impose their will. In reference to the Jíbaro, he asked, “Where’s the power for us to challenge?” When the politicians speak out, they tend to be believed because they are the “professionals.” But they do not believe “us,” the people. Whatever the Jíbaro do for themselves the ruling class smashes because they have the power.1 The intense resistance to Spanish imperialism is a testament to indigenous Caribbean cultural survival and continuity today. This was not merely a political fight but a social, cultural, economic, and spiritual clash of civilizations. The European consistently demonized and dehumanized Amerindian people in order to justify their reprehensible and genocidal ways. The resistance began at the time the Roman Catholic Church promulgated a series of papal decrees in 1493 authorizing war against infidels. The 39 Spaniards at La Navidad were killed for their crimes. Both active and passive forms of 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


Chapter 7


resistance were undertaken in Borikén. The early war dealt the Spaniards a severe blow, and, besides a robust presence in the vicinity of San Juan, they had only established a few settlements on the island. The Carib attacked and harassed the colonizer throughout the sixteenth century, limiting their ability to trade, and were a main reason for the issuance of the requerimiento. Many Indian people also fled the initial Spanish incursion and the encomienda system they had set up. Aside from the many already living throughout the island, escape, hiding, and avoiding census takers were among the most prominent forms of passive resistance exhibited in the post-European contact era. There are many many isolated places where one could live, especially on the “side side side” roads of the mountain regions. While there is no denying that a significant number of native people perished through the colonial process in Borikén, the dominant institutions keep saying the people were “conquered” so they can keep their claim to the lands and history.2 They have done this by consistently deflating native population counts and then finally eliminating the category “Indios” in the early nineteenth century. At the time, however, tens of thousands of Jíbaro Indians were present on the island living as free and independent people. They and those who came before them lived good lives, and their descendents are there today. The official history of Puerto Rico minimizes or does not tell of this history, information or events that would contradict the manufactured account of this people’s “extinction.” For example, the subject of the “año de las guácaras,” the nineteenth-century period when many Jíbaro lived in caves to escape the advancement of the Spaniards, is not taught in the schools. It was only after the attempted revolution of 1868 when the Spaniards fully took over Borikén. The Jíbaro were, in part, trying to prevent the intruders from taking the native stronghold of Lares. Spanish success in the long run was not so strong because, as Cuko explained, you find many native communities still practicing their cultural traditions.3 Resistance to the occupation continued throughout the el componte torture era until Spain’s control of the island ended in 1898. American rule has also been particularly harsh. Native resistance was strong in the first half of the twentieth century and remains today as witnessed by the continuing struggle against the U.S. military in Bieke to clean up their toxic mess and address the concerns of cancer victims. In terms of the myth of extinction, the idea of rationalizing “pure” identities as a basis of indigenous extinction came to be solidified and used in the nineteenth century in relation to Darwinian social theory and the “survival of the fittest.” The fact that this idea in this day and 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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age is still promoted and used as a primary basis of Indian extinction in Puerto Rico seems incredible. Scholars cling to the biological or genetic notion of extinction despite DNA results revealing a strong contemporary Amerindian presence on the island. In response to the findings by Martínez-Cruzado and his researchers, one scholar has even written that “[in] order to make the case against extinction,” they would now have “to locate individual Puerto Ricans who are ‘Amerindian’ and demonstrably pure from a biological standpoint.”4 First of all, the notion of “purity” is an abstraction. Who in the world is really racially “pure”? Indigenous Caribbean peoples were exogamous, so acceptance of outside groups was a norm that enhanced their culture and increased their chances of survival particularly in the post-fifteenth century, as Indian women routinely intermixed with foreigners. This proposition would logically infer that the large majority of American Indian people in the Americas today are also “extinct,” since most are mestizo. This is absurd, and the type of thinking indigenous peoples have been attempting to counter for decades. This argument appears to be a desperate effort by the Puerto Rican academy to fend off the increasing evidence of both indigenous physical and cultural survival in Borikén. As Hörmann has shown, “mixed blooded” native survival as a result of intercultural colonial contact is most viable and is frankly an understatement. This is the way most indigenous peoples today have been able to maintain or recover their identities and traditions. This is the way people are making sense of their lives! As the late Cherokee writer Louis Owens creatively summed it up, “the mixedblood is not a cultural broker but a cultural breaker, break-dancing tricksterfashion through all signs, fracturing the self-reflexive mirror of the dominant center, deconstructing rigid borders, slipping between the seams, embodying contradictions, and contradancing across every boundary. The Indian has appropriated and occupied the frontier, reimagining it against all odds.”5 “Against all odds” in the Caribbean Indian paradigm means telling the world we are still here. As biology is largely static, culture, or “cultural breaker” in terms of transcendence, is mutable and vibrant and adapts over time in relation to human survival. It is the process of change and cultural adaptation that has transcended the antiquated biological concept of indigenous extinction, where the faces have often changed but the identity and spirit have continued on. This book has debunked the deeply held belief of indigenous Caribbean extinction by primarily showing that cultural survival and affiliation are the bases of the contemporary indigenous presence in 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


Conclusion


Puerto Rico. This is what has really allowed for the Jíbaro or Boricua to continue to speak, cry out to be heard, and move forward. The synthesist and syncretist processes described in this work are similar to José Arguedas’s concept of “cultural mestizaje” in Peru, or the Inca capacity to change and assimilate foreign elements, yet remain culturally distinct in the process. Outside cultural influences have been often synthesized into modern ways of doing things in Borikén. For instance, in the making or use of the fogón, bohío, cotona, and numerous musical instruments, Western and African influences and materials have been incorporated into older indigenous customs and traditions. The Jíbaro music still played strongly exemplifies this. Likewise, the Indian words and accent still spoken produce a kind of mixed Spanish-Indian dialect, which carries linguistic and cultural meaning. The meaning is sometimes political as Pepe spoke of a flat handheld native drum called a pandero that is often used to convey a message through plena music played at strikes, protests, and other social conflicts.6 The syncretism of primarily Christian traditional beliefs and representations into the native belief structure is apparent contemporarily through the practices of espiritismo, the Rosario Cantar, and Noche de San Juan. Christian names, saints, and statues have been symbolically utilized to re-represent and uphold indigenous traditions in conforming to the times and as a sort of camouflage to please the Catholic Church and authorities. Espiritismo has been passed down since ancient times and still spiritually assists people in various ways. There are many espiritistas in Borikén, and, according to Uahtibili and others, lots of people believe in the practice. The cultural root of the Rosario Cantar is indigenous and apparently a way of perpetuating an areíto. While the ceremony may appear to be Catholic on the surface, the annual tradition of asking for “promises” carries a native meaning in reality. And Noche de San Juan is a pagan festival, whose deep meaning in Borikén is to honor the first ancestor, or the one that came from the waters to the earth.7 Through teachings that have been passed down for generations, other cultural customs and traditions have essentially remained unbroken over time such as Jíbaro planting by the moon, conuco and erone farming techniques, use of the same plants for herbal and medicinal purposes, use of stones and the cemí as means of communication, use of dita from the higüera tree, smelling for water to know if it may rain, the many foods the people still eat, and the native names people call themselves for various reasons. The character and values of the Jíbaro are also uniquely theirs. They have always been generous, humble, and wished to be left alone. They work hard, strive to 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


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be self-sufficient, and love the land; their attitude and love of freedom and independence are legendary. And as Pepe added, their values provide them with a healthy spirit and make them happy. “The values that the people express constantly are more of a spiritual thing . . . We have happiness.”8 While there are whole communities of Indian people in Borikén who know who they are, what the elders always tell him they lost is the ancient system of “social respect,” or respect for the community as a whole. This is what the Jíbaro seeks to recapture and what would really make them happy.



Conclusion




P refac e 1. See Anthony Castanha, “Adventures in Caribbean Indigeneity Centering on Resistance, Survival and Presence in Borikén (Puerto Rico)” (PhD diss., University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2004). 2. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books; and Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 1999), 35. 3. Although most indigenous groups prefer to be called by their own names in their own languages, I think “indigenous,” “native,” “aboriginal,” or “first” peoples are succinctly defined collectively by Julian Burger in terms of the right of self-identification, inclusivity, and the ability to adapt and survive, when he writes, “First peoples have a strong sense of their own identity as unique peoples, with their own lands, languages, and cultures. They claim the right to define what is meant by indigenous, and to be recognized as such by others. Some now live in cities, earning their living as, for example, lawyers and community workers—or in many cases struggling to make ends meet; others retain a traditional way of life. But they are united in their desire to maintain their identity and yet be able to adapt and survive,” in Julian Burger, The Gaia Atlas of First Peoples: A Future for the Indigenous World (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 16–17. 4. The term “Indio,” or “Indian,” was of course an imaginary creation of Christopher Columbus who believed, or refused to accept otherwise (Hulme 1986), that he had reached Asia or the Indies of the east up until his death in 1506. In other words, Columbus was virtually lost throughout his four voyages to the Americas. It is with this understanding and for the sake of clarity that I use the word in this book. I will also utilize indigenous words as appropriate as the Indian language in Borikén has survived in different forms and efforts to revitalize and perpetuate the language are under way. For an extensive listing of native words, see Luis Hernández Aquino, Diccionario De Voces Indígenas De Puerto Rico (San Juan: Editorial Cultural, 1993).



