Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of the artisans as the nexus of intellectual resistance between the peasantry and the bourgeoisie in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. This new paradigm paved the way for the social conditions that launched the organized labor movement of the American century.

Paper long abstract:

The recent trend towards global restructuring has revived an interest in the Caribbean as a part of the greater picture of Global Studies, obscuring the relevance of local processes as an integral piece in developing an understanding of social and cultural systems. The dialectics of global and local processes necessitates a solid understanding of regional studies, for, as Sydney Mintz (1998) asserts, "it is within these local sites that people create their specificities". Thus, this study aims to analyze a specific form of resistance within the complex web of historical developments in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. It is contended herein that the artisans constituted the building block of intellectual resistance between the peasantry and the bourgeoisie in late Spanish colonial Puerto Rico. By the inherent character of their labor, artisans depended on a network of interrelated exchanges to survive, and they developed a conception of society based on the need of each producer for the other. As a result, a new ideology of resistance, based on acquiring the liberal ideals of the American republic, was born in the tobacco factories of Cuba and Puerto Rico. This paper will shed light into the ways in which the artisans' superior hierarchical position on the social scale allowed them to create a knowledge infrastructure that operated in the tobacco factories by means of readers and the press as vehicles to educate the workers and promote the new liberal ideals that gave way to the organized labor movement of the American century in Puerto Rico.