African-Americans in Puerto Rico (hotels, to move, eat)

[junito86]

Originally Posted by snatale1

Thats funny, considering Puerto Rico IS the U.S! What is it with Puerto Ricans having the delusion that it's not? Take a look at the $$ in your pocket lately? Whats is say on it???? The fact that PR's a Commonwealth seems to make people think your somehow NOT the US, I guess MA,PA,KY and VA aren't the US either then.

...Dude you have to do your research man..even though they are territory..doesnt mean that culturally they are or feel like americans..yeah we have KfC and McDonalds...its still not enough...its very different from the US and will forever remain that way...we try to preserve our history which is not american...untill 100's of years later...if anything we do have amerindians..the true americans..i will definitely agree with that but not this stereo typical bullsh*t..the real stuff..im talkin about when the mexicans were calling the the euro Caucasians Gringo..and let me tell you it doesnt mean "white"
true definition means immigrant..funny how the tables have turned..lol

[junito86]

Originally Posted by chacho_keva

Before responding to this thread, I offer you the following article (it's in Spanish) about an African-American baseball player who went to Puerto Rico once. . .and never left.

Pelotero de la vida | Vocero.com

IMHO, there are two things you should consider if you feel compelled to ask this questions:

1. You need to do some serious research about Puerto Rico's African (not African-American) heritage. Puerto Rico may possibly be the only place on Earth where "Africanness" is truly celebrated and admired. Matter of fact, In Puerto Rico, the word "Negro" is a term of endearment. Unlike one the U.S. mainland, the term "Negro" carries a POSITIVE connotation. It's a good thing! In other words, calling someone "Negro" is one of the nicest compliments you can bestow upon a person, regardless of that person's race or color. That alone should clue you into the answer to your question.

2. The only way you'll be able to answer your question is by visiting the island for a week or two and drawing your own conclusions. Of course, if you're gonna go there to throw your "African-American" weight around and expect for people run in fear of you, then you're gonna be in for a gigantic surprise. I'll just leave it at that, and I hope you don't try to find out "what I mean."

It would be fair to say that most Puerto Rican's feel a particular appreciation towards Black people no matter where they're from. There's a certain kindredness felt in our veins towards most anyone who shares a connection with Africa.

I'd love to read the opinion of other poster's.

Damn...well put..and for the record for anyone that wants to know the history of PR has been changed for real..legit..true DNA strands found..61percent of Ricans Have Amerindian mitochondrial DNA,27% have African DNA, And only 12% have Caucasian DNA...honestly made me happy...

[Manolón]

Tainos (Indians) were wiped from the larger Caribbean Islands in less than 70 years. Most died of small pox and flue, other were forced to work into extinction by the Encomiendas.

When the Pilgrims arrived into America, there were no natives in the greater Antilles.

The people you find in the larger Caribbean islands with "Amerindian" traits (very few) are descendants of Indian slaves brought from Yucatan and the Guajira peninsula.

The island was settled by natives if the Canary islands and Spain and black slaves, and received a very large immigration form Majorca and Corsica during the XIXth and XXth Century.

The most important ethnic groups are Canarians and Majorcans, most PR last names come from that origin.

So, I guess that Caucasian DNA is the most frequent one followed by black DNA.

A lot of Sephardic DNA, since Puerto Rico was a place that received many Sephardic jews fleeing from the Inquisition.

Gringo is a Mexican term from "Green coat", or so goes the Urban legend. In Cuba and PR they used to say "americano". Maybe the word is an import from New York.

Gringo does not amount to "Caucasian", that's simply idiotic.

[AntonioR]

Originally Posted by junito86

Damn...well put..and for the record for anyone that wants to know the history of PR has been changed for real..legit..true DNA strands found..61percent of Ricans Have Amerindian mitochondrial DNA,27% have African DNA, And only 12% have Caucasian DNA...honestly made me happy...

