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Caribbean Studies

ISSN: 0008-6533

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Instituto de Estudios del Caribe

Puerto Rico

Scarano, Francisco A.; Curtis White, Katherine J.

A WINDOW INTO THE PAST: HOUSEHOLD COMPOSITION AND DISTRIBUTION IN PUERTO

RICO, 1910 AND 1920

Caribbean Studies, vol. 35, núm. 2, julio-diciembre, 2007, pp. 115-154

Instituto de Estudios del Caribe

San Juan, Puerto Rico

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115

Vol. 35, No. 2 (July - December 2007), 115-154 Caribbean Studies

A wINDOw INTO THE PAST: HOUSEHOLD COMPOSITION AND DISTRIBUTION IN PUERTO RICO,

1910 AND 1920

Francisco A. Scarano Katherine J. Curtis White

AbstrAct

This paper analyzes newly created samples of the 1910 and 1920 censuses of Puerto Rico to describe the composition and distribu-tion of the island’s households. It suggests, among other things, that Puerto Rican households were unusually large and complex—more so, in fact, than in all other documented Latin American or Caribbean cases. Household types, of which we recognize six in two main categories, varied greatly according to the race and gender of persons the census identified as their heads. The spatial distribu-tion of households with black or mulatto heads suggests, moreover, a strong association between blackness in the early twentieth cen-tury and distinct settlement patterns characteristic of various earlier phases of island history, when enslaved Africans were among the predominant settlers. The study demonstrates a sharp rise in the pro-portion of nuclear households during the 1910s and suggests pos-sible explanations based on the economic changes taking place in these years. Finally, it proposes ways to connect long-term socio-historical processes, such as those strengthening communal solidari-ties among rural dwellers, with certain household patterns visible in the early twentieth century.

Keywords: family composition, race, gender, agricultural production, 20th century, Puerto Rico

resumen

Este ensayo analiza las muestras de los censos de Puerto Rico de 1910 y 1920, recién confeccionadas, para describir, a base de los datos recopilados, la composición y distribución de los domicilios o unidades domiciliarias [households] isleños. Sugiere, entre otras cosas, que en Puerto Rico estas unidades eran excepcionalmente grandes y complejas, más que en cualquier otro caso caribeño o lati-noamericano que haya sido estudiado. Los tipos de domicilios, de

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Vol. 35, No. 2 (July - December 2007), 115-154

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Caribbean Studies

los cuales reconocemos seis, divididos en dos grandes categorías, variaban mucho de acuerdo con el color y el género de las personas identificadas en los censos como jefes de familia. La distribución espacial de los domicilios cuyos jefes eran denominados negros o mulatos sugiere, además, una fuerte asociación entre la oscuridad de la piel, según se la observaba en los censos de comienzos del siglo XX, y unos patrones de ocupación y asentamiento característicos de varias etapas anteriores de la historia puertorriqueña durante las cuales los africanos esclavizados estuvieron entre los contingentes de colonos más numerosos. El estudio demuestra, además, que entre los dos censos referidos hubo un aumento significativo en la pro-porción de domicilios denominados “nucleares”. Para explicar este fenómeno proponemos varias hipótesis. El ensayo concluye, final-mente, que para entender plenamente los patrones que pautan los domicilios puertorriqueños de comienzos del siglo XX, es preciso verlos como un reflejo de las solidaridades compartidas por los habi-tantes rurales de esa Isla durante largos períodos de su historia.

Palabras clave: composición familiar, raza, género, producción agrícola, siglo XX, Puerto Rico

résumé

Cet essai analyse les échantillons des recensements de Porto Rico de 1910 et 1920, récemment confectionnées, pour décrire, à partir d’une base des données compilées, la composition et la distribution des domiciles ou des unités domiciliaires [households] insulaires. Il suggère, entre autres, qu’à Porto Rico ces unités étaient excep-tionnellement grandes et plus complexes, que dans le cas des autres pays caraïbeens ou latino-américains qui ont été étudié. Les types de domiciles, dont nous reconnaissons six, divisés en deux grandes catégories, variaient beaucoup par rapport à leur couleur et le type des personnes identifiées dans les recensements comme chefs de famille. La distribution spatiale des domiciles dont les chefs étaient appelés noirs ou mulates suggère, en outre, une forte association entre l’obscurité de la peau, comme on pouvait voir dans les recen-sements durant le début du XX siècle , des patrons d’occupation et d’établissement caractéristiques de plusieurs étapes précédentes de l’histoire portoricaine, pendant lesquelles les esclaves africains étaient entre les plus nombreaux parmi les contingents de colons. En outre, l’étude démontre qu’entre les deux recensements men-tionnés il y a eu une augmentation significative dans la proportion de domiciles appelés “núcleaires”. Pour expliquer ce phénomène nous proposons plusieurs hypothèses. L’essai conclut, finalement, en expliquant que, pour comprendre pleinement les patrons qui

A WIndoW Into the PAst... 117


règlent les domiciles portoricains durant le début du XX siècle, il est nécessaire de les voir comme un reflet des solidarités partagées par les habitants ruraux de cette Île pendant de longues périodes de son histoire.

Mots-clés: composition familiale, race, genre, production agricole, 20ème siècle, Porto Rico

Received: 2 September 2007 Revision received: 11 December 2007 Accepted: 12 December 2007

For a country whose population history has not exactly been terra incognita, the subject of household and family composi-tion in Puerto Rico has attracted surprisingly slight scholarly

attention. The immense bibliography on Puerto Rican demography contains few entries devoted to family or kinship, with the notable exception of a handful related to fertility and population control (e.g., Hill, Stycos, and Back 1959) or to perceived individual or social dys-functions (Rogler and Hollingshead 1965). Such a dearth of attention, outside of narrow contexts, to one of the key building blocks of soci-ety is more surprising when one considers that family and kinship sys-tems were topics of keen interest in Caribbean studies throughout the middle and latter decades of the twentieth century (Smith 1957; Smith 1962). As Nara Milanich has recently observed, moreover, the institu-tion of the family is “peculiarly subject to mythification” (Milanich 2007:439), and as such, it is often central to discourses of national and cultural identity, a variety of which have been at the forefront of public discussion in Puerto Rico for much of the past century. This Spanish Caribbean nation presents us, then, with the odd circumstance in which the family has not only been slighted in social-science and historical studies, but it has not even been at the center of mythologies about the nation and its core attributes, with the important exception of the Partido Autonomista Puertorriqueño’s late nineteenth-century vision of the society as the gran familia puertorriqueña (Quintero Rivera 1976).

Such neglect of the family may be due in part to the scholarship’s excessive concentration on the related, but narrower, subject of fer-tility and its determinants. Over the course of the twentieth century, Puerto Rico’s population became a territory well-charted by schol-ars, many of them engaged in a colonialist project to understand the nation’s “overpopulation problem” in order to adopt policies favorable

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to its “resolution.”1 As the population’s growth rate accelerated in the early years of U.S. rule on account of diminishing mortality and a stubbornly steady —and for many critics, peculiarly high— level of fertility, scholars as well as population and policy experts invested a great deal of effort in studying the cultural bases of Puerto Rican repro-ductive behavior. Initiatives of this sort were predicated on the need to come up with strategies to bring the high fertility of Puerto Rican women under control. They dovetailed with public and private projects of population control, to tackle what some believed to be, in the notori-ous neo-Malthusian idiom of the age, “a ticking time bomb.”2 But as the observed high fertility and growth rates “finally” began to decline in the 1950s and beyond, under conditions of advancing industrialization and urbanization, Puerto Rico’s challenging population issues became a less immediate problem and therefore a less attractive subject of study. At that point the avalanche of studies characteristic of the 1940s through the mid-1960s dwindled to a trickle (Earnhardt 1984).

By focusing on its composition and distribution, this essay addresses the dearth of knowledge about the history of the Puerto Rican family. It provides a snapshot of island households at a criti-cal moment —the second decade of the twentieth century, which also marked the second decennium in the imperial transition between Spanish and U.S. sovereignty. Utilizing recently generated Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the 1910 and 1920 colonial (U.S.) cen-suses, described more fully in another article in this issue, 3 we survey household composition and distribution and examine the relationship between Puerto Rican family forms, on the one hand, and race, gen-der, and geographic and economic setting on the other. Our findings underscore the need to understand Puerto Rican household and family forms as contingent on a variety of socio-economic factors, ideologies (i.e., of race, class, and geography), and historical processes leading to communal solidarities as well as rifts; and as a set of continually shifting, adaptive behaviors people engaged in to deal with impact of the severe stresses of impoverishment and exploitation.

