Diasporic Blackness

The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

Vanessa K. Valdés

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781438465159
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A Black Puerto Rican–born scholar, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874–1938) was a well-known collector and archivist whose personal library was the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. He was an autodidact who matched wits with university-educated men and women, as well as a prominent Freemason, a writer, and an institution-builder. While he spent much of his life in New York City, Schomburg was intimately involved in the cause of Cuban and Puerto Rican independence. In the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, he would go on to cofound the Negro Society for Historical Research and lead the American Negro Academy, all the while collecting and assembling books, prints, pamphlets, articles, and other ephemera produced by Black men and women from across the Americas and Europe. His curated library collection at the New York Public Library emphasized the presence of African peoples and their descendants throughout the Americas and would serve as an indispensable resource for the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. By offering a sustained look at the life of one of the most important figures of early twentieth-century New York City, this first book-length examination of Schomburg's life as an Afro-Latino suggests new ways of understanding the intersections of both Blackness and latinidad.

1

“PATRIA Y LIBERTAD”

Schomburg and Puerto Rico

The works of José Julián Acosta and Salvador Brau have been my first inspiration to a further and intense study of the Negro in America.

—ARTURO SCHOMBURG, letter to Richard Pattee, dated February 3, 1937

IN A LETTER WRITTEN IN 1937 to Richard Pattee, professor of Latin American history at the University of Puerto Rico, Schomburg identifies his intellectual forefathers in the study of peoples of African descent as white Puerto Rican abolitionist, politician, historian, and a former teacher of his, José Julián Acosta, and white Puerto Rican journalist, poet, and historian Salvador Brau. Each man played a vibrant role in Puerto Rico’s political sphere at the end of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century. This chapter explores Arturo Schomburg’s intellectual genealogy; it looks at the men who influenced his development as a thinker, writer, historian, and archivist. Contrary to charges that he abandoned the group to which he was born, made by members of the Puerto Rican community and scholars of that history, an examination of Schomburg’s life’s work reveals an active interaction with his intellectual Puerto Rican and Cuban forefathers throughout his life. For many of them, the liberation of enslaved men and women of African descent was central to their aspirations of creating independent nations.

A consideration of these figures is imperative to understanding the complex man that Schomburg came to be; indeed, a standard feature of biographical sketches of influential men and women is a recreation of their own inspirations. Schomburg’s early years have been chiefly characterized by what remains unknown to this date, and the revolutionary period of his life has received scant critical attention from scholars either in Puerto Rico or on the mainland United States.1 Identifying Schomburg within a strictly Anglophone tradition, and treating his parentage and upbringing as negligible, ignores his raison d’être, namely, broadening and complicating contemporary notions of blackness so as to better learn and appreciate all that peoples of African descent have accomplished since the beginning of recorded history. Understanding the late-nineteenth-century Hispanic Caribbean in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution and the islands’ struggles for freedom, both in terms of ending slavery as well as in terms of the establishment of independent nations, provides a deeper comprehension of this man of African descent. Indeed, for this Afro-Latino, whose own passion for the recovery and assemblage of documents attesting to black excellence necessarily included works from the Spanish-speaking world, from the Iberian Peninsula to its former colonies in the Americas, this period is fertile ground for comprehending the breadth and scope of his later activities.

PORTRAITS OF A REVOLUTION

The last decades of the nineteenth century were a time of upheaval for the two remaining Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, as creole elites created divergent visions for the futures of Puerto Rico and Cuba.2 Eighteen sixty-eight saw simultaneous uprisings, the Grito de Lares in Puerto Rico and the Grito de Yara in Cuba; while the former was suppressed within days, the latter sparked the Ten Years’ War, a conflict that ended in a stalemate, with Cuba still a colony and slavery remaining the social, political, and economic foundation of that society. Whereas the majority of Cuban revolutionaries both on the island and in exile labored for complete independence by the last decades of the nineteenth century, Puerto Rico’s political scene was more complicated, with divisions present both within the leadership on the island itself as well as in the New York exile community.3