Notes

Notes

5. Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 36–37. 6. Ibid., 54. 7. Ronald D. Arroyo, “Da Borinkees: The Puerto Ricans of Hawaii” (PhD diss., Union Graduate School, 1977), 2. 8. Ibid., 2–3. 9. Salvador Brau, Historia de Puerto Rico (1904; San Juan: Editorial Coquí, 1966), 181. 10. Arroyo, “Da Borinkees,” 3. 11. Oscar Lamourt-Valentín, Cannibal Recipes, A sociolinguistic account of Carib-Jíbaro culture and response to the work of Ramón Pané, Unpublished manuscript (Ames: Iowa State University, 1979), 4. 12. The name “Boricua” basically means “sacred place where the people come from,” referring to both place and people. Bo—“big” or “great”; Ri—“humanity” or “people”; and Cua—“sacred.” Interview with elder and indigenous cultural practitioner Naniki ReyesOcasio, July 12, 1999. 13. María Teresa Babín, The Puerto Ricans’ Spirit: Their History, Life, and Culture, translated by Barry Luby (New York: Collier Books, 1971), 1–2. 14. Samuel M. Wilson, ed., The Indigenous People of the Caribbean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 177. 15. José Barreiro, “Carib Gallery,” Northeast Indian Quarterly 7, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 47. 16. See Bartolomé de Las Casas, in Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelly, Jr., eds., trans., The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493, abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 284–87. 17. See Jesse Walter Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 25th Annual Report, B. A. E. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1907). 18. Eugenio Fernández Méndez, Art and Mythology of the Taino Indians of the Greater West Indies (México City: Editorial Libros de México, 1972), 17. 19. See also Hernández-Aquino’s definition of “Carib” in relation to Borikén, in Aquino, Diccionario De Voces Indígenas De Puerto Rico, 124. 20. Interview with Carib-Jíbaro linguist and scholar Oki LamourtValentín, July 27, 1998; Uahtibili Báez Santiago and Huana Naboli Martínez Prieto, “Puerto Rico”: la gran mentira, Ilustraciones y arte gráfico por Luis Roberto Domínguez (Camuy, Puerto Rico: Edición Revisada, 2008), 45. 21. Lamourt-Valentín, Cannibal Recipes, 36. 22. Luis O. Zayas Micheli, in Manuel A. Alonso, El Jibaro (Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Edil, Inc., 1992), 6.



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C hapter 1 1. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492–1797, (London: Methuen & Co., 1986), 8. 2. George Lamming, “The Occasion for Speaking,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffins (New York: Routledge, 1995), 15. 3. Interview with Jíbaro campesino Cuko, August 22, 2008. 4. Interview with the Jíbaro man, August 23, 2008. 5. The main islands of the northern Antilles are known today as Cuba, Jamaica, Haití and the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. 6. In a chapter titled “Columbus: Cannibal and Hero of Genocide,” Jack Forbes provides a poignant explanation of Columbus’s mission to the Americas. He writes, “Colón had had experience along the coasts of west Africa, helping to carry Africans to Portugal. He was apparently very familiar with the slave trade and with the philosophy of imperialism. As we shall see, he implemented a process of genocide probably without parallel until the days of Adolf Hitler. Moreover, it was his intention to commit ethnocide and to ruthlessly exploit the people he found in America.” See Jack Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism and Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 1992), 35–42. Accordingly, Luis Rivera chides certain scholars’ dismissal of genocide in favor of a “sanitary disaster” as the result of epidemics when noting, “In this view, it was a matter of mosquitoes, lice, fleas, bacteria, viruses, and germs! Missing is a critical and concrete analysis of the social context of the epidemics, their relation to the breakdown of the social order, the disaster in agricultural production, the degradation of autochthonous values, and the use of natives as instruments for the avaricious search for precious metals. The strange thing is that such factors are overwhelmingly present in innumerable testimonies from contemporaries,” in Luis N. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas, translated by Westminster/John Knox Press (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 178–79. 7. Loida Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico: From the Beginning to 1892 (New York: L. A. Publishing Company, 1978), 74. 8. Adalberto López, “Birth of a Nation: Puerto Rico in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Puerto Ricans: Their History, Culture, and Society, ed. Adalberto López (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1980), 40, 53.



23. Interview with Lamourt-Valentín, July 27, 1998. 24. Correspondence with artisan and indigenous cultural practitioner Margarita Nogueras-Vidal.

Notes

9. Arlene Dávila, “Local/Diasporic Taínos: Towards a Cultural Politics of Memory, Reality and Imagery,” in Taíno Revival: Critical Perspectives on Puerto Rican Identity and Cultural Politics, ed. Gabriel Haslip-Viera (New York: Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York, 1999), 14. 10. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 11. 11. Richard A. Grounds, “Yuchi Travels: Up and Down the Academic ‘Road to Disappearance,’” in Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance, ed. Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 291. 12. Ibid. 13. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 40. 14. Franke Wilmer, The Indigenous Voice in World Politics: Since Time Immemorial (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1993), 42. 15. United Nations General Assembly, Report of the Human Rights Council, “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” September 7, 2007. 16. Maximilian C. Forte, “Introduction: The Dual Absences of Extinction and Marginality—What Difference Does an Indigenous Presence Make?” in Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival, ed. Maximilian C. Forte (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), 3. 17. Ricardo Alegría, quoted in Stan Steiner, The Islands: The Worlds of the Puerto Ricans (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 15. 18. Grounds, “Yuchi Travels,” in Native Voices, ed. Grounds, Tinker, and Wilkins, 302. 19. Interview with Carib-Jíbaro linguist and scholar Oki LamourtValentín, July 28, 1998. 20. Samuel M. Wilson, “The Legacy of the Indigenous People of the Caribbean,” in The Indigenous People of the Caribbean, ed. Samuel M. Wilson (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 206. 21. Interview with Cuko, August 21, 2008. 22. Ibid. 23. Interview with Cuko, August 22, 2008. 24. Ibid. 25. Amaryll Chanady, “Identity, politics and mestizaje,” in Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, ed. Stephen Hart and Richard Young (London: Arnold, 2003), 197. 26. José María Arguedas, Formación de una Cultura National Indoamericana (México City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1975), 2. 27. For a more detailed description and illustration of a burén, see Nelsonrafael Collazo, Imágenes del Indio Puertorriqueño (Jayuya, Puerto Rico: Nelsonrafael Collazo Grau, 1999), 33.



142

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

143

Interview with elder and espiritista Shachira, August 18, 2008. Interview with the Jíbaro man, August 23, 2008. Arguedas, Formación de Una Cultura National Indoamericana, 2. Interview with Cuko, August 21, 2008. Chanady, “Identity, politics and mestizaje,” in Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, ed. Hart and Young, 197. Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea Lā E Pono Ai? (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992), 3. Vine Deloria, Jr., Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1997), 167. The storyteller, quoted in Steiner, The Islands, 15. Francisco Moscoso, “Chiefdom and Encomienda in Puerto Rico: The Development of Tribal Society and the Spanish Colonization to 1530,” in The Puerto Ricans, ed. López, 14. Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 27–28. Some of the stories were importantly recorded in script by the early Spanish chroniclers. For example, Ramón Pané notes how the people and particularly the leaders he associated with in Kiskeya believed in ancient songs or areítos as an important form of communication: “In fact, just as the Moors, they have their laws gathered in ancient songs, by which they govern themselves, as do the Moors by their scripture,” in Fray Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians (c. 1498), trans. Susan C. Griswold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 20. Pietro Martire d’Anghiera (Peter Martyr) writes that when the indigenous peoples were asked about the origins of their traditions, “they answer[ed] that they have inherited them from their ancestors; they say those things have been transmitted in that way in songs from time immemorial.” Quoted in Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, 50. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, xi. Juan Manuel Delgado, “Sobrevivencia de los apellidos indígenas según la historia oral de Puerto Rico,” Revista de Genealogía Puertorriqueña 2 no. 1 (April 2001): 41–80. Ibid., 53. Interview with activist and indigenous cultural practitioner Baracutey, July 24, 1998. Interview with activist and Jíbaro campesino Pepe, August 24, 2008. Milton Takei, “Collective Memory as the Key to National and Ethnic Identity: The Case of Cambodia,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 4, no. 3 (1998): 62. Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise & Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 30.



Notes

Notes

46. Jesse Walter Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 25th Annual Report, B. A. E. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1907), 20. 47. Interview with artisan and indigenous cultural practitioner Margarita Nogueras-Vidal, July 30, 1998. 48. Margarita Nogueras-Vidal, “Taíno Indian Symbolism . . . To Feel is to Perceive,” Pamphlet, Jayuya, Boriké, 1996, 1998, 1. 49. Ibid., 2. 50. Interview with elder and indigenous cultural practitioner Naniki Reyes-Ocasio, August 9, 2006. 51. Jorge Duany, “Making Indians Out of Blacks: The Revitalization of Taíno Identity in Contemporary Puerto Rico,” in Taíno Revival, ed. Haslip-Viera, 46. 52. Ibid., 50–51. 53. In a study funded by the National Science Foundation, Juan Martínez-Cruzado and colleagues at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez appear to once and for all disprove the biological extinction myth of the indigenous peoples of Puerto Rico. They found that maternal ancestries (extracted mitochondrial DNA) revealed a “61.3% Amerindian, 27.2% sub-Saharan African, and 11.5% West Eurasian” breakdown of the overall Puerto Rican population. They write, “The combination of the high Amerindian mtDNA frequency found and the representativeness of the sample set leaves no doubts that the mtDNA pool of Puerto Ricans is predominantly Amerindian,” in Juan C. Martínez-Cruzado et al., “Reconstructing the Population History of Puerto Rico by Means of mtDNA Phylogeographic Analysis,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 128 (2005): 131, 146. As mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the female line only, the significance of the study shows in part how Indian women survived the Spanish colonial process in large numbers, and how this relates to today. Ironically, there may be a cultural element to this type of testing too, for there would seem to be a desire for it from mainly those who might be ethnically connected to the original people and culture to begin with. 54. Dávila, “Local/Diasporic Taínos,” in Taíno Revival, ed. HaslipViera, 23–24. 55. Duany, “Making Indians Out of Blacks,” in Taíno Revival, ed. Haslip-Viera, 37. 56. Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and its Background (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 4–5; emphasis added. 57. Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffins, 34. 58. Sandra J. Kuilan Torres, “No hallan foro los indígenas?” El Nuevo Dia, July 30, 2005.



144

145

59. Grounds, “Yuchi Travels,” in Native Voices, ed. Grounds, Tinker, and Wilkins, 292. 60. Oscar Lamourt-Valentín, Cannibal Recipes, A sociolinguistic account of indigenous Carib-Jíbaro culture and response to the work of Ramón Pané, unpublished manuscript (Ames: Iowa State University, 1979), 8–10. 61. Interview with Lamourt-Valentín, July 27, 1998. 62. Bobby González, The Last Puerto Rican Indian: A Collection of Dangerous Poetry (New York: Cemi Press, 2006), 25.