With this exercise, then, we wish to begin a discussion on Puerto Rican households and families in the early twentieth century based on recently compiled empirical data. Because family history is inter-twined with social and cultural issues of deep historical origin and significance, this inquiry into household composition and distribution raises some new questions about the Puerto Rican past, particularly about the history of community solidarities and social exclusions based



on race, gender, class, and geography. We do not intend to provide answers to all such questions, of course, for doing so would require detailed analysis into the historical record. The patterns of household composition and distribution uncovered via the PUMS suggest, how-ever, important directions for research into the social world of which the family was a key site of interaction and biological as well as cul-tural reproduction.

Puerto Rican household composition in the scholarly literatureAs we begin this study, it bears repeating that our understanding of Puerto Rican family history currently stands on loose analytical and empirical foundations. Despite the abundance of studies published in the twentieth century on island demography, and especially on Puerto Rican women’s fertility, the bulk of the literature bypassed the study of family and household composition and change, as well as their demographic, social, and cultural (and, ultimately, historical) deter-minants and effects. In Puerto Rico’s waning years in the international demography spotlight, few studies of island families and households still existed outside the field of anthropology.4 Among demographers and sociologists, the focus was, as we have said, on the family as a site of social pathology and a factor in transmitting the mindsets associated with high fertility. This emphasis stands in marked contrast with work on other Caribbean societies, where studies of family struc-ture and function were quite developed by the 1950s and 1960s. “[In] Puerto Rico,” the anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz observed in 1963, “in spite of a large number of papers and books dealing tangentially with rural family life, there is nothing permitting rigorous comparison with the excellent studies of domestic social structure carried out in Jamaica, Trinidad, British Guiana, and elsewhere” (cited in Buitrago Ortiz 1973:1). More importantly for our purposes, the few studies extant of families and households did not attempt to describe and apprehend historical continuities and change —to identify patterns, behaviors, and attitudes which had been engendered by specific his-torical circumstances and conditions. Too few studies, in short, tried to link demographic attitudes and behaviors typical of an age of rela-tive peasant autonomy or autarchy in the highland regions (the early colonial centuries), for instance, with those of the transition to a “rural proletarian” adaptation in the lowlands (the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries), and these two with the behaviors characteristic

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of the age of urbanization, industrialization, and massive emigration (the middle decades of the twentieth century).5

Studies available before the 1970s treated family and household themes as somewhat lesser aspects of the larger problems of cul-tural-ecological adaptation and historical change. In their rightfully admired work on national sub-cultures carried out in 1949 under Julian Steward’s direction (published as The People of Puerto Rico in 1956), for example, the anthropologists who wrote on sugar, coffee, and tobacco workers’ communities (Sidney W. Mintz, Eric R. Wolf, Elena Padilla, and Robert Manners, respectively) devoted sections of their respective chapters to prevalent family types and intra-family rela-tions in the communities studied, and to what those family and house-hold characteristics meant for patterns of courtship, marriage (whether common-law or state-sanctioned), child-rearing, and other building blocks of family life, as well as for participation in the wage and sub-sistence economies (Steward 1956). These ethnographies stressed dif-ferences between a patriarchal family norm prevalent in the highland coffee areas and the more fluid, less hierarchically organized forms typical of the sugar lowlands. As these were not the central questions of their investigations, however, on matters of household and fam-ily forms the authors left readers with plenty of unanswered ques-tions. Like the handful of historians interested in economic and social history (including demographic history) at the time, the members of Steward’s team were more focused on understanding the ecological, economic, and social adaptations attendant on the development of colonial capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than on observing their correlate effects on households and families.6

In a 1973 publication bearing the results of a study carried out in 1962-63 in a community nicknamed Esperanza, a peasant barrio in the backlands of the northern coastal municipio of Arecibo, anthro-pologist Carlos Buitrago Ortiz significantly broadened the study of Puerto Rican household formation, organization, economy, and value orientation, particularly for the highland peasant society of which Esperanza was deemed representative. In this community, according to Buitrago Ortiz, “the household... operates in accordance with clear basic principles:” patrifocality, legitimacy, nuclear organization, clear gender roles, and independence as soon as possible after marriage. Of his sample of 167 households, 132 (79 percent) were nuclear—an unusually high proportion by comparative and historical standards. In Esperanza, the majority of marriages had been blessed by a priest,



and were considered “well established.” Few households had female heads (see the discussion below), and most women were attached to, and considered a dependent of, a man, whether a husband, a father, or a brother (Buitrago Ortiz 1973:197).

Buitrago Ortiz posited that the high frequency of nuclear house-holds found at Esperanza pointed to an entrenched characteristic of the highland peasantry. To his credit, he devoted an entire chapter to the developmental sequence or cycle through which individual house-holds characteristically passed, thus rendering the study of household organization fluid and dynamic. Esperanza’s families were constantly in flux; they were forming and decomposing, although in Buitrago Ortiz’s rendition of the cycle, the evolution occurred largely inside the parameters of a small array of predominant forms. In this, the anthro-pologist reflected the tendency in Puerto Rican studies more generally to describe the island peasant population as a single social type result-ing from a single evolutionary trajectory (Ibid). Like other scholars of the Puerto Rican highland peasants, called jíbaros by most Puerto Ricans, Buitrago Ortiz believed that the family and household pat-terns observed in Esperanza were inherited from a deep past. Familial characteristics had been rendered stable across many generations by the relative isolation of peasant culture.7 By the 1960s, however, eco-nomic forces spawned by the rise of industrial capitalism and migra-tion to the United States had begun to break down this isolation, and changes —including a different position for women, with potentially greater authority within the household— were likely to result. For the jíbaro household, in Buitrago Ortiz’s view, after centuries of seclusion which constrained the evolution of the family system and maintained intact its fundamental form, industrialization, urbanization, and migra-tion had begun to put in motion the wheels of change.

For lack of suitable data, historians and social scientists have been unable to test the assumptions underlying Buitrago Ortiz’s claim of a relatively fixed peasant household over time, or to systematically compare household composition and organization across the bound-aries of geography, economic formation, race, residential status, and other criteria. As Buitrago Ortiz anticipated, household patterns char-acteristic of the Esperanza peasantry were not likely applicable to other groups in Puerto Rico (e.g., the urban working classes) —an observation implied earlier by the contributors to The People of Puerto Rico project when describing sharply differentiated family structures

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and relations across the various subcultures of the Puerto Rican rural population.

Fortunately, the 1910 and 1920 Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS), recently elaborated by the University of Wisconsin Puerto Rico Census Project,8 have now afforded us a tool to do just those things —to explore the extent to which Puerto Rican households at the turn of the twentieth century conformed to, and likely varied from, the “deep historical” norms described by anthropologists like Buitrago Ortiz. We are now able to observe variations that correlate with eco-logical variables (i.e., in the case of the countryside, the predominant agricultural activities in each barrio-level community), race, and set-tlement type (i.e., urban or rural, as classified in the censuses). The parallel availability of 1910 and 1920 shapefiles marking the relative position of barrios also enable the research to map relevant data onto a composite image of Puerto Rico’s municipal subdivisions.9 These “data maps” visually facilitate the comprehension of demographic continuities and discontinuities across space.

In the present study, we analyze the PUMS data in pursuit of three modest goals: to describe the essential composition and spatial dis-tribution of households in Puerto Rico for the two available PUMS, mapping the information onto barrio-level shapefiles whenever feasi-ble and analytically useful; to establish ways in which the data can be meaningfully compared across the socio-economic and demographic distinctions indicated above; and, based on the above comparisons, to suggest questions for historical-population and social-history research in the future. We only offer, however, an initial exploration of the PUMS-based data on households. Much more work will need to be done, for to describe family forms is but a first step toward under-standing the myriad ways in which they actually adapted (and often reinvented) themselves as social actors under the stresses prevalent in a poor, pre-industrial society. The PUMS data will still yield much more information, of course. But because functional (as opposed to formal or morphological) aspects of households are difficult to glean from the censuses, the more interesting and challenging work may still await us in the archives and oral sources that historians depend on to understand survival strategies, decisions, and community-building processes.

Finally, we will note continuities and changes extant during the important decade of 1910-20, a span which saw an intensification of rural to urban migration, rapid growth in the tobacco and sugar sectors



of the economy (albeit without correlative expansion of employment, especially in sugar), increased emigration (especially after 1917, when Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens by a decision of the Congress), a steep decline in coffee exports and in the capacity of that sector to sustain tens of thousands of workers formerly dependent on them, and the rise of labor militancy, particularly in sugar and in urban occu-pations. The velocity with which some of the changes in household forms occurred will suggest the ability of such households to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances.

