DISCOVERING THE INVISIBLE PUERTO-RICAN SLAVE FAMILY - DEMOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE FROM THE 18TH-CENTURY

Traditional notions that family life among slaves during the pre-plant ation period in the non-Hispanic Caribbean was necessarily unstable ar e fading in light of new research. Although marriage among this segmen t of the population in Caguas, Cayey, San German, and Yauco-rural pari shes in Puerto Rico-involved only a fraction of the overall number of marriages in these communities, the marriage of slaves was much more f requent than previously assumed. Family life among the eighteenth-cent ury Puerto Rican slave population appears to have been quite stable, a s shown by the reconstruction of birth intervals for both married and unmarried mothers. Married and unmarried mothers exhibited similar rep roductive behavior. These results strongly suggest that a majority of the unmarried slave mothers lived in unions that were not institutiona lly recognized, but that were nevertheless stable, as indicated by the high percentage of their children born at intervals comparable to tho se of married mothers. If unmarried mothers were living in stable cons ensual unions, then our understanding of these slave family units duri ng the colonial period must be reassessed not only for Puerto Rico but possibly for the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America.