C hapter 2 1. Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 167. 2. Linda Clarkson, Vern Morrissette, and Gabriela Regallet, “Our Responsibility to the Seventh Generation,” in The Post-Development Reader, ed. Majid Rahnema with Victoria Bawtree (Dhaka: University Press Ltd; Cape Town: David Philip; Halifax: Fernwood Publishing; and London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1997), 41. 3. Eugenio Fernández Méndez, Art and Mythology of the Taino Indians of the Greater West Indies (México City: Editorial Libros de México, 1972), 19. 4. Harry Levin, “Some Meanings of Myth,” in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 106. 5. Ibid., 105. 6. Julian Burger, in Cultural Survival, State of the Peoples: A Global Human Rights Report on Societies in Danger (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 6. 7. James Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), xxi. 8. Vine Deloria, Jr., Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1997), 6. 9. David Stannard points out that among scholars today it is undoubtedly recognized that “numerous complex human communities existed in South America at least 13,000 years ago and in North America at least 6,000 years before that. These are absolute minimums. Very recent and compelling archaeological evidence puts the date for earliest human habitation in Chile at 32,000 B.C. or earlier and North American habitation at around 40,000 B.C., while some highly respected scholars contend that the actual first date of human entry into the hemisphere may have been closer to 70,000 B.C.,” in David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 10. 10. Deloria, Jr., Red Earth, White Lies, 81. 11. Ibid., 31.



Notes

Notes

12. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 8. 13. Ibid., 10. 14. Ibid., 8. 15. Ibid., 123. 16. Christopher Columbus, in “The Letter of Columbus (1493),” Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day, ed. Peter Hulme and Neil L. Whitehead (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13. 17. Christopher Columbus, quoted in Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelly, Jr., eds., trans., The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493, abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 112–13. 18. Ronald D. Arroyo, “Da Borinkees: The Puerto Ricans of Hawaii” (PhD diss., Union Graduate School, 1977), 7. 19. For example, see Fray Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians (c. 1498), trans. Susan C. Griswold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 31; and Jesse Walter Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 25th Annual Report, B. A. E. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1907), 65–66. 20. Hulme and Whitehead, eds., “The Letter of Columbus (1493),” Wild Majesty, 9. 21. Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 124. 22. Ibid., 177. 23. Ibid., 10. 24. Ibid., 15. 25. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 97. 26. Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 16. 27. Ibid. 28. Todorov, The Conquest of America, 111. 29. Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 18. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. See Todorov, The Conquest of America, 4. 33. Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 17. 34. Todorov, The Conquest of America, 117. 35. Ibid., 117–18. 36. Ibid., 117. 37. Gordon Brotherston, Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through Their Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 45. 38. Ibid., 49.



146

147

39. Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 27. 40. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 199. 41. Todorov, The Conquest of America, 223. 42. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, 195–96; emphasis added. 43. Ibid., 194–95. 44. Ibid., 194. 45. Ibid., 199. 46. Ibid. 47. Todorov, The Conquest of America, 5. 48. Deloria, Jr., Red Earth, White Lies, 167. 49. Amos Kidder Fiske, The West Indies: A History of the Islands of the West Indian Archipelago, Together with an Account of Their Physical Characteristics, Natural Resources and Present Condition (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; and London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899), 24. 50. “The Bull Inter Caetera (Alexander VI), May 4, 1493,” in European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648, ed. Frances Gardiner Davenport (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917), 75–78. 51. Luis N. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas, trans. by Westminster/John Knox Press (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 38. 52. Ibid. 53. Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959), x. 54. Ibid., 72–73. 55. Ibid., 40. 56. Paul Gottschalk, ed., The Earliest Diplomatic Documents on America: The Papal Bulls of 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesillas Reproduced and Translated (Berlin: Paul Gottschalk, 1927), 15. 57. Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 106–7. 58. Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), 151. 59. Indian comment quoted in A. Garcia, History of the West Indies (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1965), 23. 60. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, 281. 61. Martin Fernández de Enciso, quoted in Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, 36.



Notes

Notes

62. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought, 7. 63. For an explanation of indigenous settlement in the Americas, see Stannard, American Holocaust, 261–66. 64. Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 69. 65. Interview with elder Juan Antonio Castillo, August 20, 2008. 66. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, 4. 67. Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 17. 68. Ibid., 9–10. 69. Ibid., 4. 70. Garcia, History of the West Indies, 15. 71. Ibid. 72. O’Gorman, The Invention of America, 165. 73. Ibid., 111–12. 74. Ibid., 18–19. 75. Ibid., 26. 76. Ibid., 35. 77. Ibid. 78. Edmundo O’Gorman, quoted in Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, 5. 79. Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 69. 80. According to Manuel Giménez-Fernández, during “the whole unfolding of the political domination of the Indies by Spain, there is not one single ideological movement intended to reform Spain’s established legitimacy, nor the direction of the governance of the Indies by the State, that in various ways does not allege the historical fact of Alexander’s letters in respect to the Indies to support its thesis, interpreting them in the light of its own conceptions,” Nuevas consideraciones sobre la historia, sentido y valor de las bulas alejandrinas de 1493 referentes a las Indias (1944), quoted in Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, 31. 81. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, 60. 82. Loida Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico: From the Beginning to 1892 (New York: L. A. Publishing Company, 1978), 59–60. 83. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, 65–66. 84. Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 134. 85. Glenn T. Morris, “Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Development of a Decolonizing Critique of Indigenous Peoples and International Relations,” in Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance, ed. Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 108. 86. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 47. 87. Ibid., 22.



148

149

88. Ibid., 26. 89. Ibid., 31. 90. W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology & Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 51. 91. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, in S. Lyman Tyler, Two Worlds: The Indian Encounter with the European, 1492–1509 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 124–25. 92. José Barreiro, The Indian Chronicles (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993), 36. 93. Interview with Carib-Jíbaro linguist and scholar Oki LamourtValentín, July 27, 1998. 94. Bernal Diaz, in Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 17. 95. Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 262. 96. Bartolomé de Las Casas, “Historia de las Indias,” in Two Worlds: The Indian Encounter with the European, 1492–1509, ed. S. Lyman Tyler (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 124–25. 97. Interview with Lamourt-Valentín, June 28, 1999; see also Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, in Tyler, Two Worlds, 124. 98. Interview with Lamourt-Valentín, June 28, 1999. 99. Barreiro, The Indian Chronicles, 24. 100. Ibid., 11. 101. Interview with artesian and indigenous cultural practitioner Margarita Nogueras-Vidal, July 30, 1998. 102. Comment by Peter Hulme and Neil L. Whitehead, eds., “The Report of Dr Chanca (1494),” Wild Majesty, 29. 103. Diego Álvarez Chanca, “The Report of Dr Chanca (1494),” in Wild Majesty, ed. Hulme and Whitehead, 32–34. 104. See engravings and captions in Hulme and Whitehead, eds., Wild Majesty, 31. 105. Irvince Auguiste, quoted in José Barreiro, “Carib Gallery,” Northeast Indian Quarterly 7, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 50–51. 106. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth, 54. 107. Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 7. 108. Ibid. 109. Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep, xxi–xxii. 110. Bernhard Lothar Hörmann, “Extinction and Survival: A Study of the Reaction of Aboriginal Populations to European Expansion” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1949), 2–3. 111. Ibid., 4. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid., 8. 114. Ibid., 55.



Notes

Notes

115. Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 39. 116. Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account (1552), trans. Herma Biffault (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 43. 117. Ibid., 29. 118. Sven Lovén, Origins of the Tainan Culture, West Indies (Göteborg, Sweden: Elanders Bokfryckeri Akfiebolag, 1935), 657. 119. Manuel Maldonado-Denis, Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, trans. Elena Vialo (New York: Random House, 1972), 15. 120. Federico Ribes Tovar, A Chronological History of Puerto Rico (New York: Plus Ultra Educational Publishers, 1973), 16. 121. Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise & Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 30. 122. Lynne Guitar, Pedro Ferbel-Azcarate, and Jorge Estevez, “OcamaDaca Taíno (Hear Me, I Am Taíno): Taíno Survival on Hispaniola, Focusing on the Dominican Republic,” in Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival, ed. Maximilian C. Forte (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), 60. 123. Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 31. 124. Lynne A. Guitar, “Cultural Genesis: Relationships among Indians, Africans and Spaniards in Rural Hispaniola, First Half of the Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1998), xv. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid., 411. 127. Juan González de Mendoza, Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran Reyno de la China (1586), quoted in Guitar, Cultural Genesis, 411. 128. Panchito Ramirez, quoted in Valerie Taliman, “Defying the Myth of Extinction,” American Indian 2, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 19. 129. José Barreiro, “Taíno Survivals: Cacique Panchito, Caridad de los Indios, Cuba,” in Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean, ed. Forte, 25. 130. Panchito Ramirez, quoted in Barreiro, “Taíno Survivals,” in Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean, ed. Forte, 29. 131. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, 202. 132. Ibid., 204. 133. Ibid. 134. Thomas King noted this comment that was once made to him in The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 48. 135. See Charles Darwin, “On the Extinction of the Races of Man,” The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1897), 181–92.



150

151

136. George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, The Clash of Culture and the Contact of Races (1927), (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 18. 137. Woodrow Borah, “The Historical Demography of Aboriginal and Colonial America: An Attempt at Perspective,” in The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, ed. William M. Denevan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 16. 138. Rouse, The Tainos, 161. 139. Hörmann, “Extinction and Survival,” 244. 140. H. J. Spinden, “The Population of Ancient America,” The Geographical Review 18 (1928): 642–43. 141. Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartman, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2007), 46–47. 142. Ibid., 45. 143. Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration in Co-operation with the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration, Puerto Rico: A Guide to the Island of Boriquén (New York: The University Society, Inc., 1940), 102. 144. Bishop Diego de Salamanca, in Stan Steiner, The Islands: The Worlds of the Puerto Ricans (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 16. 145. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 31. 146. Census data in Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 74. 147. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought, 8.