Households in Puerto Rico: elementary notionsIn our analysis of information culled from the PUMS, we have fol-lowed, in slightly modified form, Susan De Vos’s version of a typol-ogy of household organization originally developed by Hammell and Laslett (De Vos 1995; Hammell and Laslett 1974). The typology rec-ognizes two broad categories of households: Non-family and Family households. The first of these is further broken down into two groups: Individual (a single-person household) and Other (a category which encompasses households in which there is more than one person but no one is related). For family households, we distinguish four broad sub-categories: Nuclear (a household in which there are at least two people, made up of couples —whether married or in a consensual union— and their children, and where there are no other relationship types); Single-parent (a household with at least two people in it, one an adult and the other a child, and where there are no other relation-ship types); Special (a complex household with a conjugal union(s), whether married or not, with and without children, and with other rela-tionship types present); and last, Stem (a complex household without a conjugal union, with other relationship types present, but no non-relatives). These five categories follow the main principles of Hammel and Laslett’s typology, but organizes the groups slightly differently. In Hammel and Laslett’s model, the five groups (as opposed to our six) are solitary (“individual”, in our terminology), no family (corresponds to our “other” category), simple family (our “nuclear”), extended family (our “special”), and multiple family. The latter consists of a household with two or more conjugal units. In the original conception there is no separate category for a single-parent household, which is subsumed under the general category of “simple family.” The value of discriminating between single-parent households is evident, since it is this category that permits a more refined analysis of female headship,

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a phenomenon whose importance grew in the U.S. and elsewhere in the latter quarter of the twentieth century.

Demographers will often divide households into the two over-arching categories of “simple” and “complex”, a categorization whose simplicity makes it possible to compare family forms across different cultures and time periods. In our scheme, simple households would be nuclear and single-parent only, and complex would be the special and stem types. It is interesting to note in this connection that in 1910 and 1920 Puerto Rico, the proportion of complex households was at or above 40 percent for the population as a whole (see Table 1). In her analysis of six Latin American countries based on survey data for the 1970s, De Vos found that the proportion of such households varied from a low of 24 percent in Mexico to a high of 35 percent in the Dominican Republic, with the remaining four countries (Colombia, Costa Rica, Panamá, and Perú) hovering around 30 percent.10 Historical demographers have noted that in no known sample of a European or North American population has the proportion of complex households exceeded 21 percent, while in Japan, two samples suggest that the usual range was above 39 percent and as high as 48 percent.

Inquiring into the reasons for Puerto Rico’s rather high (even by Latin American standards) proportion of complex households falls beyond the scope of this paper, but we wish to suggest that it deserves closer attention. It may suffice here to cite De Vos’s conclusion with regard to the comparatively middling (but by European standards, still quite high) rates she discovered in 1970s Latin America: “The reasons for the difference in household complexity between Latin America and elsewhere appears to be,” she says, “a combination of two pat-terns: (1) the relative independence of conjugal units together with the tendency for conjugal couples to extend their households by including unmarried relatives, and (2) the tendency for many households headed by women to be extended as well” (De Vos 1987:510).

For Puerto Rico, this explanation seems compelling. In rendering this nation’s household landscape one of greater complexity than most others, perhaps the common practice of taking in relatives (and even non-relatives eventually), played a major role. The census returns are full of references to cohabiting non-nuclear kin members (e.g., abuelo/a, cuñado/a, hijastro/a, and many others), as well as to the classic “hangers on” (agregados, arrimados, etc.), a category of land-less people made famous after 1938 in the preachings of the Partido Popular Democrático and its leader, Luis Muñoz Marín. The latter



may or may not have been members of the householders’ clan. In gen-eral terms, the presence of all these individuals underscores the power of communal solidarities so often highlighted for rural Puerto Rico, especially in the work of historian Fernando Picó (1984). The extent to which there may have been a strong tendency to take in both kin relations and agregados, and the degree to which this inclination could have played a major role in the normative complexity of island fami-lies, remains for historians and historical demographers to determine. The 1910 and 1920 PUMS should facilitate this work, for census enumerators followed detailed instructions to code all relationships, including the ambiguous —and, as Picó has suggested, historically variable— category of agregado/arrimado itself (Picó 1984).

Households across geographies of space and race, 1910-1920The 1910 and 1920 PUMS render the summary census informa-tion more understandable and, in the process, suggest patterns often

Table 1Household Composition Descriptions with Simple vs. Complex

Percentages, 1910 and 1920 PUMS (weighted)

Non-Family Households (11%)

Individual: one person in household

Other (Non-Related): more than one person in household; no house-hold members are related

Family Households

Simple (48%)

Nuclear: at least two people in household; couples (conjugal union: married or consensual union) with and without children; no other relationship-types

Single-Parent: at least two people in household; one adult and one child of adult; no other relationship-types

Complex (41%)

Special (Extended): complex household with conjugal union; with and without children; with other relationship-types

Stem (Related): complex household without conjugal union; with other relationship-types; no non-relatives

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masked by aggregate data. One way to look at the data is to differentiate between households found in rural areas, as defined by the census, and those located in urban settlements (see Table 2).11 As expected, family households —whether nuclear, single-parent, special (i.e., extended) or stem (i.e., related)— were the prevalent household type in Puerto Rico, comprising nearly nine out of ten units in both years. Single-person households were much less common in rural than in urban areas; in the latter, nearly 16 percent of households in 1910 (but only 13 percent in 1920) were made up of individuals. But in the urban areas, non-family households (made up of one person or of non-related individuals) com-prised over one fifth of all households in 1910, but about one-sixth in 1920 (differences between the decades are statistically significant at the 0.001 p-value level).

The decline between the two dates is intriguing, for it occurred at a time when rural-to-urban migration is believed to have risen sharply. One possible explanation for it is that once rural Puerto Rico underwent the shock of the coffee economy’s steep fall during World War I and levelled employment opportunities in the leading agricul-tural industry, sugar, single persons were not prevalent among migrants from the countryside to the cities; instead, groups of related individu-als may have been more common. The data also suggest that rural-to-urban migration of individuals before 1910 may have been much more significant than we have believed to date, and that we should conceive of internal migration during the early twentieth century as a progression of at least two distinct flows, each of them spawned by the economic shifts attendant on Puerto Rico’s economic and politi-cal integration with the United States and the development of a colo-nial capitalist economy in the countryside. Each of these flows would require a different set of individual and group adjustments.

The notable increase in family households in urban areas between the census years confirms what the historical literature has already established: that rural conditions were “pushing” the laboring groups hard, and that migration of family groups likely outpaced that of the more opportunistic individuals. The predominance of family groups in migrant streams to the larger cities was suggested in the mid-1920s by Dr. Antonio Fernós Isern, a public-health expert (and a leading politician later on), in an article published in an influential journal, Porto Rico Health Review. Fernós noted that the increase in migra-tion to the cities in Puerto Rico in previous years had been due to the displacement of peasant families, whom he mentioned explicitly



Tabl

e 2

Hou

seho

ld C

ompo

sitio

n fo

r Tot

al P

opul

atio

n an

d by

Urb

an-R

ural

Sta

tus,

1910

and

192

0 PU

MS

(wei

ghte

d)

1910

N%

N%

N%

Non

-Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s2,679

11.2

1,657

20.2

1,022

6.5

Indiv

idual

1,9

90

8.4

1,2

74

15.5

716

4.6

Oth

er (

Non-R

elat

ed)

689

2.9

383

4.7

306

2.0

Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s21,152

88.8

6,545

79.8

14,607

93.5

Nucl

ear

8,9

87

37.7

2,2

82

27.8

6,7

05

42.9

Sin

gle

-Par

ent

2,4

28

10.2

931

11.3

1,4

98

9.6

Spec

ial

(Exte

nded

)6,8

37

28.7

2,0

26

24.7

4,8

11

30.8

Ste

m (

Rel

ated

)2,9

00

12.2

1,3

07

15.9

1,5

94

10.2

1920

N%

N%

N%

Non

-Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s2,617

9.6

1,611

16.3

1,006

5.8

Indiv

idual

2,0

39

7.5

1297

13.1

742

4.3

Oth

er (

Non-R

elat

ed)

578

2.1

314

3.2

264

1.5

Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s24,716

90.4

8,259

83.7

16,457

94.3

Nucl

ear

11,3

49

41.5

3,0

69

31.1

8,2

81

47.4

Sin

gle

-Par

ent

2,7

22

10.0

1,1

72

11.9

1,5

50

8.9

Spec

ial

(Exte

nded

)7,5

39

27.6

2,5

21

25.5

5,0

18

28.7

Ste

m (

Rel

ated

)3,1

07

11.4

1,4

98

15.2

1,6

09

9.2

Tota

l (N

= 2

3,8

31)

Urb

an

(N

= 8

,202)

Ru

ral

(N =

15,6

29)

Tota

l (N

= 2

7,3

33)

Urb

an

(N

= 9

,870)

Ru

ral

(N =

17,4

63)

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128

Caribbean Studies

Tabl

e 3

Hou

seho

ld C

ompo

sitio

n by

Hou

seho

ld A

gric

ultu

ral S

tatu

s, 19

10 a

nd 1

920

PUM

S (w

eigh

ted)

1910

Su

gar

Tob

acc

o

Coff

eeM

ixed

Ag/N

on

-Ag

Non

-Ag

(N =

4,6

75)

