![]() A la entrada de sus casas ó en los bateyes de las mismas, levantaban el signo de redención, ó sea cruces de madera, y rezaban diariamente el rosario, como su oración favorita. ![]() Eran estos vecinos muy católicos y a veces muy superticiosos. Pocas demandas ó ningunas se interponían y eran raros los asesinatos y desconocidos por completo el robo y el pillaje en esta comarca, así como en toda la isla. No existían escrituras públicas y según cuenta la tradición oral que se ha trasmitido hasta nuestros días, de padres á hijos al finalizar los contratos bervales, se arrancaban mútuamente un cabello de la cabeza, en señal de su cumplimiento, y rara vez, ó casi nunca, dejaban de llevarse á cabo sus pactos los cuales cumplían con religiosidad. Los compadres se estimaban como si fuesen hermanos, y todos los habitantes del partido se estimaban entre si con gran afecto y consideraciones. Se vivía como en familia y las viandas que faltaban en una casa se suministraban por los vecinos reciprocamente. Pocos sabían leer y menos escribir, pero había suma honradez en las compra-ventas y contratos. “ …Así se vivía en aquella época patriarcal y primitiva desprovista de ideales, aspiraciones y huérfana de comodidades, donde no habia a sola escuela en todo el partido. Neumann Gandia, Resena historica de sobre la fundacion y crecimiento del municipio de Moca Neumann Gandia’s Moca of the 1840s, p.82 Looking back at Resena, for early Puerto Rico, Neumann Gandia simply elides the topic (save for the statistics) yet the system of enslavement permeates the economic activity of the era he describes, the 1840s on. ![]() This excerpt acknowledges the experiences of Leoncia Lasalle and her daughter Juana Rodriguez Lasalle under bondage. Diaz Soler in Historia de la esclavitud negra en Puerto Rico. There are a couple of paragraphs detailing the presence of enslaved people in Moca since its founding. The 1972 book devoted two pages to mentions of enslavement: La Esclavitud Negra:( breves anotaciones) en Moca. Instead the intent is to write to reflect the struggle to live, have families or not, to stay or to go, to become part of groups that yielded forms of support, or produced a variety of creative expressions. This is not the same as a building a romanticized story of the past. These local histories can be crucial for creating the microhistories of our ancestors on different parts of the island. The purpose of Neumann Gandia’s text and its later iterations was on the importance of a cultural memory. Cultural Memory, ancestors & what gets overlooked… He married into the Yturrino family, whom i’ve written of in a previous post.Ĭover, Historia de Moca 1772-1972. Additional information builds out Neumann Gandia’s brief history and benefits from photographs of the location and personages, as for the biography of the educator Adolfo Emeterio Babilonia Quinones (1841-1884). There is no mention of the fact that Moca is an indigenous name, nor of any survival in these pages. Published by the Dept de Instruccion Publica, Estado Libre Associado de Puerto Rico, both organizations spoke to a particular moment of identification on local and state level, and a recognition of a shared history that extends to the eighteenth century. This text was the basis for the 1972 bicentennial publication, Historia de Moca 1772-1972, produced by Sociedad Civico-Cultural Pro-Conmemoracion del Bicentenario de Moca, Inc. You can download the pamphlet from the link at the bottom of the page. I made photographs of Neumann Gandia’s work, and (over 110 years later) ran it through an OCR program to make a PDF from the images. Haydee Reichard is making available through the Archivo Digital Nacional de Puerto Rico. He was an avid genealogist whose work continues to inform many today, and which Dra. Herman Reichard Esteves (1910-2005), who preserved this pamphlet and other archival materials, was a librarian and professor based in Aguadilla. He published his two volumes of Benefactores y hombres notables de Puerto-Rico: bocetos biográficos-críticos con un estudio sobre nuestros gobernadores generales, in 18, which contained mini-biographies of figures in government and business. Nor do can we tell the entire volume was by a single author, or if it was a collection that includes multiple municipalities. There’s no mention of what the original text was. It’s a brief 11 pages, taken from a larger work as can be seen from the numbered pages 79-90. Despite the homemade cover, this was one publication of at least two tracts by Neumann Gandia that served to circulate a brief history of a municipality. Two decades ago, I was in the Special Collections of U InterAmericana looking at their Herman Reichard Collection, where I photographed historian Eduardo Neumann Gandia’s Resena historica sobre la fundacion y crecimiento del municipio de Moca of 1910.
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