Those percentages only accounts for DNA inherited from the mother line. This means that most Puerto Ricans descend from female Amerindians, and it coincides with what is known from a historical standpoint about mating patterns in Spanish colonies.

Another set of tests must be done to determine the DNA inherited from the father line, although I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority have European DNA from that side. This type of test can only be done with men, since women don't inherit the Y-chromosome.

At least that is what has been discovered in other Latin American countries where similar tests have been done in both the Mestizo and Mulatto population groups. European DNA dominates from the father line while Amerindian/African DNA on the mother line.

[Manolón]

Just the same error uncovered in Cuba a long time ago....
Tainos disappeared in the larger Antilles in a couple or three generations.
The islands were left practically empty, more so when the conquest of Mexico drained all their population (White, Blacks and any mestizo remaining) into the great Conquest.
The only solution that planters and miners found was to bring Yucateco Indians from the Mayan Peninsula and Guajiro Indians from current day Colombia, that's why Cuban peasants are called "guajiros".
So sorry, PR are not Tainos.
Tainos were the first Indians to meet the Old World and the first one to perish.

[AntonioR]

Originally Posted by Manolón

Just the same error uncovered in Cuba a long time ago....
Tainos disappeared in the larger Antilles in a couple or three generations.
The islands were left practically empty, more so when the conquest of Mexico drained all their population (White, Blacks and any mestizo remaining) into the great Conquest.
The only solution that planters and miners found was to bring Yucateco Indians from the Mayan Peninsula and Guajiro Indians from current day Colombia, that's why Cuban peasants are called "guajiros".
So sorry, PR are not Tainos.
Tainos were the first Indians to meet the Old World and the first one to perish.

Yes, full blooded Tainos died rather early in history, but not the Mestizos that resulted from the first Spaniards/Taino contacts. Its from that line of mixture that the Taino DNA survived through the centuries and pretty much accounts for what has been found, at least in DNA studies done in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic (I haven't seen a similar study done in Cuba yet, but there might be one).

Also, many people don't take into account the maroon Tainos that escaped into the mountainous areas and lived there for centuries. Many of those mountains were never penetrated by Europeans until the mid to late 19th Century and in some places well into the 20th.

There have even been findings of Amerindian DNA unique to some of the islands, not found anywhere else in the Americas.

The DNA aspect is only part of the puzzle, there's plenty of Taino influence still present in other aspects of life in the Spanish Caribbean (language, food, etc).

[Manolón]

Taino culture left a great imprint in the Spanish language and culture, but they vanished, and those romantic attempts are just that, romantic attemps to bring them back. Taino disappeared entirely, just as the true Indians of Florida, the Tequestas, the Tequestas also disappeared entirely.

Taino disappeared, if there were mestizos, they either were very few or they left for Mexico (gold) since all the population of the larger Caribbean Islands (including blacks, mestizo and any healthy Taino carrier) went after Cortez and later Ovando. Any surviving mestizo was a Castilian subject and he probably left as most early Spanish. They were lots of gold and riches in Mexico and none in the Caribbean.

Taino belong to the Arawak group, just like Guajiro Indians brought a century or two after the disappearance of Tainos. Arawaks still exist in some smaller islands in the Caribbean, but not Tainos.Tainos, Siboneyes, Guanacabibes and other Caribbean Indian disappeared because they had no contact with the continent, as in smaller Caribbean islands, and they were peaceful and THEY WERE THE FIRST INDIANS that had contact with all the plagues borught from the Old World.

Taino Indians that left for the mountains died, it's well acccounted for. Not only the flu, the smallpox, the encomiendas, but they decided not to procreate. The last attempt to save them (in the island of Cuba) were carried out in the eastern part of Cuba by a Governor General that reaaly tried to save them, to have an "Indian town", that was during the XVIIth Century, they died because they refused to have children and many committed suicide. Of course, we will never know if they were exterminated by the encomenderos.