C hapter 3 1. The storyteller, quoted in Stan Steiner, The Islands: The Worlds of the Puerto Ricans, (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974), 19. 2. Interview with Carib-Jíbaro linguist and scholar Oki LamourtValentín, July 28, 1998. 3. Loida Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico: From the Beginning to 1892 (New York: L. A. Publishing Company, 1978), 41. 4. Interview with Lamourt-Valentín, July 28, 1998. 5.Steiner, The Islands, 18. 6. The storyteller, quoted in ibid., 11. 7. Ronald D. Arroyo, “Da Borinkees: The Puerto Ricans of Hawaii” (PhD diss., Union Graduate School, 1977), 9. 8. Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, “The Aboriginal Population of Hispaniola,” in Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 376. 9. Lynne A. Guitar, “Cultural Genesis: Relationships Among Indians, Africans and Spaniards in Rural Hispaniola, First Half of the Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1998), 264–65.



Notes

Notes

10. Ibid., 271. 11. Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Resistance and Caribbean Literature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980), 19. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 7. 14. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), xvii. 15. Federico Ribes Tovar, A Chronological History of Puerto Rico (New York: Plus Ultra Educational Publishers, 1973), 20. 16. Matthew Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 8. 17. Interview with artisan and indigenous cultural practitioner Margarita Nogueras-Vidal, July 30, 1998. 18. Guitar, “Cultural Genesis,” 335. 19. Francisco Moscoso, “Chiefdom and Encomienda in Puerto Rico: The Development of Tribal Society and the Spanish Colonization to 1530,” in The Puerto Ricans: Their History, Culture, and Society, ed. Adalberto López (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1980), 18. 20. Ibid. 21. Steiner, The Islands, 13. 22. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 57. 23. Interview with Lamourt-Valentín, July 27, 1998. 24. Ibid. 25. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 59. 26. Ibid., 59–60. 27. Moscoso, “Chiefdom and Encomienda in Puerto Rico,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 21. 28. Juan Angel Silén, We, the Puerto Rican People: A Story of Oppression and Resistance, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 22–23. 29. Steiner, The Islands, 14. 30. Interview with human rights advocate Nilda Aponte-Lebron, July 26, 1998. 31. Juan Manuel Delgado Colón, “¿Dónde están nuestros indios?” El Nuevo Dia, November 19, 1977. 32. Moscoso, “Chiefdom and Encomienda in Puerto Rico,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 22. 33. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 65. 34. Moscoso, “Chiefdom and Encomienda in Puerto Rico,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 22. 35. Ibid.



152

153

36. Luis N. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas, trans. Westminster/John Knox Press (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 32–33. 37. Ibid., 33. 38. Ibid. 39. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra firme del mar Océano (1851), quoted in Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, 34. 40. Mark Davis and Robert Zannis, quoted in Ward Churchill, From a Native Son: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1985–1995 (Boston: South End Press, 1996), 321. 41. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, 280. 42. Silén, We, the Puerto Rican People, 19. 43. Ibid; emphasis added. 44. Pedro Albizu Campos, quoted in Steiner, The Islands, 238. 45. Silén, We, the Puerto Rican People, 19–20. 46. Oscar Lamourt-Valentín, Cannibal Recipes, A sociolinguistic account of Carib-Jíbaro culture and response to the work of Ramón Pané, unpublished manuscript (Ames: Iowa State University, 1979), 13. 47. Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, quoted in Fray Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians (c. 1498), trans. Susan C. Griswold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 50. 48. For instance, see Samuel M. Wilson, “Introduction to the Study of the Indigenous People of the Caribbean,” in The Indigenous People of the Caribbean, ed. Samuel M. Wilson (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 4. 49. For an in-depth critique of Rouse’s first “repeoplying” theory, see Anthony Castanha, “Adventures in Caribbean Indigeneity Centering on Resistance, Survival and Presence in Borikén (Puerto Rico)” (PhD diss., University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2004), 94–104. 50. Puerto Rican archeologist Roberto Martínez-Torres confirmed to me in an interview the similarity between Alegría and Rouse’s theories, July 14, 1999. Also, Eugenio Fernández-Méndez refers to Alegría’s refusal to acknowledge that the ceremonial grounds and ball game played among indigenous Caribbean peoples was influenced and primarily found in Mesoamerica: he “clings to the traditional but now discredited position that the possible route of diffusion was by way of the northern coast of South America,” in Eugenio Fernández Méndez, Art and Mythology of the Taino Indians of the Greater West Indies (México City: Editorial Libros de México, 1972), 49. One implication here may be that the “Archaics,” as a so-called “primitive” people, could not have developed such a game or ceremonial practice. However, as Fernández-Méndez points out,



Notes

51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63.

Notes the game was apparently played in “very remote times” and among the “ancient peoples” of México and Mesoamerica (61). Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise & Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 73. Jalil Sued-Badillo, review of Irving Rouse’s The Tainos, The American Historical Review 99, no. 1 (February 1994): 333. Betty J. Meggers and Clifford Evans, “Lowland South America and the Antilles,” in Ancient South Americans, ed. Jesse D. Jennings (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1978), 308. See Castanha, “Adventures in Caribbean Indigeneity,” 105–16. Fernández-Méndez makes numerous references to the linguistic link to Mesoamerica and notes that “the arawak adscription of the Taino language rests on rather flimsy linguistic comparisons,” 16. See Fernández Méndez, Art and Mythology of the Taino Indians of the Greater West Indies. Lamourt-Valentín has most interestingly used the Mayan language to interpret the Pané text. He told me that through his Jíbaro background and knowledge of the many myths passed down to him through oral tradition, he was able to relate the myths back to the Indian language, subsequently breaking down the language from the transliteration to reveal the poetics of the narrative. By returning to the original Mayan language, he figured out that what the cacike Guarionex was telling Pané concerned “moral production,” social relations of exchange, explaining “exogamy,” and relationships of trade, distance, time, and economic productivity. Interviews with Lamourt-Valentín, July 27, 1998 and June 28, 1999. A breakdown of some important elements of the language are contained in Lamourt-Valentín’s Cannibal Recipes. Fernández Méndez, Art and Mythology of the Taino Indians of the Greater West Indies, 19. Elder Doña Herminia (Monsita) Vargas, quoted in Kukuya, The Ku of the Cemi, Codex I (Jayuya, Puerto Rico, 2008), 8. Kukuya, The Ku of the Cemi, 5. Miguel Rodríguez, “Osamenta de 5 mil años de edad,” El Expresso, January 18, 1996, 24; interview with Martínez-Torres, July 14, 1999. See Roberto Martínez-Torres, “El Yacimiento Aracaico De La Tembladera,” Tesis Presentada Como Uno De Los Requisitos Para El Grado De Maestro En Artes En Historia Con Concentacíon En Arqueología, Centro De Estudios Avanzados De Puerto Rico Y El Caribe, San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 1994. Interview with Martínez-Torres, July 14, 1999. Rouse, The Tainos, 70. Fernando Picó, History of Puerto Rico: A Panorama of Its People (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006), 38.



154

155

64. Jesse Walter Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 25th Annual Report, B. A. E. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1907), 23. 65. María Teresa Babín, “Introduction: The Path and the Voice,” in Borinquen: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Literature, ed. María Teresa Babín and Stan Steiner (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), xv. 66. Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 84. 67. Ibid., 82. 68. Ibid., 79–82. 69. The storyteller, quoted in Steiner, The Islands, 10. 70. Jesse Walter Fewkes, in ibid. 71. Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 83. 72. Moscoso, “Chiefdom and Encomienda in Puerto Rico,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 22. 73. Adalberto López, “The Evolution of a Colony: Puerto Rico in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 25. 74. Delgado Colón, “¿Dónde están nuestros indios?” 75. Steiner, The Islands, 14. 76. Regarding the partial abolition of slavery, Federico Ribes-Tovar writes, “On July 12, 1520, the King of Spain, in a letter to Lic. Antonio de la Gama, Governor and Resident Judge of Puerto Rico, stated categorically: ‘After much study and discussion, it was agreed and decided that the said Indians (encomendados) are free men and should be considered and treated as such, that they should be granted full liberty, and that we cannot and should not impose forced labor on anyone,’” in Ribes Tovar, A Chronological History of Puerto Rico, 60. 77. Adolfo Pérez-Comas, “Censo de Lando de 1530–1531,” Hereditas: Revista De Genealogía Puertorriqueña 5, no. 2 (2004): 66. 78. Moscoso, “Chiefdom and Encomienda in Puerto Rico,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 22. 79. Salvador Brau, Historia de Puerto Rico (1904; San Juan de Puerto Rico: Editorial Coquí, 1966), 70–71. 80. See Pérez-Comas, “Censo de Lando de 1530–1531,” Hereditas, 66–87. 81. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 73. 82. Guitar, “Cultural Genesis,” 271. 83. Moscoso, “Chiefdom and Encomienda in Puerto Rico,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 22. 84. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 75. 85. Brau, Historia de Puerto Rico, 80. 86. Pérez-Comas, “Censo de Lando de 1530–1531,” Hereditas, 66. 87. Census data in Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 83; emphasis added. 88. Delgado Colón, “¿Dónde están nuestros indios?”



Notes

Notes

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

Pérez-Comas, “Censo de Lando de 1530–1531,” Hereditas, 66. Steiner, The Islands, 16. Jerónimo de Aguero, quoted in Guitar, “Cultural Genesis,” 336–37. Guitar, “Cultural Genesis,” 337. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 73. Steiner, The Islands, 17. Marianna Morris, in Steiner, The Islands, 17. Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 24. For a highly speculative article that relies on the same types of sources and census analyses critiqued in this book, and which presents contradictory evidence that unwittingly supports a substantial indigenous population, specifically the census category “pardos libres” as predominantly mestizo Indian as shown in the next chapter, see Gabriel Haslip-Viera, “The Politics of Taíno Revivalism: The Insignificance of Amerindian mtDNA in the Population History of Puerto Ricans. A Comment on Recent Research,” Centro Journal 18 no. 1 (Spring 2006): 261–75. The author’s trump card reverts back, as so many do, to the racist and outdated Darwinian notion of “pure” identities as a basis of “extinction.” 98. Juan Martínez-Cruzado, et al., “Reconstructing the Population History of Puerto Rico by Means of mtDNA Phylogeographic Analysis,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 128 (2005): 131. 99. Ibid., 147.

