The unprepared visitor will find Porto Ricans astonishingly white, especially in the interior. There are few full negroes on the island; sixty per cent. of the population have straight hair. Yet there is a motley mixture of races, without rhyme or reason from our point of view. Mulatto estate owners may have pure white peons working for them; a native octoroon is frequently seen ordering about a Gallego servant from Spain. There is still considerable evidence of Indian blood in the Porto Rican physiognomy, for the aborigines, taking refuge in the high mountains, were wiped out only by assimilation. Then there are Japanese or Chinese features peering forth from many a hybrid face. The Spaniards brought in coolies to work on the military roads, and they mixed freely with all the lower ranks of the population. Yet pure-blooded Orientals are conspicuous by their absence; so overcrowded a community does not appeal even to the ubiquitous Chinese laundryman. For the same reason Jews, Syrians, and Armenians have not invaded the island in any great numbers, though one now and then meets an olive-skinned peddler tramping from village to town with a great flat basket filled with bolts of calico and the like on his cylindrical head.
Small commerce is almost entirely in the hands of Spaniards, thanks to whom the mixture of races that made Latin-America a hybrid is still going on—to say nothing of an exploiting of the simple jíbaros that would have been scorned by the old straight-forward, sword-brandishing conquistadores. The modern Spaniard, especially the Canary Islanders, come over as clerks, live like dogs until they have acquired an interest in their master’s business, and eventually set up a little store for themselves. Sharp, thrifty, heartless, utterly devoid of any ideal than the amassing of a fortune, they resort to every species of trickery to increase their already exorbitant profits. The favorite scheme is to get the naïve countrymen into a gambling game, manigua, the native card-game, for instance, and to urge them on after their scanty funds are exhausted with a sweet-voiced “Don’t let that worry you, Chico, I’ll lend you all you want. Go ahead and play,” until they have a mortgage on “Chico’s” little farm or have forced him to sign a contract to sell them all his coffee at half the market price. Then when his fortune is made, the wily Iberian leaves each of his concubines and her half-breed flock of children a little hut, goes back to Spain, marries, and bequeaths his wealth to his legitimate offspring. Many a little plantation is still encumbered with these “manigua mortgages.”
To the casual observer there seems to be no color-line in Porto Rico; but in home life and social matters there is comparatively little mingling of whites and blacks above the peon class. In the Agricultural College at Mayagüez, for instance, this question is left entirely to the pupils. The students draw their own color-line. Clubs are formed that take in only white members, though a few of these might not pass muster among Americans. The colored boys do not form clubs because they cannot afford to do so. In the early days the teachers gave a dance to which all students were invited without distinction. But the darker youths brought up all sorts of female companions from the playa hovels, and the experiment was never repeated. Yet it is no unusual sight to see a white and a mulatto youth sharing a textbook in the shade of a campus mango-tree.
There remain few strictly insular customs to distinguish Porto Rico from the rest of Latin-America. The native musical instrument is a calabash, or gourd, with a roughened surface over which a steel wire is rubbed, producing a half-mournful, rasping sound almost without cadence. Thanks perhaps to American influence, the church bells are musical and are rung only by day, in grateful contrast to the incessant, broken-boiler din of other Spanish-settled countries. The Rosario, a kind of native wake, consists of all-night singing by the friends and relatives of the recent dead. Possibly the most universal local custom is that of using barbed-wire fences as clothes-lines, to the misfortune even of the linen of trustful visitors. The panacea for all rural ills seems to be the tying of a white cloth about the head. Doctors seldom go into the country, but let the sick be brought in to them, whatever the stage of their illness. More than ten thousand, chiefly of the hut-dwelling class, died of “flu” during the winter of 1918–19, largely because of this inertia of physicians.
One must not lose sight of their history in judging the present condition of the Porto Rican masses. It is only fifty years since slaves over sixty and under three were liberated, and later still that slavery was entirely abolished. No wonder the owners were glad to be rid of what fast breeding had made a burden, especially with free labor at twenty cents a day. Yet they were indemnified with eight million dollars from the insular revenues. Nor was servitude confined to Africans. Spain long used Porto Rico as a penal colony, and when public works no longer required them, the convicts were turned loose to shift for themselves. Most of them took to the mountains where the “poor white” population is numerous to this day. Yet the later generations are no more criminal than the Australians; if there is much petty thieving, it is natural in a hungry, overcrowded community.
