Jesse Garskoff Article

Hoffnung-Garskof 3
The Migrations of Arturo Schomburg:

On Being Antillano, Negro, and Puerto
Rican in New York
1891–1938
JESSE HOFFNUNG-GARSKOF
HISTORIANS REMEMBER Arturo Alfonso Schomburg principally

for his magnificent collection of books and documentary materials about
black history and culture. In 1926 he sold the collection, originally
stored and catalogued in his home in Brooklyn, to the New York Public
Library, laying the foundation for one of the world’s richest archives for
the study of black culture. Schomburg was also a visible public figure in
Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, collaborating with elite black intellectu-
als such as W.E.B. Dubois, Alain Locke, and Charles S. Johnson and
serving as a mentor to Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and other
young writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Unfortunately, the first half
of Schomburg’s biography is less well remembered. He was, in the
language of the day, a foreign Negro, born in the Spanish colony of
Puerto Rico in 1874 to a black West Indian mother and a father of
German immigrant stock. Schomburg migrated to New York in 1891
where he found his way into a small Puerto Rican enclave in the bur-
geoning Cuban community of radical cigar workers and nationalist in-
tellectuals. In his late teens and early twenties he helped to found a
revolutionary nationalist club named for Cuba and Puerto Rico, “Las
Dos Antillas.”
Schomburg’s gradual absorption into black North American social
and intellectual life reflects an untold history of race within the small
group of Puerto Rican migrants in New York between 1890 and 1900.
Over the course of the 1890s, even as his political involvement in the
cause of Puerto Rican and Cuban independence reached its peak,
Schomburg married a young black woman from Virginia and moved to
a North American Negro neighborhood. As prospects for Puerto Rican
independence worsened—and national, racial, and social conflicts within
the Antillean separatist movement intensified—he migrated more fully
into black public life, particularly through Masonic activities. Among
4 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2001
Prince Hall Masons he found a community of middle-class black men

that was multi-ethnic, pan-Africanist, and, like Schomburg, increasingly
pessimistic about the prospect of racial advancement through liberal,
integrationist, national projects like the Cuban independence movement.
In the decade following 1898, he maintained some ties to black and
mulatto activists in Cuba and Puerto Rico, hoping to build them into an
international alliance of black intellectuals. But as these links to the
islands of his youth faded he continued his intellectual commitment to
racial internationalism. He dedicated his life to gathering evidence of
“Negro” contributions to world civilization.
Perhaps because he fits uneasily into our contemporary notions of
how ethnic history should look—with early colonies of Puerto Ricans or
blacks evolving neatly into later “communities”—historians have de-
voted surprisingly little scholarship to Schomburg’s biography. Unfortu-
nately the researchers who have written about his life have often sought
to establish a relationship between the great intellectual progenitor and
contemporary black or Puerto Rican communities, leading them to gloss
over the ambiguity and shifting of identity that are central to his biogra-
phy.1 These competing interpretations suffer from an underlying, and
understandable, desire to claim bragging rights over Schomburg’s
memory, but they also reveal the deeper trouble historians face when
trying to come to terms with his life. Under the prevailing notion that
blacks and Puerto Ricans have been separate, relatively uniform, and
neatly bounded ethnic groups throughout time, Schomburg is a difficult
figure to comprehend. Was he black or Puerto Rican, or, at best, a
remarkable ambassador from one group to the other?
Historian Winston James provides refreshing relief from this stale-
mate, arguing that we should seek to understand how it was possible for
Schomburg to be both black and Puerto Rican simultaneously. Yet
Schomburg, as James describes him, sheds little light on the broader
experience of Puerto Rican blackness. With the exception of Schomburg,
Puerto Ricans of color were overwhelmingly absent in the black radical
movements that are the primary subject of James’s research. This evi-
dence, and frequent observations by scholars and journalists over the
years that Puerto Ricans of color tended to assert their Hispanic identity,
keep to themselves, and avoided being “mistaken” for North American
blacks, leads James to conclude that Schomburg was “one of a rare
breed of Puerto Ricans, if not a species of one.” He explains this unique-
ness by pointing to Schomburg’s ties to his mother’s family in the West
Indies. His stronger non-Hispanic identity, James concludes, outweighed
Hoffnung-Garskof 5
his Hispanic identity, predisposing Schomburg to an explicit politics of

race, common in the British West Indies but rare in Puerto Rico.2
James’s analysis contributes mightily to our understanding of
Schomburg, and initiates a much needed discussion of how the mark-
edly different racial systems in different parts of the Caribbean led to
different kinds of ethnic identity in New York. The emphasis on
Schomburg’s ties to the English-speaking West Indies highlights the
important fact that he, like many of his contemporaries, was a product
of multiple migrations as well as colonial displacement. Indeed
Schomburg negotiated a dizzying array of ethnic and national identi-
ties—West Indian, Spanish, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Antillano, North Ameri-
can, African, Negro, and even (on one trip to Europe) German—never
fitting exactly into any of them. But we should not stop there. If show-
ing that Schomburg and other black immigrants were central to the
formation of Harlem intellectual life can help to push the boundaries of
our thinking about black ethnicity, why not ask how his unusual tale
might begin to do the same for our ideas about Puerto Rican ethnicity
and assimilation? Schomburg was in many ways a unique Puerto Rican.
But to cut off the evolution of his racial consciousness from the com-
mon experience of race among Antillean nationalists in New York at the
turn of the century would be to misread his life. And it would miss the
opportunity that his biography offers to help us rethink the history of
race in early Puerto Rican migration to the United States. 3 In the years
before and after the United States invasion of Puerto Rico, in 1898,
Schomburg’s migration to Negro North America was facilitated by an
overlap between the multi-racial world of Antillean nationalism and the
multi-ethnic world of Negro middle class institutions.
Biography is in many ways the ideal vehicle for elaborating this sort
of overlapping, unpredictable, or fluid group identity. But the story of
one extraordinary man, with all its migrations and uncertainties, can
only be extrapolated to an entire “community” with great caution. In
Schomburg’s case the greatest limitation is that of timing. For
Schomburg’s first twenty years in New York there were probably never
more than fifteen hundred Puerto Ricans on the mainland of the United
States. The first great migration of laborers and families from the island
started in the middle of the 1920s. By the 1930s when “Puerto Rican”
emerged—in the hands of community leaders and racist white North
Americans—as a racialized ethnic identity that was neither black nor
white, Schomburg was a veteran “Negro” New Yorker. He maintained
some friendships with Spanish speakers, but lived a life that was un-
questionably isolated from Latino social and political organizations. Even

if Afro-Puerto Rican migrants, in the 1930s, were less passive in the
construction of Puerto Rican identity in New York than has been pre-
sumed they were neither led by Schomburg nor did they follow his
example.
It is also difficult to extrapolate his experiences back onto the social
life of the island of Puerto Rico in the 1890s. Because early Puerto
Rican migration to the mainland was small, the majority of the island
population in those years did not share Schomburg’s experiences as an
exile, a nationalist, and an immigrant. There were ties between his ac-
tivities in New York and some local centers of activism on the island.
And at the very least an imagined Puerto Rican nation resided at the
center of his politics. But, placing Schomburg within the groups, net-
works, and associations that shaped his early migrant experiences, it is
clear that Cuba figured more prominently in them than Puerto Rico. In
the 1890s, Schomburg, along with a multi-racial group of working-class
Puerto Rican exiles, adhered to the larger Cuban community in New
York. They helped build a nationalist politics of class and race that
resonated more closely with the deep social conflicts in Cuba than with
the relative calm in Puerto Rico. For this handful of Puerto Rican exiles
the alliance with the Cubans was in itself an important, and much con-
tested, symbol of both their nationalism and their progressive racial
agenda.
Schomburg’s migrations, and his racial consciousness, reflect a mo-
ment of overlapping diasporas as trade, migration, imperialism, and war-
fare encouraged newly mobile intellectuals in the Caribbean basin to
form international identities. In the 1880s and 1890s the thinkers and
militants who first proposed a Puerto Rican national project left the
colony to join the network of Cuban revolutionary exiles in the United
States, Latin America, and Europe. The very internationalism of their
movement, marked by steam travel, correspondence, migration, and in-
ternational intellectual exchange, also opened up space for Puerto Rican
nationalists to imagine themselves as part of other networks of allies in
the Atlantic World. Puerto Rican separatists joined the Antillean Union,
led by the Cubans. Working-class nationalists built alliances with Cuban
and Spanish workers, and eventually joined the Second International
and Socialist party in New York. And some Puerto Ricans, including
Schomburg, built alliances with Cubans of color around their struggles
to define a racially progressive nationalism. Cuban intellectuals worked
within the framework of a multi-racial nationalist politics (feeling com-
Hoffnung-Garskof 7
paratively less attraction to strong messages of black nationalism than,

say, Jamaicans). But in the Puerto Rican and Cuban circles Schomburg
frequented in New York, this race-blind nationalism was the terrain for
intense conflict about race and history.
The independence movement in New York was steeped in nineteenth-
century liberal ideals about the importance of nations in the course of
universal progress and civilization. Within the movement, activists of
color and artisans worked to construct their own histories, placing the
black race and the working class in the center of national progress. Even
within their nationalism, which was officially race-blind, they some-
times used a language that prefigured Schomburg’s later Negro history.
Then as their hopes for revolutionary Puerto Rican and Cuban Repub-
lics began to unravel, Schomburg and his compañeros faced a common
dilemma: the need to establish solid foundations of national and ethnic
belonging in a world disfigured by colonial domination and racism. If
Schomburg was unusual, among veterans of the Antillano revolutionary
movement, it was not in the intense energies he devoted to historical
collecting. Nor was it even in his imagination of an alliance between
North American and Hispanic blacks. Some Cubans whom he counted
as friends began to imagine similar ties. He was unique in the extent to
which his historical passion and his commitment to a new international
black alliance propelled him to prominence in middle-class black social
institutions in New York.
Schomburg’s move into middle-class Negro social life, after 1898, is
perhaps the most compelling and unusual of his migrations. Observers
have frequently marveled at how many Afro-Puerto Ricans in New
York took pains to avoid being “mistaken” for black North Americans,
in an attempt to avoid the trap of the hardening color line. But Schomburg
did just the opposite. He consciously identified himself as a Negro. And
in a strange twist, behind the color line he found space for three decades
of upward mobility. Schomburg’s second migration—to black North
America—like his first migration—to the heart of the Cuban Revolu-
tionary party in New York—was a result of his desire for a progressive
racial politics not yet alive on the island. This interest was, in part,
inspired by his West Indian heritage which probably allowed him to
recognize himself more easily, than most Puerto Ricans, among multi-
ethnic black New Yorkers. But the second migration was also a way of
expressing class aspirations and intellectual ambitions. Such aspirations
were common enough in the revolutionary circles of Schomburg’s youth,
but it was by overlapping into black internationalism that he managed to
satisfy them. Schomburg the mulatto colonial exile, became a Negro—a

second-class citizen in the wealthiest, most powerful country in the
world. Schomburg the tireless historian became a famous Negro intel-
lectual.
Applying the idea of “overlapping diasporas” to migration, and to the
history of race and ethnicity in New York, would probably have grati-
fied Schomburg’s own desire to encourage the study of black history
from an international perspective. But if we hope to use Schomburg’s
biography to reassert the importance of diaspora to the history of ethnicity
we should be careful to define diaspora, not, as he did, as a timeless
truth to be uncovered by objective historical research. We should, in-
stead, understand diaspora as a rather thorny set of ideas about belong-
ing and displacement that has emerged from the modern experience of
Atlantic slavery, colonialism, emancipation, and migration, and has
evolved in dialogue with dominant discourses about race and nation.4 In
this sense Schomburg was not simply an example of a migrant whose
ethnicity and racial identity were shaped by diasporic experiences; he
was also an active constructor of the idea of diaspora that we have
inherited. His archive—thousands of books and manuscripts from every
comer of the Negro world he imagined—reflects not an abstract histori-
cal truth about the unity of all black people, but his own preoccupations,
his migrations, and his relationships—what literary scholars might call
his “subject position.” So if the events of Schomburg’s life can provide
evidence to support a flexible and international approach to ethnicity,
the contours of his work also provide a foundation for an intellectual
history of that very approach. The short biography that follows is, in this
sense, also the genealogy of an archive that continues profoundly to
shape contemporary historical consciousness about black studies, espe-
cially our current notions of the African diaspora.5
“PARA QUE SEAN REALES Y NO VAGA FICCIÓN LOS

DERECHOS DEL PUEBLO”6
RACE AND PUERTO RICAN NATIONALISM IN THE PARTIDO
REVOLUCIONARIO CUBANO IN NEW YORK, 1891–1998
During the Ten Years War in Cuba (1868–1878) and its aftermath,
colonias of Cuban exiles and refugees, fleeing the war and political
persecution, sprang up in cities across the Caribbean and around the
North Atlantic: Paris; Madrid; Santo Domingo; Kingston; Key West;
Philadelphia; and New York. Many in this emigración were active op-
Hoffnung-Garskof 9
ponents of the Spanish colonial regime. They established networks of