(N =

302)

(N =

2,2

75)

(N =

1,1

70)

(N =

8,9

27)

%%

%%

%

Non

-Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s6.9

5.5

3.9

1.7

22.0

Indiv

idual

4.2

3.5

2.6

0.0

17.2

Oth

er (

Non-R

elat

ed)

2.7

2.0

1.3

1.7

4.8

Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s93.1

94.5

96.1

98.3

78.0

Nucl

ear

46.0

43.8

49.7

23.8

25.3

Sin

gle

-Par

ent

6.8

8.6

7.5

6.9

15.5

Spec

ial

(Exte

nded

)31.0

30.7

30.0

52.4

21.4

Ste

m (

Rel

ated

)9.4

11.4

8.9

15.3

15.8

1920

Su

gar

Tob

acc

o

Coff

eeM

ixed

Ag/N

on

-Ag

Non

-Ag

(N =

5,2

57)

(N =

1,4

82)

(N =

3,0

92)

(N =

11,7

78)

(N =

9,9

86)

%%

%%

%

Non

-Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s6.1

3.1

3.1

1.0

17.1

Indiv

idual

4.0

2.1

2.2

0.0

13.9

Oth

er (

Non-R

elat

ed)

2.1

1.0

1.0

1.0

3.2

Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s93.9

96.9

96.9

99.0

82.9

Nucl

ear

49.2

49.1

52.2

29.0

31.8

Sin

gle

-Par

ent

7.0

9.9

7.2

5.7

13.9

Spec

ial

(Exte

nded

)29.1

29.2

29.3

49.6

22.7

Ste

m (

Rel

ated

)8.6

8.7

8.2

14.7

14.5



while abstaining from mentioning individual migrants (Fernós Isern 1925:5). It bears remembering in this discussion that the most impor-tant push factor for migration, the reshuffling of the agrarian economy and, more precisely, the coffee bust that took place during World War I and in succeeding years affected an area, the highland interior, where family households —and within this category, nuclear households— were the norm (see below). We take this as indirect support of the hypothesis of family-group migration.

If other evidence were to confirm family-group migration, it might allow us to say that internal migration in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico comprised at least two distinct streams: a (presumably) one-way migration of family groups to urban areas, and a seasonal migration from the highlands to the lowland sugar zones, which historians and others believe to have been common in this period. Most of these laborers who “went down” from the mountains and climbed back up after the harvest, popularly known as correcostas or “coast-runners”, were likely single men who left their families behind (Mintz 1956). It seems feasible to cull the PUMS data for evidence of this migration.

Our figures strongly suggest, however, that before 1920 the migration of single laborers moving from highland to lowland zones may not have been as large as is often assumed. Table 3, which breaks down household types by the agricultural industry in which house-hold heads were engaged, indicates that on both dates the frequency of family households among sugar, tobacco, and coffee workers was well over 90 percent across the board. Throughout rural Puerto Rico, then, regardless of the agricultural context, non-family households were exceedingly rare (less than 7 percent in sugar in both years, less than 6 percent in tobacco in 1910 with a further decline to 3 percent in 1920, and 4 percent or less in coffee, and only 2 percent or less in mixed agricultural/non-agricultural). In all agricultural economic set-tings, the ratio of nuclear to extended households held steady through-out the period —about five of the former to three of the latter. When one looks at households whose members participated in two or more industries, however, the nuclear-household norm breaks down and the proportions become inverted: in these “mixed” agricultural settings, there were approximately five extended households for every three nuclear households.

There are several possible interpretations for these patterns. The data may suggest that households tried to diversify the members’ skills whenever more than two generations of a family (parents and their chil-

scarano, WhiTe


130

Caribbean Studies

dren) cohabited. If this were so, it might indicate a rational response to the grueling seasonality of labor in sugar, coffee, and tobacco, and variability in work opportunities which dogged the rural inhabitants of early twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Workers in the sugar and cof-fee industries, for example, would spend many months of the year without steady work, a desperate time known in Puerto Rico as tiempo muerto or “dead season.” An alternative interpretation would be that as more generations of a family lived together, sheer generational plu-rality brought with it greater occupational diversity. The latter point hinges, however, on household access to jobs in several agricultural sectors. In a highly specialized and regionalized agricultural economy, where household opportunities to fan out its members toward more than one of the cash-crop industries were limited by geography and people could not readily commute to work, such access might not be an option.

Although we have detected appreciable differences in the types of households located in urban as opposed to rural settings, and in various agricultural or ecological zones, the distinctions by “race” are much sharper and worth exploring further. We acknowledge certain drawbacks to relying on census-defined race categories, especially categories defined in a different context and implemented by a gov-ernment new and unfamiliar to the island and its social landscape.12 The race categories in the PUMS reflect those used in the U.S. and, as pursued in Mara Loveman’s study in this issue, may not have accu-rately reflected Puerto Rican racial categories per se. We are confident, however, that the categories are useful representations of the island’s social hierarchy; those enumerated as “white” occupy a higher status than those counted as “black”.

Figures 1 and 2, and Tables 4 and 5, illustrate the Puerto Rican household-composition scene by geography, race and location (urban vs. rural) in 1910 and 1920, respectively. The maps, in particular, illustrate a sharply differentiated landscape of household compo-sition by race in Puerto Rico in the second decade of the twentieth century. Most striking, at least at first glance, are the geographic pat-terns and variations in the racial ascription of households throughout Puerto Rico. With white people accounting for 61.8 percent of the total population in 1910, the census understandably reported white households as predominant (more than 50 percent of the households enumerated) in most barrios up and down the island. But there were significant, patterned deviations from this norm. White households



Figu

re 1

. Spa

tial D

istr

ibut

ion

of D

omin

ant R

acia

l Com

posi

tion

for

Hou

seho

lds i

n ea

ch B

arri

o, 1

910

scarano, WhiTe


132

Caribbean Studies

Figu

re 2

. Spa

tial D

istr

ibut

ion

of D

omin

ant R

acia

l Com

posi

tion

for

Hou

seho

lds i

n ea

ch B

arri

o, 1

920



predominated in the higher elevations of the Cordillera Central as well as in the northern, northwestern, and southwestern coasts, and in portions of the dry southern foothills of the central mountain range. Yet, the picture was considerably more variegated elsewhere. In the northern coastal plains, from Arecibo east toward Fajardo, and espe-cially in barrios surrounding the capital city of San Juan, either black or mulatto households comprised more than half of the total number of units (often in several contiguous barrios). The same was true of certain barrios surrounding the historic axis of settlement around the city of San Germán and of portions of the southern foothills around Guayama, once a sugar-producing district with a large population of enslaved Africans (Figueroa 2005).

Clearly, majorities of black, mulatto, and mixed-race households existed in the areas of longest historical settlement around San Juan and San Germán, in districts where enslaved Africans concentrated during the nineteenth-century sugar boom (Scarano 1984), and even in those areas (like Yauco and Cayey) where the coffee economy generated a great deal of migration “pull” in the mid- to late 1800s (Bergad 1983; Picó 2007). All of these areas had been through economic phases (in the sixteenth century in the first case, and in the nineteenth century in the latter two) which required significant importations of enslaved workers from Africa. In this sense, the history of black settlement in Puerto Rico continued to be etched onto the island’s geography well into the twentieth century. The 1920 census (see Figure 2) suggests a pattern quite similar to that of the preceding census year, but with a significant overall reduction in households identified as “black”, “mulatto”, and “mixed-race”. This is understandable, given the mas-sive shift in racial ascriptions between the two censuses. By 1920, an impressive 73 percent of the population was tallied as white (see Loveman, in this issue, for an exploration of this shift).

