For after all, San Juan is still a son of Spain, despite the patently American federal building that contains its post-office and custom-house. Its architecture is of the bare, street-toeing façade, interior-patio variety, its sidewalks all but imaginary, its noise unceasing. Beautiful as it looks from across the bay, heaped up on its nose of land, it has little of the pleasant spaciousness of younger cities, and withal no great amount of the Latin charm with which one imbues it from afar. Its Americanization consists chiefly of frequent “fuentes de soda” in place of its bygone cafés, and a certain reflection of New York ways in its larger stores, whose almost invariably male clerks sometimes know enough English to nod comprehendingly and bring an armful of shirts when one asks for trousers. Something more than that, of course; its dressier men have discarded their mustaches as a sign of their new citizenship, and many a passer-by who knows not a word of English has all the outward appearance of a continental American. Base-ball, too, has come to stay, though the counter influence may be detected in the custom of American schoolmarms of attending the bet-curdling horse races in the outskirts of the capital on Sunday afternoons.
The central plaza on a Sunday evening has a few notes of uniqueness to the sated Latin-American traveler. It is unusually small, a long, narrow rectangle with few trees or benches, cement paved from edge to edge, and burdened with the name of “Plaza Baldorioty.” The Porto Rican seems to like free play in his central squares; more than a few of them have been denuded of the royal palms of olden times, and are reduced to the bare hard level of a tennis-court. A few years ago a venturesome American Jew conceived the plan of providing concert-going San Juan with rocking-chairs in place of the uncomfortable iron sillas that decorate every other Sunday-evening plaza south of the Rio Grande. Strangely enough, the innovation took. Now one must be an early arrival at the weekly retreta if he would exchange his dime for even the last of the rockers that flank the Plaza Baldorioty four rows deep on each side. While the municipal band renders its classical program with a moderate degree of skill, all San Juan rocks in unison with the leader’s baton. All San Juan with the color-line drawn, that is; for whether it is true that the well-groomed insular police have secret orders to ask them to move on, or it is merely a time-honored custom, black citizens shun the central square on Sunday evenings, or at most hang about the outskirts. There is no division of sexes, however, another evidence perhaps of American influence. Señoritas sometimes good to look at in spite of their heavy coating of rice powder trip back and forth beside their visibly enamored swains as freely as if the Moorish customs of their neighboring cousins had long since been forgotten. For the time-honored promenade has not succumbed to the rocking-chair. One has only to turn his rented seat face down upon the pavement, like an excited crap-player, to assure his possession of it upon his return from the parading throng, whose shuffling feet and animated chatter drown out the music a few yards away, and no great harm done. In that slow-moving procession one may see the mayor and all the “quality” of San Juan, a generous sprinkling of Yankees, and scores of American soldiers who know barely a word of English, yet who have a racial politeness and a complete lack of rowdyism that is seldom attained by other wearers of our military uniform. Then suddenly one is aware of a tingling of the blood as the retreta ends with a number that, far from the indifference or scorn it evokes in the rest of Latin America, brings all San Juan quickly to its feet, males uncovered or standing stiffly at salute—the Star-Spangled Banner.
From the sea-wall one may gaze westward to Cabras Island, with its leper prisoners, and beyond to Punta Salinas, “poking its rocky nose into the boiling surf.” Ferries ply frequently across the bay to pretty Cataño, but it is far more picturesque at a distance. From San Juan, too, the tumbled deep-green hills behind the little town have a Japanese-etching effect in the mists of the rainy season that is gradually lost as one approaches them, as surely as when the sun burns it away.
But there is more to modern San Juan than this old Spanish city huddled together on its nose of rock. It has grown in American fashion not only by spreading far beyond its original area, but by boldly embracing far-flung suburbs within the “city limits.” Puerta de Tierra, once nothing more than the “land gate” its name implies, is almost a city of itself, a pathetic town of countless shacks built of tin and drygoods boxes, spreading down across the railroad to the swampy edge of the bay, where anemic babies roll squalling and naked in the dirt, and long lines of hollow-eyed women file by an uninviting milk-shop, each holding forth a pitifully small tin can. It is far out across San Antonio Bridge, however, that the capital has seen most of its growth under American rule. More than half of its seventy thousand, which have raised it, perhaps, to second place among West Indian cities, dwell in capacious, well-shaded Miramar and Santurce. Time was when its people were content to make the upper story of the old town its “residential section,” but it is natural that the desire for open yards and back gardens should have come with American citizenship.
Ponce, on the south coast, gives the false impression of being a larger city than the capital, loosely strewn as it is over a dusty flat plain and overflowing in hovels of decreasing size into the low foot-hills behind. It is the most extensive town in Porto Rico, and, like many of those around the coast, lies a few miles back from the sea, for fear of pirates in the olden days, with a street-car service to its shipping suburb of Ponce-Playa. Air-plants festoon its telephone wires, and its mosquitos are so aggressive that to dine in its principal hotel is to wage a constant battle, while to disrobe and enter a bathroom is a perilous undertaking.
