Adriana Garriga Lopez

Native Bodies and Colonial Discipline

Prof. Anupama Rao

October 17, 2003

 

Lepers, Natives, and Nations:

Isla de Cabras Leper Colony and the Biopolitical History of Puerto Rico

 

Introduction

 

            This essay is about Isla de Cabras, which existed as a leper colony in Puerto Rico for a century or more.  In what follows I attempt to trace a geo-political history of the islet, and its historical movement from colonial fortification, to exilic leper colony, to military base, to National Historic Park and police arms training ground.  I want to show the interrelatedness of the history of Isla de Cabras to that of leper colonies in Hawaii, India, and other places in the (post?)colonial world from the late 19th century to the present, in terms of the strategies of medicalization, containment, and the exercise of colonial state power which constitute(d) leper colonies as special kinds of places.  I am interested in how social life in the isolated spaces of the leper colonies became the basis for a transformation of notions of citizenship, ironically through the very terms of social exclusion, and disfiguring difference: leper and native.  Further, I am looking for ways to understand the incommensurate conjunction of an “eco-tourist” ethos deployed as a political discourse that can refigure or rescue land “spoiled by its history[1],” and the simultaneous environmental devastation and military dissonance of Isla de Cabras National Historic Park.  Notions of culture, heritage, and national history come into play here as the colonial mark of difference, as the absent past (and absent or ghostly ‘natives’) which must be preserved so that it might be enjoyed by tourists and others, but through an incorporation of Puerto Rico into the national body of the United States (after the disappearance of the ‘native’ body) which both allows for the “protection” of the ‘national’ (natural) resources through agencies such as the EPA, and simultaneously performs the labor of “national” interests through military exercises, police arms and explosives training procedures, and recreational activities which ultimately threaten the stability and survival of Isla de Cabras, the San Juan Bay, and the health of the population[2].

 

A Bio-Political History of Isla de Cabras

 

Fig. 1

 

            The islet of Isla de Cabras is located on the northeastern coast of Puerto Rico.  It lies to the west of the old city of San Juan, and faces the castle of El Morro to the east.  Between the tip of Old San Juan and Isla de Cabras is the San Juan Harbor, the main northern port of entry to the interior of Puerto Rico through the Bayamón River, and a crucial point of defense for the island.  Ships entering the harbor had to pass between these two points of land, and they provided a natural defense of the bay for colonial Spanish forces.  It is probable that Isla de Cabras was inhabited by indigenous Taíno people before the Spanish arrived, since the latter are said to have encountered fierce resistance in the nearby area known as Caparra.  At present, the islet is connected to the Palo Seco (famous for the Bacardi Rum factory) and Caparra areas (see Fig. 1) by a low-lying narrow road which is protected by a causeway that “stabilizes” the shoreline[3] (visible in Fig. 2, below.)  All around Isla de Cabras to the North and Northwest are at least 5 different kinds of reef, and that area, along with the San Juan Bay, a series of other lagoons, channels, and mangrove forests form the San Juan Estuary.  This estuary measures about 75 square miles and was declared “an estuary of national significance and added to the National Estuary Program in October 1992[4].”  The estuary also has serious environmental problems, including high levels of arsenic, cadmium, chromium, cyanide, mercury, nickel, thallium, and zinc, and sediment contamination with pesticides, pathogens, and garbage.

            In 1610 the Spanish built the first fortification on Isla de Cabras, the fort known as “El Cañuelo,” but formally named the Fort of San Juan de la Cruz.  According to a U.S. National Parks Service website, El Cañuelo:

“was built to help control the estuary of the Bayamón River and thus close the channel between Palo Seco and Isla de Cabras to enemy shipping. The first construction was of wood, but this was burnt during the Dutch attack in 1625. It was rebuilt [in1670] in stone in its present form, square shaped with walls fifty feet long and fifteen feet high. It has a flat roof which serves as an artillery platform for up to 18 cannon, which may be directed to fire from all four sides[5].”