correspondence and revolutionary activity to connect their dispersed
communities. Others simply hoped to protect their persons or invest-
ments from the ravages of war. In the 1880s the growth of Cuban
migration to southern Florida and New York was given an additional
boost by United States tariff laws that favored the importation of raw
tobacco over finished cigars. Cuban cigar makers transplanted their fac-
tories and their workers to Key West, Tampa, and New York City,
establishing pockets of working class activism within the emigración
and changing the complexion (often literally) of the nationalist move-
ment abroad.7 Puerto Rico was spared both the benefit and the trauma of
widespread anti-colonial warfare. Still periodic waves of authoritarian
vigilance against liberals and separatists produced a smaller number of
political refugees many of whom joined the larger Cuban colonies scat-
tered about the world. In New York exiled Puerto Rican cigar workers,
or tabaqueros, and other working-class refugees, established their own
enclave connected to the greater Puerto Rican colonia and to the social
and political institutions of the Cuban tabaqueros. It was into this en-
clave that Arturo Schomburg, a seventeen-year-old apprentice in a San
Juan print shop, arrived in 1891. With a letter of introduction signed by
his former boss, a Puerto Rican nationalist named José Gonzalez Font.
He disembarked from the steamship in New York harbor and went
looking for tabaquero friends who helped him find a place to stay and
ways to make ends meet.8
Schomburg first lived among the Puerto Rican and Cuban nationalists
of lower Second Avenue, while studying English at night at Central
High School, and teaching Spanish to North American pupils. But after
only four years in New York, at the age of 21, he married Elizabeth
Hatcher, a light-complexioned African American woman from Virginia.
With Elizabeth. and their three sons, Máximo Gómez, Arturo Jr., and
Kingsley Guarionex, he lived on West Sixty-second Street, in the black
neighborhood known as San Juan Hill. Other Puerto Rican nationalists
could be found in the vicinity too,9 but four years after arriving in New
York he was a husband and a father in a home where English, presum-
ably imbued with a strong southern twang, was the language of his wife,
in-laws, and children. From Hatcher, who died in 1900, and his two
subsequent wives (both native blacks) and their families he must have
learned North American black music, dance, jokes, and folklore, as well
as patterns of kinship and social networks. He certainly learned to eat
Afro-North American food and apparently developed a considerable
fondness for it, proposing at one stage of his life to research and write a
cookbook and social history of Negro cooking. Judging from his highly
personal descriptions of, “the hearty egg breads and sugar baked apples
of Virginia to brains in brown butter and batter cakes with borders of
crisp black embroidery in the Blue Grass, on down to rice calas and the
ineffable steeped coffee, cinnamon flavored chocolate and hot toddies
served in the early hours behind the sun-streaked jalousies of the Vieux
Carre in New Orleans—and particularly at the home of my friend W.W.
Cohen,” he had dedicated hours of loving research to the study of Negro
culinary achievement, in the company of family and friends.10 Family
life, though scantily documented in Schomburg’s papers, thus serves as
an important backdrop to Schomburg’s later public life among North
American blacks.
Still, as can be surmised from the names he gave his children, in the
decade after Schomburg’s immigration to New York he inhabited a
social and political world dominated by the Partido Revolucionario
Cubano and its Sección Puerto Rico. In his later essays and letters
Schomburg frequently referred to José Martí and Afro-Cuban leader
Rafael Serra as close collaborators and personal friends, “[Yo] era amigo
del inolvidable Martí” he wrote to a Cuban historian in the month before
his death in 1938, “llegué a gozar de la inspiración que nos animaba
durante los primeros dias de la formación del Partido Revolucionario
Cubano en Nueva York.” [“was a friend of the unforgettable Martí. . . . I
had the opportunity to enjoy the inspiration that drove us during the first
days of the formation of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York.”]11
Likewise in a 1933 article in Opportunity he described the Afro-Cuban,
abolitionist, journalist, and independence leader Juan Gualberto Gómez
as a friend since the early 1890s.12 One suspects he sometimes exagger-
ated the importance of his role in the movement, portraying himself as
the secretary of the “Cuban Junta” (which he certainly was not) and
claiming once to have helped save Martí from an attempted assassina-
tion (which he may have). But without doubt, as a young man in New
York the towering figures of Serra, Martí, and Gualberto Gómez, and
their writings, were at the center of his social and intellectual develop-
ment. Even in the decade after 1898, when he began to socialize more
consistently with Afro-North Americans, his primary credentials were
from the Cuban movement. The black journalists who met him on a visit
to the South in the early 1900s described him as a “well educated
cultured Cuban gentleman . . . and a recognized leader in Cuban-Span-
ish circles in New York City.”13
Hoffnung-Garskof 11
These credentials were well earned. Schomburg was an active orga-

nizer in the first days of the formation of the Partido Revolucionario
Cubano, in 1892. A member of a small Puerto Rican minority in the
Cuban movement, Schomburg helped to found a revolutionary club called
“Las Dos Antillas” (The Two Antilles) in New York, and served as the
club’s recording secretary. Along with “Borinquen,” led by Sotero
Figueroa, and a women’s club called “Mercedes Varona,” Las Dos
Antillas was one of only three revolutionary clubs created by the Puerto
Rican enclave within the New York Cuban community.14 Several fac-
tors led Schomburg, Sotero Figueroa, Juan Terraforte, and the other
Puerto Rican nationalists in New York to join the Partido Revolucionario
Cubano rather than setting out on their own. Cubans were the vast
majority of exiles from the Spanish islands in the United States, some
2000 in New York and thousands more in Key West and Tampa.15 Their
neighborhoods, institutions, and social networks largely defined Latino
ethnicity and politics in New York before the turn of the century. More
important, while the Puerto Rican masses were largely uninterested in
nationalism, and liberals among the Puerto Rican political elite eschewed
radical programs for independence in favor of cautious autonomism,
Cuban society had been profoundly radicalized by the Ten Years War
(1868–1878). The war had transformed the independence movement
into a popular cause, linked to the social claims of the poor and of Afro-
Cubans. The Puerto Ricans led by Ramón Emeterio Betances and Eugenio
Maria de Hostos cast their lot with the Cuban cause, hoping a free Cuba
could be the anchor for an independent Puerto Rico and a free Antillean
Union.16
Made up primarily of tabaqueros, printers, and other artisans, the
Puerto Rican revolutionary clubs in New York were home to radical
politics and working-class intellectual life descended from the artisans’
casinos and mutual aid societies that had exploded on the island since
the late 1860s. Sotero Figueroa, who founded Borinquen, was a mulatto
journalist and historian. A decade earlier he had created a Centro de
Recreo e Instrucción para Artesanos y Obreros (Center for Recreation
and Instruction for Artisans and Workers) in the municipio of Juana
Diaz, as a means for educating workers and incorporating them into the
anti-colonial movement.17 Schomburg also participated in this artisans’
club movement where, according to Puerto Rican labor radical Bernardo
Vega, “recibió las primacias de la educación” [“he received his basic
education”] before emigrating to New York.18 The casinos and later the
revolutionary clubs were led by non-elite intellectuals like Schomburg,
Figueroa, and Pachín Marin, men who had not attended university but
who aspired to literary greatness as well as national heroism. Meeting
minutes show that Las Dos Antillas fundraising work took place prima-
rily in “las fábricas,” the cigar factories.19
In their rhetoric, too, the clubs venerated the contributions of the
working class to the Cuban wars of independence. Artisans, according
to a speech in 1895 by Cuban Compañero Agramonte recorded in the
Las Dos Antillas meeting minutes, had introduced “los principios de
libertad” and “las ideas avanzadas” into the project of national indepen-
dence. And their contributions in New York, Tampa, and Key West
sustained the revolution in Cuba. A statue should be erected in honor of
the artisans, Agramonte argued, because, in addition to everything else,
“ellos son los que han hecho la guerra de los 10 años” [“because they
were the ones who made the Ten Years War”]20 Meanwhile, the same
club leadership that passed the hat in the factories to buy arms for
expeditions to Cuba, and that celebrated working-class sacrifice to the
cause of nationalism, responded to the periodic economic vulnerability
of the rank and file. The leaders of Borinquen and Dos Antillas acted as
brokers for elite charity within the émigré community. During the eco-
nomic panic of 1893, for instance, Schomburg and the other leaders of
Las Dos Antillas called a meeting to discuss ways to provide for émigré
families suffering from extreme poverty. They retracted their call when
Spanish officials began broadcasting the news that the revolutionary
movement was faltering in the face of economic hardship. But in return
they extracted a promise from wealthier émigrés that some of the re-
sources of the Cuban community would be dedicated to protecting poor
families. “Nuestros pobres en New York.” they announced in Patria,
“serán auxiliados por sus hermanos de todos rangos y matices.” [“Our
poor in New York will be aided by their brothers of all ranks and
shades.”]21
Though calls for social reform (or mutual aid) among tabaquero labor
activists in the nationalist movement were often articulated as a politics
of class, race too was a central source of ideological fervor within the
Partido Revolucionario Cubano. The revolutionary clubs in New York
predicated their politics on the racially and socially democratic vision of
Cuban nationality, articulated by Cuban leader José Martí. Cubans of all
races (if not of both sexes), Martí wrote, shared a common national
character: they were generous, enlightened, patriotic, and manly. And
since true political and social unity derived from shared values, shared
beliefs, and shared interests, not shared skin color, Cubans’ national
Hoffnung-Garskof 13
similarities would always far outweigh any racial antagonism they might
harbor. “Los hombres verdaderos,” Martí proclaimed, “blancos y negros,
se tratarán con lealtad y ternura, por el gusto del mérito y el orgullo de
todo lo que honre la tierra en que nacimos, negro o blanco.” [“The true
men both white and black, will treat each other with loyalty and tender-
ness, for the love of merit and for pride in all that honors the land where
we were born, black or white.”]22
In the context of intensely racist Puerto Rican and Cuban societies,
where slavery had been abolished only in the 1870s and 1880s, Cuban
intellectuals of color welcomed this apparent race neutrality and the
promise of full citizenship. Many of them formed deep and lasting friend-
ships with Martí. But Martí’s speeches and essays, now canonized as the
foundational texts of Cuban “racial democracy,” were only part of a
broader intellectual trend among white, liberal, Cuban separatists. In the
1880s and 1890s, these white thinkers wrote a flood of new histories of
the Cuban independence wars seeking to contradict the repeated accusa-
tions of the Spanish press that the Cuban insurgency was a war of racial
hatred waged by remorseless blacks. To the contrary they argued, white
independence leaders had won the loyalty of their slaves through self-
less acts of manumission, when themselves “todavía esclavos” to Span-
ish tyranny “tuvieron la abnegación de salvar á sus hermanos, [the
slaves]—que materialmente sufrían mas que ellos,—salvando al propio
tiempo sus ilustradas conciencias.” [“still slaves . . . they showed self-
abnegation and saved their brothers [the slaves]—who materially suf-
fered more than them—at the same time saving their enlightened con-
sciences.”]23 This act of sacrifice and generosity had absolved the Cu-
ban nation of the stain of slavery, and in return blacks had proven
themselves eternally grateful, loyally following their former masters into
battle to forge a Cuban nation. This was a message of comfort to white
nationalists many of whom had little commitment to racial equality.
And Martí’s own writings, while promising full citizenship, discouraged
the formulation of explicit claims for racial redress as contrary to the
spirit of racial brotherhood.24
Race neutrality in the Cuban nationalist movement was thus predi-
cated on constructing a new image of blacks not as bloodthirsty Afri-
cans, but as passive, grateful, and non-threatening black Cubans. But
Afro-Cuban nationalists like Serra and Gualberto Gómez appropriated
the ideals of racial democracy, and the tales of black loyalty and sacri-
fice, for their own project of racial advancement and equal rights. They
told the history of the independence movement in their own way. It was
true that Cubans of color had loyally sacrificed themselves in the previ-
ous wars, they argued, but this was not a sign of their gratitude to the
men who formerly held them as slaves. It was rather a mark of national
heroism for which they should be repaid with full citizenship. Within
the supposedly race neutral world of the nationalist movement, Afro-
Cuban leaders contested the histories concocted by white liberals, and
maintained independent political forums like the Directorio de Sociedades
de Color. In the Sociedades de Color, and in the mixed-race revolution-
ary movement, they pursued the cause of racial equality. They also
created popular education programs, to socialize and uplift the black
masses, preparing them for citizenship. 25 In the hands of these intellec-
tuals, Martí became the symbol of a popular nationalist agenda for racial
advancement and social transformation. “Desde la extrema izquierda del
Partido Separatista,” Serra wrote, “y en conformidad con los preceptos
aceptados por todos, hemos de dirigir nuestros esfuerzos para el triunfo
de la Independencia de la patria, y para que sean reales y no una vaga
ficción los derechos del pueblo.” [“From the extreme left wing of the
Separatist Party and in accord with the precepts accepted by everyone,
we must direct our efforts toward the triumph of Independence for the
fatherland, and toward ensuring that the rights of the people are real and
not a vague fiction.”]26
This was a radical politics that resonated with the transformations two
decades of anticolonial warfare had wrought in Cuba. Cuban national-
ism, despite the grave misgivings of some white leaders, had incorpo-
rated Afro-Cubans as soldiers and even officers. And these combatants,
led by mulatto general Antonio Maceo, had changed the way race was
discussed in Cuban society. But Puerto Rico remained relatively tran-
quil in the last years of Spanish domination. No popular nationalist
uprising had emerged there. It would be reasonable to suspect, therefore,
that not everyone in the working-class Puerto Rican enclave in New
York shared the Cuban “left wing” perspective on race and nation.
Some of the tabaqueros were certainly much more attuned to matters of
class than to struggles over the meaning of black sacrifice and racial
democracy. But the meeting minutes of Las Dos Antillas show that
some club leaders saw race as a crucial aspect of their nationalist poli-
tics. The Cuban revolutionary movement provided them an outlet for
racial politics that did not yet exist openly on the island of Puerto Rico.
In October of 1895, Las Dos Antillas met jointly with Borinquen at
Military Hall to celebrate the arrival of two Puerto Rican compañeros,
Gerardo Forrest and Gumersindo Rivas, from a stay in the exile colonia
Hoffnung-Garskof 15
in Venezuela. The speeches that night, recorded in Schomburg’s hurried

hand, offer a rare glimpse at the substance of Puerto Rican revolutionary
politics in New York in the 1890s. Race was central to the oratory that
night. And history was the crucial terrain for exploring the subject.
One orator, in fact, gave a speech about the role of the “raza negra” in
world history that closely resembled the historical perspective employed
by Schomburg, the collector, in his days as a Harlem intellectual. After
words of thanks from Forrest and Rivas, a speech about class from
Agramonte, and a few remarks from Juan Terraforte, Hanibal A. Castro,
a Colombian volunteer in the Mambí army, took the podium. From
Colombia he had made his way to New York and, having joined the
Partido Revolucionario Cubano there, was waiting for a chance to dis-
patch to the island. Spain, he told the audience, had appealed to racist
sentiments in its attempts to damage the Cuban cause. But in Colombia
and Venezuela “la negra es la raza privilegiada, la que triunfó en Carabobo
y Ayachucho [sic].” He continued, “la raza negra, la generosa, la viril, la
valiente, tuvo su cuna en Egipto, patria del Negro.” [“the black race is
the privileged race, the race that triumphed in Carabobo and Aya-
chucho . . . the black race, generous, virile, valiant, had its cradle in
Egypt, the Negro’s fatherland.”] Black Egypt was the birthplace of
civilization and progress, he told the audience. The colossal pyramids
constructed by black Egyptians had never been duplicated, even by the
most intelligent of modern minds.27
Such a discourse would probably have earned a hostile reception
from the leading intellectuals and politicians in Colombia at the time as
they strove to erase all hint of blackness from Colombian national iden-
tity.28 But among the men of Las Dos Antillas and Borinquen it was
warmly received. Schomburg certainly must have enjoyed it. In an inter-
view in the 1920s, he recalled making similar arguments to friends in an
artisans’ casino in San Juan before emigrating to New York. Some
white boys had taunted him with the argument that Puerto Rican blacks
had no history, and he had dedicated himself to finding instances that
proved them wrong.29Afro-Cuban intellectuals too were kept busy, in
those years, producing stories of black heroism to contest the racist
histories told by their white allies. In short, Castro’s speech was not an
instance of a Colombian introducing a strange Colombian racial ideol-
ogy to a baffled, race-blind, Puerto Rican audience. It seems rather that
the Cuban revolutionary movement, symbolized by the figure of Anto-
nio Maceo who had recruited Castro on a visit to Colombia, attracted
the Colombian precisely because it offered him space to enunciate his
resistance to the dominant racial ideologies common among Colombian

