Borinquen MadeA history magazine in Spanish
The history of Puerto Rico in one order of time
Puerto Rico is the easternmost island of the Greater Antilles, a Caribbean territory whose history reads as a single arc: the first Taíno peoples, the centuries of colony under Spain, the transfer of the island to the United States, the territory and the Free Associated State. Current events on that arc are dated on News. This magazine arranges that arc by the time of the events, with no sections breaking the reading. Choose the years you want to read and start there.
Freeze 2026-08-22. Not current events in these History essays; News is. Not original historical research.
The situado, an annual subsidy
San Juan's cannons were paid for from Mexico, not out of the island's thin purse.
Loíza and the African coastal towns
Black coastal towns, not a costume stop.
Santiago in Loíza
A festival of drums and saints, not a tourism calendar.
The hornwork of El Morro, 1602-1625
After the English came overland, Spain rebuilt the land front in the shape of bull's horns.
The Dutch burn San Juan, 1625
Boudewijn Hendricksz took the town and could not take the fort. He left a blackened island behind.
San Cristóbal and the eighteenth-century fortification boom
After repeated sieges, Spain doubled down: it built the largest fortification the empire raised anywhere in the New World.
San Cristóbal begun, 1634
After the Dutch fire, Spain began a land fort on the eastern hill and named it for the patron saint of travelers.
Bomba
A Puerto Rican conversation of drum and dance, not a party ad.
Sugar, slavery, and the plantation economy
Across the wider Caribbean, sugar built fortunes on enslaved labor on a scale that reconfigured entire islands, and Puerto Rico's own sugar economy was part of that same regional system.
La Perla
One of Old San Juan's most iconic neighborhoods began as a slaughterhouse district built outside the walls.
The asiento and African slavery
Utrecht gave Britain a contract to sell enslaved Africans in Spanish America. Puerto Rico was a smaller market, not a free one.
Coffee country: the rise of the mountainous interior
By the late nineteenth century, small Puerto Rico had risen to be the world's seventh-largest coffee producer, grown not on the coast but in the clouded central mountains.
O'Reilly and O'Daly, 1765-1790
Two Irish officers in Spain's service rebuilt the garrison and the stone after Havana fell.
West-coast smuggling
Mayagüez and Cabo Rojo lived off foreign sloops while San Juan lived off the situado.
The bastion of Santa Bárbara
El Morro's ocean bastion is O'Daly's work. A 1783 cornerstone is not on the park's page, so this journal will not invent one.
Abercromby fails at San Juan, 1797
Sir Ralph Abercromby brought a serious British force and left. O'Daly's finished fort was the reason.
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.