UPenn Daniel Morarles Armstrong - Black Puerto Rican History

by KRISTEN DE GROOT | News Officer - krisde@upenn.edu

Ph.D. candidate Daniel Morales-Armstrong’s research considers whose voices and narratives prevail and whose are plagued by silences.

February 22, 2023 – Poring over historical records at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico in Old San Juan, Africana studies and history Ph.D. candidate Daniel Morales-Armstrong made a discovery that would transform his research.

Morales-Armstrong describes sitting at a table inside that pale yellow, 19th-century Spanish neoclassical building, where he says he happened across a labor contract from 1873 for a 17-year-old girl named María Josefa. The document, he says, noted that even though she was free, she was required to work from sunup to sundown every workable day for a period of three years, all for the man who previously enslaved her. Her pay included living at his house, eating at his house, and four pesos a month.

On the left is Maria Josefa’s birth certificate, and on the right is the labor contract the man who previously enslaved her drafted when she was free. Image: Courtesy of Daniel Morales-Armstrong Throughout his research over the years, he says, he constantly bumped up against insufficient representation in the scholarship of Black Puerto Rican history and lived experiences.

“As I was doing my research, I was constantly wishing there was more. I wanted to know about my people’s histories—Black Puerto Rican history,” says Morales-Armstrong, whose family is from Ponce, in southern Puerto Rico, not far from María Josefa’s Santa Isabel.

Because of Puerto Rico’s colonial status with the United States, combined with its geographical position, this history often falls between the cracks, he says.

“In Latin American studies, oftentimes folks say, ‘Puerto Rico is part of the U.S., so we don’t need to include it.’ And in U.S. history oftentimes folks say, ‘You’re part of Latin America, so, we don’t need to include you.’”

Before he came to Penn, Morales-Armstrong taught, among other subjects, Black Latin American history to high school students in the Washington Heights and Bronx sections of New York City.

“At the time I didn’t know much about emancipation in Puerto Rico but this was a heartbreaking document for me to find. How was this freedom?” asks Morales-Armstrong. “Aside from a bit of pocket change, it sounded a lot like slavery to me.”

Finding that document led Morales-Armstrong on a journey to discover María Josefa’s story and, in turn, revealed a much larger story about how the freed people in her small town of Santa Isabel engaged in a collective labor strike, one that the Spanish colonial government tried to erase all evidence of. In fact, he says, freed people across other communities along the southern Puerto Rican coast also engaged in varied forms of resistance to the forced-labor mandate during this time.

“In trying to find María Josefa’s story I found that there was this larger story happening in terms of resisting the afterlives of slavery in Puerto Rico, and that research has just grown through my time at Penn,” he says.

“These experiences inform my approach to history: considering whose voices, histories, and narratives prevail, and whose are plagued by silences,” he says. He ran up against those silences time and again in researching the resistance to the forced-labor mandate in Puerto Rico.

“The dominant narrative in the history books in Puerto Rico and the Atlantic world is that emancipation was a complete success and that there were no issues whatsoever, which would make Puerto Rico a very significant outlier,” he says. “Everywhere else in the hemisphere, with the end of slavery came conflict over labor control. Former slaveowners were trying to figure out how to continue to exploit the labor of these newly emancipated people.” continued on page 6

The land outside Ponce, Puerto Rico, that once was the Hacienda Florida, the sugar cane plantation behind where Maria Josefa lived. Image: Courtesy of Daniel Morales-Armstrong.