The question of the independence of Puerto Rico in the nineteenth century cannot be discussed without an understanding about the abolition of slavery on the island. Latin American historiography has, to a great extent, pushed to the margins of their inquiries the presence of African peoples and their descendants. In light of the Haitian Revolution, fear of similar occurrences dominated the hemisphere, leading to widespread terrorizing of peoples of African descent, enslaved and free. This was particularly striking in the Hispanic Caribbean, to which landowners, free blacks, and enslaved men and women had fled during the uprising in Saint Domingue.4 In its aftermath, the sugar industry in Cuba expanded exponentially, as the island became the primary producer of sugar in the hemisphere; Puerto Rico, which had previously been an island mainly used for defense of the region during the eighteenth century, also saw considerable expansion in its sugar industry and consequently in the population of enslaved African laborers during the nineteenth century.5

The reality of slavery was also central to Puerto Rican independence efforts; there were rebellions and uprisings throughout the island, as the enslaved fought for their own freedom.6 Eighteen forty-eight saw the abolition of slavery in the French Caribbean colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique and a slave rebellion in nearby St. Croix, leading to the passage of the Bando contra la raza africana in Puerto Rico. This decree made no distinction in color (mulatto or black) or legal status (slave or free); anyone who harmed a white person, or who even made a threat against one, was subject to imprisonment, if not mutilation or death.7 While this decree was revoked within months, its passage speaks to the widespread repression of individual liberties on the island.8

Revolutionary fervor therefore marked the decade of the 1860s in the Hispanic Caribbean and its exile communities in the United States. Eighteen sixty-eight saw the Liberal Revolution whereby Queen Isabella II of Spain was deposed on September 17, as well as the uprisings in Puerto Rico, the Grito de Lares, which took place on September 23, and in Cuba, the Grito de Yara, which began on October 10. While conservative factions existed in Puerto Rico, liberalism would be the prevailing political ideology. Writing about the effect of liberalism on Afro-Latin Americans in the nineteenth century, George Reid Andrews observes: “The explicitly egalitarian rhetoric of liberalism—which invoked the concepts of civic equality, political democracy, and the rights of citizenship—touched a powerful chord with these longtime victims of colonial absolutism and social hierarchy.”9 Liberalism therefore created distinct visions of the future of the nation, which were affected by factors such as race, class, and gender.

During the next two decades, there developed two strains of liberal thought regarding the future of Puerto Rico: the Asimilistas desired that the island be declared a province of Spain, its inhabitants sharing the same rights as their peninsular counterparts along with the establishment of institutions that would recognize the specificities of Puerto Rico, while the Autonomistas called for decentralization, with control of the island’s economic affairs left in the hands of Puerto Ricans themselves.10 The latter group would eventually succeed, as the Spanish Crown did grant autonomy to Puerto Rico in 1897; the Carta Autonómica was signed November 25, 1897, with the new Puerto Rican government under the Autonomous Charter installed in February 1898. Two weeks into that month, on February 15, the U.S.S. Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, prompting the United States to enter the Cuban insurrection against Spain, which had been ongoing since 1895. It is for this reason that for many Latin Americanists, “Spanish-American War” is a misnomer that erases the fact that it was a war being waged by Cuba for independence; instead, they offer the term “Spanish-Cuban-American War.”11 By the summer of 1898, both islands, along with the Philippines and Guam, had been ceded to the United States, thereby signaling the end of the Spanish Empire.