nationalists. The Puerto Ricans and Cubans he addressed in New York,
began to respond heartily. “En la linea de Reyes Españoles,” Castro
said, “hubo sangre de Negro.” [“In the lineage of the Spanish Kings
there was Negro blood.”] “Bravo!” the crowd answered. “Y hoy un
negro es el primer Cubano,” “Bravo,” they interrupted. “Maceo.” Castro
finished. “Viva Maceo!” a voice shouted, and the crowd responded with
an emphatic “Viva!” [“And today a black man is the foremost Cuban.”]
The men of Borinquen and Las Dos Antillas cheered the idea that the
black race was a central participant in their independence movement,
and in that grand narrative of civilization and progress they held so dear
in their liberal hearts. And they went wild when he repeated his promise
to risk his life to join the Afro-Cuban general. “Una lluvia” Schomburg
wrote in the minutes, “puede decirse de aplausos zozobró las elocuentes
palabras del hijo de Colombia.” [“A downpour, it might be called, of
applause drowned the eloquent words of the son of Colombia.”]30
Sotero Figueroa was the next speaker. He provided his own history to
vindicate the role of Puerto Rico in the revolution, and to frame the
independence movement as an international struggle for racial justice.
The origin, he said, of the union between Cuba and Puerto Rico was the
1867 joint commission to Madrid. On that mission the Puerto Rican
representatives had recommended the abolition of slavery but the Cu-
bans had asked only for an improvement in terms of slavery. The Ten
Years War, he continued, had failed to end slavery in Cuba while the
Grito de Lares had resulted in total emancipation. Each of these in-
stances proved, he said, that Puerto Rico was no mere passive bystander
in the revolutionary struggle.
Figueroa’s assertion that the short-lived uprising in Lares in 1868 was
responsible for the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1874 was
dubious at best. But beneath his bluster Figueroa’s reformulation of
history shows an open assumption that Antillean Union was a move-
ment dedicated, at its historical core, to negotiating the status of former
slaves. And, paradoxically, his speech defending the leading role of
Puerto Rico in the struggle for emancipation shows how attuned to “left
wing” Afro-Cuban historical arguments he was. He took their part when
he denied the claim of white Cuban separatists that they had ended
slavery in Cuba in 1868. Then he paid homage to the Afro-Cuban aboli-
tionist intellectual and club leader Juan Gualberto Gómez. “Puerto-
rriqueños y Cubanos,” Figueroa told the audience, ahí tenemos ese Ne-
gro, esa inteligencia, el gran Cubano Gualberto Gómez.” [“Puerto Ricans
Hoffnung-Garskof 17
and Cubans, here we have the black man, this intelligence, the great
Cuban Gualberto Gómez.”] Finally he took the hand of Hanibal Castro,
the “hijo de Colombia,” and asked for another round of applause for his
beautiful words, before taking his seat to a chorus of cheers.31
The Partido Revolucionario Cubano, as awash in the rhetoric of race
neutrality as it was, was a place where alternative views of race and
history could be discussed. Because Puerto Rico had no parallel institu-
tion, some early Afro-Puerto Ricans in New York built an alliance with
like-minded activists in the Cuban party. Schomburg should be num-
bered among them. Even as they despaired of their own national cause
after 1895, these Puerto Ricans renewed their alliance with the “left
wing” of the Cuban movement, itself increasingly marginalized by the
rightward swing of the Cuban leadership under Estrada Palmas. As Patria
took an increasingly conservative line, Afro-Puerto Rican Sotero Figueroa
and Afro-Cuban Rafael Serra began publishing their own newspaper
called Doctrina de Martí, defending their socially and racially progres-
sive view of the revolutionary cause as Martí’s true legacy.”32 They
made the memory of Martí a standard for their defense of progressive
racial and class politics in the movement. Just before the close of the
meeting at Military Hall in 1895, Secretary Arturo Schomburg, who had
sat diligently through speeches about class, race, and history scribbling
notes in his pad, rose and asked “que los Antillanos respondieran a un
viva á la memoria sagrada de nuestro querido José Martí.” [“that the
Antilleans should respond with a ‘ viva’ for the sacred memory of our
dear José Martí.”] Perhaps it was an innocent salute to a nationalist
hero. But in the context of the divided Partido Cubano Revolucionario,
it was likely an attempt to link the symbol of the fallen martyr to the
radical politics of class and race that so permeated the oratory of the
evening. This was Schomburg’s only recorded speech as a Puerto Rican
nationalist. The crowd roared an emphatic “¡viva!” before closing the
meeting.”33
In the years between 1895 and 1898 a growing divide between the
Puerto Rican elites and the wealthy Cuban leadership widened the gulf
between the radicals in the revolutionary clubs and the wealthy Puerto
Rican annexationists who controlled the newly formed Seccion Puerto
Rico of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano.34 As Sección Puerto Rico
president Julio J. Henna moved to separate from the Cubans, Las Dos
Antillas and Borinquen held a joint vote of confidence for Estrada Palmas,
the head of the Cuban delegation in Washington. A short time later
Figueroa resigned from his position on the SPR executive committee.
“Veo con sentimiento” he wrote, “que marchamos dando palos de ciego,

sin unión ni cordialidad.” [“It grieves me to see that we are thrashing
along blindly with neither unity nor cordiality.”]35 Sotero Figueroa,
Schomburg, and the other revolutionary club members were no less
frustrated than Henna about the difficulty of bringing the war to Puerto
Rico. They surely were more upset than Henna by the increasingly
undemocratic control Estrada Palmas exercised over the movement, at
the expense of the revolutionary clubs. On 26 July 1896, at a joint
session of Dos Antillas and Borinquen, various compañeros took the
floor proposing, in a tone of desperation, an immediate invasion of the
smaller island. Marcos Rosario, Schomburg wrote in the minute book,
“suplicó a la Colonia en que abandonaran la oratoria y pasasen a hacer
efectivo lo que tanto habían prometido, hizo presente también la posesión
de un Rifle.” [“begged the Colonia to abandon its oratory and put into
effect what it had so often promised. He also noted that he possessed a
rifle.”] Other speakers took the floor and promised to free Puerto Rico
from Spain or die trying. Schomburg took a tally as the club members
listed the weapons they were willing to donate to the cause.36 But they
were isolated from the social realities of the island, and from the mon-
eyed sectors of the Puerto Rican emigration. The invasion never materi-
alized.
Henna began lobbying the United States to include Puerto Rico in its
plans to intervene in the Spanish-Cuban war. But for radical Puerto
Rican separatists, with hopes for popular republicanism and social re-
form, continued support for the Cuban cause was far preferable to nego-
tiations with the racist, pro-business, United States government. Some
300 Puerto Rican exiles made the ultimate gesture of this commitment
to Cuba by fighting and dying in the Mambí army.37 In March of 1896
for instance, Pachin Marín, the young mulatto poet who acted as
Schomburg’s counterpart, recording secretary of Borinquen, announced
his decision to depart for Cuba. He offered some choice words for the
members of Borinquen and Las Dos Antillas who stayed behind. “Tan
llena de fuego y de eloquencia como siempre,” [“As full of fire and
eloquence as always,”] Schomburg editorialized in his notes, Marín “nos
califico de soldados sin gloria, infecundos, y sin tener la satisfacción de
ser un soldado que pelea por la desdichada Cuba y mi desgraciada
Puerto Rico.” [Marín called us soldiers without glory, infertile and lack-
ing the satisfaction of those soldiers who fight for unlucky Cuba and my
disgraced Puerto Rico.”] Then, as a reminder of the racial politics per-
meated in the fighting, the poet paid, in Schomburg’s words, “igual y
Hoffnung-Garskof 19
justo tributo al General Maceo” recently fallen in battle, calling him “el
hombre que revindica su raza.” [“Equal and just tribute to General
Maceo . . . the man who vindicated his race.”]38 Marín died in the fight-
ing. Schomburg may have seriously considered following this path too.
He later remembered that friends were “fearful that I would be so aroused,
as to go to Cuba and perish in the miasmatic swamps.”39 But he already
had a young family in New York and, anyway, saw himself primarily as
an intellectual, not as a soldier.
Instead, as the Puerto Rican clubs began to come apart in the late
1890s, Schomburg, like Serra and Figueroa, continued his intellectual
work in New York. He collected documents, wrote, and attended meetings.
He dedicated himself to the Cuban revolution, but never picked up a gun.
Gazing in the fractured mirror of Puerto Rican nationalism, two images
caught his eye, the lingering reflection of the Cuban left and, the inter-
national Negro alliances that were growing up around him in New York.
RACE AND HISTORY BETWEEN EMPIRES:

1898 AND THE MEANING OF “RACIAL INTEGRITY”
IN NEW YORK AND HAVANA
The radical social agenda espoused by Doctrina de Martí, and mobi-

lized in the Cuban revolutionary army, was for the most part trumped by
the United States Military Governments established on both islands in
1898, and by the Cuban Republic created in 1902. Serra returned to
Cuba. With Gualberto-Gómez and other Afro-Cuban leaders he man-
aged to force universal manhood suffrage into the new Cuban constitu-
tion, against the wishes of the United States to disenfranchise popular
sectors with literacy and property requirements.40 But United States
military governors and their Cuban allies passed the Platt Amendment
and propelled the openly-annexationist, anti-labor, United States citizen
Tomás Estrada Palmas, into the presidency of the Republic.41 Blacks
and mulattos had citizenship but, as the new republican government
distributed jobs among former Spanish loyalists, set out to “whiten” the
nation through immigration and criminology, and began to restore the
plantation economy, many social groups, including veterans and people
of color felt the sting of discrimination. As an editorial in the Havana
newspaper La Discusión explained, there was a sharp contradiction be-
tween the official rhetoric of equality and the social reality of racism.
Blacks in Cuba, the editorial complained, “están sometidos á un régimen
de desigualdad disimulada, de desigualdad hipócrita.” [“Are subjected
to a regime of inequality hidden by appearances of hypocritical inequal-

ity.”] 42
Sotero Figueroa also moved to Cuba after the war. Along with José
Dolores Poyo, a tabaquero and a leader of the South Florida Cuban
colonia, he attempted to transplant the racially progressive labor alli-
ance, built in their years of exile, back into republican Cuba. The two
created the Asociación de Obreros de la Emigración (the Association of
Workers from the Emigración) in Havana, and later the Asociación de
Emigrados Revolucionarios (Association of Revolutionary Émigrés).
Schomburg followed a different path. After the death of his wife
Elizabeth in 1900, he left his children in the care of his wife’s kin in
Virginia and Tennessee, but remained in New York. In 1901, he found
employment as a messenger and clerk for the law firm of Pryor, Mellis,
and Harris. In 1902 he remarried, again to a black woman from the
southern United States, Elizabeth Morrow Taylor of North Carolina.
The couple lived on the Lower East Side until 1907, then moved to
West Ninety-ninth Street.43 Schomburg again formed an English-speak-
ing household. He still had close friends with whom he conversed in
Spanish. But he discouraged his sons from speaking anything except
English.44 Outside the family too, Schomburg crossed increasingly into
Negro social circles.
Still he allowed new acquaintances to receive him as a “refined Cu-
ban gentleman” and a veteran of the nationalist movement.45 And even
as he spent most of his time in black North American social institutions,
Schomburg claimed he was keeping up a correspondence with Rafael
Serra and the Cuban mulatto General Evaristo Estenoz. In Havana Estenoz
took up leadership in a new movement against racist immigration poli-
cies. He also lobbied for improved public education, and demanded
more equitable distribution of public employment.46 When his political
union became a full-fledged Afro-Cuban political party in 1909, the
Partido Independiente de Color (PIC), Schomburg sent Estenoz an ar-
ticle which appeared in the party newspaper, Previsión.47It told the “true
history” of a slave revolt in the West Indies. Schomburg also took
Estenoz’s message to a North American black audience. He wrote a
profile of General Estenoz in The Crisis in 1910, reflecting bitterly on
the aftermath of independence in Cuba to explain the popularity of the
PIC. “Many Cuban Negroes curse the dawn of the Republic,” he wrote.
“Negroes were welcomed in the time of hardship, during the days of the
revolution, but in the days of peace and white immigration they are
deprived of positions, ostracized and made political outcasts. The Negro
has done much for Cuba. Cuba has done nothing for the Negro.”48
Hoffnung-Garskof 21
Shortly after the end of the second United States occupation of the
island in 1910, Estenoz and the radical racial politics that had reflected
back at Schomburg from Cuba, itself began to shatter. First the PIC was
outlawed in Cuba and its leaders jailed. Then, in 1912 Estenoz and
another mulatto general named Pedro Ivonet, led an armed rebellion
against the Cuban government, an attempt to win the right to participate
in Cuban elections that quickly unhinged a peasant revolt in the eastern
province of Oriente. In the bloody repression of the revolt Schomburg’s
hopes for independent racial organizing in Cuba seemed to be extin-
guished, along with hopes for a meaningful politics of racial democracy.
The death of Estenoz broke the last ties that bound Schomburg to the
community of color on the island. Serra had died of natural causes in
1909. Though recent scholarship shows that Afro-Cuban intellectuals
continued to intervene in the Cuban national debate about race,
Schomburg would not renew his direct contact to intellectuals of color
on the island until he traveled to Cuba in the winter of 1932.49
As with his “friendships” with Martí and Gualberto Gómez, and his
own qualifications as a “Cuban gentleman,” Schomburg probably exag-
gerated his friendship with Estenoz and Serra in the wake of 1898. Yet
this exaggeration, in itself, reveals much about his self-image, and his
racial ideology, as he migrated into black North American neighbor-
hoods and institutions. It should be seen as no coincidence that in a
speech called Racial Integrity given to an audience of black teachers in
1913, a year after the massacre of Estenoz and his followers, Schomburg
made one of his clearest statements of racial separatism and pan-
Africanism. Apart from a few “sincere and helpful white friends who
[have] fought and battled with us,” white people had proved unreliable
allies, he told his audience. Nationalism had failed and the only answer
was for people of color to build ties of “racial patriotism.” Particularly,
he felt, Negroes should look to form political, cultural and economic
alliances with black people in other countries, to forge an international
racial coalition. “The Negro must strive to follow in the good examples
of the Jews,” he argued, “who though not a practical nation, live in
theory a nation of most powerful intellects.” He admired what he per-
ceived to be the unshaken unity of Jews even after centuries of exile.
“[T]hey cling to their customs and traditions, no matter whether they
live in Timbuctoo or in the highest peaks of the Andean mountains.”
The sons of Africa, like the sons of Israel, he argued, must “cling to-
gether and uphold the maxim that ‘in unity there is strength.’” Negroes,
he felt, employing the concept of the Jewish “Diaspora” if not the word,
should emulate this international unity, or they would be lost in the