Chapter 4 1. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 36. 2. Maria Teresa Babín and Stan Steiner, eds., Borinquen: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Literature (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 38. 3. Ronald D. Arroyo, “Da Borinkees: The Puerto Ricans of Hawaii” (PhD diss., Union Graduate School, 1977), 9. 4. Francisco Moscoso, “Chiefdom and Encomienda in Puerto Rico: The Development of Tribal Society and the Spanish Colonization to 1530,” in The Puerto Ricans: Their History, Culture, and Society, ed. Adalberto López (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1980), 23. 5. Loida Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico: From the Beginning to 1892 (New York: L. A. Publishing Company, 1978), 83. 6. Census data in Salvador Brau, Historia de Puerto Rico (1904), San Juan de Puerto Rico: Editorial Coquí, (1966), 70–71. 7. Michael L. Conniff and Thomas J. Davis, Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 76.



156

157

8. Adalberto López, “The Evolution of a Colony: Puerto Rico in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 25. 9. Ibid., 25–26. 10. Ibid., 26. 11. Stan Steiner, The Islands: The Worlds of the Puerto Ricans (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 60. 12. Conniff and Davis, Africans in the Americas, 76. 13. Census data in Brau, Historia de Puerto Rico, 70–71. 14. Conniff and Davis, Africans in the Americas, 76. 15. Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Resistance and Caribbean Literature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980), 14. 16. Ibid., 22. 17. Arturo Santana and Rafael A. Torrech, Atlas De La Historia De Puerto Rico: Desde sus orígenes hasta finales del Siglo XIX (San Juan de Puerto Rico: Editorial Cordillera, 1988), 34. 18. Census data in Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 74. 19. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 84. 20. Interview with Puerto Rican human rights advocate Nilda AponteLebron, July 26, 1998. 21. Ibid. 22. Interview with elder and indigenous cultural practitioner Naniki Reyes-Ocasio, August 9, 2006. 23. Ibid. 24. For a breakdown of ancestral frequencies per municipality, see Juan C. Martínez-Cruzado et al., “Reconstructing the Population History of Puerto Rico by Means of mtDNA Phylogeographic Analysis,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 128 (2005): 141. 25. Interview with elder Juan Antonio Castillo, August 20, 2008. 26. López, “The Evolution of a Colony,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 27. 27. Lynne A. Guitar, “Cultural Genesis: Relationships Among Indians, Africans and Spaniards in Rural Hispaniola, First Half of the Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1998), 359. 28. Ibid. 29. Jíbaro Don Pedro Matos-Matos, quoted in Steiner, The Islands, 94. 30. Ibid., 90–91. 31. Interview with indigenous cultural practitioner Niña RaffaeleAponte, July 26, 1998. 32. Interview with Raffaele-Aponte, Aponte-Lebron, and Baracutey, July 26, 1998. 33. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 103. 34. Juan Angel Silén, We, the Puerto Rican People: A Story of Oppression and Resistance, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 18.



Notes

Notes

35. Fray Iñigo Abbad y Lasierra, in Silén, We, the Puerto Rican People, 17. 36. Matos-Matos, quoted in Steiner, The Islands, 94. 37. López, “The Evolution of a Colony,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 33. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 44. 40. Ibid., 27. 41. Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 148. 42. López, “The Evolution of a Colony,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 28. 43. Ibid., 34. 44. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 93. 45. Interview with Carib-Jíbaro linguist and scholar Oki LamourtValentín, July 27, 1998. 46. López, “The Evolution of a Colony,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 38. 47. Ibid., 38–39. 48. Interview with Lamourt-Valentín, July 27, 1998. 49. Ibid. 50. López, “The Evolution of a Colony,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 44. 51. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 74. 52. Brau, Historia de Puerto Rico, 199–200. 53. Ibid., 200. 54. Juan Manuel Delgado Colón, “¿Dónde están nuestros indios?” El Nuevo Dia, November 19, 1977. 55. Ibid. 56. Brau, Historia de Puerto Rico, 199. 57. Census data in Santana and Torrech, Atlas De La Historia De Puerto Rico, 37. 58. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 74. 59. Interview with Puerto Rican historian Juan Manuel Delgado, July 15, 1999. 60. Juan Manual Delgado, “Sobrevivencia de los apellidos indígenas según la historia oral de Puerto Rico,” Revista de Genealogía Puertorriqueña 2, no. 1 (April 2001): 42–43. 61. Ibid., 46. 62. Ibid., 53. 63. Census data in Santana and Torrech, Atlas De La Historia De Puerto Rico, 37. 64. Ibid., 37, 55. 65. Ibid. 66. Interview with Naniki, August 9, 2006.



158

159

67. Interview with Puerto Rican archeologist Roberto Martínez-Torres, July 14, 1999. 68. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 74. 69. Delgado Colón, “¿Dónde están nuestros indios?”; Manuel ÁlvarezNazario confirms that in 1802 Governor Montes ordered all mestizos, mulattoes who were not slaves, and indios to be included as pardos libres, in Manuel Alvarez Nazario, El Elemento Afronegroide en el Español de Puerto Rico: Contribución al estudio del negro en América (San Juan de Puerto Rico: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1974), 353. 70. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 74. 71. Federico Ribes Tovar, A Chronological History of Puerto Rico (New York: Plus Ultra Educational Publishers, 1973), 171. 72. Fernando Picó, History of Puerto Rico: A Panorama of Its People (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006), 50. 73. Alvarez Nazario, El Elemento Afronegroide en el Español de Puerto Rico, 353. 74. Fray Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra, Historia Geográfica, Civil y Natural de la Isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto-Rico (1788), (Ediciones Doce Calles e Historiador Oficial de Puerto Rico, 2002), 495. 75. See Pablo Morales Cabrera, Puerto Rico Indigena: Prehistoria y Protohistoria de Puerto Rico (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Imprenta Venezuela, 1932), 23–27. 76. Interview with Jíbaro campesino Cuko, August 22, 2008. 77. Ibid. 78. Picó, History of Puerto Rico, 166. 79. Interview with artisan and indigenous cultural practitioner Margarita Nogueras-Vidal, August 12, 2008. 80. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 74. 81. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research, Writing and Indigenous Peoples (London and New York: Zed Books; and Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 1999), 72–73. 82. For an excellent account refuting the extinction of the Yuchi, see Richard A. Grounds, “Yuchi Travels: Up and Down the Academic ‘Road to Disappearance,’” in Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance, ed. Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 290–317. 83. Lenore A. Stiffarm with Phil Lane Jr., “The Demography of Native North America: A Question of American Indian Survival,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 37. 84. Henry F. Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology 7, no. 4 (October 1966): 395.



Notes

Notes

85. William M. Denevan, “Estimating the Unknown,” in The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, ed. William M. Denevan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 1. 86. Denevan, ed., “Epilogue,” The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 291. 87. See Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, “The Aboriginal Population of Hispaniola,” Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 376–410. 88. Denevan, “Estimating the Unknown,” in Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 5–6. 89. David E. Stannard, Before the Horror: The Population of Hawai‘i on the Eve of Western Contact (Honolulu: Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai‘i, 1989), xv. 90. Woodrow Borah, “The Historical Demography of Aboriginal and Colonial America: An Attempt at Perspective,” in Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 20. 91. Stiffarm with Lane, Jr., “The Demography of Native North America,” in Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America, 23. 92. Borah, “The Historical Demography of Aboriginal and Colonial America,” in Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 19. 93. Ibid. 94. Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), 4. 95. Borah, “The Historical Demography of Aboriginal and Colonial America,” in Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 19. 96. Thomas Biolsi, “The Anthropological Construction of ‘Indians’: Haviland Scudder Mekeel and the Search for the Primitive in Lakota Country,” in Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology, ed. Thomas Biolsi and Larry J. Zimmerman (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 135. 97. Ashley Montagu, “Preface,” in Ashley Montagu, ed., The Concept of the Primitive (New York: The Free Press; and London: CollierMacmillan Limited, 1968), vii–viii. 98. Ashley Montagu, “The Fallacy of the ‘Primitive,’” in Montagu, ed., The Concept of the Primitive, 2. 99. E. De Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law: Applied to the Conduct and to the Affairs of Nations and of Sovereigns, vol. 3, trans. Charles G. Fenwick (1758), (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916), 84–85. 100. Ibid., 85.



160

161

101. M. Annette Jaimes, “The Stone Age Revisited: An Indigenist View of Primitivism, Industrialism and the Labor Process,” New Studies on the Left 14, no. 3 (Winter 1990–1991): 59. 102. Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law, 84. 103. See Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (98 Wheat), 543, 1823. 104. Stiffarm with Lane Jr., “The Demography of Native North America,” in Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America, 28; emphasis added. 105. See Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.), 1, 1831. 106. Jesse Walter Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 25th Annual Report, B. A. E. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1907), 23. 107. Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, trans. Herma Biffault (1552; Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 43. 108. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 73–74. 109. Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 23. 110. Ricardo E. Alegría, “An Introduction to Taíno Culture and History,” in Taíno: Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean, ed. Fatima Bercht, Estrellita Brodsky, John Alan Farmer and Dicey Taylor (New York: The Monacelli Press, Inc., and El Museo del Barrio, 1997), 18. 111. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 74. 112. Alegría, “An Introduction to Taíno Culture and History,” in Bercht et al., eds., Taíno, 18. 113. Ibid., 20; emphasis added. 114. Denevan, “Estimating the Unknown,” in Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 6. 115. Cook and Borah, Essays in Population History, viii. 116. Ibid., xiii. 117. Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, “The Historical Demography of Interior Tribes of Columbia in the Studies of Juan Friede and German Colmenares,” in Essays in Population History, 429. 118. Ibid.

C hapter 5 1. María Teresa Babín, “Introduction: The Path and the Voice,” in María Teresa Babín and Stan Steiner, eds., Borinquen: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Literature, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), xii–xiii. 2. Interview with the Jíbaro man, August 23, 2008. 3. Interview with the wife of Cuko, August 22, 2008. 4. Franke Wilmer, The Indigenous Voice in World Politics: Since Time Immemorial (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1993), 7.



