The late Christopher Schmidt-Nowara gives the name of the “conquest of history” to the archival curation of national histories in what would become Spain’s former colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century.[1] In the case of Puerto Rico, works like Biblioteca histórica de Puerto Rico by Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, Los indios borinqueños by Agustín Stahl, La prehistoria de Puerto Rico by Cayetano Coll y Toste, among others, were all attempts to imagine a premodern Caribbean with its originary peoples, flora and fauna before its Spanish colonization. A rival and supplementary archive emerged in the United Stated States at the dawn of the Spanish-American War as a publishing frenzy consisting of memoirs, official reports conflating topographical surveys, agricultural prospects, reports of customs, theories of race, population, and hygiene, and the contested histories of Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.[2]

A curious contribution to this repository is Adam Haeselbarth’s 1907 novel, Patty of the Palms, which narrates the Caribbean rendezvous of a young American couple, Howell and Patty, exploring their prospects in the new island territory. As the couple strolls through the weary, centenary streets of Old San Juan in Puerto Rico, they reach the old cathedral of St John the Baptist and venerate the relics of its Roman martyr St Pius. Howell and Patty are mesmerized by the visage of Puerto Rico’s past:

the queer old homes of Cristo street with their massive doors and windows and overhanging balconies, catching glimpses of deep hallways and alleys leading into open courts which are bits of the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella transported, the sightseers were driven to the front of the Cathedral ever the center of memories of an ancient Catholic city. Before its stations, shrines and rich altar, in the quiet of its spacious nave, millions of prayers have ascended to the Deity from the high and the mighty and humblest beggar. A century before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, its walls, unchanged to-day by the touch of time, were raised.[3]

As subtext to this romantic stroll, was the question of the ownership of perceived patrimony. The American occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898 meant a definitive break in any vestiges of the centenary traditions of the real patronato, that is royal patronage controlling major appointments of Church officials and the management of Church revenues and properties under the terms of concordats between the Spanish crown and the Holy See. A question that lingered as Howell and Patty enjoyed the imagined pristine past of the old walled city was: Who owns the properties claimed by the church, municipalities, and other entities?

A commemorative coin issued in 1908 celebrating 400 years of the colonization of Puerto Rico, “Cuarto Centenario.”

As Nadia Altschul reminds us, it has survived as a historical truism of sorts that the Iberian nations that colonized the Caribbean, Central, and South America had purportedly not advanced from their late ancient and medieval, premodern world to modernity.[4] The church property disputes in Puerto Rico carried a decade of litigation (1898-1908) that put this truism to the test through dozens of cases that ended up in the Supreme Court of the United States.[5] Ending a decade of litigation, Chief Justice Melville Fuller led a unanimous ruling on June 1, 1908 in favor of the Catholic Church in Municipality of Ponce v. Roman Catholic Apostolic Church in Porto Rico (1908).[6] This decision is a bewildering survey of European Christian history, Roman, and Spanish law taking its cues from Anglican minister Henry Hart Milman’s multi-volume History of Latin Christianity published throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.[7] Chief Justice Fuller and his fellow justices counted with a wide trajectory of legal challenges that the Catholic Church had experienced in the emerging and expanding United States, but to settle the matter of the legitimacy of the Church as a claimant to the properties in question they lingered on a familiar specter and their own version of a global, trans-temporal late antiquity:

The Roman Catholic Church in Porto Rico is a juristic personality and a legal entity under the laws of Porto Rico, as it had always been under the Spanish laws in force in the island at the time of the ratification of the Treaty of Paris [that ended the Spanish-American War and made Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam and the Mariana Islands American colonies]. The Roman Catholic Church has been recognized as possessing a legal personality and a capacity to take and acquire property since the time of the Emperor Constantine.[8]

Furthermore, the decision appealed to the sixth-century Code of Justinian, “The strictest prohibition against alienating the property of the church exists in that code, and it provides that the alienation of church property shall not take place, even with the assent of all the representatives of the church, since these rights ‘belong to the church,’ and the church is the mother of religion; and as faith is perpetual, its patrimony must be preserved in its entirety perpetually.”[9] To say the least, these Caribbean versions of Constantine and Justinian turned Puerto Rico into one of the outermost and unlikeliest of territories of a Transatlantic Roman Empire, an eruption of late antiquity into the so-called American Century.

Image from inside San José Church, Puerto Rico [Image courtesy of the author].

The Ponce decision is many things; certainly, a historical justification of expropriation and/or appropriation, another episode in what Brenna Bhandar calls the colonial lives of property. One of its more compelling and jarring aspects is its play on temporalization as a linear, unavoidable sentence and its iteration of what Anibal Quijano calls the coloniality of power, namely the intricate system and the living legacies of colonialisms in contemporary societies in various forms (legal, gendered, racial, economic, environmental, etc.).[10] In her recent monograph, Year 1, philosopher Susan Buck-Morss invites readers to cultivate a “diasporic consciousness” by thinking a historical commons as a tentative connection of the fragments of history, rather than the irrefutable certainties of cosmopolitan linear universality.[11] As a historian of Late Antiquity trying to parse the elsewhere of the refulgence of those pasts, Constantine and Justinian do not have to be its most obvious specters. One has to think of the different groups that inhabit these worlds, I have to think about amulets, translations and texts in close to a dozen languages beyond the Mediterranean basin, angels, demons, and other nonhuman lives, the enslaved, female scribes, monks, pilgrims, experts, and patrons, councils, controversies, and the various experiments devoted to how to live life. I want to keep in mind and paraphrase Saidiya Hartman’s invitation and rise to the challenge of guessing at the world, seizing at chance, eluding the law and transforming the terms of the possible.[12]

[1] Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).

[2] Lanny Thompson, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘I Press, 2010); Bonnie M. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).

[3] Adam Haeselbarth, Patty of the Palms (New York: The Kenny Publishing Co., 1907), 75.

[4] Nadia R. Altschul, Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

[5] For a more detailed account see Edward Berbusse, The United States in Puerto Rico 1898-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966); Elisa Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church in Colonial Puerto Rico (San Juan: Edil, 1982); Gerardo Alberto Hernández Aponte, La iglesia católica en Puerto Rico ante la invasion de Estados Unidos de América: Lucha, sobrevivencia y estabilización (1898-1921) (San Juan: Academia Puertorriqueña de la Historia/UPR, 2013); David Maldonado Rivera, “‘A Perfect Irrevocable Gift’: Recognizing the Proprietary Church in Puerto Rico 1898-1908,” in At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 37-50.

[6] 210 U.S. 296 (1908).

[7] On the culture of ecclesiastical history manuals of this period, see Elizabeth A. Clark, Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

[8] 210 U.S. at 302.

[9] 210 U.S. at 311-12.

[10] Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018); Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: View from the South 1.3 (2000): 533-80.

[11] Susan Buck-Morss, Year 1: A Philosophical Recounting (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021), 25-26.

[12] Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019), 349.

David Maldonado Rivera is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Kenyon College, specializing in Christianity in Late Antiquity. His areas of research include the emergence of cultures of expertise in heresiology, ethnic and racializing polemic in premodern contexts, and the legal debates between religion and law in the Caribbean post-1898. His current project focuses on the reception of late ancient and early medieval literary and legal tropes in early twentieth-century Spanish Caribbean literature.