vicissitudes of isolated national politics.50
There is no mistaking the sharp contrast between this separatist and
internationalist racial ideology and the racial unity and nationalist frater-
nity espoused by Martí, even as it was appropriated and reformulated in
the hands of men like Serra, Figueroa, and Gualberto Gómez. Schomburg
belonged to a segment of the Puerto Rican independence movement that
invested its hopes for racial equality and social reform in the project of
national liberation in Cuba. Along with Afro-Cuban allies he and his
comrades appropriated the message of racial unity, brotherhood, and
self-sacrifice espoused by white nationalists, turning it to their own aims
and contesting the course set by conservative forces within the move-
ment. As the Puerto Rican movement dissolved and the Cuban experi-
ence disappointed, this group scattered. Pachin Marín died in the fight-
ing in Cuba. Sotero Figueroa spent a dozen disillusioned years in Ha-
vana before leaving for a disenchanted retirement in Puerto Rico. Flor
Baerga and other tabaqueros in New York, San Juan, and Ponce, forged
ahead into the independent class politics, the socialism, unionism, and
anti-nationalism of the second international. Schomburg took his own
path north into Harlem, a path shaped by events in Cuba, by his West
Indian ancestry, by his new wife, and, perhaps most of all, by the black
new friends he was making though involvement in his Masonic lodge.
Foremost among these new friends was an aging black journalist in
New York named John Edward Bruce whose Pan-Africanism profoundly
influenced Schomburg’s evolving view of race. Bruce, a former slave
who had taught himself the craft of journalism, was a contemporary and
friend of the early Pan-African thinkers Alexander Crummell and Ed-
ward Blyden. In the late nineteenth century, he helped to lay the founda-
tions of an ideology of international racial solidarity among Negroes, an
intellectual current that first circulated among a relatively small circle of
internationally-aware intellectuals, and was later popularized in Harlem
by streetcorner orator Hubert Harrison and the young Jamaican radical
Marcus Garvey.51 Schomburg met Bruce through his involvement with
the Masons and, by 1905, the older man convinced Schomburg to join a
literary society that met in Bruce’s apartment in Yonkers, the Sunday
Men’s Club.
As the social and political world of the Puerto Rican separatist move-
ment began to fragment, both the familiar setting of a literary and social
club and the sharp politics of militant racial separatism appealed to
Schomburg. He began to adopt the unapologetic biological approach to
Hoffnung-Garskof 23
racial unity preached by his new mentor, quoting Bruce in a 1905 ar-
ticle, “The Negro, may he ever be right, but right or wrong let us
remember that his is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh and that we
are indissolubly linked together for weal or for woe, wherever under the
sun or heaven one of our race and blood is found.”52 Over the next two
decades Bruce and Schomburg became close collaborators, working to-
gether to create the Negro Society for Historical Research in 1911. The
two also became key supporters of Garvey’s movement at the end of
World War I. Schomburg kept some distance, never actually joining
Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. But he helped Garvey
with historical research and translations. 53
After 1898, Schomburg’s growing social contact with Bruce and other
Anglophone blacks helped reshape his ideas about race. In fact his pref-
erence for the strategies of Estenoz and his disdain for Afro-Cubans
who worked within the party system in Havana (he called Morua Delgado
a “Judas to his race”) may have been a sign of Bruce’s influence. Again,
this fact did not wholly distinguish Schomburg from many of his con-
temporaries on the island of Cuba. Schomburg’s integration into institu-
tions like the Sunday Men’s Club appears to have been unique among
veterans of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano. But as United States
influence in the Caribbean grew, he shared with his counterparts who
returned to Cuba a close attention to comparisons between the status of
Cuban and North American people of color, and a new attraction to
North American black social institutions. He also shared with them his
hope that an alliance between the two black communities would help
improve the status of each.
Like Blyden, Bruce, and other black intellectuals in the imperial capi-
tals of Paris and New York, Schomburg saw black North Americans as
more “advanced” than their counterparts in Africa and the Caribbean.
They had achieved a higher level of civilization even though they faced
more brutal racial oppression than, for instance, Cubans of color. This
superiority meant that middle-class blacks in the United States should
take the lead in any worldwide project of racial uplift. In 1904, Schomburg
suggested, for instance, that relatively advanced Afro-North Americans
should impart their moral and technical superiority to backwards Hai-
tians, just as they were doing for the ignorant black masses in the South.
He wrote, “I only wish I was able to infuse in Hayti, graduates of
Booker T. Washington’s technical school that would lift the people to
an ambitious love that would increase the material wealth of the people
and the country.54 In his new internationalist view, moving from the
Caribbean to the middle-class clubs and lodges of Harlem was moving

up in the world.
But, as disparaging (and often overtly colonial) as its terms often
were, the idea of international racial unity under North American leader-
ship was also common among intellectuals of color in Cuba. Returned
from exile, other veterans of the emigración made their own compari-
sons between Cuban and North American race relations and built their
own plans for international racial solidarity. While Schomburg joined
the Sunday Men’s Club in New York, in Havana, Rafael Serra dedicated
considerable space in his newspaper El Nuevo Criollo, and the majority
of his 1907 volume Para Blancos y Negros to commentary comparing
the situation of Afro-Cubans and African-North Americans. In an article
called “Los Negros Americanos,” he summarized his view of this com-
parison. With regard to the United States he wrote, “se dice, con razón
sobrada, que aquel pais es el colmo de la más amarga preocupación
contra la clase de color. Esto es cierto.” [“that country, it is said with
more than enough justification, brims over with the most bitter preoccu-
pation against the colored class. This is certain.”] But somehow, he
reflected, North American blacks had managed to overcome this bitter
discrimination to surpass the accomplishments of Afro-Cubans and other
black populations of the world. They might be disenfranchised, but in
terms of wealth, education, and political power North American blacks
seemed to Serra far ahead of Afro-Cubans. They somehow “asombro-
samente se desenvuelve en los distintos ramos de la actividad humana.”
[“Astonishingly develop themselves in the various brances of human
activity.”]55
Serra offered this paradox not only as a criticism of Cuban race
relations but also in the hope that the astounding black North American
successes he documented might be transformed into a resource for racial
movements on the island. El Nuevo Criollo printed regular features on
black-American millionaires, doctors, savings banks, profiled not only
as an inspiration to Cuban blacks and mulattos (or as proof that people
of African descent could achieve greatness as professionals and business
men), but as a possible source of investment that would be friendly to
Afro-Cuban endeavors. The newspaper’s editor salivated as he estimated
the total property of North American blacks at an astounding
$335,000,000. To attract this capital, and reap the benefits of North
American success, however, Cubans had to cultivate the proper lines of
international racial solidarity. So as Schomburg’s contemporaries in New
York began to imagine new opportunities for investment and missionary
Hoffnung-Garskof 25
work in backwards, black communities abroad, racial internationalism

emerged with a slightly different aspect at the other end of the colonial
food chain.56 Securing financial support from wealthy Harlemites was
probably one of the primary aims of the trip Rafael Serra and Evaristo
Estenoz made to New York in the summer of 1905.57 This sort of
fundraising visit to friends and allies in New York was old hat to veter-
ans of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano, but now their alliances were
alliances of race. By 1909 Estenoz was apparently using the promise of
financial and technical assistance from North American blacks as part of
his platform when campaigning for the Independent Party of Color.58
The Cubans were focused on building ties with economically power-
ful North American blacks in efforts to secure investment or human
capital; the North Americans sought to assume the role of international
race leaders, establishing semi-colonial relationships with their foreign
brothers, and Schomburg began to see himself as the correspondent and
translator who could bring this international alliance together. He de-
voted most of his energies, as secretary of the Sunday Men’s Club and
the Negro Society of Historical Research, to expanding the international
pan-African intellectual, cultural, and business community imagined by
Blyden, Bruce, Serra, and himself. And until the massacres of 1912,
New York and Havana seemed one of the crucial axes for such an
alliance. Schomburg’s debut as secretary of the Men’s Club was a din-
ner he organized in 1905 to honor the anniversary of John Bruce’s entry
into journalism. Among those Schomburg invited were Rafael Serra,
then a member of the Cuban House of Representatives, Tomás Carrion a
member of the Puerto Rican House of Delegates, and Edward Blyden,
Liberian Ambassador to France.59 This core of international Negro friends
and colleagues, along with Mojoli Agbebi of Nigeria and Evaristo Estenoz
in Cuba, became the corresponding membership of the Negro Society
for Historical Research, whose mission was to stimulate “the collection
from all parts of the world of books and documents dealing with the
Negro,” and also to bring together “for the first time co-operatively in a
single society, African, West Indian and Afro-American scholars.”60
Schomburg also began to see himself as an intellectual, a collector, in
the service of this international racial network. “We need a collection or
list of books written by our men and women,” he told his audience in
1913. “We need the historian and philosopher to give us, with trenchant
pen, the story of our forefathers and let our soul and body, with phos-
phorescent light, brighten the chasm that separates us.”61 Collecting, he
thought, documenting Negro contributions to world civilization through
the science of history, would inspire the racial patriotism necessary for
building an international Negro alliance across the chasm created by
national boundaries and provincialism.
This historical sensibility, while newly applied to the cause of inter-
national racial unity, had its roots in Schomburg’s days among Puerto
Rican and Cuban nationalist-intellectuals. Schomburg later attributed
his first interest in history to a childhood encounter with Puerto Rican
historian Julian J. Acosta, an ardent nationalist whose influence had
diffused widely among the intellectuals of the independence movement.62
History in general and collecting in particular had, in fact, been some-
thing of a mania among the émigré nationalists in New York. It was as
if colonialism and displacement produced uneasiness about belonging
that could only be assuaged by lists of books, biographical sketches, and
other testaments to the achievements of national progenitors. Sotero
Figueroa published a volume of biographical essays “de los que mas han
contribuido al progreso de Puerto Rico.” Martí collected poetry, Flor
Baerga collected books and documents, José Gonzalez Font, Schomburg’s
former boss, collected and republished newspaper clippings relating to
Puerto Rico.63 They sought to construct a Puerto Rican patrimony, writ-
ing a history to inspire unity and self-consciousness among members of
the national community. And they hoped to establish a connection be-
tween that community and the transcendent narrative of human progress
that dominated their view of modernity. Colonialism had cut Puerto
Ricans off from their rightful participation in this narrative, and through
historical collecting these intellectuals aimed to restore what Figueroa
called “La Verdad de la Historia.”64
If yearning for a modern sense of belonging produced an anxious
intellectual efflorescence in the Cuban and Puerto Rican diasporas, the
added burden of racial exclusion doubled Schomburg’s need to establish
a solid place for himself in world history. Without trustworthy historical
roots, he told his audience in 1913, “We often feel that so many things
around us are warped and alienated.”65 The answer, he concluded, was
to construct an archive, a permanent scientific testimony to the promi-
nent place of Negro courage and learning in Western culture. Schomburg,
Figueroa, Hanibal A. Castro, and others in the Partido Revolucionario
Cubano had already begun to apply this mode of history to people of
African descent within their nationalist histories. But in the first decade
of the twentieth century Schomburg abandoned the constraints of na-
tional history. He migrated from the Hispanic periphery to the most
powerful and prestigious point in the Negro world, Harlem. And this
Hoffnung-Garskof 27
migration to the center put him a unique position to pursue his Pan-
Africanist collecting.
The same steamships that had carried West Indian migrant workers to
Latin American, that had moved Cuban and Puerto Rican revolutionar-
ies and their letters from port to port—ships built with financing from
Wall Street firms and protected by the United States Marines—also
carried Schomburg’s precious cargo of papers and information.
Schomburg found space as a second class citizen in the center of the
new empire, to contest the mythology of white supremacy that cloaked
the imperial project. His office in the mailroom of Banker’s Trust Com-
pany, the Wall Street firm where he worked from 1906 to 1929, allowed
him easily to conduct his correspondence with foreign book dealers,
Masons, and friends. He stole time on the job to write a mountain of
letters to dealers and friends abroad requesting help in locating bibliog-
raphies, books, or documents. He complained to Bruce, in a letter appar-
ently written while at work in 1912, “While am writing the boss of the
joint . . . is fussin’ because I keep pegging away on the writing side of
life.”66 While his boss fussed Schomburg pieced together his archive,
funneling books and documents from his networks of friends in the
periphery of black civilization to its hub in New York City.
ARTHUR A. SCHOMBURG, FREEMASON:

CLASS MOBILITY AND BLACK ASSIMILATION AFTER 1898
The international black community that shaped Schomburg’s political

and intellectual migrations after 1898 did not exist exclusively in
Schomburg’s stacks of books and documents, in his imagination, or in
his correspondence with Blyden, Bruce, and Estenoz. It could be seen
every day on the streets of Harlem. Between 1900 and 1930, 40,000
black immigrants arrived in New York City, settling uptown along with
the tens of thousands of black migrants from the Southern United States.
Later in the century Harlem would become synecdochic for an explicitly
North American black identity, but when the Schomburg family moved
there in 1907 southern blacks lived on the same blocks, and often in the
same households (as borders) with West Indians, Haitians, and even a
few tabaqueros. “Little pockets of tropical dreams in alien tongues,”
Langston Hughes called these foreigners, the flavorful ingredients of a
“Melting Pot Harlem.”67 Later in the century distinct West Indian, Hai-
tian, and black North-American neighborhoods took shape, but before
the end of World War I foreign and native communities, of varying
shades, overlapped on an everyday basis.68
To what extent did any Afro-Hispanic migrants, besides Schomburg,

resist the racism within Puerto Rican and Cuban societies by joining this
multicultural black alliance? Winston James has shown that very few
joined the ranks of black socialism or Garveyism. And indeed the scant
research on Puerto Rican migration to New York suggests that most of
those who arrived before the 1920s (perhaps only about 10,000), settled
as a small minority in the Manhattan neighborhoods and institutions
established by immigrants from Spain—Chelsea and East Harlem. The
invention of Puerto Ricans as a distinct racial identity, rather than a
conglomeration of whites, mulattos, and blacks born in one country, did
not take shape definitively until the 1930s. But already in the immediate
wake of 1898 there seems to have been an attempt by Puerto Rican
labor and nationalist leaders to fortify distinctions between Hispanic and
native blacks. In 1901 Santiago Iglesias, a Spanish immigrant who be-
came a Puerto Rican socialist leader on the island, wrote “Al trabajador
de color, cubano o puertorriqueño,” he wrote, “no debemos confundirlo
con el americano” [“We should not confuse the colored Puerto Rican
and Cuban worker with the North American”] who is the “enemigo
inconciente de sus compañeros unionados.” [“unconscious enemy of his
union brothers.”]69 And already observers noted that Afro-Puerto Ricans
seemed eager to distinguish themselves from Negro New Yorkers, re-
sisting the racism of North American society by emphasizing their
hispanidad.
On the other hand several bits of evidence suggest that some Afro-
Hispanics in New York did contest this distinction in the early part of
the century, and even lived in spaces outside of the world dominated by
white Spaniards. Baerga, Schomburg, and several other veterans of the
Puerto Rican emigracíon in New York responded to Iglesias by publish-
ing a harsh critique of his position and of the racism of the AFL.70 And
one study of Harlem census records conducted by Irma Watkins-Owens
discovered a handful of tabaqueros in black Harlem in the years before
the end of World War I. For instance, in 1915, Andro Faugas, a Cuban-
born cigar maker, lived as a lodger in the home of black Socialist and
civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph and his wife Lucille. Four other
tabaqueros lived on the same block, as borders in the homes of North
American blacks. They were less than one percent of the total number of
foreign residents on the block, but there were very few Hispanic
Caribbeans in New York at the time.71 Furthermore there is some pre-
liminary evidence that a larger percentage of the Spanish-surnamed New
Yorkers identified as black in the 1925 census lived in Brooklyn than in
Hoffnung-Garskof 29
Spanish Harlem. These Brooklyn Hispanics were more likely than their
Manhattan counterparts to have intermarried with other ethnic groups
including North American blacks. There seem also to have been some
class-based and racial antagonisms between the Puerto Rican leaders in
El Barrio and Brooklyn Puerto Ricans underlying the process of ethnic
group formation.72
Eventually more and deeper studies of the tensions over race in Puerto
Rican New York may put these early fragments into fuller perspective.
In any case, Schomburg’s own intellectual and social migration to Ne-
gro New York does not reflect continued ties to the radical working-
class Cubans and Puerto Ricans who graduated from the nationalist
clubs to international socialism, and in some instances, moved to Harlem.
His later migration to Brooklyn does not suggest that he became part of
the working-class Brooklyn Hispanic community that challenged the
racial messages emerging from professionals in East Harlem. Instead he
joined middle-class black clubs and fraternities—the Sunday Men’s Club,
and most important of all, the Prince Hall (or Negro) Masons. There he
pursued his heady ambitions to become a renowned intellectual, and
there his affinities with the other black people among whom he lived
were expressed explicitly in terms of racial internationalism. Aside from
his family life, masonry was the primary institutional framework that
organized his social, political, and intellectual migrations into black
Harlem and Brooklyn. While there is no question that his attraction to
these institutions was related to Schomburg’s evolving views about race
(and probably to his West Indian heritage), his insertion into Negro
Masonry was also fundamentally tied to his notions of class.
In the early twentieth century this assimilation by a Puerto Rican into
black middle-class institutions stands out as unusual. But Schomburg’s
path into Prince Hall Masonry was in fact blazed two decades before by
the founders of his Masonic lodge, the Sol de Cuba Lodge in Brooklyn.
Sol de Cuba was created by a group of Spanish-speaking brothers who
split, in 1880, from two Negro lodges, the Celestial and Mt. Olive
Lodges. Manuel Coronado, Sixto Pozo, Abony Brown and several oth-
ers then received a charter from the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of New
York State, the Negro Masons, to form their own Spanish-speaking
lodge within the Prince Hall hierarchy.73 The formation of Cuban lodges
in New York is not surprising. Freemasonry was a crucial institution in
the organization of clandestine Cuban and Puerto Rican nationalism in
the nineteenth century. Lodges also served as important mutual aid soci-
eties for immigrant Cubans in the United States during and after the Ten
Years War. Accordingly by the 1890s, when Schomburg was initiated,

