Buena Vista: Life and Work on a Puerto Rican Hacienda, 1833-1904 - Paperback

by Guillermo Baralt (Author), Andrew Hurley (Translator)

This book traces the history of Buena Vista, an estate located in the southern foothills of Puerto Rico's central mountain range. Now a popular living history museum, Buena Vista flourished in the nineteenth century -- first as a farm that furnished food for the city of Ponce and surrounding plantations, later as a producer of corn and cornmeal ground at the estate's water-powered mill, and finally as a coffee plantation.
Drawing on an impressive range of primary sources, Guillermo Baralt portrays the estate's history as a series of overlapping changes: from slavery to salaried labor, from primitive processing techniques to the latest in mill technology, from Spanish rule to American control, and from hard-scrabble country life to life as part of the world marketplace. Richly illustrated and written in a lively narrative style, Buena Vista paints a compelling portrait of an era, an island, a family, and an estate, bringing a period in Caribbean history to vivid life.

Front Jacket

This translation of a Caribbean classic vividly captures the full history of Buena Vista, the 19th-century Puerto Rican estate that is now a popular living history museum.

Author Biography

Guillermo A. Baralt is professor of history at the University of Puerto Rico. Andrew Hurley is professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico.