The Routes of Struggle: Caribbean Organizing Networks in the Late 19th Century

Like contraband networks of earlier decades in the revolutionary Caribbean, networks of exile, organizing, and anti-colonial struggle in the latter half of the nineteenth century are slow to reveal themselves to historical record.  Some nodes of organizing, like those of Cuban and Puerto Rican pro-independence activists in Ybor City and New York City, are fairly well known.  Many others, however, were intentionally shrouded in secrecy or were simply the unremarkable product of everyday life, springing from regional trade, small-scale migration, and the circulation of news and ideas. 

In this paper, I consider the political organizing that sprang from several port towns in the late nineteenth century: Cockburn Town (Grand Turk), Puerto Plata (Dominican Republic), Mayagüez (Puerto Rico), and Roseau (Dominica).  Under different political regimes and sometimes-volatile economic circumstances, the residents of these towns were experiencing a period of pronounced transition.  The paper aims to reconstruct the political imaginaries of activists in these towns from the 1870s through the 1890s, as they lobbied for independence from Spain, rallied in opposition against local leaders, confronted the decline and centralization of sugar, and grappled with the shifting imperial influence in the region, particularly the rise in hegemony of the United States.  Common-sense geographies of travel, local migration, and political organizing increasingly united these residents across regime and circumstance. The paper explores how this “Caribbeanness” operated,