 

The crucial direction was in the east, towards El Morro, in order to protect the harbor. At one point, a long chain could be drawn between El Morro and El Cañuelo to prevent entrance into the harbor[6].  Along with the fort there would have been on Isla de Cabras a significant number of troops living or working in the fort.  My knowledge of the daily life or even of particular, singular incidents in the history of the Isla de Cabras leper colony is curtailed by the limitations of my access to a recent article in a Brazilian journal by Julie H. Levison entitled “Beyond quarantine: a history of leprosy in Puerto Rico, 1898-1930s,” which she wrote, according to her abstract of this essay, on the basis of primary source materials written in Spanish in order to “reconstruct the social history of leprosy in Puerto Rico when the United States annexed this island in 1898[7].”  This is the only such article on leprosy in Puerto Rico[8].  However it is public knowledge that at the end of the 19th century, a leprosarium was built near the fort.

 

 Fig. 2

 

Then governor of Puerto Rico Segundo de la Portilla set the first stone of the building on the 17th of December, 1876, and construction was completed in 1883[9].  I would venture that the building could have been constructed where the leper colony was already existent, or that the colony and the housings grew simultaneously during the 7 years of construction. 

            The U.S. trained civil engineer (and Unionist Resident Commissioner to Washington, DC, from 1901-1911,) Tulio Larrinaga (1842-1917) worked on the “reconstruction” of the lepers building[10].  Early in the American occupation of Puerto Rico, the leprosarium was brought into the management of the colony (this time I mean the Puerto Rican one.)  The building signified the medicalized inscription of the colony as an official site; an approved, geographically appropriate site for the care of socially exiled people.  In 1908 there was a historic lighthouse described as a “two-story gray stone structure with white trimming, with [a] short cylindrical tower on one corner supporting a black lantern[11].” The lighthouse was given a new stone tower in 1937, was replaced by a skeletal metal tower in 1965, and was later demolished[12].  This lost lighthouse is in some lighthouse enthusiasts’ view, an historic construction.  This intimates that had it survived, it would have formed part of the San Juan National Historic site and part of the tourist attractions of Puerto Rico, or rather, that it remains as a part of it that is ghostly, or as a memory. 

 

Fig. 3, Isla de Cabras leprosarium.

 

            When the U.S. conducted its first federal census in Puerto Rico in 1910, there were a total of 35 people living in Isla de Cabras, counting Sebastian Padilla, the head of the leprosarium, his wife and mother-in-law, 10 employees, and 22 residents[13]. (By way of contrast, at the time of the census there were 66 patients in a tuberculosis hospital in Santurce[14].)  “Isla de Cabras” served in the census documentation as both a designation of the geographical area or the name of the “barrio,” and also as the name for/of the leprosarium itself. The original construction of the leprosarium still stands, and its ruins are considered to be part of the historical interest of the islet (see Fig. 3, above.)  In 1926 a leper asylum (“lepricomnio”) was inaugurated in Trujillo Alto next to a church, where lepers were move to, and where the tents of those who survived remained well into the late 20th century[15].  Patients were confined to the colony, as they had been before on Isla de Cabras.

            By the 1940’s, when the U.S. inaugurated Fort Amezquita a few hundred feet from El Cañuelo, Isla de Cabras was no longer a leper colony in any formal sense.  During World War II, Amezquita served as a “military reservation” or a “concrete gun battery” for the U.S. Army, was used by Battery Reed (1941 – 1948,) and contained “a 155mm GPF panama-mounted gun battery, and an Anti Motor Torpedo Boat battery[16].”  The base received its guns from Ft. Delaware, Florida[17].  It is this part of the islet which is now used by local police as a shooting range and training area (see Fig. 4, “Academia de la Policia” Police Academy.)  The remaining 24.89 acres of land were part of a land transfer to the Puerto Rico Department of Sports and Recreation, which declared it a Recreation Area and opened the Isla de Cabras Recreational Park.  Children and young adults are taken to this park on school field trips, and it is favored for this because of low traffic and its clearly delimited area.  It is a small place.