Notes

Notes

5. Adalberto López, “Birth of a Nation: Puerto Rico in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Puerto Ricans: Their History, Culture, and Society, ed. Adalberto López (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1980), 59. 6. José C. Rosario, The Development of the Puerto Rican Jibaro and His Present Attitude towards Society (San Juan: The University of Puerto Rico, 1935), 17. 7. Ibid. 8. Interview with the Jíbaro man, August 23, 2008. 9. Interview with elder William Feliciano, August 25, 2008. 10. Interview with espiritista and indigenous cultural practitioner Uahtibili Báez-Santiago, August 26, 2008. 11. Ibid. 12. Interview with activist and Jíbaro campesino Pepe, August 24, 2008. 13. Ibid. 14. Stan Steiner, The Islands: The Worlds of the Puerto Ricans (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 97. 15. Rosario, The Development of the Puerto Rican Jibaro and His Present Attitude towards Society, 8. 16. Ibid., 9. 17. Ibid., 18. 18. Ibid., 17–18. 19. Interview with Carib-Jíbaro linguist and scholar Oki LamourtValentín, July 27, 1998. 20. Ibid. 21. Fernando Picó, History of Puerto Rico: A Panorama of Its People (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006), 118–19. 22. Interview with elder Feliciano, August 25, 2008. 23. Ronald D. Arroyo, “Da Borinkees: The Puerto Ricans of Hawaii” (PhD diss., Union Graduate School, 1977), 3. 24. Steiner, The Islands, 95. 25. Interview with Jíbaro campesino Cuko, August 21, 2008. 26. Interview with elder Lipio, August 21, 2008. 27. Interview with the Jíbaro man, August 23, 2008. 28. López, “Birth of a Nation,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 62. 29. Rosario, The Development of the Puerto Rican Jibaro and His Present Attitude towards Society, 63. 30. Interview with Cuko, August 22, 2008. 31. Déborah Berman Santana, “Indigenous Identity and the Struggle for Independence in Puerto Rico,” in Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, ed. Joanne Barker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 213. 32. Ibid. 33. Steiner, The Islands, 90.



162

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

163

Ibid., 238. López, “Birth of a Nation,” in López, ed., The Puerto Ricans, 70. Ibid. Ibid., 72. Interview with Cuko, August 21, 2008. Picó, History of Puerto Rico, 186. Ibid., 184–85. Loida Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico: From the Beginning to 1892 (New York: L. A. Publishing Company, 1978), 281. Juan Angel Silén, We, the Puerto Rican People: A Story of Oppression and Resistance, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 31. Interview with Cuko, August 21, 2008. Interview with artisan and Jíbara cultural practitioner Pluma, December 22, 2009. Manuel Maldonado-Denis, Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, trans. Elena Vialo (New York: Random House, 1972), 46. Steiner, The Islands, 213. Ibid., 216. Silén, We, the Puerto Rican People, 32. “Compontes,” according to Figueroa-Mercado, is a word of Cuban origin. “It means the act of submitting an individual to a third degree test to extract confessions,” in Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 379. Interview with elder Lipio, August 21, 2008. Interview with elder Domingo Guzman, August 21, 2008. Interview with the Jíbaro man, August 23, 2008. Interview with Cuko, August 21, 2008. Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico, 408. Steiner, The Islands, 238. Picó, History of Puerto Rico, 239. Interview with elder Lipio, August 21, 2008. Interview with Pepe, April 5, 2010. Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, eds., The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 16. Earl P. Hanson, quoted in Steiner, The Islands, 232. Interview with Uahtibili, August 26, 2008. Interview with Pepe, August 24, 2008. Carlos Feliciano, quoted in Steiner, The Islands, 238. Ibid., 241–42. Ibid., 239. Luis Muñoz-Marín, quoted in Steiner, The Islands, 241. Feliciano, in Steiner, The Islands, 239–40. Bolívar Marquez, in Steiner, The Islands, 226.



Notes

Notes

69. Steiner, The Islands, 11. 70. Ibid., 10–11; emphasis added. 71. Jesse Walter Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 25th Annual Report, B. A. E. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1907), 24–26. 72. Ibid., 41. 73. Interview with Puerto Rican archeologist Roberto Martínez-Torres, July 14, 1999. 74. Photos printed in Roberto Martínez Torres, “Nuestros Primeros Artistas,” in Revista Catey, ed. Roberto Martínez Torres (Morovis, Puerto Rico: Revista Arqueologica, Antropologica e Historica, 1994), 11–14. 75. Interview with Martínez-Torres, July 14, 1999. 76. Ibid; emphasis added. 77. Interview with elder Doña Varín Chéverez, August 2, 1998. 78. Juan Manual Delgado, “Sobrevivencia de los apellidos indígenas según la historia oral de Puerto Rico,” Revista de Genealogía Puertorriqueña, 2, no. 1 (April 2001): 77. 79. Ibid. 80. Interview with Boricua and president of the United Puerto Rican Association of Hawai‘i (UPRAH), Angel Santiago-Cruz, September 19, 2004. 81. Interview with Santiago-Cruz, November 11, 2004. 82. Steiner, The Islands, 18.

Chapter 6 1. See Ronald D. Arroyo, “Da Borinkees: The Puerto Ricans of Hawaii” (PhD diss. Union Graduate School, 1977), 101–11, 139–40. 2. Loida Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico: From the Beginning to 1892 (New York: L. A. Publishing Company, 1978), 46. 3. Fray Bartolomé Las Casas, in Fray Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, trans. Susan C. Griswold (c. 1498; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 62. 4. Interview with Güiya, August 25, 2008. 5. Expanding on the etymology of the word “dita,” Lamourt-Valentín writes, “The container made from the fruit of the calabash-tree (‘higüero’) is called a ‘dita’ from ‘ti’ (to, in, with) and ‘taab’ (to hang, to suspend) or = ti’-taab . . . and in some places people apply this native term to metal cooking pots.” in Oscar Lamourt-Valentín, Cannibal Recipes, A sociolinguistic account of indigenous CaribJíbaro culture and response to the work of Ramón Pané, unpublished manuscript (Ames: Iowa State University, 1979), 6. 6. Interview with Güiya and Migui, August 25, 2008. 7. Interview with Migui, August 25, 2008.



164

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

165

Interview with activist and Jíbaro campesino Pepe, August 24, 2008. Interview with Isabel Serrano, August 25, 2008. Interview with elder Celia Gonzales, August 25, 2008. Ibid. Interview with Isabel, August 25, 2008. Interview with espiritista and indigenous cultural practitioner Uahtibili Báez-Santiago, March 24, 2010. Ibid. Interview with elder William Feliciano, August 25, 2008. See Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, 19–23. Interview with Isabel and elder Feliciano, August 25, 2008. Adalberto López, “Birth of a Nation: Puerto Rico in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Puerto Ricans: Their History, Culture, and Society, ed. Adalberto López (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1980), 61. See María Dolores Hajosy Benedetti, Earth & Spirit: Healing Lore and More from Puerto Rico (Maplewood, NJ: Waterfront Press, 1989). Hajosy Benedetti, Earth & Spirit, xi. Bárbara Rodríguez, in Hajosy Benedetti, Earth & Spirit, 117. Hajosy Benedetti, Earth & Spirit, xv. Interview with elder and espiritista Shachira, August 21, 2008. Ibid. Uahtibili Báez Santiago and Huana Naboli Martínez Prieto, “Puerto Rico”: la gran mentira (Camuy, Puerto Rico: Edición Revisada, 2008), 26. Interview with Shachira, August 21, 2008. Ibid. Doña Bolina, in Hajosy Benedetti, Earth & Spirit, 58. Hajosy Benedetti, Earth & Spirit, 58. Interview with elder Shachira, August 21, 2008. Ibid. Frances Robles, “Puerto Rico Archaeological Find Mired in Politics,” Miami Herald, July 1, 2008. Interview with elder Shachira, August 21, 2008. Interview with Uahtibili, August 26, 2008. Ibid. Interview with Uahtibili, March 24, 2010. Lamourt-Valentín, Cannibal Recipes, 19–20. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 20. Interview with Huana Naboli Martínez-Prieto, August 26, 2008. Interview with Uahtibili, August 26, 2008. Interview with Uahtibili and Huana, August 26, 2008.



Notes

Notes

43. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 30. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 33. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 30. 48. Interview with Uahtibili, March 24, 2010. 49. Interview with Jíbaro campesino Cuko, August 22, 2008. 50. Lamourt-Valentín, Cannibal Recipes, 6–7. 51. Interview with Carib-Jíbaro linguist and scholar Oki LamourtValentín, July 27, 1998. 52. Quoted in Norma Carr, “The Puerto Ricans in Hawaii: 1900–1958” (PhD diss., University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 1989), 47. 53. See Webster’s II New College Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995, 1999), 806. 54. Jesse Walter Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 25th Annual Report, B. A. E. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1907), 20. 55. Interview with Pepe, August 24, 2008. 56. Interview with Migui, August 25, 2008. 57. See Nelsonrafael Collazo, Imágenes del Indio Puertorriqueño (Jayuya, Puerto Rico: Nelsonrafael Collazo Grau, 1999), 184–86. 58. Interview with activist and indigenous cultural practitioner Baracutey, August 19, 2008. 59. Interview with artisan and indigenous cultural practitioner Pluma, August 22, 2008. 60. Interview with Baracutey, August 19, 2008; Interview with Pluma, August 22, 2008. 61. José Luis Morín, “Chiapas Uprising: An Indigenous Peoples’ Struggle for Justice,” Covert Action Quarterly, no. 48 (Spring 1994): 39. 62. Luis A. Gómez, “Evo Morales Turns the Tide of History,” in Dispatches from Latin America: On the Frontlines against Neoliberalism, ed. Teo Ballvé and Vijay Prashad (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006), 141. 63. Interview with Cuko, August 21, 2008. 64. Interview with Pepe, August 27, 2008. 65. Interview with elder and indigenous cultural practitioner Naniki, July 31, 2003. 66. Isolina Rondón, quoted in Jean Wiley Zwickel, Voices for Independence: In the Spirit of Valor and Sacrifice (Pittsburg, CA: White Star Press, 1988, 1993), 24. 67. Edwin Meléndez and Edgardo Meléndez, eds., “Introduction,” Colonial Dilemma: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Puerto Rico (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 5.



