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Jose O Sola
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| Education: |
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Ph.D., University of Connecticut
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| Brief Bio: |
| I specialize in 20th-century Latin American and Caribbean history, focusing on the Spanish Caribbean. My current research traces the Puerto Rican encounter with the United States and the ways that this encounter shaped the formation and evolution of a new socio-political group in the island. The experience under study spans approximately thirty years, from 1898 to the end of the 1920s. The early decades of the twentieth century in Puerto Rico coincided with far-reaching changes in the United States; it is impossible to understand present day Puerto Rican culture without appreciating the multiple ways in which North American culture (political, economic, social) integrated itself into the islands life. A profound transformation of the Puerto Rican sugar industry began after the United States granted protectionist status to local crops in 1900. With the arrival of United States and foreign investors and the construction of sugar producing industrial mills (centrales), land ownership and utilization, and the political strategies of the local producers changed irrevocably. I intend to study the political and economic responses by an emergent group within the Puerto Rican sugar industry, the contracted sugar farmers (colonos) who owned the land on which the sugar was cultivated, during the first three decades of the twentieth century. |
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| Research Interests: |
| Puerto Rico, Spanish Caribbean, Modern Latin America, Colonialism and Imperialism, Popular culture. |
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