Revisiting The People of Puerto Rico: Towards a Cultural-Historical Research Agenda José A. Laguarta Ramírez John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York Prepared for delivery at the 2018 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Barcelona, Spain, May 23-26, 2018. “A translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife.” —Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” When Anastacio ‘Taso’ Zayas Alvarado died and was buried in Jauca, the barrio of Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico where he spent his entire life, two books were placed in his casket during the wake: a Bible, and a copy of Sidney Mintz’s groundbreaking narrative of Taso’s life, Worker in the Cane (Ferguson 1996; Mintz 1974 [1960]). Taso and ‘Sid,’ who would come to recognize his key informant as a fellow ethnographer with “a remarkable outsider’s sense of his own culture” who had “started instructing me in his culture before I could even understand or answer him properly in his own language” (2000: 175), became lifelong colleagues and compadres over the course of the research project that would eventually produce the classic volume of cultural-ecological and political economic anthropology, The People of Puerto Rico (henceforth, PPR) (Steward, et al. 1956). Although Worker in the Cane was eventually translated into Spanish (1988), PPR has yet to be translated into any language. The Vanishing Island Directed by cultural-ecological anthropologist Julian Steward and child of the postwar era of close collaboration between academics, including social scientists, and the United States federal government, PPR was produced at the height of the U.S. territory’s tenure as a premiere social science laboratory (Duany 2005; Lapp 1995; Quintero-Rivera 1993). This unprecedented attention in turn responded to a shift in colonial governmentality at both the federal and local levels, which prioritized the island’s modernization as a showcase of capitalism and polyarchy in the Caribbean over previous military and extractive considerations (Grosfoguel 2003). The University of Puerto Rico, which commissioned the study that would become the book, was considered the strategic heart of this project (Duany 2005; Villaronga 2004). Interest in Puerto Rico by U.S. institutions, academic and otherwise, has since waned, occasionally resurging in momentary spurts. Furthermore, although “native” anthropology and the social sciences in general have expanded considerably (Duany 2010; Valdés-Pizzini 2001; Buitrago Ortiz 1982; Duncan, ed. 1979: 37-49), only a handful of Puerto Rican scholars expressly recognize their indebtedness to PPR or its participants (García-Colón 2009; Valdés-Pizzini 2001; Giusti-Cordero 1996). This is unfortunate, as the book represents, not the first encounter, but still the most comprehensive one, between Puerto Rico and the discipline of anthropology (or ethnographic practice, more generally)—two sociohistorical fields that owe much to and need each other, perhaps now more than ever. Despite its many flaws, PPR is a crucial part of Puerto Rico’s collective, ongoing quest for self-understanding. Dramatic changes in the broad patterns of that history taking place under the eyes of the Steward research team were recorded in the book, even if they acknowledged 1