Borinquen MadePeriod
1800-1899
The entries in this magazine that fall in these years, in the order the events occurred. Freeze 2026-08-22. Not current events in these History essays; News is. Not original historical research.
Jíbaro life: rural culture in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico
While the port cities filled with colonial administrators and merchants, most of the island's population lived a very different life in the mountains.
Why "extinct" entered the census
A paper disappearance is not biological extinction.
Cuatro and seis
The instrument and the song-dance of the interior.
Ramón Power y Giralt, 1810-1813
The island's first deputy to the Cortes of Cádiz carried a vote, not a sword, into the war against Napoleon.
The Constitution of 1812 on the island
On March 19, 1812, Spain wrote a liberal charter that reached Puerto Rico, until Ferdinand VII tore it up.
The Cédula de Gracias of 1815
Fearing it would lose its last Caribbean colonies to Latin America's independence wave, Spain tried something counterintuitive: opening its doors to foreign settlers.
Cédula de Gracias, 1815
A royal decree of August 10, 1815, opened the island to foreign settlers, tools, and bound labor: a development policy, not a gift.
From trapiche to ingenio
Animal mills gave way to steam. The nineteenth-century sugar house is not the later central.
Ramón Emeterio Betances and the road to Lares
A Paris-trained surgeon, nicknamed "the Doctor of the Poor," became the most important architect of Puerto Rico's independence movement, largely from exile.
Corsican settlers and the making of "Pueblo del Café"
One of the Cédula de Gracias's most concrete legacies: a wave of Corsican immigrants that came to dominate Puerto Rico's coffee industry so completely that a town still bears its name today.
Abolition of slavery, March 22, 1873
It took a partial 1870 law and a new Spanish republic to formally end almost 360 years of slavery in Puerto Rico: later, and more gradually, than many people believe.
Hostos
Born January 11, 1839, in Mayagüez; a Caribbean public life.
Women in the sugar mills
Enslaved and free women on the mill yard; 1868 stays in Redoubt.
Reglamento de Jornaleros, 1849
On June 11, 1849, Governor Juan de la Pezuela put free poor men into a booklet.
Coartación: buying one's way out of slavery
Spanish law let some enslaved people buy their freedom in installments. It was a market, not a pardon.
The jíbaro interior
The sierra peasantry as a place, not as a costume.
Coffee in the Cordillera
Nineteenth-century coffee moved inland. This board will not tell the later collapse.
The Grito de Lares, September 23, 1868
For one day, a mountain town declared Puerto Rico an independent republic, swore in a president, and raised a hand-embroidered flag for the occasion.
Lola Rodríguez de Tió
A poet of San Germán; 1868 is a pointer, not a retelling.
Betances and Ruiz Belvis, January 6, 1868
On Three Kings' Day the Revolutionary Committee plotted an uprising. Spain still had the cannons.