The insular police established by the Americans have an efficiency rare in tropical countries. Their detective force rounds up a larger percentage of law-breakers than almost any other such body in the world. The insular character of their beat is to their advantage, of course; few Porto Ricans can swim. The island has long since been “cleaned up,” and the unarmed stranger is safer in its remotest corners than on Broadway. In olden days the Porto Rican was as fond of making himself a walking arsenal as the Dominican; ten thousand revolvers were seized in nine years, and miscellaneous weapons too numerous to count have been confiscated and destroyed. To-day, except in the rare cases when a desperado like “Chuchu” breaks loose, or strikers grow troublesome, the spotlessly uniformed insular force has little to do but to enforce the unpopular laws that have come with American rule.
Porto Rico voted herself dry in 1917. Three varying reasons are given for this unnatural action, according to the point of view of the speaker. Missionaries assert that, thanks largely to their work with the populace, the hungry rank and file determined that their children should not grow up under the alcoholic burden that had blasted their own success in life. Scoffers claim the people were misled by psychological suggestion. The majority make the more likely assertion that the result was largely due to a mistake on the part of the ignorant peons. The “dries” chose as their party emblem the green cocoanut, a favorite rural beverage. Their opponents decorated the head of their ballot with a bottle. Now, the bottle suggests to the jíbaros of the hills the Spaniards who keep the liquor shops, and they hate the Spaniards as fiercely as they are capable of hating anything. Whatever the workings of their obscure minds, the unshaven countrymen came down out of the mountains to the polls, and next morning Porto Rico woke up to find herself, to her unbounded surprise, “bone-dry.” The mere fact that the politicians and the “influential citizens” almost in a body, and even the American governor, who saw insular revenues cut down when they sadly needed building up, were against the change had nothing to do with the case. Since then the insular police have confiscated hundreds of home-made stills and thousands of gallons of illicit liquor. It is rumored that they would like to indict the Standard Oil Company as an accessory before the fact, for virtually all the stills that languish in the police museum in San Juan are made of the world-wide five-gallon oil can, some of them ingenious in the extreme.
Cockfighting was forbidden by American edict soon after we took over the island—and in retaliation the Porto Rican Legislature forbade prize-fighting, even “practice bouts.” But there is no law against keeping fighting-cocks, and where there are game-cocks there is bound to be fighting, at least in Latin-America. The police are on the constant lookout for clandestine riñas de gallos. One point in favor of the sleuths is that, though they cannot arrest people for harboring prize roosters, they can bring them up on the charge of cruelty to animals if they pick and trim the birds as proper preparation for battle requires. Americans who have lived long in Porto Rico assert that cock-fighting and the lottery are so indigenous to the island that there is little hope of really stamping them out. Indeed, even the police are in sympathy with the sport, though they may not let that sympathy interfere with doing their duty. High American officials sometimes ask what there is wrong in running a lottery, so long as other forms of gambling are permitted, especially as the old government lottery kept up many benevolences. Why, they ask, should not the poor man be allowed to “take a chance” as well as speculators on the stock exchange? Roosters and billetes are two things that are sure to come back if Porto Rico wins her autonomy during the life of the present inhabitants. Possibly the next generation will be like-minded; one of the absorbing tasks of the insular police is to keep street urchins from gambling on the numbers of passing automobiles.
It is not surprising that Porto Rico has more than her share of juvenile offenders. Sexual morality is on a low plane in the island. Though there is less public vice than with us, the custom of even the “best citizens” to establish “outside families” is wide-spread. Even the “Washington of Porto Rico,” who is pointed out as the model man of the island, always kept two or three queridas, and lost none of his high standing with the natives for that reason. Estate owners are well-nigh as free with the pretty wives of their peons as were old feudal lords. Women of this class are often more proud to have a son by the “señor” than by their own husbands. The latter are easy-going to a degree unknown among us; they may be cajoled by presents or threatened with discharge—and where else shall they find a spot to live on?—or at worst they can seek consolation in the arms of their own queridas. The men usually acknowledge their illegal children without hypocrisy, but they frequently abandon them to their own devices. Homeless children are one of the problems of all Porto Rican cities; in San Germán a gang of little ruffians roost in trees by night. The cook of an American missionary family openly gave all her wages, except what went for the rent of her hovel, to her “man,” who was married to another. It was not that he demanded it; there is little of the “white slave” attitude in Porto Rico, but she was proud to do so and it is costumbre del país. Much as they deplored such an employee, the missionaries endured her, knowing only too well by experience that they might look farther and fare worse. Few Porto Ricans of the better class permit their women to go to confession, however strictly they keep up the other forms of religion. Out of church the priests are frankly men like other men, and seldom have any hesitancy in admitting it. One famous for his pulpit eloquence brazenly boasts himself “the most successful lover in Porto Rico.”