166

167

68. Interview with Pepe, April 5, 2010. 69. Juan Manuel Carrión, “The National Question in Puerto Rico,” in Meléndez and Meléndez, eds., Colonial Dilemma, 71. 70. J. Benjamín Torres, in Zwickel, Voices for Independence, 10. 71. Gómez, “Evo Morales Turns the Tide of History,” in Ballvé and Prashad, eds., Dispatches from Latin America, 143. 72. Déborah Berman Santana, “Indigenous Identity and the Struggle for Independence in Puerto Rico,” in Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, ed. Joanne Barker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 211. 73. Ibid. 74. Interview with activist and indigenous cultural practitioner Elba Anaca Lugo, July 17, 1999. 75. Ibid. 76. Interview with Anaca Lugo, November 2, 2004. 77. Interview with artisan and indigenous cultural practitioner Margarita Nogueras-Vidal, September 2, 2004. 78. Interview with Nogueras-Vidal, July 30, 1998. 79. Ibid., July 10, 1999. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., July 14, 2004. 82. Interview with Naniki, July 12, 1999. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Interview with Cuko, August 21, 2008. 87. Ibid., April 13, 2010. 88. Liliana Cotto, “The Rescate Movement: An Alternative Way of Doing Politics,” in Meléndez and Meléndez, eds., Colonial Dilemma, 120. 89. Interview with Pepe, April 5, 2010. 90. Interview with Cuko, August 21, 2008. 91. Ibid., April 13, 2010. 92. Morris Morley, “Dependence and Development in Puerto Rico,” in The Puerto Ricans: Their History, Culture, and Society, ed. Adalberto López (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1980), 179. 93. Interview with Cuko, August 21, 2008. 94. Interview with Pepe, April 5, 2010. 95. Interview with Cuko, August 21, 2008. 96. Berman Santana, “Indigenous Identity and the Struggle for Independence in Puerto Rico,” in Barker, ed., Sovereignty Matters, 220.



Notes

168

Notes

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

Interview with the Jíbaro man, August 23, 2008. Interview with activist and Jíbaro campesino Pepe, April 5, 2010. Interview with Jíbaro campesino Cuko, August 21, 2008. Gabriel Haslip-Viera, “The Politics of Taíno Revivalism: The Insignificance of Amerindian mtDNA in the Population History of Puerto Ricans. A Comment on Recent Research,” Centro Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 267. Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 40–41. Interview with Pepe, April 5, 2010. Interview with espiritista and indigenous cultural practitioner Uahtibili Báez-Santiago, August 26, 2008. Interview with Pepe, August 24, 2008.



C hapter 7

( Sel ected Indian and S pa ni sh Wo rd s)

año de las guácaras : The “time we lived in caves.” areíto: A traditional ceremonial dance, recitation, or song. apodo: A nickname. batey: A ceremonial ground or ball court. behike: Similar to a shaman. bohío: An traditional Indian house. burén: Traditional Indian plate used for cooking. cacike/a: A regional leader or chieftain. campesino: A Jíbaro farmer in Puerto Rico. cemí: Personal or familial guardians representing various spiritual entities and a link between the physical and ancestral worlds. coca: A cup made from coconut that is African in origin. comadrona: A midwife. el componte: Documented period of torture in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. conuco: Multicropping and subsistence farming. cotona: A dress like a tunic. criollo (or “blanquito”) elite: In Puerto Rico, mainly locally born descendants of Spaniards. cuandero/a: A medicinal healer. dita: A bowl-shaped calabash made from the native higüera tree. encomendado: Indian people held under the encomienda said to be “free persons.” encomendero: A landlord and slaveholder. encomienda: Institutionalized system of forced labor, akin to slavery, where native lands and people were apportioned to encomenderos. erone: Mound cultivation. espiritismo: Spiritualism. espiritista: Similar to a shaman, or one who works with spirits. fogón: Jíbaro way of cooking using a table with stones. guajiro: Cuban Indian, equivalent to Jíbaro in Puerto Rico. 10.1057/9780230116405 - The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction, Tony Castanha


Glossary

Glossary

guatiao: A greeting, exchanging of names or “blood mixing” in order to establish kinship relations, peace, and friendship. Indios esclavos: Indian slaves. Kiskeya: Also Quisqueya; today Haití and the Dominican Republic. mestizo/a: “Mixed blooded” Indian as is commonly known in the Spanish Americas. “pardos libres ”: “Free Colored” people. repartimiento: Distribution of native people. requerimiento: Utilization of Spanish “just war” theory as a way of requiring native people to convert to Christianity. tiznado: A native warrior. yagua: The “boards” or tabla de palma from the native yagua palm tree. yucayeke: A village or province.



170

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Abbad y Lasierra, Fray Íñigo, 75, 79 African Americans, 112 Afro-Boricua, 112 Agüeybana, cacike, 39, 51, 54–56, 67, 118 Albizu-Campos, Pedro, 59; and nationalist movement, 103–4, 125 Aldrete, Bernardo de, 119–20 Alegría, Ricardo, xv, 60, 69, 86, 153; on cultural extinction, 6 Alexander VI, Pope, 30–31; Alexandrian bulls or letters, 31, 148 Alonso, Manuel, xvi Álvarez-Chanca, Diego, 39 Álvarez-Nazario, Manuel, 79 American westward expansion, 85–86; atrocities, 102–3 American Indian Movement, 5 año de las guácaras, 106, 134 “Archaics” and “Archaic sites,” 60–61, 153 areíto, the, 12, 54, 62, 118, 136, 143 Arens, W., 41 Arguedas, José María, 8–10, 136 Arroyo, Ronald, xiv, 12–13, 52, 67–68, 94, 109 Asociación Liberal Separatista de Utuado, 97, 101 Atabei, 12, 21 Atzantiha (Atlantis), 60

Auguiste, Irvince, 41 Aura Surey (Morning Star), 14 autonomists, 100, 102 Babín, María Teresa, 62 Baneke, 51 Barreiro, José, 37, 46 Bayamo, cacike, 37 behike, 110, 116 Bering Strait theory, 23–24, 49 Berman-Santana, Déborah, 96, 126, 132 Betances, Ramón Emeterio, 98, 102 Bieke (Vieques), 57, 97, 124, 132 biological extinction, 16, 47–48, 134–35, 156 Black Legend, 16, 83 Boas, Franz, 48 Borah, Woodrow, 52, 81–82, 86–87 Boricua, meaning of, 140 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5 Braceti, Mariana, 98 Brau, Salvador, 63, 75, 86 Brotherston, Gordon, 28 Burger, Julian, 139 Caguana ceremonial grounds, 15, 62, 92, 104, 116 campesinos, xiv, 1–2, 7, 12–13, 67, 72, 76, 95, 98 Caniba, xvi, 51 Canibaro (Kanjibaro), xvi cannibalism, xvi, 16, 22, 36–41, 50



Index

Index

Caonabó, cacike, 38 Caparra, 55, 57 Carib, xiv–xvi, 2, 7, 14, 17–18, 22, 35, 37–38, 41, 50–51, 57, 63, 69, 80, 112, 134 Carlos, King Juan, 101 “Casimiroids,” 60–61 Catholic Church: and baptism records, 76–79, 96; changing minds and, 79 Catholicism, ideology of, 95–96 “Caverns of Creation,” 60 cemí, 110, 112, 115, 136 census data and studies, 53, 63–65, 68–69, 74–82, 87–88, 96–97, 156 Chanady, Amaryll, 10 Charles V, King, 39 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 85 Chiapas uprising, 124 Christian conversion and evangelization, 30–32, 35, 40, 57–58 Club Borinquen, 101 cohoba, 110 Collazo, Nelsonrafael, ix, 142 collective memory, 13 Coloma, General Don Francisco, 65 Colón, Diego, 57 Columbus, Bartolomé, 34; Ferdinand, 34 Columbus, Christopher, xv– xvi; apotheosis of, 24–25; cannibalism and, 36–41; genocide and ethnocide, 2, 141; the heathen and, 30; lies, 33, 41; reaching Asia and, 33–35, 139; resistance to, 54, 104 componte, el, xii, 100–101, 107, 134 conuco (subsistence) farming: and diversified agriculture, 8, 72, 84–85, 95, 97, 136; erone technique, 8, 136

Cook, Captain James, apotheosis of, 24–25 Cook, Sherburne, 52, 81, 86–87 Cordilleras, 77, 79 corporate latifundio, 130 Corretjer, Juan Antonio, xiv Cortés, Hernán, 26, 38; apotheosis of, 24, 27–28 cotona, 114, 136 Cotto, Liliana, 130 Council of the Indies, 29 criollo (Puerto Rican) elite, xii, 3, 59, 90–93, 97, 99, 103, 124, 129 cuanderos, xi, 109, 113–14, 116 Cuba, 34, 37, 46–47, 102 Cudjoe, Selwyn, 53, 69 cultural mestizaje, 8–10, 136 cultural nationalist, 14–15 cultural survival and continuity, xi, xiii, 2, 6–10, 19, 46–50, 53, 66, 70–72, 80, 88, 90, 93–94, 105–7, 109, 112–19, 132–36 Darwinism, social, 6, 134–35; and species extinction of native peoples, 48, 156 Dávila, Arlene, 15 Delgado, Juan Manuel, 12, 63, 75–77, 79, 106, 122 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 23–24, 29, 49 Denevan, William, 81 dependency, 126, 128–30, 132; cycle of, 110, 128–29 diaspora, xiv, 81 Diaz, Bernal, and Mexica “cannibalism,” 37–38 Diego, José de, 97 “discovery” and Christian dominion, 30–31, 35–36, 84–86 DNA testing and results, 15, 66, 70, 92, 135, 144, 156 Duany, Jorge, 14–15