 

 Fig. 4

 

            I remember going to Isla de Cabras when I was in grade school on a special art project field trip, where we were instructed in how to make sand art with molds, shells, and plaster.  We were not allowed to get in the water, because, we were told, it was dirty.  As we picked the sand for artifacts for our “sand art,” we found hypodermic needles, a tampon, and other unpleasant things.  In the background we could hear the sharp noise of guns firing, and were told by our teachers and other students that the police were learning how to shoot.   The police training area is fenced off but is not totally inaccessible.  In the mid 90’s two trailers on the police grounds were discovered to hold full cargos of corroded explosives and pyrotechnics.  An EPA associate reported that:

Public entry to the area was evidenced by the fishing tackle debris, cigarettes, and alcohol containers strewn about the trailers which contained the pyrotechnic materials. The site was run by the Puerto Rico Police Department (PRPD) for weapons qualifications, explosive demolition training and explosive storage.  At the site, two 40 foot truck trailers were staged and packed full of police confiscated explosive, fireworks and pyrotechnic material. These materials had been stored in uncontrolled temperature and humidity conditions since 1992. The material was stored in concrete bunkers and then repackaged into trailers in October 1997, where the materials continued to deteriorate until their destruction in June/July 1999. The trailers were located about 50 feet from the bay, so salt water intrusion severely deteriorated the trailers making them non-road worthy. In addition, the high humidity and possible water damage only accelerated the deterioration of the materials[18].

The explosives and such found in the trailers were detonated within the police training grounds.

            Today the recreational park and the police training grounds coexist on the islet, and people still fish, play, and swim there.  The EPA states that it is participating in efforts to protect the ecosystem of the San Juan Bay, the estuary, and the San Juan Watershed in general, but it remains to be seen whether these efforts alongside those of the local Puerto Rico Environmental Quality Board will be able to deter the effects of multiple kinds of contamination and habitat destruction[19].  Even with these environmental problems, however, the site is hailed as a destination for tourists and as a recreational haven for the local population.  The creation of the National Historic Park of Isla de Cabras incorporated the islet into the preservationist logic of historical significance, and at the same time eerily interpenetrated colonial military history and ongoing police training with public recreational activities.

 

Colonial Containment

 

            The leper colony at Kalaupapa in Moloka’i, Hawaii, was founded in 1865 under U.S. American recommendation.  It was later incorporated or created as a National Historical Park in 1980 by a statute that refers in particular to the importance of respecting “the special needs of the leprosy patients residing in the Kalaupapa settlement[20].”  In their essay about the extant colony or “settlement” of Kalaupapa, Christine B. Harrington and Barbara Yngvesson argue that Kalaupapa “became the model for the legal banishment of leprous persons worldwide[21].”  Whatever merit the claims of a world-wide influence of Kalaupapa on forms of containment and imprisonment may or may not have, it seems a certainty that the U.S. American troops and police enforcing quarantines and disease control measures in Puerto Rico would have drawn from their earlier experiences in Moloka’i. 

 

People who had leprosary [sic] became “colonists” in a penal colony, rather than patients, and were condemned to a lifetime of exile where they were expected to care for themselves[22].

 

The reconfiguration of the leper colony as/into penal colony in Hawaii can be comparatively historicized through the leper colonies in India[23]. 

            In 1898, the year that both Puerto Rico and the Hawaiian islands were “annexed” to the United States, the British colonial administration in India passed the Lepers Act of 1898, also known as Act III of 1898, which “allowed for the segregation and medical treatment of pauper lepers[24].”  This Act provided official recognition to already existing leprosaria and asylums.  Because of the leper’s legacy of stigma and the belief that leprosy was a manifestation of the sin of the leper, the leprosaria demanded spiritual as well as medical attentions, and the Lepers Act facilitated their management by the church and missionaries, as well as by the colonial state[25].  In fact, according to Kakar, it was the “apprehensions if a leprosy epidemic in Hawaii in the 1880’s, followed by the death of Father Damien de Veuster, a Belgian priest who had elected to spend his days with leprosy patients isolated in an island off Hawaii, [that] signaled for many, the proof that leprosy was contagious[26].”  Proof of leprosy’s contagiousness or communicability, rather than the belief that it was a corporealization of the sinfulness of the soul of the leper, produced the need for confinement, although differentially enforced across institutions, colonies, and empires.  From then on the leper colony was a penal colony as well as a spiritual reformatory in India, and patients were confined to it.  Kakar states:

The asylum was a medical and penal institution, at once a sanctuary and a prison, a religious as well as a curative site, and any attempt to discuss the situation of the patient must negotiate these interrelated aspects.  Important aspects of discord between the patients and the asylum managements were (i) religious teaching, (ii) medical treatment, (iii) segregation of the sexes, all of which were enmeshed with (iv) the nature of confinement; and the expression of protest by asylum patients was determined by this to some extent[27].

