An Overview of U.S. Colonial Photography and Its Vision of Puerto Rican Black Women

Abstract

The United States experimented with a new political system in several former Spanish colonies at the end of the nineteeth century. This system established a political order based on colonialist approaches that were partly based on binary conceptualizations such as, civilization versus savagery and civilzation versus barbarism. A novelty in this approach was the use of photography as a propaganda tool.

This technology extended the reach of the U.S. civilizing mission and imbued it with a certain objectivity and scientism. In photographic representations, the image of the Puerto Rican woman stands out. Always racialized by the U.S., she was typically represented in scenes of mulatto or Black workers in the coffee and tobacco industries, as hatters or Black laundresses, as Black and poor peasant women, in some cases mixed with the Indigenous population, as nannies of African descent taking care of white children, or as sick Black women. The contrast with the white woman is presented in U.S. colonial photography with the newly arrived American woman. The United States appears as the saving power of the “island-woman,” that is, the island of Puerto Rico and its people, represented by Black children passively waiting for the arrival of the new colonizers.