180

encomendados, 63, 155 encomienda system, 10, 19, 55–56, 58, 63–66, 69, 88, 134 epidemics, 16, 53, 56, 81, 87–88, 141 espiritismo, 109–117, 136 Estevez, Jorge, 45, 49 Evans, Clifford, 17, 60 exogamy, 7, 135, 154 extinction, explanation of, 4, 6, 43 Fabian, Johannes, 4 Feliciano, Carlos, 104 Fernández de Navarrete, Martín, 34–35 Fernández-Méndez, Eugenio, xvi, 60–61, 153 Fernández-Retamar, Roberto, 41 Fewkes, Jesse Walter, xv, 13, 45–46, 62–64, 66, 86, 121 Figueroa-Mercado, Loida, 51, 64, 68–69, 73, 75–76, 79–80, 86, 98 “Flight of the Jíbaro, The,” 63, 65, 88 fogón (and burén), use of, 9, 111, 136 folklore, 13, 23, 29 Forbes, Jack, 141 Garcia, A., 32 Garifuna (Black Caribs), 70 genocide, 2, 29, 32, 58, 85, 133, 141; cultural genocide, xiii, 58; ethnocide, 2, 90, 141 Giménez-Fernández, Manuel, 148 González de Mendoza, Fray Juan, 46 Gottschalk, Paul, 31 gran lagarto, 119 Grito de Lares, 8, 19, 79, 94, 97–99, 121, 134 Grotius, Hugo, 31 Grounds, Richard, 4, 6, 16

181

Guajiro, xvi, 46–47 Guarionex, cacike, 17, 56, 154 Guarocuya (Enriquillo), cacike, 39, 45 guatiao, the, 39, 54–55, 67 Guitar, Lynne, 46, 52–53, 64, 70 hacienda system, 7, 98, 120 Haití, 73, 91 Hajosy-Benedetti, María Delores, 113–15 Hanke, Lewis, 31, 83 Harrington, M. R., xv Haslip-Viera, Gabriel, 156 Hatuey, cacike, 46 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 73 Hawai‘i, xii, xiv, 7, 11, 28, 72, 81, 94–95, 102, 109 Hernández-Aquino, Luis, 139 Herodotian tradition of savagery, 36–37, 41 Hörmann, Bernard, 43–44; on “mixed blood” survival, 43, 48, 135 Hulme, Peter, 36–37 Inca, 8, 35 independence movement, 19, 109, 123–25, 128, 132 indigenous movement, Borikén, 126–32 indigenous sustainability, model of, 131 Insulae canibalium (The Islands of the Cannibals), 39–40 Inter Caetera papal bull or grant, 30–32, 35, 133; native resistance to, 32, 57 Iroquois, 54 Isabella, Queen, 34; and subjugation and enslavement, 57 Jacana Indian site, excavation of, 116 Jaimes, M. Annette, 84–85, 87



Index

Index

Jamaica, 44, 47, 69, 86 Jayuya, cacike, 14 Jíbaro, origin of, xiv–xvi, 91–92 Jíbaro music, xiv, 71–72 Johnson v. McIntosh, 85 “just war” theory, 30–32, 85 Kame‘eleihiwa, Lilikalā, 11 Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian), xiv, 7, 24–25, 28, 48, 81 Kiskeya (Española or Hispañola), 37–40, 44–47, 52–55, 57, 61, 64, 69–70, 73, 86–87, 143 Lamourt-Valentín, Oscar (Oki), xiv–xvi, 12, 17–18, 37–38, 51–52, 55, 73–74, 94, 117–18, 121–22 Lando, Francisco Manuel de, 18, 63–65, 68–69 Las Casas, Fray Bartolomé de, 16, 31, 38, 44, 47, 82, 86, 100, 110 Law of Nations, 31, 85–86 Ledru, André Pierre, 74 linguistic survival, 109, 119–23 López, Adalberto, 3, 68, 72, 74, 80, 91, 96–97 Lovén, Sven, xv, 44 Lugo, Elba (Anaca), 127 Macheteros, Los, 94, 97 Maldonado-Denis, Manuel, 44, 99 Mankiller, Wilma, 128 Marquez, Bolívar, 104 Marshall, Chief Justice John, 85 Martí, José, 101 Martínez-Cruzado, Juan, and mitochondrial DNA, 66, 135, 144 Martínez-Torres, Roberto, 12, 61, 78, 105, 153 Martire d’Anghiera, Pietro (Peter Martyr), 110, 143

Matos-Matos, Don Pedro, 71–72 matriarchal society, Caribbean, 21, 66 Maya and Mayan, 35, 60–61, 124; Mesoamerican origins and influence, 21, 60–61, 153–54 medicinal plants, 8, 106, 129; and healing, 109, 113–14 Meggers, Betty, 60 mestizo Indian (or “mixed blooded”), 6, 8–10, 15, 22, 46, 48–49, 67–68, 70, 75, 80, 92–93, 125, 135, 156 Mexica (Aztec), 26–29, 37–38 Mignolo, Walter, 28–29, 120 Montagu, Ashley, 83–84 Montes, Governor Toribio, 78–79 Moors, the, 120, 143 Morales, Evo, 124, 126 Morales-Cabrera, Pablo, 79 More, Thomas, 41 Morison, Samuel, 35 Morris, Marianna, 65 Morris, Morley, 130 Moscoso, Francisco, 56–57, 63–65, 68 Muñoz-Marín, Luis, 104, 130 Muñoz-Rivera, Luis, 102 myth models, 18, 24–27, 29 myths and mythmaking, 18, 21–25, 29–30, 36, 41–42, 49–50, 80 Nahuatl, 28–29 names (naming): apodos, xvi, 12, 76, 110, 122; survival of, 12; use of, xv–xvi, 38–39, 76, 101 Napoleonic wars, 94 Navidad, La, 38 Nebrija, Antonio de, 119 Noche de San Juan, 119, 136 Nogueras-Vidal, Margarita, 14, 39, 54, 127–28 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 124



182

Obeyesekere, Gananath, 24–27, 38 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 33–35 oral tradition and history, 11–14, 51–52, 61–62, 66, 76, 89, 98–99, 102, 107, 122–23, 132–33, 154 Orbis Terrarum (Island of the Earth), 21 O’Reilly, Alejandro, 69 Ovando, Fray Juan de, 29 Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo Fernández, 55, 57 Owens, Louis, 135 palo monte-palo mayombe tradition, 115 Pané, Fray Ramón, 17, 110, 112, 143, 154 Papacy, 30, 32 “pardos libres” (“Free Colored” people), 49, 74–76, 78–79, 90, 94, 156 “people power,” 131 Pérez-Comas, Adolfo, 63–64 Philippine-American War, 103 Picó, Fernando, 62, 78, 80, 94, 98 Pitt-Rivers, George, 48 Polo, Marco, 34; and the Grand Khan, 36–37 Ponce de Leon, Juan, 39, 54–56, 67 Ponce Massacre, 104 “primitivism,” 83, 86, 88 proletariat, the, 74 Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), 125 Puerto Rican Institute of Culture, 15, 105 Quetzalcoatl and Montezuma, 27–28 Rafinesque, Cornelius, xv Ramirez, Panchito, cacike, 46–47, 71 rape, 8, 100, 102; and forced marriages, 70

183

religious rites, survival of, 104–5 repartimiento, 62, 66 requerimiento, 30–32, 57–58, 134 resistance, active and passive forms of, xvi, 10, 18, 36–39, 41, 46, 53–59, 63–65, 67–73, 76, 90, 94, 97, 99, 109, 115–16, 120–26, 131–34 “revisionist,” 17, 30 Reyes-Ocasio, Naniki, 14, 70, 78, 125, 127–29, 140 Ribes-Tovar, Federico, 44, 78, 155 Rivera, Luis, 33, 36, 58, 141 Rondón, Isolina, 125 Rosario Cantar, 117–18, 136 Rosario, José, 91–93 Rosenblat, Ángel, 48 Rouse, Irving, xv, 13, 44–45, 153; on extinction, 48; and first “repeoplying” theory, 60–61 Ruiz-Belvis, Segundo, 98 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 27–29; and Florentine Codex, 28–29 Sahlins, Marshall, 24 “Saladoid,” 60 Sale, Kirkpatrick, 35–36 San Ciriaco, hurricane, xiv Sanes, David, 132 San Juan Bautista, 54, 57 Santana, Arturo, 75 santo de palo statue, 118 Sauer, Carl, 44, 47 Scott, James, 67 self-determination, right of, 35–36, 124, 126, 133 self-identification, right to, 5, 48 self-sufficiency, 128; breaking colonialism and, 129; model of, 129 separatist societies, 100–101 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 35; and Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery, 31



Index

Index

Sierra de Luquillo, 77–78 Silén, Juan Angel, 56, 98, 100; on Puerto Rican “docility,” 59 slaves and slavery, xiii, 7, 10, 18, 36–37, 41, 52, 58, 63–64, 66–70, 91, 94, 155 “social respect,” 137 Spanish American war, 101 Spanish Crown, 25, 30, 32, 37, 39, 53–54, 63–64, 69, 83, 155 Spanish exodus, 68 Spanish foreign policy, resistance to, 57–59 Spinden, H. J., on “mixed bloods,” 48 Stannard, David, 145, 148, 160 Steiner, Stan, 11–13, 51–52, 56, 63, 69, 93, 95, 97, 99, 104–5 syncretized traditions, 114–15, 118–19, 136 terra nullius (“vacant lands”), 16, 32, 84–85 Thomas, King, xiii tiznado, 98–99, 102, 120 Todorov, Tzvetan, 26–29, 38 Torrech, Rafael, 75 Torres, J. Benjamín, 126

Toscanelli, Paolo dal Pozzo, 34 treaties, broken, 39 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 5 Urayoan, cacike, 56 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 116 U.S. Navy, 132 Vansina, Jan, 12 Vattel, Emmerich de, 84–85 Vespucci, Amerigo, 33 Vitoria, Francisco de, 31 voodoo, 109 Weisskoff, Richard, 17 West Indian, history of the, 1; novel, 15 Williams, Robert, Jr., 32, 50 Wilmer, Franke, 90 Wilson, James, 42 “work books” (libretas reglamentarias), 98 Yaya and Yayahel, creation myth of the sea and, 110 Yúcahu Bagua Maórocoti, 21



184

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