Sol de Cuba was an important meeting place for nationalist emigracíon
and its network of Latin American liberals. Like the revolutionary clubs,
the lodge attracted a network of visitors from across Latin America.
“There were visiting brothers to El Sol de Cuba Lodge from almost
every republic of South America” wrote historian Harry Williamson,
“and the exchange of fraternal greeting was cordial and cheeringly pleasant.”74
What is interesting about the Sol de Cuba lodge is its affiliation with
the black Masonic hierarchy in the United States. El Progreso was the
other prominent Cuban lodge in New York, and its meeting place, Mili-
tary Hall, was the site of many important nationalist gatherings includ-
ing meeting to welcome Rivas and Forrest in 1895. El Progreso, origi-
nally named C.M. Céspedes to honor the Cuban independence leader,
was formed only two years before as Sol de Cuba. But it was affiliated,
by contrast, with the Orden Caballero de la Luz, an unofficial Masonic-
style order founded by Cuban immigrants in Philadelphia.75 Furthermore
a group of Cubans in Brooklyn contacted the Philadelphia leadership of
Caballeros de Luz, asking for help in starting an affiliated lodge in
1879, a year before the creation of Sol de Cuba, but the project never
materialized.76 Instead, a year later, a second group of Brooklyn Cubans
(or perhaps some of the same men) created a Spanish-speaking lodge
affiliated with the Prince Hall Grand Lodge.
It is not clear from the existing records whether the founders of Sol de
Cuba or the bulk of the later membership were all men of color. Nor can
we assume that the differences between the Sol de Cuba and El Progreso
lodges were strictly matters of black versus white. North American Ma-
sonry and some elite Masonic groups in Cuba were strictly segregated in
these years. But in Puerto Rican and Cuban societies at large, the color
line was not as clearly demarcated. And among liberal nationalist or
socialist émigrés, particularly in the independent Masonic groups like
Caballeros de Luz, overt discrimination was expressly forbidden. Ma-
sonic ideology reinforced nationalist rejections of social privileges or
alliances based on caste or race as contrary to progress and enlightened
morality. Officially race could not be taken into account in membership
decisions among immigrant Masons, so this sort of overt racial exclu-
sion cannot explain the link between Brooklyn Cubans and black Ma-
sonry.77
Still apparent race neutrality and meritocracy among Caballero de
Luz masons often concealed deeper tensions over social interaction among
brothers of different social classes and races. Brother Hartman, an im-
Hoffnung-Garskof 31
portant Philadelphia lodge member complained bitterly in 1879, that

“nuestra logia parecia a una mesalina que se ocupaba en recoger hijos
de todas clases y todos colores.”78 A white Cuban doctor or factory
owner could hold fast to the conviction that all men should be treated
equally and rewarded according to their merit; he could even vote to
accept a few model blacks or artisans into his lodge, but that did not
mean he wanted to open the floodgates of populism within the lodge.
Another factory owner could endorse the candidacy of his employees,
with an eye to controlling their social behavior or reinforcing his ties of
patronage with them. And all could agree to keep “unworthy” candi-
dates out, without specifying the prejudices behind the decision, as El
Progreso did with some frequency in 1879 and 1880.79
As relations between elite and working-class émigrés deteriorated in
the 1880s, it is easy to imagine that some black, mulatto, or multiracial
group of Cubans in New York would have attempted to create social
spaces of their own.80 To express claims to broader citizenship or to
vindicate black identity within the broader Masonic construct of univer-
sal “progress,” as Schomburg and his compañeros later sought to do,
Afro-Cubans had to create independent social space (perhaps shared by
black, mulatto, and white working-class allies). In the 1880s, their coun-
terparts in Cuba and Puerto Rico founded mixed-race artisan social
clubs, independent Masonic lodges, mutual aid societies, and sociedades
de color, as strategies for resistance to, and independence from, the
class and racial prejudices of elite social clubs. At the same time some
Cubans in New York apparently established ties with the multi-ethnic
world of black Masonry as a way of escaping the restrictions of main-
stream immigrant institutions, or merely because they found acceptance
there and none in Luz de Caballero.
Also, judging from their names it seems likely that a few of the
founding members of Sol de Cuba, Abony Brown, John Johnston, and
Lafayette Marcus, were West Indians whose families migrated first to
Latin America and then to New York, a common phenomenon in the
late nineteenth century.81 Their ties of kinship with British West Indians
in the Prince Hall lodges of Brooklyn may have helped establish a
bridge between communities otherwise separated by language and cul-
ture. In 1880, however, their non-Hispanic identities took a back seat to
the stronger Hispanic identities that led Brown, Johnston, and Marcus,
along with Pozo and Coronado, to split from their English-speaking
lodges and to create a Spanish-speaking lodge, a hub of Cuban revolu-
tionary activity in Brooklyn.
Schomburg joined the Sol de Cuba lodge shortly after arriving in

New York.82 By 1910 he had risen to leadership in Sol de Cuba, serving
as secretary and then Master. These offices allowed him the opportunity
to socialize and collaborate with the North American and West Indian
Negroes in the Prince Hall hierarchy, and provided him a crucial institu-
tional setting for his introduction to middle-class, male, African-Ameri-
can social and intellectual circles. Masonry shaped his evolving North
American ethnicity even more profoundly, perhaps, than his family life.
It was in Masonic functions, for example, that he met John E. Bruce and
the other men of the Sunday Men’s Club.
The transformation of Sol de Cuba from a Spanish-speaking lodge
into a Negro lodge with a membership largely indistinguishable from
other Prince Hall lodges, mirrors Schomburg’s own increasing assimila-
tion into Negro public life in the early years of the twentieth century. In
1901 twelve of the thirteen lodge members listed in a report to the
Prince Hall Grand Lodge had Spanish surnames, as well as two new
initiates. 83 But after 1898, according to Masonic historian Harry Albro
Williamson, membership in Sol de Cuba began to dwindle. In 1911, in
keeping with his evolving racial ideology, Schomburg voted with the
rest of the lodge to support Master C. E. Cyril’s plan to boost lodge
membership by attracting black English-speakers. Thereafter race—not
language or nationality—was to be the primary basis for membership in
Sol de Cuba. To mark this transition, in 1914, the Sol de Cuba lodge
officially changed its name to Prince Hall Lodge, commemorating Prince
Hall, the free black West Indian who founded Negro Masonry in the late
eighteenth century. According to Williamson, as the membership of
Lodge number 38 became increasingly English-speaking, “Brother
Schomburg translated all of its old records from Spanish to English, an
undertaking requiring a great deal of time and labor.”84 The Hispanic
linguistic and cultural consciousness that had created Sol de Cuba as a
separate entity within the Negro Masonic movement, faded, and the
lodge was folded back into the Prince Hall mainstream.
Schomburg’s involvement in Prince Hall Masonry in Harlem and
Brooklyn was thus part of a broad historical arc of relations between
multi-racial Cuban and Puerto Rican communities and multi-ethnic black
social institutions before 1898. After 1898 Schomburg’s attraction to
this older tradition, even as other veterans of the emigración turned to
socialism, was related both to his West Indian heritage and to the con-
tours of his experiences within the independence movement. But it was
also in large part a reflection of Schomburg’s attitudes about class, and
Hoffnung-Garskof 33
of the opportunities he found to satisfy his personal aspirations in middle-

class black social clubs—opportunities that would likely not have been
available to him had he tried to make his way into the institutions of
Spanish New York.
In his memoirs Bernardo Vega made a forceful bid to appropriate
Schomburg’s memory for the history of the organized Puerto Rican
working class in New York, emphasizing the young man’s friendships
with labor activists like Flor Baerga. This essay argues too that
Schomburg and other non-elite intellectuals in the Partido Revolucionario
Cubano, many of them self-taught tabaqueros or printers, did have an
intimate relationship with the working-class wing of the independence
movement, serving as leaders and brokers for the mass membership in
the revolutionary clubs.
Artisan intellectuals—black, white, and mulatto—also created their
own intermediate social institutions, literary clubs, casinos, and night
schools, and in Brooklyn, as this essay suggests, a Masonic lodge. These
clubs and lodges were built around what social historian Angel Quintero-
Rivera has described as parejería, the conscious imitation of “superior”
classes in forms of dress, social life, and public behavior. In a society
built on static social privilege, this imitation (often linked to attempts to
vindicate the role of workers or blacks in national history) implied a
subversive pride in self and a healthy disrespect for established hierar-
chies of caste. And for many artisans, in the context of increasing prole-
tarianization after 1898, the shared social expectations and disregard for
authority implied by parejería became a basis for a militant working-
class consciousness.85 But while Schomburg shared the humble origins
of the cigar workers and their parejería, his personal and intellectual
aspirations led him toward middle-class institutions not socialism. He
found upward mobility in status within his emerging identity as a Ne-
gro.
Had ambition been the only factor, he might have skipped right over
the Masonic black lower-middle class, into the relatively small profes-
sional elite of doctors, lawyers, and journalists. By 1901 he secured
employment as a legal clerk and messenger for the firm Pryor, Mellis,
and Harris, and told friends that he was “reading law” in preparation for
the New York State Regents examination. In 1906, however, his at-
tempts to receive a law certificate were thwarted when he could not
produce evidence of sufficient schooling and the state refused to let him
take the exam.86 Painfully humiliated, he instead settled in as a white-
collar employee in the mailroom at Bankers Trust Company. A mailroom
job would hardly be prestigious employment by today’s standards, and

surely fell far short of Schomburg’s ambitions. But in 1906 it was also
far removed from the working-class world of the cigar factories or print
shops of San Juan. While cigar workers on the islands, and in New
York, faced increasing pressure from mechanization in the early de-
cades of the century, Schomburg observed sympathetically from the
relative comfort and stability of a white-collar job.87
As he helped Sol de Cuba fold itself back into the mainstream of
English-speaking Prince Hall Masonry, Schomburg surrounded himself
with men who shared his professional status and his middle-class val-
ues. The membership lists, for instance, of the nearby English-speaking
Carthaginian Lodge in Brooklyn, show a lodge made up almost entirely
of white-collar workers, clerks, low-level managers, entrepreneurs, or
postal employees. Black elites, such as journalists, educators, or doctors,
were entirely absent from the rolls, as were common laborers. Skilled
laborers or artisans were only a very small minority. The Carthaginian
Lodge, and other Prince Hall lodges in Brooklyn were institutions of the
lower stratum of the black middle class, a group whose class status as
respectable black men was defined by a rigid code of public behavior.
Membership in the lodges was selective and lodge members policed
each other, enforcing shared notions of morality, behavior, and mascu-
linity.88
The brothers in the Prince Hall lodges glorified the image of the
“self-made man,” a message that appealed to Schomburg, the humble
artisan, whose humiliation before the New York State Board of Regents
was replayed multiple times at the hands of elite black intellectuals—
especially W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter Woodson—who depended on his
collection but would not accept him as a colleague because he had no
degree.89 He pointedly expressed his Masonic attitude towards black
elites in his 1913 speech “The university graduate is wont to overesti-
mate his ability, fresh from the machinery that endows him with a
parchment and crowns him with knowledge, he steps out into the world
to meet the practical men with years of experience and mother wit.’90 It
was among these men of “mother wit” that Schomburg first established
his class and ethnic identity in Negro New York.
But Masonry also helped satisfy Schomburg’s higher ambitions, his
subversive desire to excel as a leader and an intellectual despite the
racism of white society and the snobbery of black society, his parejería.
If lodge membership helped secure respectability for black men in the
uncomfortable lower echelons of the middle class, becoming an officer,
Hoffnung-Garskof 35
and then rising in the Masonic hierarchy was an avenue for becoming a
Negro notable or a “race leader.”91 After first serving as secretary and
master of the Sol de Cuba lodge, Schomburg rose quickly through the
ranks of the order to become, in 1918, Grand Secretary of the Prince
Hall Grand Lodge of New York State and associate editor of the Ma-
sonic Quarterly Review. In the first decades of the century, while schol-
ars took a keen interest in his growing library, this success in Masonic
circles won him more generalized recognition than his historical work.
Nationally, it was not until the 1920s that Schomburg’s reputation as a
scholar and collector surpassed his reputation as a fraternal official. 92
The mentorship of Bruce, another man of “mother wit” and Schomburg’s
own remarkable accomplishments as a collector gradually increased his
fame in academic circles as well, bringing Schomburg no small satisfac-
tion. In 1914, after Bruce helped with his election to the American
Negro Academy he wrote, “I have been elected an Academician!!! That’s
higher than a co-editor [Bruce had just been made co-editor emeritus of
Bolivar’s Who’s Who in Negro America]. Thanks for your good letter of
recommendation to the Academy.”93 Two years later, when he was ad-
mitted to the American Bibliographer’s Society, Schomburg wrote Bruce
again, “I thank you for adding more weight to my head . . . by having
used your good will in electing me to membership in such an exclusive
society.”94 By the 1930s, after selling his collection, retiring from the
bank, publishing several articles, and serving as an officer in dozens of
societies, Schomburg was widely recognized as a “race leader,” the
highest status available to a middle-class black man in those years. He
had successfully migrated upward into black society. As tabaquero so-
cial life revolved ever more tightly around issues of work, Schomburg
tended towards a Victorian philosophy of uplift—of racial progress di-
rected by a respectable Negro middle class. His continued concern for
the welfare of less privileged members of society was expressed in
charity work with the Urban League and YMCA, not in socialism or
union organizing.95
Schomburg’s methodical rise in status in black social circles during
the first decade of the century might make it seem as though he gradu-
ally shed his Puerto Rican distinctiveness and “became” Afro-North
American. His role in translating the lodge liturgy into English is only
the most prominent example of his fading hispanidad after 1898. But,
paradoxically, in these years it was often Schomburg’s very foreignness,
including his facility with foreign languages, that nurtured his social
advancement in American Negro society. In the 1920s The Negro World
reported, with some jealousy, that Spanish-speaking Negroes escaped

