Smoker beyond the Sea

The Story of Puerto Rican Tobacco

Juan José Baldrich

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496842121
• Print ISBN:
  9781496842107
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History

In this groundbreaking volume, Juan José Baldrich traces the deep changes affecting Puerto Rican tobacco growers and manufacturers and their export markets from the Spanish colonization of the island to the present. Based on more than twenty years of research in the United States and Puerto Rico, the book sheds light on the important history of tobacco in Puerto Rico while highlighting the people and practices that have indelibly shaped Puerto Rico and its culture.

Smoker beyond the Sea: The Story of Puerto Rican Tobacco is a work of recovery that examines tobacco's transitions from medicinal use to rolls fit for chewing and pipe smoking, followed by the appropriation of the Cuban paradigm for cigars and cigarettes, and, finally, to the US models after the 1898 invasion. This pioneering volume also offers the only history of the US tobacco monopoly in local agriculture and manufacture from its beginning in 1899 to the bankruptcy of its last successor company forty years later.

Baldrich's extensive research documents the organization of the cigar and cigarette manufacturing sectors and the resulting development of trade unions and socialist ideals. This multidisciplinary investigation gives due attention to the modifications that farmers made to tobacco planting and harvesting techniques in fine-tuning plants to the expected aromas and tastes of the manufactured commodities. In addition, Baldrich pays considerable attention to gender relations in the labor process, not only in the manufacturing sector but also in tobacco agriculture. The book also provides the only narrative of the rise and maturity of the Hermanos Cheos, a powerful apocalyptical movement that began and spread in the tobacco growing regions. Ultimately, this encompassing volume fills a major gap in the histories of tobacco-producing islands in the Caribbean.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter One: The Foundations
• Chapter Two: From Handcrafted Tobacco Rolls to Machine-Made Cigarettes, 1847–1903
• Chapter Three: The Development of the “Porto Rico” Cigar and the Independent Manufacturers, 1899–1929
• Chapter Four: The Tobacco Trust in Puerto Rico, 1899–1911
• Chapter Five: “Sailing Close to the Wind”: The Porto Rican–American Tobacco Company, 1912–1939
• Chapter Six: Tobacco Leaf Dealers, Stemmers, and Merchants after the Invasion
• Chapter Seven: The Social Organization of Tobacco Growing, 1899–1950
• Chapter Eight: Strikes and the Institutionalization of Trade Unions in Tobacco Manufacture, 1892–1927
• Chapter Nine: The Hermanos Cheos: Religious Resistance to the Breakdown of Order and Market Forces, 1898–1938
• Chapter Ten: The Unraveling of an Industry
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author