 

All of these aspects, religious views on leprosy, capacities for medical treatment of the disease, sex segregation in asylums, and confinement were determined by the colonial policies of the British Empire in India.  In a sense, however, these aspects form part of the structure of the social implementation of colonial rule everywhere: religion and efforts at conversion, treatment of the body—its insertion into Western conceptions of health, disease, and proper organization, gendered policing (heavily influenced by religion), and practices of containment, circumscription, and surveillance.

            In Puerto Rico as in Hawaii during this time, the mechanisms of control must have turned on similar axes of culture and would have formed a complex web of material practices and symbolic ideations on and about the body, a delimitation of the contagious appendage of the social body.  In this sense, leper colonies were not invented, but were profoundly transformed by the development of medical techniques of supervision, isolation, and treatment, and of the reformation of deviant forms of life.  These techniques seek to bring the leper colony to the “threshold of modernity[28].”

            By the 1930’s the threshold of modernity, which Foucault describes as “reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies,” resided in a different political strategy from that of the “colony” model of leprosaria.  As treatment for the disease became more widely available, the hospital or asylum became the dominant form of internment, remaking lepers as patients.  It wasn’t until 1902 that Kalaupapa had a resident physician (Dr. William Goodhue) and medical care was offered to those living out life sentences in the leper colony.  Once the colony had been refigured by medical intervention, however, the “community” of Kalaupapa was “constituted […] by the ideology and practice of quarantine, which was maintained and enforced by the Department of Health and pervasive in every aspect of daily life […[29]]  Although quarantine as a practice was in use long before the advent of biomedicine, the routinization of clinical practice transformed institutions and places of quarantine and isolation, in some cases abandoning them for more modern, enclosed facilities, as with Isla de Cabras.  In others, for example Kalaupapa, the politicization of bodies, ‘native’ life, and national culture produced composite forms of citizenship within structures of governmentality, such that despite the harsh conditions of their exile, Kalaupapa was re-signified as “home” in the imaginaries of the people living there.  One patient/resident of Kalaupapa explains that: “the fences are in my body[30].”

            The competing forces that brought the leper settlement into the jurisdiction of particular forms of law (i.e. colonial, imperial) also constituted it as an exception to the social body of the new territorial acquisitions.  In a sense, Kalaupapa developed both as a result of the law which served to circumscribe and quarantine lepers, but also as an exception to it, in that the colony was in many ways autochthonous in relationship to the governmental structures which enforced its isolation. Harrington and Yngvesson argue that the land made available to “peoples defined as “native” by the federal government” was offered under “political pressure[s,]” and that it was offered because it was “throwaway land, either agriculturally worthless (Jaimes, 1992:127) or spoiled by its history (as in Kalaupapa[31].)”  The leasing practices of the federal government which resulted in part from the perceived necessity of preserving the legacy of the lepers confined to Kalaupapa as a particular form of indigenous life, and the establishment of the National Historic Park had to reconcile in some way the conceptual and material slippage here between ‘native’ and ‘leper.’  This reconciliation can be said to have happened through a fetishization of “indigenous culture,” but also through the demands of the inhabitants of Kalaupapa,  and through the commodification of the identity of the leper, or the leper colony, as a “valued (commodified) resource for a culture industry because righting the wrong committed by the state (exiling and incarcerating people with leprosy until the late 1960s), through statutory entitlement of life tenancy necessarily retains the identity of “lepers,” however, it—the law—inverts their legal status by constituting a hybrid[32].”  This hybrid is both native and leper, and the political claims s/he makes as each or both are not totally differentiable.