much of the racial segregation in transportation and accommodations
visited on natives, and that many had found preferred employment as
bookkeepers, clerks, or in import-export firms because of their language
skills. 96 Schomburg was an early example of this trend. Able to corre-
spond in English, Spanish, and French, he worked his way up in the
mailroom at the Bankers’ Trust Company to become the head of the
Latin American and Caribbean correspondence division, and a supervi-
sor of several subordinates, by the time he retired in 1929. It is of course
no accident that he was promoted in the area he knew best. Cosmopoli-
tan men like Schomburg were essential resources for Wall Street firms
as United States financial interests infiltrated Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti,
the Dominican Republic, and Central America. His mailroom job was
not glamorous, but it covered the expenses of Schomburg’s book col-
lecting, and allowed him, in his retirement, to travel, write, and act as
curator of his collection.
Within the Masons too, it was as an international correspondent and
translator, that he first made his mark. For instance, the first important
position Schomburg attained in the New York State hierarchy, accord-
ing to Harry A. Williamson, was “chairman of the Grand Lodge Com-
mittee on Foreign Relations,” a new chairmanship that the lodge created
especially for him. In that role he established contacts with fellow Ma-
sons in Santo Domingo, Haiti, and several countries in Central and
South America, expanding the range of Masonic pan-Africanism, previ-
ously limited to the United States, West Indies, and Liberia.97 Schomburg
already had contacts in many of these countries, from his days in the
Partido Revolucionario Cubano. The idea of an international community
of correspondence was familiar from his earlier days as a nationalist. He
also spoke Spanish fluently and could read French. He had access to a
world of foreign Masonry, international history, and overseas racial broth-
erhood. As pan-Africanism spread in Harlem and Brooklyn, Schomburg
made himself an indispensable link to the non-English-speaking world,
explaining events in Cuba, and translating for men like Bruce and Garvey.
Likewise his preeminence as a historical researcher often depended on
his intermediate status between black North America and the non-En-
glish speaking world. Years later he traveled to Spain and Cuba, delving
into archives that were ignored by most North American scholars of the
day, black or white. And he corresponded with authors and book dealers
across the Hispanic world.
Schomburg, like other foreign blacks in New York, occupied a space
Hoffnung-Garskof 37
between the “melting pots” of black Harlem and Brooklyn and the much
larger foreign Negro world outside them. This intermediate position
helped him gain status in black North American society, and helped him
to create his spectacular collection of international documents.98 But his
story should not be simplified to an empty celebration of the advantages
of hybrid ethnicity. Nor, for that matter should it be seen as a tale of
special privilege based on foreign, and therefore not quite “Negro,”
status. Race prejudice, anxieties of national belonging and displacement,
and humiliation at the hands of educated elites might alone have made
Schomburg’s migrations painful. But the experience of being between
cultures, with all the advantages it brought, could also frequently be-
come an added source of anxiety and alienation. Here again language is
a key example. Schomburg’s clumsiness with the English language,
particularly in written form, was famous. Though friends excused his
tortured prose, attributing it to his foreign birth, his trouble writing in
English helped reinforce his secondary rank among black intellectuals.
When he did publish in major journals, DuBois, Charles S. Johnson,
Alain Locke, and other editors rewrote his pieces with a heavy hand. In
their eyes he was just a collector not a sophisticated writer or a histo-
rian. “My good loyal friend Schomburg,” Locke wrote while editing one
of Schomburg’s articles in 1937, “can gather facts but he cannot write.
He was trained in Porto Rico on florid Spanish and his English is impos-
sible.” 99
At the same time, Schomburg’s imperfect Spanish, dulled by years of
living abroad, was a source of embarrassment when he was among
Spanish-speaking intellectuals. The Afro-Cuban architect and journalist
Gustavo Urrutia wrote, apparently unaware of the offense it might give,
that when Schomburg visited Havana in 1932 “apenas recordaba su
Castellano.” [“scarcely remembered his Spanish.”]100 Similarly Max Rios,
a Puerto Rican professor at Columbia, kidded Schomburg on his acci-
dental use of Spanglish in a letter to a Uruguayan book dealer. “I real-
ized your mistake,” he wrote, “le tradujo del inglés la palabra “library”,
y puso “libreria”. Y “libreria en español quiere decir “bookstore.” Por
eso le enviaron muchos ejemplares para la venta. [“You translated the
word ‘ library’ from English and put the word ‘librería.’ And ‘librería’ in
Spanish means ‘bookstore.’ That is why they sent you so many copies,
to sell them.”] So the laugh was on you.”101 By the 1930s Schomburg
was admired in both communities, English-speaking and Spanish-speak-
ing, for his control of foreign languages. But within each community his
credentials were tarnished and, one presumes, his pride humiliated by
clumsy phrasing and imperfect usage.
Schomburg, whose cosmopolitanism and intermediate ethnic status

had been such a boon amid the Pan-Africanism of the 1910s and 1920s,
often found himself frustrated in the late 1920s and early 1930s as the
intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance began to construct an explicitly
North American identity for Harlem and the New Negro artistic and
intellectual movement.102 If, as Alain Locke wrote in 1925, Negro cul-
tural traits were “neither characteristically African nor to be explained
as an ancestral heritage” but rather “the result of his peculiar experience
in America,” where did that leave foreign Negroes like Schomburg?
Where did it leave the cause of Negro internationalism? Schomburg’s
pent-up rage over this emerging Americanism is evident in his sharp
reply to Ira de A. Ried, who had written for advice in writing his book,
The Foreign Negro (1937). “Personally I am unconcerned with the preju-
dicial angle of where a man comes from” Schomburg wrote, “the more I
hear a man prattle about foreign-born the less he is in my estimation.”
As a foreigner, he wanted to be recognized as fully part of the Harlem
community, as fully American, and to downplay any concern with na-
tional origins, expressed so frequently in the 1920s and 1930s as nativist
prejudice. “The American nation opened its door to the foreign born and
these people helped in a great measure to make the nation what it really
is today,” he told Ried.103
But at the same time he did not want to give up his internationalism
and simply fold into an introspective, English-speaking, North Ameri-
can black culture. In fact, after more than thirty years in New York, and
two decades of isolation from Afro-Cuban intellectuals, Schomburg be-
gan reasserting his own Hispanic origins and tried desperately to re-
kindle the interest of black North Americans in the rest of the black
world. This effort seems to have sharpened after his trip to Cuba in
1932, where he went in search of “Negro books” and introduced himself
some of the very same Afro-Cuban leaders whose continued leadership
had slipped from his view after the “Race War” of 1912. He met Juan
Gualberto Gómez (probably for the first time, though he called him an
old friend), Lino D’Ou, General Campos Marquetti, a younger black
journalist named Gustavo Urrutia, and the young poet Nicolás Guillén.
And in a burst of new excitement he once again imagined building an
axis of intellectual and cultural life between communities of color in
Cuba and New York. “To American Negroes,” he wrote, “interested in
the cultural development of their race, a trip to Cuba would be an
inspiration and a revelation that might astound them.”104 But, at the
peak of his fame as a race leader, he was painfully out of step with the
Hoffnung-Garskof 39
mood of Harlem intellectuals. He planned unsuccessful boat tours of

Cuba and Haiti.105 He tried desperately to find someone to translate the
works of Nicolás Guillén, and to bring Guillén to New York.106 He
hosted the surly Cuban painter, Pastor Argudín, at his home in Brooklyn
for nearly a year and fulminated at the provincialism of “the so-called
Negro artists of [this] city” who “did not have the courtesy to invite the
distinguished Cuban painter to a reception or a tea. They are so clannish
and prejudiced” he wrote to Catarina Jarboro in France, “that I have
given up having anything to do with them.107 In his last years he lived
among his books and with his letters, emerging occasionally to give
speeches or attend fund raising dinners. In his correspondence with
Urrutia and other Cuban friends he rekindled his sense of belonging to
the Afro-Cuban intellectual class. In documents and articles he contin-
ued piecing together the image of a historically unified, but internation-
ally dispersed, African diaspora, an image that had gradually ceased to
resonate in the ethnic life of the city around him.
CONCLUSION
Though it is in many ways unusual, Schomburg’s story helps us to
rethink the evolution of Puerto Rican ethnic and racial identity in New
York as a relatively open process of community formation. Understand-
ing this process begins, as Winston James suggests, with understanding
the different racial systems that have operated in Puerto Rico, in the
British Islands, and in the United States. It also requires much more
serious scholarly attention to the evolution of strong lines of demarca-
tion between black and Puerto Rican ethnic groups between the 1930s
and the 1960s—to addressing the question of how it became so difficult
to be black and Puerto Rican simultaneously in New York. But within
these two general sets of historical questions, Schomburg reminds us
that we should also begin to examine how Puerto Ricans (like other
racial and ethnic groups in New York and in the Caribbean) interpreted
and negotiated their own identities locally and in unpredictable ways,
often at odds with the dominant racial ideologies operating in Puerto
Rico and New York. Schomburg cannot be made into an archetype for
Afro-Puerto Rican resistance to racism in the Hispanic Caribbean or
Hispanic New York. But a reexamination of his life can initiate a closer
analysis of tensions over race among Puerto Ricans nationalists in New
York, and of the alliances that some Afro Puerto Ricans built with
Cubans and even black North Americans in the margins of overlap
between their communities and institutions.
In a sense this projects Juan Flores’s insight—that a special relation-

ship with black people and black culture resides at the center of Puerto
Rican identity in New York—backwards in time.108 But the “moment of
branching out” Flores examines among mainland Puerto Rican poets of
the civil rights era, was not the same as Schomburg’s moment. His
migrations were the product of specific moment of overlapping diasporas
in the Atlantic world. His migration to Negro North America was facili-
tated by a narrow overlap between the multi-racial world of Antillean
nationalism and the multi-ethnic world of black institutions. Schomburg
did not branch out to black North Americans as an oppressed Puerto
Rican seeking allies. He branched out to black North Americans as a
“Negro” born in Puerto Rico. He and others in the small early Puerto
Rican enclave in New York had already allied themselves with Afro-
Cubans in the Partido Revolucionario Cubano in New York and with
North American blacks in the Sol de Cuba Masonic lodge. He was
accepted in North American pan-Africanist circles, not because all Puerto
Ricans were seen as natural allies, but because, according to the racial
philosophy espoused there, foreign Negroes were family—related by
blood. He became a respected race leader not because he immediately
became an assimilated, North American Negro, but because being fluent
in Spanish and competent in French, Schomburg was able to serve as a
correspondent and translator between North American blacks and a net-
work of black intellectuals that grew within the new imperial order in
the Atlantic basin. He gained prestige in the institutions of Negro New
York precisely because he was something between a foreigner and a
black North American. He gained prestige among blacks in the Carib-
bean by becoming a race leader at the center of the wealthiest and most
powerful black middle class in the world.
The historical and racial consciousness that he constructed in this
world of shifting and displaced identity—a world dominated by racism
and growing United States imperial power—is important not only in
readjusting our view of early Puerto Rican migration and ethnicity or
revising our understanding of Schomburg’s peculiar biography. Out of
his international allegiances and hybrid ethnicity, Schomburg, the avid
reader and prolific collector, fashioned the archive for which historians
fondly remember him. Negotiating his own identity as a West Indian in
Puerto Rico, a Puerto Rican in the Cuban independence movement, and
a foreign Negro in Harlem and Brooklyn, he laid the foundations for the
idea of an African diaspora that we have inherited. He left us a collec-
tion shaped not only by his cosmopolitan view of race, but also his
Hoffnung-Garskof 41
friendships, correspondence, and travel in the Atlantic World. Under-