It was carnival time when we visited Ponce. By day there was little evidence of it, except for the urchins in colored rags who paraded the streets and the unusual throngs of gaily garbed citizens who crowded the plaza on Sunday afternoon. At night bedlam broke loose, though, to tell the truth, the uproar was chiefly caused by automobile-horns. The medieval gaieties of this season have sadly deteriorated under the staid American influence. What there is left of them takes place chiefly within the native clubs, each of which has its turn in gathering together the élite of the city and such strangers as can establish their ability to conduct themselves with Latin courtesy. We succeeded in imposing ourselves upon the Centro Español. But there were more spectators than spectacle in its flag and flower-festooned interior. Toward ten the throng had thickened to what seemed full capacity, but it was made up chiefly of staid dowagers and solemn caballeros whose formal manners would have been equally in place at a funeral. Only a score of girls wore masks, and these confined their festive antics to pushing their way up and down the hall, squeaking in a silly falsetto at the more youthful oglers. Even confetti was strewn sparingly, evidently for lack of spirit of the occasion, for the mere fact that a small bag of it cost $1.50 seemed no drawback to those who would be revelers. At the unseemly hour of eleven the queen at length made her appearance, escorted to her throne by pages, knights and ladies-in-waiting, while courtiers flocked about her with insistent manners that could be called courteous only in Latin-American society. But her beauty was tempered by an expression that suggested bored annoyance, whether for the tightness of her stays or the necessity of avoiding lifelong disgrace by choosing one of these pressing suitors before a year had passed there was no polite means of learning. The most aggressive swain led her forth and the dancing began. It differed but slightly from a dance of “high society” in any other part of the world. I wandered into the “bar.” But alas! I had forgotten again that I was in my native land. There was something pathetically ludicrous in the sight of the score of thirsty Latin-Americans who gazed pensively at the candy, chewing-gum, and “soft drinks” that decorated what had once been so enticing a sideboard, for after all they were not of a race that had abused the bottled good cheer that has vanished.
Mayagüez was more like the ghost of a city than a living town. Its ugly plaza was a glaring expanse of cracked and wrinkled cement across which wandered from time to time a ragged, hungry-looking bootblack or a disheveled old woman, dragging her faded calico train, and slapping the pavement in languid regularity with her loose slippers. On his cracked globe pedestal in the center of the square the statue of Columbus stood with raised hand and upturned gaze as if he were thanking heaven that he had not been injured in the catastrophe. Of the dozen sculptured women perched on the balustrade around the place several had lost their lamps entirely; the rest held them at tipsy angles. The massive concrete and mother-of-pearl benches were mostly broken in two or fallen from their supports. Workmen were demolishing the ruined cathedral at the end of the square, bringing down clouds of plaster and broken stone with every blow of their picks, and now and then a massive beam or heavy, iron-studded door that suggested the wisdom of seeing the sights elsewhere. House after house lay in tumbled heaps of débris as we strolled through the broad, right-angled streets, along which we met not hundreds, but a scattered half-dozen passers-by to the block. The majority of these were negroes. The wealthier whites largely abandoned the town after the disaster. Spaniards gathered together the remnants of their fortunes and returned to more solid-footed Spain; Porto Ricans began anew in other parts of the island. The sisters of St. Vincent de Paul have a bare two hundred pupils now where once they had two thousand. It was hard to believe that this was a city of teeming, over-crowded Porto Rico.
Eighty years ago earthquakes were so continuous in this western end of the island that for one notable six months the population ate its food raw; pots would not sit upon the stoves. But the new generation had all but forgotten that. Guide-books of recent date assert in all sincerity that “Porto Rico is as free from earthquakes as from venomous snakes.” Then suddenly on the morning of October 11, 1918, a mighty shake came without an instant’s warning. Within twenty seconds most of Mayagüez fell down. The sea receded for several miles, and swept back almost to the heart of the town, tossing before it cement walls, automobiles, huge iron blocks, débris, and mutilated bodies. Miraculous escapes are still local topics of conversation. A merchant was thrown a hundred yards—into a boat that set him down at length on his own door-step. A great tiled roof fell upon a gathering of nuns, and left one of them standing unscratched in what had been an opening for a water-pipe. Scientists, corroborated by a cable repair-ship, explain that the sea-floor broke in two some forty miles westward and dropped several hundred fathoms deeper. Lighter quakes have been frequent ever since; half a dozen of them were felt all over Porto Rico during our stay there. The inhabitants of all the western end are still nervous. More than one American teacher in that region has suddenly looked up to find herself in a deserted school-room, the pupils having jumped out the windows at the first suggestion of a tremor.