Grito de Lares

Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim's Puerto Rico's Revolt For Independence: El Grito De Lares may not be the best introduction to the frustrated assertion of Puerto Rican sovereignty, but it's definitely worthwhile. This study seeks to elucidate the factors that led up to the Grito de Lares and its defeat, beyond the nationalist interpretations or those of the Spanish colonial government explanations. Using a variety of archival sources and testimony from the defeated rebels, the social, economic, and political origins of the rebellion are clearly presented in a persuasive manner. While we are not sure if the reasoning of the author for why Puerto Rico's independence movement developed later than that of mainland Spanish America is valid, framing Puerto Rico as experiencing the type of colonization the mainland had experienced centuries before might be correct. 

We are just a little unsure about how the Puerto Rican case really differed from that of the Dominican Republic and, to a certain extent, Cuba. Like the DR, Puerto Rico was a marginal Spanish colony, but having the exceptional case of the Haitian Revolution and the change in sovereignty from French, Spanish and Haitian rule definitely made it different from Puerto Rico. But the Dominican nationalists had to fight another war of independence from Spain after Pedro Santana reinvited Spanish rule. Why did the War of Restoration succeed while Puerto Rico's independence movement failed to secure widespread support from hacendados, slaves, and jornaleros (besides those of Lares and nearby western regions)? Was it really due to the strong foreign provenance of many slaveholding landowners whose wealth and connections would have been necessary for the Creoles to successfully attain independence? Or the ambiguous promises of the revolutionaries to slaves and jornaleros who joined their cause?