standing the migrations of Arturo Schomburg, and the peculiarities of
the world he inhabited, help us to understand the emergence of an idea
of a black diaspora that had New York at its hub. His migrations help
explain how Harlem became the center for research in international
black culture, rather than Havana, Port-Au-Prince, Salvador da Bahia, or
Johannesburg.
NOTES
In this story words can become rather slippery. What we call people of African
decent born in different parts of the Americas reflects certain presuppositions about
the relationships among them, as well as the political evolution of the English
language. Negro, the word most frequently used by Schomburg and his contempo-
raries in the United States to refer to their self-conscious community, and to apply
their own sense of self to international causes, has since passed out of favor. I have
nonetheless sometimes used it, in historical context, to present that community in
its own words.
The term African-American is used to mean all Americans with some African
decent, not, as in common usage, only those native to the United States. The word
black, often qualified by North American or other geographical adjectives, then
stands in for what Alain Locke called American Negro, referring to a specific,
native, African-American social group in the United States. And the variants Afro-
Cuban, Afro-Puerto Rican, black and mulatto Puerto Rican, or Cubans of color to
refer to African Americans from those countries.
I wish to express my deep gratitude to Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones. He first sug-
gested this project to me and he has been its most avid supporter. I am also greatly
indebted to Jeremy Adelman, Paulina Alberto, Eduardo Elena, John Mack Faragher,
Ben Goldfrank, Winston James, Barbara Krauthamer, Félix Matos-Rodríguez, Lorrin
Thomas, and all the participants in the Latin American History Workshop at Princeton
University for their generous comments on drafts of this paper.
1. Elinor des Verney Sinnette, whose work provides the essential foundations
for all contemporary biography of Schomburg, views Schomburg’s racial patriotism
as a simple mark of his unfolding brilliance and loyalty, since he was by definition
a “black bibliophile.” Elinor Des Verney Sinnette Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, Black
Bibliophile and Collector: a biography. (New York and Detroit; 1989), pp. 2, 23.
Puerto Rican writer, Flor Piñiero de Rivera, makes the opposite case, claiming that
Schomburg was “first” a great Puerto Rican, and second an intellectual who discov-
ered “el legado histórico del negro.” His birthplace and his credentials as a national-
ist before 1898 allow her to reclaim Schomburg for Puerto Rico. All his accom-
plishments after moving to Harlem are therefore the accomplishments of a Puerto
Rican, no matter that they were almost entirely dedicated to rejecting nationalism
and defining a new international Negro identity. See Flor Piñeiro De Rivera’s
introduction in Arturo A. Schomburg, Arturo Schomburg: un puertorriqueño descubre
el legado histórico del negro: sus escritos anotados y apéndices. ed. Flor Piñeiro de
Rivera (San Juan; 1989).
2. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism
in Early Twentieth-Century America. (London, New York; 1998) pp. 193–231. For
accounts of the racial attitudes of Puerto Rican migrants see for instance Tomás
Blanco’s classic study of Puerto Rican racial prejudice, which cites a “natural”
tendency among Afro-Puerto Ricans to “rehuir cuanto pueda clasificales en montón
con un a clase que sufre tal grado de injusticia y desprecio.” Tomás Blanco, El
prejuicio racial en Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras, P.R., 1985) p. 103. (Earlier accounts
are Lawrence Chenault. The Puerto Rican Migrant in New York City. New York;
1938), W.A. Domingo, “Gift of the Black Tropics,” in The New Negro: An Inter-
pretation. ed. Alain Locke (New York, 1925), p. 342.
3. Schomburg has recently received renewed attention among historians seeking
to push the frontiers of African-American history outside of U.S. national bound-
aries. See Earl Lewis “To turn as on a pivot: Writing African-Americans into a
History of Overlapping Diasporas,” American Historical Review, 100:3 (June,
1995):765–787 and Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem.’
Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History, 86:3
(December, 1999).
4. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1993) pp.1–40. Colin Palmer “Defining the Modern African Diaspora,”
Perspectives, 36:9 (September 1998):1, 22–25.
5. Kelley, “But a Local Phase of a World Problem.” points to the profound
influence Schomburg’s collection, and by extension his personal biography, had on
black North American ideas about world history.
6. “So that the rights of the people will be real, and not a vague fiction.”
7. Gerald Poyo, With All and for the Good of All: The Emergence of Popular
Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898 (Durham,
N.C., 1989), pp. 52–55.
8. For Bernardo Vega’s account of Schomburg’s arrival in New York see César
Andreu Iglesias, ed. Memorias de Bernardo Vega: conibución a la historia de la
comunidad puertorriqueña en Nueva York (Rio Piedras, P.R., 1977), p. 106. See
also Letter of Introduction from José González Font, 2 April 1891. Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, N.Y., Arthur A. Schomburg
Papers (hereafter SSRBC, Schomburg).
9. The Club Borinquen, for instance, was founded at a meeting on west 57th
Street, only a few blocks away from Schomburg’s house. Josefina Toledo Sotero
Figueroa: Editor de Patria (Havana, 1985) p. 37.
10. See Schomburg’s undated prospectus for a cookbook and social history of
Negro cooking, a remarkable document with an unmistakably personal flair. SCRBC,
Schomburg.
11. A.A. Schomburg. Letter to Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, 14 May 1938,
SCRBC, Schomburg.
12. For Schomburg’s curriculum vita claiming to have “worked with” José Martí
and Rafael Serra, see SCRBC, John Edward Bruce Papers (hereafter SCRBC, Bruce).
This fragment is undated, but it is reasonable to suspect this was in 1906 or before,
since it does not list his employment at the Bankers’ Trust Company. Schomburg
claimed that a plot to assassinate Martí had been discovered while he, Martí and
some others were meeting at the home of Sotero Figueroa on Second Avenue.
Schomburg, Rosendo Rodriguez, and Gonzalo de Quesada escorted Martí to his
home, helping to save his life. Martí told them if the incident became known it
could bring “malas consecuencias” to the cause so Schomburg told no one until he
wrote about it in his article “General Antonio Maceo,” The Crisis. May, 1931. See
letter from Schomburg to the Cuban historian Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, 14
May 1938, SCRBC, Schomburg. For Schomburg’s claim to have been friends with
Gualberto Gómez in these years see A.A. Schomburg, “My Trip To Cuba in Quest
Hoffnung-Garskof 43
of Negro Books,” Opportunity, February, 1933. Winston James has informed me in

a personal communication (March 2001) that an early meeting between Schomburg
and Gualberto Gómez was almost certainly impossible despite Schomburg’s claim.
13. Undated Scrap in Schomburg’s files announcing a visit of the “Cuban gentle-
man” to the city. It appears to date from one of his early visits south shortly after
1898. SCRBC, Schomburg.
14. For details on the founding of Dos Antillas and Borinquen see Ibrahím
Hidalgo Paz, “Reseña de los clubes fundadores del Partido Revolucionario Cubano,”
Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos, 4 (1981): 208–230. And the “Reglamento
del Club Politico Las Dos Antillas,” SCRBC, “Club Las Dos Antillas” manuscript
Minute Book (1892–1895). (hereafter SCRBC, Antillas). For the ideology of Union
Antillano see the newspaper printed by Benito Monge, a member of Borinquen.
Puerto Rico. Periodico Separatista. (New York) 10, 17 March 1895.
15. For statistics on the growth of the tabaquero communities of South Florida
see Gerald Poyo, With All and for the Good of All, pp. 50–56. For figures on Puerto
Rican immigration see Barry Levine “The Puerto Rican Exodus: Development of
the Puerto Rican Circuit” in The Caribbean Exodus, ed. Barry Levine (New York
1987. According to Levine, Puerto Rican migrants to New York numbered only
1500 in 1910. The number was likely considerably smaller in the 1890s.
16. For an analysis of the transformation of Cuban society, the rise of popular
nationalism, the emergence of social banditry, and the alienation of elite planters
from Spanish governors in the period after 1878 see Ada Ferrer, “To Make a Free
Nation: Race and the Struggle for Independence in Cuba, 1868–1898, (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Michigan, 1995), pp. 174–205. Puerto Rico did have an uprising in
Lares in 1868, but it was quickly isolated and squelched. By the 1890s, most Puerto
Ricans, complained independence leader Ramón Betances, “tenia solo una vaga
memora del movimento revolucionario de Lares,” “had only a vague memory of the
revolutionary movement in Lares” Cited in Carmelo Rosario Natal, Puerto Rico y
la crisis de la Guerra Hispanoamericana (1895–1898). (Rio Piedras, P.R., 1989),
p. 104.
17. Toledo, Sotero Figueroa, p. 28. Many of the Cuban leaders, men like Rafael
Serra, José Martí, and Juan Gualberto Gómez, came from similar backgrounds in
literary clubs and popular education, like Armonía and la Liga Antillana.
18. Andreu Iglesias, Memorias de Bernardo Vega, p. 243.
19. SCRBC, Antillas. For issues related to fundraising in the club and in the
cigar factories see, for example, meeting minutes from 21 May 1895, and 27 Aug.,
1895.
20. SCRBC, Antillas. Minutes from Special General Assembly in “Military
Hall,” 6 October 1895.
21. Gabriel López, F. G. Marín, Federico Pacheco, F.J. Prieto, Narciso Garcia,
Silvestre Bressman, S. Pivaló, Isidoro Apodaca, Antonio Molina, Rosendo Rodríguez,
Arturo Schomburg, “A los Cubanos y Puertorriqueños residentes en New York,”
Patria. (New York), 22 August 1893.
22. José Martí, “Mí Raza,” Patria. (New York) 23 March 1894.
23. Enrique Medín Arango, Discurso pronunciado en la velada inaugural de la
Sociedad de Instrucción y Recreo Porvenir por el ciudadano Enrique Medín Arango.
La Noche del 3 de Agosto, de 1896. (Key West, 1896) pp. 33–34.
24. Ferrer. “To Make a Free Nation,” pp. 225–241.
25. Ibid., pp. 241–268.
26. Rafael Serra y Montalvo, Ensayos Politicos (New York, 1896), p. 134.
27. SCRBC, Antillas. Minutes from Special General Assembly in “Military
Hall,” 6 October 1895. For a contrasting view of race but a similar vision of history,
from an ally in the Cuban movement for social equality, see for instance the words
of M.F. Barranco He argued that only by accident had the white race “recibió y
propagó la luz bendita de la ciencia, la que guió el carro del Progreso.” If “la
primera colonia que como golondrina fué á sentar sus reales en Grecia hubiera sido
de hombres amarillos de la China, ó de hombres negros de Africa, entonces hubiera
sucedido que la raza civilizadora hubiera sido la raza amarilla o negra, y la raza
blanca hubiera ocupado un puesto inferior en la escala de la humanidad.” M.F.
Barranco. “A Rafael Serra.” published as a preface to Serra, Ensayos Politicos, pp.
21–22. (“received and spread the blessed light of science, which drove the cart of
Progress.” “If . . . the first colony that settled like swallows in Greece had been
yellow men from China, or black men from Africa, then the civilizing race would
have been the black or the yellow, and the white race would have occupied an
inferior position on the ladder of humanity”).
28. See Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial
Identity in Colombia. (Baltimore, 1993) pp. 9–47.
29. According to the story one day, some of the white children in the club
boasted that all of the great figures in Puerto Rican history were white, that Puerto
Ricans of color had never made a significant contribution to the nation. Stung by
the implication that, in effect, black people had no history to be proud of, young
Arturo began searching for books and documents that would prove his friends
wrong. The next time his compañeros spoke of the accomplishments of white
Puerto Ricans, Schomburg had collected enough evidence that he could “hablar con
igual soltura sobre la historia de los portorriqueños [sic] negros.” (“he could speak
with equal facility about the history of black Puerto Ricans”). My citation is from
Gustavo Urrutia, “Schomburg” in Diario de la Marina (Havana) 2 November 1933.
Winston James has shown that this article was in fact largely a translation from an
earlier piece by Floyd Calvin called “Race Colleges need Chair in Negro History—
A.A. Schomburg,” in the Pittsburgh Courier, 5 March 1927.
30. SCRBC, Antillas, Minutes from Special General Assembly in “Military
Hall,” 6 October 1895.
31. Ibid. Race was not his only concern. He also listed several Puerto Rican
heroes in the struggle, Ruís Mendis, Lazaga, and Mascaró.
32. For republished articles from this newspaper see Rafael Serra, La Repœblica
Posible (Havana, 1909).
33. SCRBC, Antillas, Special General Assembly in “Military Hall” Minutes
from 6 October 1895.
34. In 1895, with war now raging in Cuba, and the Party controlled by a small
delegation of elite Cuban civilians in Washington, Henna suggested the creation of
a parallel Puerto Rican Revolutionary party separate from the Cuban hierarchy. He
hoped to gain more control over funds raised by Puerto Rican nationalists, and to
speed the spread of the fighting to Puerto Rican soil. But the fierce objection of
Betances and Sotero Figueroa to any sign of division between Puerto Rican and
Cuban separatists led to a compromise solution. In 1895 Henna, an annexationist,
assumed the presidency of the new Sección Puerto Rico (SPR) of the Partido
Revolucionario Cubano. It was, ostensibly, to be the new central authority for
Schomburg and the other members of the Puerto Rican revolutionary clubs. Then,
in 1897, after a dispute over money, Henna broke off relations with Estrada Palmas
and began negotiating with the U.S. government to make sure that Puerto Rico
would be included if and when the U.S. decided to intervene in the Cuban conflict.
According to SPR historian (and Henna ally) Roberto Todd, Estrada Palmas and the
Cuban junta HAD reneged on a promise of money and munitions for an expedition
to Puerto Rico. Partido Revolucionario Cubano, Sección Puerto Rico, Memoria de
Hoffnung-Garskof 45
los trabajos realizados: 1895 a 1898 (New York, [1898]) pp. 198–200. Natal,
Puerto Rico y la crisis de la guerra hispanoamericana pp. 87–120. Toledo Sotero
Figueroa, pp. 72–81.
35. The members of Borinquen and Las Dos Antillas sent the Cuban leader an
official letter of support in July of 1896. SCRBC, Antillas, Toledo Sotero Figueroa,
p. 80.
36. SCRBC, Antillas, For Rosario’s statement and discussion of a plan to mount
a military expedition to Puerto Rico see minutes from 26 July 1896.
37. This figure is from Natal, Puerto Rico y la crisis de la guerra hispano-
americana, p. 106. There is unfortunately no indication of what proportion of these
volunteers were Afro-Puerto Rican.
38. SCRCB Antillas, 18 March 1896.
39. Schomburg to Mr. John Clarke, 1 May 1936. SCRBC, Schomburg.
40. For a history of Afro-Cuban intellectuals in the early Cuban Republic see
Sandra Bronfman, Reforming Race in Cuba, 1902–1940. (Ph.D. diss., Princeton
University, 2000).
41. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba Between Empires 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh, 1983).
42. “La nota del día de 6 de Agosto de 1907” in La Discusión, Havana. Re-
printed in Rafael Serra y Montalvo, Para Blancos y Negros. Para Blancos y Negros:
Ensayos politicos, socials, y económicos (Havana, 1907) p. 210. At the same time
some Afro-Cuban leaders found space within the new party system to advance
themselves or their projects. And a black Puerto Rican physician named José Celos
Barbosa provided pro-U.S. leadership on that island.
43. His second marriage produced two sons, Reginald Stanfield and Nathaniel
José, both raised by their maternal grandparents, and his third produced Fernando
Alfonso, Dolores Maria, and Carlos Plácido. His penchant for naming children after
famous Cubans and Puerto Ricans underscores his continued ideological connection
to the islands in these years, even as his practical connections began to fade.
44. In an interview many years later Reginald and Nathaniel Schomburg told
Sinnette that their father continued to speak Spanish with close friends but discour-
aged his children from speaking it. Sinnette, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, p. 166.
The contrast between the Spanish names he gave many of his children, and the
choice not to teach Reginald and Nathaniel Spanish, is one of the interesting com-
plications of Schomburg’s identity. In this he was not unlike countless other immi-
grants to New York, ambivalent about the process of assimilation.
45. See note 13.
46. See Tomás Femdández Robaina, Negro en Cuba, 1902–1958: apuntes para
la historia de la lucha contra la discriminación racial (Havana, 1990). Serra, La
Republica Posible; Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux, Rafael Serra y Montalvo: obrero
incansable de nuestra independencia (Havana, 1975).
47. Arturo A. Schomburg, “La historia verdadera de la insurección de los esclavos
bajo de la cabecilla de Juan Buddhoe, quien es aún venerado por sus compatriotas,”
Prevision (Havana), 10 February 1910.
48. Arthur A. Schomburg “General Everisto Estenoz,” The Crisis, October, 1910,
p. 144. Race relations in Cuba were followed closely by the North American Negro
press in these years, but few North American journalists had inside knowledge of
events in Cuba. Schomburg was an exception. See David J. Hellwig, “The African
American Press and United States Involvement in Cuba, 1902–1912” in Between
Race and Empire: African Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution, ed.
Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuertes. (Philadelphia, 1998) pp. 70–84.
49. See Aline Helg. Our Rightful Share. Fernández Robaina, Negro en Cuba;
and Louis Pérez, “Politics, Peasants, and People of Color: The 1912 ‘Race War’ in
Cuba Reconsidered,” HAHR. 66: 3 (February 1986): 509–539. Helg argues that the
race war extinguished the possibility of independent political voices for Cubans of
color. More recent work has contradicted this conclusion, pointing to ways that
many people of color continued to operate within the confines of the Cuban politi-
cal and intellectual system. Bronfman, Reforming Race in Cuba, 1902–1940.
50. Arthur A. Schomburg. “Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a
Chair of Negro History in our Schools and Colleges, etc. Address Delivered at the
Teachers’ Summer Class at the Cheyney Institute, July 1913.” (Baltimore, 1979),
pp. 6–7.
51. See Gilroy: The Black Atlantic, pp. 19–29, Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s
House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (N.Y., 1992), pp. 3–46. James, Holding
Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia. For the relationship between these early Pan-Africanists
and Garvey and Harrison see Irma Watkins-Owens. Blood Relations: Caribbean
Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930. (Bloomington, Ind., 1996),
pp. 92–125.
52. Guarionex (A.A. Schomburg), “Bruce Grit Honored,” The Guardian (Bos-
ton), 7 October 1905.
53. Des Verney Sinnette, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, p. 126. James, Holding
Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, pp. 211–213.
54. Arthur A. Schomburg. “Is Hayti Decadent?” The Unique Advertiser IV,
August 1904. Schomburg’s view of the black Caribbean was projected through the
lens of U.S. expansion in the region. His impressions of Haiti, for instance, were
gathered during a visit to Santo Domingo with an American mineral survey team in
1904. See a typescript of Schomburg’s impressions of Santo Domingo in SCRBC,
Schomburg.
55. See Serra Montalvo, Para Blancos y Negros, pp. 135, 184–187.
56. The AME church for instance, sent missionaries to Santo Domingo, Haiti,
and eventually Cuba as part of a larger, Protestant, Americanizing mission. At the
same time the AME attempted to foster independent racial identity among local
populations. Jualynne Dodson, “Encounters in the African Atlantic World: The
African Methodist Episcopal Church in Cuba,” in Between Race and Empire, ed.
Brock and Castañeda, pp. 85–103. Kevin Gains “Black Americans’ Racial Uplift as
a ‘Civilizing Mission’: Pauline Hopkins on Race and Imperialism” in Cultures of
United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.,
1993), pp. 433–455. Appiah, In my Father’s House, pp. 3–46.
57. It seems likely that Schomburg first met Estenoz on this trip. Schomburg,
“General Everisto Estenoz,” p. 143.
58. For example an unsigned handwritten note among John Bruce’s papers (c.
1910) complains that Estenoz had been bragging about his ability to attract invest-
ment and contributions from African Americans. Another tells of a “prominent”
member of the Odd Fellows, an African American fraternal order also important as
a mutual aid society among Afro Cubans, promising thousands in investments by
American Negroes for projects in Cuba. SCRBC, Bruce.
59. See Guarionex (Schomburg), “Bruce Grit Honored.” See also program from
the dinner dated 28 September 1905 and a letter to Bruce from Edward Blyden in
Paris, 19 Aug. 1905. Both in SCRBC, Bruce. Including Serra on the list of those
invited may be an example of Schomburg’s ambitious imagination. Serra did travel
to the U.S. that summer. I do not know if it was possible that he attended Bruce’s
dinner.
60. This is Shomburg’s own description of the work of the Negro Society for
Historical Research, from his famous essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” in The
New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Locke, p. 236.
Hoffnung-Garskof 47
61. Schomburg, “Racial Integrity,” pp. 7, 18.