The breakdowns of household data by measures of race shown in Tables 4 and 5 suggest important relationships between the data on color ascriptions and other factors. Whereas, as we saw in Table 2, family households were close to 90 percent of the population total, when looking at the data for variation across color groups the correla-tions of race with family formation come sharply into focus. In both census years, the darker the householder’s skin the greater the prob-ability that she or he lived in a non-family household, especially in one occupied by a single individual. Moreover, even when living in a fam-ily household (76 percent of blacks, and close to 86 percent of mulat-

scarano, WhiTe


134

Caribbean Studies

Tabl

e 4

Hou

seho

ld C

ompo

sitio

n by

Hou

seho

ld R

ace

Stat

us a

nd b

y U

rban

-Rur

al S

tatu

s, 19

10 P

UM

S (w

eigh

ted)

Tota

lB

lack

Mu

latt

oW

hit

e M

ixed

(N =

859)

(N =

5,3

16)

(N

= 1

2,8

33)

(N =

4,8

23)

%%

%%

Non

-Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s24.0

14.0

11.4

5.4

Indiv

idual

22.9

11.8

9.1

-

Oth

er (

Non-R

elat

ed)

1.1

2.3

2.3

5.4

Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s76.0

86.0

88.6

94.6

Nucl

ear

30.0

37.3

40.0

33.6

Sin

gle

-Par

ent

16.4

14.8

10.7

2.7

Spec

ial

(Exte

nded

)15.3

21.3

26.6

44.7

Ste

m (

Rel

ated

)14.3

12.5

11.3

13.7

Urb

an

N%

N%

N%

N%

Non

-Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s145

30.9

519

22.1

848

24.3

145

7.7

Indiv

idual

144

30.5

446

18.9

685

19.6

--

Oth

er (

Non-R

elat

ed)

20.3

74

3.1

163

4.7

145

7.7

Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s325

69.2

1,835

78.0

2,648

75.8

1,738

92.3

Nucl

ear

120

25.5

691

29.4

951

27.2

521

27.7

Sin

gle

-Par

ent

81

17.2

377

16.0

416

11.9

57

3.0

Spec

ial

(Exte

nded

)46

9.8

425

18.1

759

21.7

796

42.3

Ste

m (

Rel

ated

)78

16.6

342

14.5

523

15.0

365

19.4

Ru

ral

N%

N%

N%

N%

Non

-Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s62

15.8

227

7.6

617

6.6

117

4.0

Indiv

idual

54

13.8

181

6.1

482

5.2

--

Oth

er (

Non-R

elat

ed)

82.1

46

1.6

136

1.5

117

4.0

Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s328

84.2

2,736

92.4

8,720

93.4

2,824

96.0

Nucl

ear

138

35.4

1,2

92

43.6

4,1

79

44.8

1,0

98

37.3

Sin

gle

-Par

ent

60

15.4

411

13.9

953

10.2

74

2.5

Spec

ial

(Exte

nded

)85

21.9

709

23.9

2,6

59

28.5

1,3

59

46.2

Ste

m (

Rel

ated

)45

11.6

325

11.0

930

10.0

294

10.0

Mix

ed (

N =

1,8

82)

Bla

ck (

N =

389)

Mu

latt

o (

N =

2,9

62)

Wh

ite

(N =

9,3

37)

Mix

ed (

N =

2,9

41)

Bla

ck(N

= 4

70)

Mu

latt

o (N

= 2

,354)

Wh

ite

(N =

3,4

96)



toes, as opposed to 89 percent of whites did so), the chances of living in a single-parent unit were much higher for black householders than for white, with mulattoes tellingly falling in between the two. More dramatically still, black urban householders were much more likely in 1910, but just as likely in 1920 to be in a single-person unit than in a nuclear one. Not surprisingly, we found that almost one in three urban black households (31 percent) in 1910 and one in four (26 percent) in 1920 were comprised of single persons. This contrasts with 19 and 18 percent of the urban mulatto households, and 20 and 15 percent of urban white households, in the respective census years. When added to the high numbers of single-parent households among blacks and mulattoes in the cities (14 and 17 percent in 1910), an important impli-cation becomes clear: race correlated more strongly with household type than did any of the primordial agrarian occupations (e.g., laborer in sugar, coffee, or tobacco). Put another way, if one had to guess the type of household in which a given person resided in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico, knowing his/her racial ascription would be of greater help than any other circumstance in contriving an answer.

Before we make too much of race as a causal factor in this relation-ship, however, it is important to bear in mind two things: that single variables, like race, residence, or occupation, cannot by themselves “explain” something as complex as household composition; and more importantly, that we should avoid easy inferences about qualitative dimensions of family life from the mere observation of household organization.

The first caveat cautions us against treating race in isolation of its correlates. Even as color influenced household formation in Puerto Rico, it cannot obscure the importance, already discussed, of the urban/rural divide as a predictor of household organization. Indeed, since urban households of all races were much more likely to be non-family —and especially single-person— households, and since nuclear families existed at much higher rates in the countryside than in cities, regardless of color, it would be prudent to conclude that the combined effect of color and residence contributed more to household configuration than did agricultural/ecological distinctions.

But this is far from the whole story. In order to fully grasp the complexity of the problem, one would have to view the observed dif-ferences in household composition against the backdrop of a history in which geography and urban space were consistently racialized. In Puerto Rico, as elsewhere, color and place of residence had been (and

scarano, WhiTe


136

Caribbean Studies

Tabl

e 5

Hou

seho

ld C

ompo

sitio

n by

Hou

seho

ld R

ace

Stat

us a

nd b

y U

rban

-Rur

al S

tatu

s, 19

20 P

UM

S (w

eigh

ted)

N

ote:

Tot

al o

f rep

orte

d ra

ce fo

r 192

0 do

es n

ot e

qual

the

tota

l sam

ple

(N =

275

,333

) bec

ause

the

“oth

er”

race

hou

seho

lds

are

not

incl

uded

in th

is su

mm

ary

tabl

e. S

ome

race

cat

egor

y to

tals

may

not

equ

al th

e to

tal f

or th

e ra

ce c

ateg

ory

due

to ro

undi

ng.

To

tal

Bla

ckM

ula

tto

Wh

ite

Mix

ed

(N =

87

6)

(N =

4,0

69

)(N

= 1

7,5

22

)(N

= 4

,85

5)

%%

%%

No

n-F

am

ily

Ho

use

ho

lds

21.9

14.1

9.4

4.0

Ind

ivid

ual

19

.31

2.8

7.7

-

Oth

er (

No

n-R

elat

ed)

2.6

1.3

1.8

4.0

Fa

mil

y H

ou

seh

old

s

Nu

clea

r3

4.4

39

.64

4.0

35

.7

Sin

gle

-Par

ent

12

.41

5.4

10

.53

.1

Sp

ecia

l (E

xte

nd

ed)

17

.11

8.6

25

.44

4.8

Ste

m (

Rel

ated

)1

4.3

12

.41

0.7

12

.4

Urb

an

N%

N%

N%

N%

No

n-F

am

ily

Ho

use

ho

lds

136

29.3

364

19.8

1,000

17.8

106

5.4

Ind

ivid

ual

12

02

5.9

33

51

8.2

83

71

4.9

--

Oth

er (

No

n-R

elat

ed)

16

3.5

29

1.6

16

42

.91

06

5.4

Fa

mil

y H

ou

seh

old

s328

70.7

1,477

80.2

4,609

82.2

1,840

94.6

Nu

clea

r1

20

25

.85

77

31

.31

,79

03

1.9

57

82

9.7

Sin

gle

-Par

ent

63

13

.63

21

17

.47

15

12

.77

43

.8

Sp

ecia

l (E

xte

nd

ed)

66

14

.22

88

15

.61

,30

52

3.3

86

34

4.4

Ste

m (

Rel

ated

)7

91

7.0

29

21

5.9

80

01

4.3

32

61

6.8

Ru

ral

N%

N%

N%

N%

No

n-F

am

ily

Ho

use

ho

lds

56

13.5

208

9.3

655

5.5

88

3.0

Ind

ivid

ual

49

11

.91

85

8.3

50

84

.3-

-

Oth

er (

No

n-R

elat

ed)

71

.62

31

.01

47

1.2

88

3.0

Fa

mil

y H

ou

seh

old

s357

86.5

2,019

90.7

11,247

94.5

2,821

97.0

Nu

clea

r1

82

44

.01

,03

34

6.4

5,9

08

49

.71

,15

43

9.7

Sin

gle

-Par

ent

46

11

.23

05

13

.71

,12

19

.47

92

.7

Sp

ecia

l (E

xte

nd

ed)

84

20

.24

69

21

.13

,14

72

6.4

1,3

13

45

.1

Ste

m (

Rel

ated

)4

611

.22

13

9.5

1,0

71

9.0

27

69

.5

Bla

ck (

N =

41

3)

Mu

latt

o (

N =

2,2

27

)W

hit

e (N

= 1

1,9

01

)M

ixed

(N

= 2

,90

9)

Bla

ck (

N =

46

4)

Mu

latt

o (

N =

1,8

41

)W

hit

e (N

= 5

,60

9)

Mix

ed (

N =

1,9

46

)



still are today) closely related. The effects of this relationship are evi-dent in the censuses of 1910 and 1920.

The topic of how race was regionalized in the island country across time is, of course, beyond the scope of this paper. But in order to fully understand the way in which race and residential status together con-tributed to the sharp contrast between urban and rural family patterns in 1910 and 1920 Puerto Rico, one must take into account the history of such settlements and the way in which race helped shape them to begin with. In the case of urban areas, for example, most of which were located on the coastal plains, it is necessary to keep in mind their historic connection with blackness. African slavery on this island had been a lowland, coastal institution, and after final emancipation in 1876, many freedpeople —and among them, a disproportionate num-ber of single women— migrated to the towns and cities, near or far.

While the chance occurrence of slaves’ proximity to cities offers a valuable explanation for some of the observed differences between black and non-black urban households, it is not the only explanation for racially differentiated settlement. Another is the willful and systematic manner in which island elites racialized Puerto Rico’s space across the span of many centuries. The mountainous interior, especially, was long regarded a zone of (and for) “white” settlement, to be occupied by jíbaros—denizens of a rural type deemed to be quintessential Puerto Rican, a national salt-of the-earth figure— and immigrants from the metropole, Spain, and other European nations (Scarano 1996). Such racialization of space, in conjunction with a specific form of highland economic exploitation (subsistence crops and coffee) jointly steered the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century occupation of the interior toward settlement by a lighter-skinned element, both Puerto Rican and immigrant in origin. It was thus that jíbaro peasants, the most numer-ous inhabitants of remote, mountainous (i.e., peasant) areas, ended up looking arguably more European than the “average” Puerto Rican of the working classes. Ultimately, many of those peasants doubtless were counted as “white” in the censuses (see Figures 1 and 2).

Patterns of this sort were the product of centuries-long processes by which space became racialized and some areas, like the poverty-stricken popular barrios in the peripheries of the larger cities, were conceived as appropriately black spaces, while others, like the moun-tain regions or the inner cores of cities and towns, were deemed suitable only for white occupation (Matos Rodríguez 1999; Martínez-Vergne 1999). Puerto Rico is not, of course, alone in Latin America

scarano, WhiTe


138

Caribbean Studies

in the racialization of regional space, nor is this racialization enough to explain the observed contrasts in household organization.13 But in order to interpret these remarkable distinctions culled from the census material, one needs to account for the extent to which seemingly “nat-ural” phenomena (e.g., the prevalence of single-person households in urban areas, or the predominance of the patriarchal, nuclear household in the peasant backlands) actually resulted from the social and histori-cal construction of blackness and whiteness and their repeated map-ping onto Puerto Rican space. In this case for sure, detailed historical knowledge is the key by which to decipher intricacies of population distribution.

In analyzing the household data, an additional interpretive caveat is in order. Household composition, viewed statically and outside its proper social and cultural contexts, can be incomplete at best and misleading at worst. The census data themselves tell us little about the quality and meaning of lived family relationships. What was it like to live in a single-person household in Puerto Rico in the early twentieth-century? Who lived in one and how did she/he constitute family relationships inside and outside the dwelling? Did a single-person household in the island’s rural areas, where spatial dispersal and individuated housing were the norm, mean the same thing as in the densely packed quarters of a large city, where families could more easily extend beyond the confines of a single residential unit? Did the nuclear family form carry the same cultural meanings and val-ues in the highland peasant zones than it did in the more proletarian lowlands? What, in other words, do the census data suggest about the nature of social relationships in various settings, and what are their interpretive limitations?

Reviewing an older scholarship on household composition and family history which tended to focus more on formal aspects than on the functions and adaptations of the unit and its members, critics have raised questions about the value of a social or demographic history of households based solely on its form, that is, on its morphology. One of the most persuasive objections raised to the household-com-position literature is that census data (or fiscal lists, as in the case of some Early Modern European analyses of population) do not allow us to look at households as the dynamic and adaptable entities they undoubtedly were. Lists and censuses captured family forms only as formal structures viewed at a single moment in time; in the case of 1910 and 1920 Puerto Rico, the instant the census enumerator visited



the dwelling. This is evidently a problematic approach, perhaps one that confuses more than it illuminates. Another objection to the mor-phological approach refers to the ubiquity, not to mention the subjec-tive value, of family ties beyond the confines of the household units modern censuses use as cases. While common sense would dictate that “family” does not consist only of those people with whom we cohabit, the structure of census data and other popular sources for the study of the household makes it extremely difficult to apprehend the meaning of those familial but extra-local ties.

If we take these objections seriously, then our analysis of Puerto Rican single-family households would need to go a few steps further; to understand, for example, if people clustered together in urban bar-rios were more apt to form family or kin bonds with others living in surrounding communities than peasants scattered about a broken mountain landscape, and living preponderantly in family (and within these, nuclear) households. We would hypothesize that they did. We would also like to know if in Puerto Rico, as in other Caribbean coun-tries with a slave past, descendants of enslaved workers may have been more likely than others to form a variety of household types, from single-person to stem and everything in between.14 If they were —and we strongly suspect this was the case— then the census data would only provide a glimpse into the formal category of “house-hold”, from which important and highly meaningful family relations and kin networks would be left out.

These caveats notwithstanding, the PUMS data are invaluable to begin to unravel configurations of family and community in the early decades of the twentieth century. In doing so, they help to formulate new questions and probe areas not otherwise visible or accessible to demographers and historians. Two such areas of investigation are the extent of female headship of households and observed changes in the prevalence of the nuclear family form. In the rest of this article we turn to these two matters.

Female headshipIn a society often described as patriarchal, where males supposedly “carried the reins” in the family, their authority unquestioned, and women’s role as domestic subalterns were affirmed in elite as well as popular discourse, one would not expect to find a significant number of women heads of households. Buitrago Ortiz’s study of Esperanza, for example, found that of fifty families sampled, only three were

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headed by women, and of these, two were widows while the third was separated from her husband (Buitrago Ortiz 1973:31). Men, accord-ing to this study, became household heads early in their lives, through marriage; women, when they did so, came upon headship later in life, usually as a result of widowhood. If this kind of “traditional” division of roles existed in early 1960s highland Puerto Rico, what generaliza-tions do the PUMS allow us to make for a time, forty to fifty years earlier, for the entire country?

This question becomes especially relevant in light of the counter thesis that female headship was rather commonplace in nineteenth-century Latin America and in the Spanish Caribbean. In her review of research on family history in Latin America and her own research on Nicaragua, Dore aims to discount “the myth of the traditional family” (1997:101). She suggests that Latin American family law was inher-ited from patriarchal Spain, yet it was not consistent with the lived experience; depending on a number of social characteristics, one-fifth to one-half of all households were female-headed during this period. The distribution of female headship did not vary across social strata in the same ways for all Latin American countries. For example, Arrom (1985) found that female-headed households were more common in higher and lighter social strata in early nineteenth-century Mexico City. The opposite, however, was found in Brazil and Argentina (Kuznesof 1991; Ramos 1991). Still, Safa (2005) suggests that matrifocality has historical roots in the Caribbean, which originated in the black lower classes and has increased in contemporary periods. This, in the spirit of Dore, is evidence that there is no universal family norm. Patterns of family formation and dominant forms of family types are dynamic and unstable over time. We, therefore, might find Buitrago Ortiz’s tra-ditional family in our data for early twentieth-century Puerto Rico.

The PUMS data suggest that, first, in terms of gender roles within the household at least, the rural Puerto Rico that Carlos Buitrago Ortiz studied was markedly different than the one whose underlying social and demographic patterns the PUMS allow us to reconstruct and are more consistent with Dore’s nineteenth-century Latin America. In this other Puerto Rico, women were household heads at much higher pro-portions than in the jíbaro highlands of southern Arecibo in the early 1960s. No fewer than one in five household heads in 1910 and 1920 (21.3 percent and 20.1 percent, respectively) were female across Puerto Rico. In twentieth-century world-comparative or even Latin American terms, these rates were quite high. Indeed, they are at the upper range



Tabl

e 6

Prop

ortio

n of

All

Hou

seho

ld T

ypol

ogie

s tha

t are

Fem

ale-

Hea

ded

by U

rban

-Rur

al S

tatu

s,

1910

and

192

0 PU

MS

(wei

ghte

d)

1910

Urb

an

Ru

ral

Urb

an

Ru

ral

Urb

an

Ru

ral

Urb

an

Ru

ral

%%

%%

%%

%%

Non

-Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s

Indiv

idual

40.3

27.8

39.0

28.2

26.0

17.4

--

Oth

er (

Non-R

elat

ed)

50.0

25.0

52.7

39.1

31.9

22.8

39.7

25.6

Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s

Nucl

ear

--

--

0.1

--

-

Sin

gle

-Par

ent

88.9

83.3

93.4

80.3

89.4

80.0

84.2

77.3

Spec

ial

(Exte

nded

)4.3

4.7

6.1

3.9

4.2

3.2

4.4

2.9

Ste

m (

Rel

ated

)77.2

67.4

83.6

66.5

73.6

55.7

83.0

66.0

1920

Urb

an

Ru

ral

Urb

an

Ru

ral

Urb

an

Ru

ral

Urb

an

Ru

ral

%%

%%

%%

%%

Non

-Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s

Indiv

idual

39.7

26.5

44.0

25.8

33.3

26.5

--

Oth

er (

Non-R

elat

ed)

47.1

42.9

69.0

12.5

45.7

26.5

52.8

27.3

Fam

ily H

ou

seh

old

s

Nucl

ear

--

0.9

0.5

0.5

0.3

0.5

0.2

Sin

gle

-Par

ent

89.1

83.0

90.0

73.1

86.9

74.1

89.2

79.7

Spec

ial

(Exte

nded

)7.5

6.0

8.0

4.1

5.5

3.0

4.8

3.6

Ste

m (

Rel

ated

)80.0

53.2

81.5

59.8

74.9

55.3

77.7

64.1

Wh

ite

Wh

ite

Mix

ed

Mix

ed

Bla

ck

Bla

ck

Mu

latt

o

Mu

latt

o

scarano, WhiTe


142

Caribbean Studies

of female headship computed by De Vos for the six countries she was able to look at with the 1970s data. Importantly, this author found the highest headship rates in the Dominican Republic (20.8 percent) and Panama (20.2), the two countries in her study with the highest overall percentage of people of African descent in the population (De Vos 1995:513).