The resettlement came a generation afterwards. Canary Islanders at the center, blacks in the coast so they could no flee and become cimarrones "maroons" in palenques and Guajiro and Champeche Indians.

Spain tried other groups, but all the attempts failed....Indians (From India), Malayans, Flilipinos...then came the coolies, etc. The last attempt was the great Migration were Corsicans and Majorcans from Soller, last names such as Roselló, Serrallés, etc, are Majorcan.

[AntonioR]

I would had believed you, had I not known of:

MtDNA studies that have been done to bones from Taino individuals found in various Taino grave sites in the Caribbean. One of the greatest findings is the homogeneity among Taino mtDNA and how such group has no relation to North American and Central American tribes, and a greater relation to South American tribes, albeit the Taino mtDNA remains rather unique from any other Amerindian group in the Americas and quite homogenous with very little variations: http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf/LALUEZA-FOX.pdf

Taino mtDNA markers are quite different from those of any other group of humans and, naturally, would be identifiable on any surviving samples today.

Then we have comments by actual geneticists from very prestigious universities making comments such as this one:

...the footprints of this extinct ethnicity are scattered throughout the genomes of modern Puerto Ricans, according to geneticist Carlos Bustamante at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. On average, the genomes of Puerto Ricans contain 10 to 15% Native American DNA, which is largely Taíno, says Bustamante.

(Genome Project Reconstructs Lost Group of American Indians: Scientific American)

Had there not been any unique Taino mtDNA markers, one could had asked how could a geneticist from Stanford University make the claim that the Amerindian mtDNA found in Puerto Ricans is largely Taíno. But what the Taino mtDNA looked like is already known thanks to genetic investigations into bone fragments from full blooded Tainos that died centuries ago. It was a matter of comparing the old samples with the new ones.

Then comes the your questioning of whether there were Mestizos, despite by 1514, barely two decades after first contact, an official survey showed that 40 percent of Spanish men had taken Indian wives. The unofficial number is undoubtedly higher. (What Became of the Taíno? | People & Places | Smithsonian Magazine)

The other issue is that you rely too much on long held beliefs, despite the following known facts:

An 80-90% loss [of Tainos] is a significant and horrifying loss. It is so horrifying that it obscures the fact that 10-20% of the Taino survived. Clearly then, when the chroniclers wrote that “all of the Indians” of Hispaniola were gone, they were following the lead of [Bartolome] de las Casas, who purposely exaggerated the Taino decline. Simultaneously, other Spaniards on Hispaniola testified that growing numbers of indios cimarrones had the island “in the grip of such terror” that no one wanted to leave the Capital (Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean; p. 48).

Historians and demographers generally use the censuses of the era, such as the census that accompanied the 1514 Repartimiento, to confirm that the Taino were nearly extinct by then. They forget that Taino had been fleeing from the Spaniards for more than two decades by then – since 1492. Governor Nicolás de Ovando himself wrote, as reflected in a 1503 royal report, that Taino and Africans frequently ran away together, using the Indians’ knowledge of the countryside to survive and to evade the Spanish partrols (Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean; p. 48).

Juan Mosquera, in one of dozens of court testimonies that mention runaways, told the Jeronymite friars in 1517 that he had personally observed many Indians fleeing to the mountains… (Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean; p. 48).

Jerónnimo de Agüero testified that “indios want very much never to see Spaniards… so they frequently go to the mountains” (Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean; p. 48).

There are hundreds more examples. Obviously the early Spanish censuses are not accurate for the island as a whole. How can you count people who are hiding from you? The censuses only account for those Taino who stayed on the Spaniards’ encomiendas (Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean; p. 48-49).