62. For Schomburg’s memories of being a “pupil” under Acosta see his “In
Search of Juan de Pareja,” The Crisis. July 1927, p. 153.
63. Sotero Figueroa. Ensayo biográfico de los que mas han contribuido al
progreso de Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras, 1973) José González Font, Escritos sobre
Puerto Rico. (Barcelona, 1903) pp. 188–189. There were also several working class
history projects established by tabaqueros in Puerto Rico, and Alejandro Tapia y
Rivera founded the Biblioteca Histórica in these years. I am indebted to an anony-
mous referee who commented on an earlier version of this paper for bringing these
to my attention.
64. See Figueroa’s “La Verdad de la Historia” reprinted in Edgardo Meléndez,
Puerto Rico en Patria (Santo Domingo, D.R., 1996), pp. 156–181.
65. Schomburg, Racial Integrity, p. 5.
66. Letter to Bruce from Schomburg discussing the Negro Society for Historical
Research, 21 March 1912, SCRBC, Bruce.
67. Langston Hughes, “My Early Days in Harlem” in Harlem, A Community in
Transition. ed. John Henrik Clarke (New York, 1964), p. 64.
68. For figures on black immigration to New York and analysis of housing
patterns in Harlem see Watknis-Owens, Blood Relations, pp. 39–53.
69. Cited in Andreu Iglesias, Memorias de Bernardo Vega, pp. 127–128.
70. Ibid.
71. Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, pp. 48–50. Extrapolating from the case of
Faugas and Randolph, and observing the tendency of tabaqueros to be involved in
the labor movement she cautiously speculates that tabaqueros came to Harlem
because of some contact with black radicals in the Uptown Socialist party. Winston
James however is emphatic that no such contact existed. Winston James, personal
communication. March 2001. I am much indebted to his suggestion that I rethink
this evidence.
72 . Most of the evidence for this paragraph, the idea that the racialization of
Puerto Rican identity occurred in the 1930s, the earlier relationship to Spanish
immigration, and the comparison/tensions between Puerto Ricans in Manhattan and
Brooklyn are from unpublished drafts of a forthcoming dissertation by Lorrin Tho-
mas, (University of Pennsylvania), and her personal communications. I am particu-
larly indebted to her for sharing these ideas with me.
73 . Petition for a warrant for a new lodge to be named “Sol de Cuba.” submit-
ted to “the M.W. Grand Master of the H.F. of F.A.M. for the state of New York” in
New York, 26 June 1880 signed by Lafayette Marcus, Manuel Coronado, Abraham
Seino, Sixto Pozo, John Johnson, Andrew N. Postro, of the Mt. Olive Lodge and
Abony Brown of the Celestial Lodge. SCRBC, New York, Harry A. Williamson
Papers (SCRBC, Williamson).
74. “The History of Prince Hall Lodge No. 38” Published by the Prince Hall
Lodge No. 38 F. & A. M.., P.H. included in a “Souvenir Program—75th Anniver-
sary” New York: 4 November 1956, SCRBC, Williamson.
75. Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia, Pa. Logia Luz de Caballero
Manuscript Collection. (Hereafter PHA, Logia Luz). For founding of Logia C.M.
Céspedes at Military Hall in NY, see Libro de Actas Gran Logia Luz de Caballero,
11 April 1878.
76. PHA, Logia Luz. Libro de Actas Gran Logia Luz de Caballero, 26 May
1880.
77. Aspirants to the lodge were required, as part of their initiation, to recite their
conviction that “es contrario a la justicia otra desigualdad que no sea la del mérito”
and that human dignity and fraternity should never depend on “tal ó cual raza de
esta ó aquella gerarquía social.” (“any inequality that is not based on merit is
unjust” and “such and such a race or this or that social hierarchy”). PHA, Logia
Luz, Orden Caballero de la Luz, Liturgia (New York, 1879), pp. 14–15.
78. For Brother Hartman’s comments see PHA, Logia Luz. “Libro de Actas,”
Book 2. No. 293, 21 March 1879.
79. For instance four candidates for membership in El Progreso were rejected in
June of 1879, PHA, Logia Luz, Libro de Actas, Gran Logia Luz de Caballero, 29
May 1880. None of these men were among the founders of Sol de Cuba.
80. “Libro de Actas,” PHA, Logia Luz, Manuel Hernández González. “La Orden
Cubana de los Caballeros de la Luz en el exilio norteamericano,” in Masonería
Española en América: 5th Symposium Internacional de Historia de la Masonería
Española, (Zaragoza, Spain, 1993) On the deterioration of class relations in the
emigración see Poyo, With All and for the Good of All, pp. 65–73.
81. See Watkins Owens, Blood Relations, pp. 11–29.
82. Harry A. Williamson. “Arthur A. Schomburg: The Freemason.” Typescript
of a biographical “sketch” dated 13 March 1941, SCRB, Williamson. Williamson, a
distinguished Masonic historian and good friend of Schomburg, writes that
Schomburg joined Sol de Cuba in 1892. Schomburg’s name however is curiously
missing both from a membership list compiled in the early 1890s, and the Report of
the Sol de Cuba Lodge No. 38 F. and A.M. to the Grand Lodge of the State of New
York, 5 June 1901. Each in SCRBC, Williamson.
83. Report of the Sol de Cuba Lodge No. 38. SCRBC, Williamson.
84. Williamson, “Arthur A. Schomburg: The Freemason.”
85. Angel. Quintero Rivera, “Socialista y tabaquero: la proletarización de los
artesanos,” Sin Nombre. 8:4 (January–March 1978), pp. 107–111.
86. Des Verney Sinnette, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, p. 35.
87. Schomburg told Ira de A. Ried that “the Cuban Negro, who laid the founda-
tion of the great tobacco industries in the United States . . . [has] been made useless
and forced out, being substituted in a large measure by the whites and modern
machinery,” Schomburg to Mr. Ira De A. Reid, 18 July 1935, SCRBC, Schomburg.
88. Martín Summers, “Prince Hall Freemasonry in New York City, 1900–1930:
Class, Ethnicity and the Organization of Black Masculinity,” Working Paper, Cen-
ter for Historical Analysis, Rutgers University. December 1997, pp. 9–13.William
A. Muraskin, Middle-class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in
America, (Berkeley, Calif., 1975), pp. 25–42.
89. See Elinor Des Verney Sinnette, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, pp. 41, 190.
Summers, “Prince Hall Freemasonry in New York City,” pp. 18–19, 31–36.
90. Schomburg, Racial Integrity, pp. 5–6.
91. For an analysis of the importance of social clubs, dances, dinners, and
elected offices in determining the status of black North Americans in the 1920s and
1930 see the sociological work of Horace Cayton and St. Claire Drake. Black
Metropolis (Chicago, 1940) pp. 669–670, 688–715.
92. Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 73. She gleans this from references to
Schomburg in the black press.
93. Schomburg to Bruce, May 1914, SCRBC, Bruce.
94. Schomburg to Bruce, 5 September 1916, SCRBC, Bruce.
95. Schomburg was also an active member and sometime officer of The Urban
League, the YMCA, Negro Society for Historical Research, the Association of
Trade and Commerce, the Business and Professional Men’s Forum, Harlem Citi-
zens League for Fair Play, the NAACP, and several fraternal organizations includ-
ing Kappa Alpha Psi. See Victoria Ortiz, “Arthur A. Schomburg: A Biographical
Hoffnung-Garskof 49
Essay” in The Legacy of Arthur A. Schomburg: A Celebration of the Past, A Vision

for the Future. (New York, 1986), p. 63.
96. The Negro World, 2 July 1927, 17 July l926. Cited in Watkins-Owens,
Blood Relations, p. 5.
97. Harry A. Williamson, “Arthur A. Schomburg: The Freemason,” SCRBC,
Williamson.
98. His roll as a correspondent, international collector, and translator did not
depend on deep or continuous contacts with Afro-Cuban activists. While at the
beginning he introduced himself to North Americans as a Cuban gentleman, be-
tween 1912 and 1932 he had little or no direct contact with Afro-Cubans on the
island.
99. Cited in Des Verney Sinnette, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, p. 172.
100. Gustavo Urrutia, “Imperialismo afrocubano” Diario de la Marina (Ha-
vana), 1 March 1936.
101. Max Rios Rios, Dept of Hispanic Languages, Columbia U., to Schomburg,
22 Feb. 1933.
102. Alain Locke, “American Negro Musical Traditions” in The New Negro: An
Interpretation, ed. Locke, p. 254. Cultural historian, George Hutchison, has sug-
gested that this trend towards Americanism intensified still further among Harlem’s
literary elite in the 1930s. George Hutchison, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and
White (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 396–403, 435–448.
103. Schomburg to Mr. Ira De A. Reid, 18 July 1935, SCRBC, Schomburg.
104. Arthur A. Schomburg, “My Trip To Cuba in Quest of Negro Books,”
Opportunity, February, 1933, p. 50
105. For the details of this plan see Claude A. Barnett (editor of the Chicago
Defender) to Schomburg, 22 November 1932. Dantes Bellegarde (Haitian diplomat)
to Schomburg, 22 May 1934. Gustavo Urrutia to Schomburg (no date), all in
SCRBC, Schomburg. Schomburg did manage to convince several friends to make
stops in Havana and Port-au-Prince on their way to the Panama Canal, and wrote at
least a dozen letters of introduction to Bellegarde, Urrutia, and Haitian President
Stenio Vincent. See SCRBC, Schomburg.
106. Edna Worthy Underwood to Schomburg, 29 March 1933. Schomburg to
Guillén, 1 November 1932, 28 February 1938, and 29 April 1938. Richard Patee,
Department of State, to Schomburg, 3, 7 May 1938. Guillén to Schomburg, 7
November 1937 and 2 February 1938, SCRBC, Schomburg.
107. Schomburg to Catarina Jarboro, 9 June 1936, SCRBC, Schomburg. For the
details of Argudín’s fateful visit to Brooklyn see correspondence between Pastor
Argudín and Schomburg, 1932–1934, Gustavo Urrutia to Schomburg 29 August
1934 and 9 September 1935, Schomburg to Urrutia (no date), SCRBC, Schomburg.
108. Juan Flores, “ ‘Qué Assimilated, Brother, Yo Soy Asimilao’: The Structur-
ing of Puerto Rican Identity in the U.S.” in Challenging Fronteras: Structuring
Latina and Latino Lives in The U.S.: An Anthology of Readings. ed. Mary Romero,
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Vilma Ortiz (New York, 1997), pp. 175–185.

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Hoffnung-Garskof 3

The Migrations of Arturo Schomburg:

HISTORIANS REMEMBER Arturo Alfonso Schomburg principally

Prince Hall Masons he found a community of middle-class black men

his Hispanic identity, predisposing Schomburg to an explicit politics of

questionably isolated from Latino social and political organizations. Even

paratively less attraction to strong messages of black nationalism than,

satisfy them. Schomburg the mulatto colonial exile, became a Negro—a

“PARA QUE SEAN REALES Y NO VAGA FICCIÓN LOS

ponents of the Spanish colonial regime. They established networks of

These credentials were well earned. Schomburg was an active orga-

in Venezuela. The speeches that night, recorded in Schomburg’s hurried

resistance to the dominant racial ideologies common among Colombian

“Veo con sentimiento” he wrote, “que marchamos dando palos de ciego,

RACE AND HISTORY BETWEEN EMPIRES:

The radical social agenda espoused by Doctrina de Martí, and mobi-

to a regime of inequality hidden by appearances of hypocritical inequal-

should emulate this international unity, or they would be lost in the

Caribbean to the middle-class clubs and lodges of Harlem was moving

work in backwards, black communities abroad, racial internationalism

ARTHUR A. SCHOMBURG, FREEMASON:

The international black community that shaped Schomburg’s political

To what extent did any Afro-Hispanic migrants, besides Schomburg,

Years War. Accordingly by the 1890s, when Schomburg was initiated,

portant Philadelphia lodge member complained bitterly in 1879, that

Schomburg joined the Sol de Cuba lodge shortly after arriving in

of the opportunities he found to satisfy his personal aspirations in middle-

job would hardly be prestigious employment by today’s standards, and

reported, with some jealousy, that Spanish-speaking Negroes escaped

Schomburg, whose cosmopolitanism and intermediate ethnic status

mood of Harlem intellectuals. He planned unsuccessful boat tours of

In a sense this projects Juan Flores’s insight—that a special relation-

friendships, correspondence, and travel in the Atlantic World. Under-

of Negro Books,” Opportunity, February, 1933. Winston James has informed me in

61. Schomburg, “Racial Integrity,” pp. 7, 18.

Essay” in The Legacy of Arthur A. Schomburg: A Celebration of the Past, A Vision

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