 

 

Eco-Tourism and the Strange Turns of Pathologized Spaces

           

            In the introduction to their essay, Harrington and Yngvesson describe the role of the provision of construction of “conceptual access” to pathologized spaces in transforming Kalaupapa from a zone of total social exile to one of historical and cultural import, as well as an attractive place to visit.  They state:

 

Eco-tourism is about making local places globally accessible.  This access is not simply a matter of transportation, but requires making remote places conceptually accessible and desirable, as well as politically feasible.  At Kalaupapa, “conceptual access” is shaped by the representation of the leprosarium in the media as a “piece de resistance” of local culture, “home to a historic colony,” a “special place” where “patients themselves guide tours” and where visitors can conquer the steep, once insurmountable barrier of the pali […[33]]

 

Making leper colonies into exciting tourist destinations involves a complicated process of shifting significations and demarcations of space, culture, ecology, and historical legacy[34].  Leprosy is no longer an incurable disease, therefore the fear of infection is relatively easy to dispel, making contact with the inhabitants of Kalaupapa, or with the space itself, seem much less deadly.  In Isla de Cabras of course, there are no more lepers, there is only the stone structure of the building which housed the lepers.  Ruins of old buildings are even less threatening than de-pathologized populations.  Conceptual access to colonial ruins needs very little buttressing, since tourism in the colonial world depends on these quaint fortresses and fortifications as indices of ‘local culture’ and history.  The accumulation of cultural meaning within these “historic places” makes it possible to cast them in the light of exceptionality and exoticism.  In the case of leper colonies, extant or extinct, the tortured lives and deaths of their inhabitants mark the spaces as ‘weird’ or morbidly interesting.  Because of the historical isolation that was required of leper colonies, they are now often places with minimal industrial or residential development, making them easily amenable to reconfiguration within an ecological ethics of tourism.  What is the place of culture here?

            Isla de Cabras differs from Kalaupapa in some regards, the main one being that there are no “native” people inhabiting the land; no one lives on Isla de Cabras anymore.  Whereas Kalaupapa, as a community of (mostly indigenous) people, has undergone a whole series of transformations as a result of its re-insertion into Hawaiian political economy and has emerged with a particular sort of cultural valuation invested in the people living in Kalaupapa, Isla de Cabras is an ecologically damaged, uninhabited, and militarized space.  This is not to say that the processes observable in the history of Isla de Cabras have nothing to do with the political economy of Puerto Rico.  On the contrary, it is the very shifts in different strategies of governmentality and in political-economic priorities or strategies which produce the different moments of utility of Isla de Cabras: whether it should serve as a military base, as in WWII, or whether it should be safeguarded as a National Historic Park or ecologically significant area.  The San Juan Bay, which served as an entry point to Puerto Rico and made it a militarily crucial position for the Spanish as well as for the U.S. during WWII, and its surrounding waters, isolated the population of lepers on the islet, and this isolation in turn proved significant and useful for the Puerto Rican Police Department’s arms training needs, and is again useful to teachers, parents, and caretakers of children on day trips as it contains the children’s activity to a relatively small, easily supervised area. 

 

            Places such as Robben Island in South Africa, which has been both jail and leper colony, among other things, and Carville, Louisiana near New Orleans demonstrate the potentially great pull of exilic colonies on tourist consumers.  Here is a description of Carville from a New Orleans tourism web guide:

 

Today, there are 2,000,000 people afflicted worldwide, but only 31 patients still living on the grounds in Carville. The main building has been turned into a museum where visitors can see special pot handles that prevented patients from burning their fingers, special shirt buttons that were easy to open and close, adaptive devices to make life easier. Former and current patients act as tour guides. I was shown around by a woman who has been a resident for sixty-two years; her disease is controlled by medication, and she is cheerful[35].

 

The cheerful leper leading the tourists through the colony describing their institutionalization as a way of redressing the violent silencing of exiled lepers of days past has become a figure in the tourist imagination only through the reconfiguration of the image of the leper colony, and of leprosy (or incarceration, as something not to be forgotten, or to thrill us) itself.