When we probe deeper into the question, the impact of race on female headship proves unmistakable. In Table 6 we present a break-down of female headship by race status and urban/rural status. The two categories that contained a majority of female heads for all racial groups in both time periods were the single-parent and the stem house-holds. Female household-heads tended not to live alone, but either with their children (minus the father) or in complex households that did not contain a conjugal union. There was a greater proportion of male household heads living alone and in households with conjugal unions (nuclear and special).

One exception to this general trend is the larger and, over time, increasing proportion of mulatto female household heads in “other”, non-family households living in urban barrios (differences between the decades are significant at the 0.001 p-value level). Of what, pre-cisely, these households were comprised is a bit of a mystery to us and awaits further study. The data may be suggestive of a pattern of residence and work whereby mulatto women, more so than women of other racial groups, tended to live with other women while trying to make a living in urban, popular-class barrios. Or they may sug-gest that more mulatto women than those in other racial groups, and more women of color in general, operated boarding houses in cities. Historians Félix Matos Rodríguez and Eileen Findlay, among others, have made us aware of the highly differentiated roles that women, and particularly darker-skinned women, played in the economies of San Juan and Ponce, Puerto Rico’s largest cities, during the nineteenth cen-tury and the early years of the twentieth.15 Women often pooled their resources to maximize the economic value of their labor and other assets, and this was true of housing arrangements as well as activities that involved participating in labor or commodity markets.

The PUMS data should be analyzed in greater detail and with more precise analytical instruments (regression analysis, for example) to further assess the seemingly powerful but multifaceted place of the race/gender dyad in Puerto Rican household formation. At this stage of the analysis we feel justified in saying that for a society where power-



ful forces were at work to make race into a non-issue, to silence it from public discourse and chasten those who dared bring it up as a causal factor in the poverty, deprivation, and inadequate access to education of Puerto Rico’s black and mulatto minorities, race seems to be deeply involved in some of the country’s most salient social distinctions.16 Since the ways in which households formed, related to each other, and functioned as economic and social actors were directly pertinent to questions of social justice, the “outlier” quality of households made up of people of African descent presents one of the most intriguing issues for the social historian of early twentieth-century Puerto Rico.

Household adaptations to capitalism: the growth of nuclear householdsIn 1910s Puerto Rico, the most remarkable change in household orga-nization, as it turns out, was a substantial growth in nuclear house-holds. Between the two censuses, the percentage of all households in this category grew by the considerable margin of nearly four percen-tage points, from slightly less than 38 percent to almost 42 percent (see Table 2). In the urban centers the growth generally matched this overall pattern. But it was in the rural areas where we witness the stee-pest rise: almost five percentage points over a mere ten years. More pointedly, rural nuclear households grew across the board; indeed, as Table 3 makes plain, families in the five major occupational catego-ries (sugar, tobacco, coffee, mixed occupations (agricultural and non-agricultural), and non-agricultural) all saw a marked increase.

The breakdowns by race and residence in Tables 4 and 5 reveal other facets of the story while confirming the increase across racial and residential boundaries. The low percentage of nuclear households among urban blacks in 1910 (under 26 percent) remained the same over the ten-year period, but the number of nuclear households among black rural dwellers exploded, advancing from just over 35 percent to 44 percent —the largest recorded increase of any subgroup. Mulatto nuclear households increased by a small margin (2 to 3 percentage points), but their white counterparts moved from 27 percent in urban zones and 44 percent in rural zones to 31 and 46 respectively (a nearly 5 percentage-point increase). A closer look at the table reveals that the jump in black rural households came largely at the expense of single-parent family households and of single-person (non-family) households, and not, as one might perhaps anticipate, as a result of reductions of special or stem households.

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How to explain the resurgent nuclear household in 1910s Puerto Rico? Before we consider this question, we must first acknowledge important assumptions which inform contemporary studies of house-holds and families. These suppositions hold true for many societies, like early twentieth-century Puerto Rico, where communal solidarities were essential tools of daily survival. One such assumption is that the household boundaries identified in censuses and other administrative documents are never rigid, and that kin and non-kin networks of soli-darity, familial bonding, and assistance typically cross those boundar-ies and extend outward into contiguous areas —in Puerto Rico’s case, the housing units surrounding a batey (a communal space or neigh-borhood), a barrio (ward), a larger administrative unit, and larger ter-ritories beyond, such as a municipio (equivalent to a U.S. county) or a region. While it is true that non-nucleation and dispersal were pre-vailing settlement patterns in rural Puerto Rico since early Spanish colonial times, the fact is that even such non-nucleated or dispersed rural populations recognized the interdependence of several house-holds (kin-based or not) spread across a certain space. Thus, when one refers to households as single units, there is a high risk of not paying sufficient attention to the importance of kin and non-kin rela-tionships which cemented communal solidarities across and between households, and were vital for the survival and well-being not only of people in those residential units, but in the community at large.

With that caveat in mind, it is still conceivable that people’s grow-ing reliance on nuclear family and living arrangements after 1910, as observed from the PUMS data, was a specific response —whether of the household unit itself or of social groups straddling two or more households— to the profound changes taking place in Puerto Rico’s rural economy. Across the island’s countryside, the development of agrarian capitalism proceeded at a faster pace in the first thirty years of the twentieth century than at any other time before or since. The adaptations forced upon families and households by this economic transition —still largely unexplored— must have been huge.17 Amidst an unprecedented turn toward individual production and exchange, which disrupted and rendered obsolete kin- or community-based eco-nomic networks, Puerto Rican peasants may have chosen the nuclear household as a unit better suited to the novel conditions of labor and exchange.

A robust Latin American literature on capitalism’s impact on “tra-ditional” family life lends support to our hypothesis. In her work on the



southern Andes, for example, sociologist Jane Collins seeks to under-stand the manner in which a Western category such as that of “the household” began to make sense among Aymara peasants of Perú with the advance of capitalist forms of production and exchange. Affirming that “the participation of Andean peasants in wage and commodity markets weakens networks of non-household relationships and creates an emphasis on the nuclear family that previously did not exist...,” she posits that capitalist relations in the countryside operate in a trans-formative manner: “at the level of our analytical categories and the level of concrete economic processes, the capitalist economy imposes the household on Aymara cultivators” (Collins 1986:653, 668). It is, moreover, the independent, nuclear household that is imposed by the introduction of cash cropping and wage labor.18

Although Aymara peasants in the 1980s and Puerto Rican peas-ants 1910s were arguably worlds apart, there is much to be learned about the latter from Collins study. Indeed, two strong tendencies evi-dent in our analysis of the 1910 and 1920 PUMS render her interpreta-tion a viable explanation for the sharp increase in nuclear households in 1910s Puerto Rico. The first is that the turn toward the nuclear family was more intense in the rural areas, where the effects of an accelerating colonial capitalism were being felt most profoundly in the inter-censal period. While capitalist relations of production and exchange had affected Puerto Rico’s urban and rural workers since the nineteenth century, there is no question that during the 1910s the rural population was being more profoundly and rapidly transformed by the expansion of sugarcane and tobacco agriculture since the U.S. invasion, and by the even more recent spread of home-based needle-work. A further reason to credit Collins’ hypothesis is that by far the greatest conversion to nuclear households in 1910s Puerto Rico took place among the rural black population, who disproportionately occu-pied the lowest rungs of the socio-economic structure. The aggregate impact of racially discriminatory practices and the legacies of a slave system exhausted only a couple of generations earlier likely made black rural residents more susceptible to proletarianization than the more entrenched lighter-skinned (and never-enslaved or long-freed) peasantry.19 Put another way, the rise in nuclear households among rural blacks conjugated the well-known effects of race and class in a society which, like Puerto Rico, was “structured in dominance.”20

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ConclusionThe foregoing discussion of household composition in Puerto Rico underscores the value of the PUMS data for the study of social history and historical demography. Until now, we have been limited in our ability to grasp more than just the outlines of social life across distinc-tions that were meaningful to Puerto Ricans of the early twentieth cen-tury. If household composition is seen as a barometer, these variations followed, to some degree, ecological, spatial and economic lines, but were even more sharply drawn —in ways unexpected to us— along racial and gender lines.