There's more information of this type:

In 1555 four entire Pueblos of Indios in the Puerto Plata region of the DR that no one previously knew about were found by the Spanish and all were in peripheral areas well outside of Spanish control, which proves that the Spanish could only count the people that were in areas they controlled. CDIU, Vol 18. 10 Consejo de Indias advisory dated July 31, 1556. The Consejo de Indias advised the crown that none of the Indians of “those” Pueblos should be moved or divided among the Spaniards, but that priests should be sent to indoctrinate them into the Catholic Faith. From Lynne Guitar’s “Cultural Genesis: Relationships between Indians, Africans and Spaniards in Rural Hispaniola in the first half sixteenth century” dissertation, December 1998, Nashville, Tennessee.

Irving Rouse writes in “The Arawak”, for the Handbook of South American Indians, page 518, 1948, that in 1585 Sir Francis Drake visited the Island of Hispaniola and reports that not a single Indian was left alive. Yet….

Fray Juan González de Mendoza in his book, published in 1586, wrote that fewer than 200 Indians still lived on Hispaniola, where "most [residents] are mestizos, sons of indias and Spaniards, or negroes." Fray Juan González de Mendoza, Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran Reyno de la China (Madrid, 1586), as presented in Juan López de Velasco, Relaciones geográficas de Santo Domingo, ed. Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi (Santo Domingo: Editora del Caribe, 1970), 8, . From Lynne Guitar’s “Cultural Genesis: Relationships between Indians, Africans and Spaniards in Rural Hispaniola in the first half sixteenth century” dissertation, December 1998, Nashville, Tennessee. And again in 1650 Friar Domingo of the Dominican Republic finds 50 “wild Indians living near the vicinity of his church. As it appears in the Census of 1650, Dominican Republic.

In 1543 it was reported to the King of Spain by the bishop of San Juan, that there were but 60 Native Indians remaining in the entire island of Puerto Rico. Yet when the Earl of Cumberland, who had captured San Juan, fled the island, the King of Spain sent an armada, commanded by General Don Francisco Coloma, to re-conquer the colony in 1599, and was surprised to find the city of San Juan inhabited almost entirely of Indians. As it appears in “The Islands, the world of the Puerto Ricans, by Stan Steiner, page 17, 1974.

Jose Alvarez de Peralta writes that, at the time of the treaty between Spain and France on June 3, 1777 at Aranjuez, the Dominican population was, not counting the Haitian side, 400,000. The break down was as follows: blancos (white)........................................... ..........................100,000
Mestizos de Raza India y Blanca........................................100, 000
Mulatos........................................... ..........................................70,000
Mestizos de Raza India y Negro............................................6 0,000
Negros............................................ ...........................................70, 000 Emilio Rodriguez Demorizi In, Relaciones geográficas de Santo Domingo Vol 1, P.162.

In the 1787 census under governor Toribio Montes in Puerto Rico, over 2300 “pure” Indians are listed living in the Central Cordillera, yet in the census of 1800, there are no categories for Indians or mixed blood Indians. What do appear in place of Indians are Freemen of color or “pardo”. As it appears in the 1787 census of Puerto Rico. According to historian Salvador Brau.

So much so that the national complexion of skin and general physiognomic traits may well be described as being alight brown, approaching the copper color of the North American aborigines, straight black hair in the case of the females, glossy and in luxurious profusion and a combination of features resulting from about an equal blending of the African, Caucasian and -Indian physiognomies. The very visible traits of the latter would seem to indicate, although we are not aware of the existence of any other evidence of it, that the aboriginal race instead of having been entirely exterminated, had been particularly amalgamated. In “The Dominican Republic in the Island of St. Domigue” by S. A. Kendall, page 243, 1849

May the devil take me, if I happen see him around here. These damned Indians can never be seen; as soon as they are here they disappear, and when we think they have been defeated, they re-appear shooting even more. And they are not bad shots either. They have spent their entire lives hunting, so wherever they aim, one has no choice but to make the sign of the cross. By an anonymous Spanish soldier to his family in 1864 during the War for Dominican Restoration which began August 16, 1863 as it appears in at 27febrero.com

There are still half breed Indians living in the town of Boya, Dominican Republic, notes Frederick Albion Ober, in “Aborigines of the West Indies” 1895, page 289. Proc. Amer. Antiq. Soc. n.s. vol. 9 pp. Worcester, Mass.