            In the case of Kalaupapa the scene is a bit more complex, since ‘native’ people or the inhabitants of de-pathologized zones stake claims of citizenship and ownership on the wrongs committed against them or their historical entitlements.   The tourist industry is crucial in this valuation of the Kalaupapa settlement because according to Harrington and Yngvesson:

 

The “market value” of Kalaupapa (and, by association, of Moloka’i), is discounted in the mass tourism market because it is Kalaupapa, a term that for over a century has been synonymous with “horror.”  By contrast, alternative tourism (and thus a different kind of “market value”) is materializing there for this very reason.  As leprosarium, Kalaupapa has made possible the preservation of a “last Hawaiian place,” “a culture of originality which existed before the Western discoverer […[36]]

 

The native to this place of Hawaiian originality or authenticity is in fact a historical hybrid, a body that has been contextualized and re-contextualized in accordance with the demands of political economy in the U.S and its territories. The residents of Kalaupapa are recognized as indigenous people by the state through “statutory entitlement of life tenancy” in the leper colony, but in this way also are made to retain “the identity of “lepers”” for as long as they remain there, “however, it—the law—inverts their legal status by constituting a hybrid[37].”  These are the residents of a double colonial exception.

 

Conclusion

 

            I have shown how the space of Isla de Cabras has been transformed at different points by particular historical processes initiated by colonialism, biomedical conscription, and national organization.  Isla de Cabras is not an isolated incident in the history of leper colonies in terms of its insertion into military as well as tourist and environmentalist economies.  In fact the development of Kalaupapa can be seen to be in many cases analogous to Isla de Cabras, but differentiated by the particular contingencies of controlling native populations in Puerto Rico and Hawaii.  I have tried to elucidate the role of the symbolic power of leprosy as bodily figure of disruption and death in the spatialization of pathologies, and its incorporation into a military praxis of destruction, and ecological loss in Puerto Rico, as evidenced not only in Isla de Cabras, but in Vieques and Culebras as well, both small islands-cum-deactivated-military bases.  One of the questions that remain for me is about the role of culture in the authorization of particular identities and ecologies… I would like to explore further the role of the more recent forms of isolated encampment like Vita in Brazil and AIDS SRO (single room occupancy) hotels in New York City.  At times the quotes in this essay about leper colonies seemed to fit the descriptions of these other camps only too well.  The role of the bodies of the Puerto Rican lepers and their particular application to/of different kinds of social meanings and forces remains unexplored in this paper, but this may be a result of incomplete sources, rather than an avoidance of the material practices of the leprosarium.

Bibliography

 

Ahmed, S., Stacey, J., eds., 2001. Thinking Through the Skin, Routledge, New York and London.

 

Alavi, Seema, 1995.  The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770-1830, Oxford University Press, Delhi.

 

Bashford, A., Strange, C., eds., 2003.  Isolation: places and practices of exclusion, Routledge, New York and London.

 

Bernault, Florence, 2003.  A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.

 

Biehl, João, 2001. “Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment,” Social Text, 68, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall 2001, Duke University Press.

 

Bush, Webb, Gonzalez Liboy, Hyman, Neal, 2003. Living with the Puerto Rico Shore, “Shoreline Stabilization: Trying to Stabilize the Unstable.”  Available at http://geology.uprm.edu/Morelock/GEOLOCN_/clnliv.htm

 

Canning, Kathleen, 1999.  “The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History,” Gender & History, Vol. 11, No. 3, November 1999, pp. 499-513.

 

Green, Linda W., 1985.  Exile in Paradise: the isolation of Hawai’i’s leprosy victims and development of Kalaupapa settlement, 1865 to the present, Branch of Planning, Alaska/Pacific Northwest/Western Team, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, Denver Service Center, Denver.

 

Grosz, Elizabeth, 1994.  Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis.

 

Harrington, C. B., Yngvesson, B., 2001.  “Diaspora Jurisprudence: The Politics of Native Entitlement,” inedited.

 

Jackson, Lynette Aria, 1997. Narratives of “Madness” and power: a history of Ingutsheni Mental hospital and social order in colonial Zimbabwe, 1908-1959, Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 1997. History Department.

 

Kakar, Sanjiv, 2001. “Medical Developments and Patient Unrest in the Leprosy Asylum, 1860 to 1940,” in Health, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India, eds. Biswamoy Pati, Mark Harrison, Orient Longham, New Delhi.

 

Levison, J. H., 2003 (abstract from) “Beyond quarantine: a history of leprosy in Puerto Rico, 1898-1930s,” História, Ciências, Saúde, Manguinhos, vol. 10 (supplement 1): 225-45, 2003.

 

MacLeod, Roy, ed., 2000. Nature and Empire: science and the colonial enterprise, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

 

Palacios de Borao, Gonzalo, 1928. An epidemiological study of leprosy in Porto Rico, San Juan? P. R.