The new data allow us to observe and document the country’s social diversity with greater detail and nuance. Under the kind of scru-tiny allowed by the microdata, household composition, distribution, and formation will surely be among the most brightly illuminated. Over the coming years, as other scholars use the PUMS to expose with even finer detail the interconnections between family and society, these rich data sets will suggest many more features of a society caught in the throes of a colonial-capitalist transformation whose speed and intensity was matched by few others in the twentieth century.

Families are institutions that both reflect and constitute larger social forces. For the case at hand, the composition and distribution of households reflected many of the changes cascading through Puerto Rico’s social fabric during the transition to U.S. colonialism and to a relentless agrarian capitalism. The contrasts between urban and rural, for example, were deeper and farther-reaching than we may have realized, as the above discussion has tried to establish. In the 1910s, migration from depressed rural areas was beginning to reshape the larger cities and towns, and while it also had begun to affect the coastal strips where sugarcane farming was resurgent, it had not recast those communities as deeply as it appears to have done the cities. We should perhaps have expected this to be so, since rural to urban migration had been taking place now for many decades, but the fact is that the histori-ography has not placed on the movement of people to cities and towns the emphasis it is due. Be that as it may, in terms of household compo-sition the rural/urban divide was larger than we expected to find, while the contrasts between ecological and economic regions of Puerto Rico were smaller. Notwithstanding the obvious socio-cultural differences between these regions —variations explained by sharply different economic conditions as well as historical factors (land use, ownership patterns, market conditions, the nature and extent of capitalist relations



of production, crop types, etc.)— rural households, or more precisely, households devoted to monocrop production, presented impressive consistencies. Among households where sugar, tobacco, and coffee provided almost the sole means of employment outside the home, for example, not only did nuclear households predominate, but they were expanding at a fast rate throughout the 1910s, perhaps because their economic roles in a waged and commodified environment were now more sharply drawn. For households with assorted employment out-lets (i.e., household members worked in more than one type of enter-prise) extended and stem households were much more common. In rural Puerto Rico, then, the nuclear household strongly correlated with the “new economy” of monocrop production in sugar and tobacco, especially, and, not unexpectedly, with the “old economy” of coffee production in the highlands, an economy which suffered during and after World War I a severe shock from which it would never recover.

Our analysis has also sought, perhaps with blunt analytical instru-ments, to underscore the significance of race and of racialized space in the making of the Puerto Rican family. One of our main findings bears repeating here: that race mattered a great deal in the composi-tion and distribution of families, and that certain patterns cannot be explained unless one resorts to a historically layered explanation of its demonstrable influence in shaping Puerto Rican household patterns. Although we have been able only to trace the outlines of this influence, we believe it is potent enough to warrant a deeper, analytically more nuanced, and statistically more robust investigation. Social historians and historical demographers would do well to explore this relation-ship further. Along with newer work that demonstrates the politically constituted silence of racial discourse and racially based claims, we believe that research into the ways in which Afro-Puerto Ricans, some still bearing the mark of legal enslavement in 1910 and 1920, whether in their own person or in that of their immediate ancestors, chose to constitute their family lives differently than others around them —gen-erally in non-nuclear, female-headed and/or individual and single-par-ent households, with a strong preference for urban residence— is a frontier of knowledge worth extending.21

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United States Senate. Bailey K. Ashford, M. D. and Pedro Gutiérrez Igaravidez, M. D. 1911. Uncinariasis (Hookworm Disease) in Porto Rico: A Medical and Economic Problem, 61st Cong., 3d Sess. Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

University of Puerto Rico, School of Tropical Medicine. 1946. El problema poblacional de Puerto Rico. San Juan: Administración General de Suministros, Oficina de Servicios, División de Imprenta.

Vázquez Calzada, José Luis. 1988 [1978]. La población de Puerto Rico y su trayectoria histórica. Río Piedras: Escuela de Salud Pública, Universidad de Puerto Rico.

Wade, Peter. 1993. Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia. Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Notes1 See Laura Briggs (1997). For an honestly neo-Malthusian explanation of

the “overpopulation problem,” see Cofresí (1951 and 1968). For a critical appraisal, see Parrilla-Bonilla (1974).

2 The literature on Puerto Rican demography is vast. The best one-volume survey of the island’s population history is Vázquez Calzada (1988). Classic U.S.-based studies include: Thieme (1959); Presser (1973); Hill and Stycos (1959); Davis (1948); Combs and Davis (1951); Feldman and Hatt (1953); Senior (1953); and many others. In Puerto Rico itself, a rich literature based mostly on empirical studies of the peasantry began to appear in the 1910s and 1920s, examples of which are: Gutiérrez Igaravídez and Ashford (1911); Pérez (1926); and Fernós Isern (1928). After World War II, island-based demographers, some of them critical of studies based in the United States, contributed to the ongoing debates; see especially Janer (1949); Chaves (1949); Cofresí (1968); and School of Tropical Medicine (1946), among others. On population control cam-paigns and their colonialist ramifications, see Ramírez de Arellano and Seipp (1983) and Briggs (2002).

3 A full description of sampling procedures and sample characteristics of these samples in Kristen Velyvis, Theresa Thompson-Colón, and Halliman Winsborough, “Public Use Samples of the 1910 and 1920 Puerto Rico Censuses,” in this issue. Briefly, the data files are 1-in-10 samples for most of the island with over-samples (1-in-5) for the coffee regions. Sampling weights are used in the present analysis to correct for over-sampling.

4 This is in line with trends in the study of the family in the social sciences and demography. Bongaarts writes: “The social sciences, including socio-logy, economics, and anthropology, have long recognized the importance of families and households and there are extensive corresponding literatu-



res. In contrast, demographers have neglected the quantitative dimensions of the size, composition, and change in households and their causes and consequences.” Bongaarts (2001:263).

5 The work of R.T. Smith and M.G. Smith on the English-speaking Caribbean stands out among these contributions. See, for example, by the former, R. Smith (1956 and 1957); and by the latter, M. Smith (1962a and 1962b). For fine summary of Puerto Rico’s agrarian history, see Dietz (1986) and Bergad (1978). The concept of a “rural proletariat” is associa-ted with the work Sidney W. Mintz did on Puerto Rican sugar workers. See especially Mintz (1960).

6 For an excellent summary of The People of Puerto Rico, see Steward (1953). Lauria-Perricelli (1989) presents a critical overview of the pro-ject. For the significance of the culture history approach, see Fernández Méndez (1970).

7 Regarding jíbaros as a timeless people, for whom change came very slowly, if at all, has a long tradition in the Puerto Rican environment. In a report on hookworm disease authored in 1911 by two medical authorities, Bailey K. Ashford and Pedro Gutiérrez Igaravídez, jíbaros were described as “[living] now as they lived 100 or 200 years ago, close to the soil.” Ashford and Gutiérrez Igaravídez (1911:12).

8 See Velyvis, Thompson-Colón, and Winsborough, “Public Use Samples of the 1910 and 1920 Puerto Rico Censuses,” in this issue.

9 These shapefiles were the work of Katherine J. Curtis White, which she developed while on an NICHD fellowship (T32 HD07014 and F32 HD052345-01) at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Demography and Ecology in 2003-2006, with the assistance of Bill Buckingham at the University of Wisconsin’s Applied Population Laboratory. The shapefi-les are available through the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) project at the Minnesota Population Center and through White.

10 De Vos (1987). See also her fuller treatment of the subject in (1995).11 The census defined an urban district or urbanized area as an incorporated

place with at least 2,500 inhabitants.12 Historical demographers have engaged in and encourage a critical reflec-

tion of traditional demographic categories by taking into account the con-texts in which the categories are applied. See, for example, Szreter et al. (2004) edited collection as well as Kertzer and Arel (2002).

13 For an excellent discussion of race and region in an instructive Latin American case, see Wade (1993).

14 See Higman (1978); Craton (1979). For insights into the Puerto Rican slave family, see especially Stark (1996a and b). Stark has uncovered a

scarano, WhiTe


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much more “stable” slave family pattern in eighteenth-century Puerto Rico, despite the high rate of consensual unions.

15 On San Juan, see Matos Rodríguez (1998 and 1999). On Ponce, see Findlay (1999).

16 For the finest analysis yet of this “silencing”, see Rodríguez-Silva (2004).

17 For the best synopsis of what these changes meant in the lives of rural or small-town Puerto Ricans, see Picó (1983).

18 Other scholars who have studied Latin American cities have found a somewhat opposite effect: as capitalist relations of labor and exchange multiplied, households tended to get larger and more complex. See, for instance, Kuznesof (1980).

19 On the racial differential in rural proletarianization, see Mintz (1960), Giusti-Cordero (1994).

20 We borrow the term from Hall (1980).21 The work of Isar Godreau-Santiago has filled in many of the ethnographic

details for one such “black and mulatto” community in Ponce: San Antón. See her Godreau (2002).

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