It is notable that neither group of Liberal politicians called for the complete independence of Puerto Rico; separatism was a characteristic of the exile communities on the mainland, not on the island itself. As Harold J. Lidin writes, “They were liberals, not radicals, and their victory came after much patient insistence that they were faithful to Spain.”12 In her study on the regulation of race and sexuality in Puerto Rico in the decades between 1870 and 1920, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay writes how a tactic used by these lawmakers in their negotiations with the Spanish Crown was to highlight their preference for peace, thereby distinguishing themselves from surrounding islands: “Social conflict had always remained at a minimum, particularly when compared with Haiti and its slave-led revolution, or Cuba, where the struggle to end slavery and gain independence from Spain had exploded in a bloody, decade-long war.…Puerto Rico would advance through legislative change, not rebellion, they insisted.”13 In concordance with this point, Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva writes: “At a moment in which most imperial politicians equated blackness with instability and destruction, particularly in the Caribbean, Puerto Rican liberals sought to represent themselves and the island population as white and hence harmonious and stable.”14 Upon the transfer of power from Spain to the United States, these legislators only slightly shifted their message, assuring the new colonizer that they would not seek independence but instead were eager to be a part of the United States.

Key to the assurances offered by the Liberal leadership to U.S. politicians, as they had to their Spanish counterparts, was the manner in which the abolition of slavery had been managed in the 1860s and 1870s. Puerto Rico avoided the bloodshed of Haiti, Cuba, and the United States itself in its quest to end slavery.15 Instead, two laws were passed regarding this effort: first, the Law of Partial Abolition, the 1870 Moret Law, whereby the state purchased children born between 1868 and 1870 and vowed to compensate their owners. This legislation also emancipated those enslaved men and women who were over the age of sixty.16 This latter statute of the law was mostly symbolic, as there were very few enslaved human beings who reached this age.17 Still, approximately ten thousand persons were freed under the Moret Law; three years later saw the passage of the Abolition Law, which liberated the remaining 31,000 enslaved humans. The state once again vowed payment to the landholders as well as stipulated obligatory labor of three years (contratación) for the newly freed, the libertos.18 In this way, insular politicians were able to later claim that they had kept the Puerto Rican family intact.

The metaphor of the great Puerto Rican family (la gran familia puertorriqueña) is one whose origins are in this historical moment of the late nineteenth century, when the liberation of the small segment of the population that had been enslaved left lawmakers facing the task of integrating them into society, thereby creating a cohesive nation. As Suárez Findlay writes, “To replace the brutality of slavery and the libreta labor regime, they posited a benevolent but hierarchical paternalism as the glue which would hold society together under Liberal leadership and which would effectively mold a pliable workforce.”19 Social harmony was a guarantee, then, provided that everyone knew their place within a highly regimented hierarchy and respected said order. The exile communities in New York and Florida did no such thing, instead seeking to destroy such stratification in order to create a region defined by freedom and equality for all.

PUERTO RICAN REVOLUTIONARIES: BETANCES, HOSTOS, RODRÍGUEZ DE TIÓ

Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances, Eugenio María de Hostos, and Lola Rodríguez de Tió lay the spiritual foundation for the Puerto Rican nation and for a broader Caribbean nation, and so are esteemed throughout the region and its diaspora; exiled by Spanish authorities, all were prolific writers who were deeply involved in the fight for the independence of the lands of the Hispanic Caribbean in order to create a coalition of these nations.20 Cuba being the largest landmass of the Greater Antilles, the establishment of its sovereignty as a liberated nation would serve to secure the Antillean Confederation.21 Betances and Hostos died shortly after the United States intervention in 1898, and while Betances’s remains were repatriated (he had spent a good part of his life in France), Hostos instructed that he wished to be buried on the island only when Puerto Rico was free; he is buried in the Dominican Republic.22 Rodríguez de Tió lived into the third decade of the twentieth century; having moved to Cuba a year after the conclusion of the war, she lived and died there, and is buried in Colón Cemetery in Havana.

Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances
(Cabo Rojo, PR, 1827–Neuilly-sur-Seine, Île-de-France, 1898)

¡Unámonos! Amémonos! Formemos todos un solo pueblo.…Las Antillas para los antillanos.

[Let us unite! Let us love! Together we will form one people.…The Antilles for the Antilleans.]

—RAMÓN EMETERIO BETAN...