 

Thomas, Howard Elsworth, 1947. A study of leprosy colony policies … with a chapter on The contribution of Christianity in leprosy colonies, by Raymond B. Buker

 

US Government, 1910 US Federal Census, Series T624, Roll No. 1779


[1] Harrington, C. B., Yngvesson, B., 2001.  “Diaspora Jurisprudence: The Politics of Native Entitlement,” inedited, p. 14.

[2] Ibid. And Bush, et al., 2003.

[3] Bush, Webb, Gonzalez Liboy, Hyman, Neal, Living with the Puerto Rico Shore, “Shoreline Stabilization: Trying to Stabilize the Unstable”. http://geology.uprm.edu/Morelock/GEOLOCN_/clnliv.htm

[4] http://www.epa.gov/ecoplaces/part2/region2/site25.html

[5] National Park Service  - San Juan National Historic Site.  http://www.nps.gov/saju/saw12.html

[6] Ibid.  http://www.nps.gov/saju/nps-spa/canuelo.html

[7] Levison, J. H., 2003 (abstract from) “Beyond quarantine: a history of leprosy in Puerto Rico, 1898-1930s,” História, Ciências, Saúde, Manguinhos, vol. 10 (supplement 1): 225-45, 2003.

[8] Other materials available, but located in Columbia University rare book storage, and which I was not able to acquire in time to write this essay, are Palacios de Borao, Gonzalo, An epidemiological study of leprosy in Porto Rico, San Juan? P. R., 1928.

[9] Puerto Rico... Municipios 78 - Toa Baja. Courtesy of http://www.rootsweb.com

[10] Areciboweb – Puerto Rico Isla del Encanto.  http://areciboweb.50megs.com/pr/trujillo.html

[11] Lighthouse Depot Online.  http://www.lhdigest.com/database/uniquelighthouse.cfm?value=743

[12] Ibid.

[13] 1910 US Federal Census, Series T624, Roll No. 1779

[14] Ibid.

[15] Puerto Rico... Municipios 78 - Toa Baja. http://www.angelfire.com/de3/municipios78/toabaja.html

[16] Puerto Rico Forts.  http://www.geocities.com/naforts/pr.html

[17] The harbor defenses of the Caribbean.  http://www.cdsg.org/carrib.htm   

[18] http://www.ertresponse.com/rovr/public_access/isla_de_cabras/isla_descr.asp

Videos of the materials being exploded and destroyed are accessible on this site.

[19] San Juan Bay.  http://www.epa.gov/ecoplaces/part2/region2/site25.html

[20] Harrington, C. B., Yngvesson, B., 2001.  “Diaspora Jurisprudence: The Politics of Native Entitlement,” inedited, p. 12.

[21] Ibid, p. 4.

[22] Ibid, 4.

[23] I have not here had space to consider the possible role or influence of the lunatic or insane asylums and/or madhouses on the forms of medicalization and containment facilitated by the leprosarium.

[24] Kakar, S., 2001.

[25] Ibid., p. 194.

[26] Ibid, p. 196.

[27] Ibid., p. 198.

[28] Foucault, quoted in Biehl, João, 2001, p. 139.

[29] Harrington, C. B., Yngvesson, B., 2001.  “Diaspora Jurisprudence: The Politics of Native Entitlement,” inedited, p. 9.

[30] Ibid, p. 6.

[31] Ibid. p. 14.

[32] Ibid, p. 6.

[33] Ibid, p. 3.

[34] The ruins of Pompeii are in this sense a precursor to the presentation of death and cultural specificity as historical tourism, and as tourist of death, in the sense that what is preserved is not only the particularity of cultures or social organizations, but of the forms of death which in a sense fixes, or maintains those cultural or social institutions as historical legacies. 

[35] New Orleans tourism.  http://www.globaladventure.us/articles/bayou_heart.html

[36] Harrington, C. B., Yngvesson, B., 2001.  “Diaspora Jurisprudence: The Politics of Native Entitlement,” inedited, p. 20.

[37] Harrington, C. B., Yngvesson, B., 2001.  “Diaspora Jurisprudence: The Politics of Native Entitlement,” inedited, p. 6.