“The one of most interest is the indio, or that of the descendants of Inhabitants found on the island at its discovery and settlement. They form a great mass of the country laborers over the island, especially in the centre and northeastern section. They have much of the serious appearance of the North American Indian, with his high cheek bones, but their color is less red and more swarthy.” M.W. Harrington’s , Porto Rico and the Porto Ricans, Catholic world, volume 70, Issue 416, page 174.

Walter J Fewkes writes: El Yunque, where marked Indian features were casually observed everywhere, especially in the isolated mountainous regions, where the inhabitants still preserve Indian features to a marked degree. In“The Aborigines of Porto Rico” 1913. Johnson re-print corporation, USA 1970, p. 24-25

In 1948 Dr Jose de Jesus Alvarez concluded after a study based on A-B-O blood groups, that the “Indian mestizo ” did in fact exist in the Dominican Republic. He found that 57% of the Dominicans studied had a predominance of Blood type O, M and Rh¹ which is highest among American Indians. He also stated that in places where the people displayed strong Indian features (like the mountain communities and isolated regions, there was between 54 and 70 percent Indian descent. As reported to the “American Anthropologist” 1951 page 127 titled “Studies on the A-B-O, M-N and Rh-Hr blood factors in the Dominican Republic, with special reference to the problem of admixture. Also in EME EME Vol 2, No 8 Sept-Oct. 1973

In 1949 Bertita Harding writes: What appears most noteworthy about the entire district of Constanza, Dominican Republic is the fact that the population has remained almost pure Indian. Almonds shaped eyes, aquiline features, straight black hair, and high cheekbones all bear the stamp of Taíno and Carib strains. In “The Land Columbus Loved” Bertita Harding, 1949 Chapter 21, p141

Studies on the so called “shovel shaped incisors” conducted in the town of Sabana de los Javieres , indicated that between 35 and 40 percent of Dominicans in this town (many of which were aware of Native ancestry) had shovel shaped teeth which is a trait found in Native Americans and Asians. Hernan Omos Cordones, in Boletin (15) Museo del Hombre Dominicano. 1980

They withdrew into the mountains, later intermarrying with the escaped black slaves and deserting Spanish soldiers. They later became the rural proletariat. Indeed, their imprint is still visible in the faces and stature of many Puerto Ricans as well as in the Islands language. In “The Puerto Rican Houses in Socio-historical Perspective” by Carol F. Joppling page 11, 1988

Despite not working today and have plenty of time to dig up more similar information, I'm really tired right now. This should do, for now at least.

[Carlito Brigante]

Originally Posted by traveler00

Nobody has claimed, not even implied, that "blackness" is limited to America. But there's a simple reality between what is to be "black" in Puerto Rico – a mostly blurred and mulatto experience – compared to what is to be an African-American in the U.S.. I'll put it boldly: you do not find people that resemble Michelle Obama in the circles of power of Puerto Rico.

If the OP is happy with living a simple, "barrio" experience, particularly in those where being "negro" is the norm, he would probably do fine and even enjoy if very much. But if he aspires to higher middle class lifestyle, then, I believe, he may have a much harder time fitting in (unless he is mulatto himself and could blend in easily). In this respect, he will do much better with the group support and won battles that the African-Americans have achieved in the U.S..

I know exactly what you mean...te entiendo bien!!! I am African-American and fluent in Spanish. 9 times out of 10, I can meet a Puerto Rican (or a Latino in general) whose skin tone is darker and features are more African than mine and they will tell me, "I'm not black...I'm Puerto Rican/Latino," as if they don't realize, or want to deny, that you can be both.

[Manolón]

Well, Domicans reject their blackness and they always say they are Indian....
But reality is different.