Unoccupied House, Hacienda Esperanza

CAJ_0016_F0001_R

Archivo de Arquitectura y Construcción de la Universidad de Puerto Rico > Colección Carol F. Jopling > Caja 1 -Fotografías

Manatí

1978 o 1979

The title, date and address were provided by the Architecture and Construction Archive of the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR). On the back of the image, there are handwritten notes that read: "Fig. 15, CAJ|0016|F0001". There are repeated photos among the files of this collection because they document different photographic formats created for the project. Examples: 35mm negatives, color, black and white, instant photography, photos that were clarified or with contrast.

This unoccupied house at Hacienda La Esperanza reveals a discourse of colonial entropy and decolonial struggle. Hacienda La Esperanza was once the most successful sugar mill in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Nearly two-hundred enslaved peoples worked those fields, their pain now hidden in the building’s austere remains. By the 1970s, the dilapidated building monumentalizes the island’s historic legal efforts at decolonization. The sugar industry in Puerto Rico all but collapsed after the abolition of slavery that came with the emancipation of 1873. The Hacienda Esperanza eventually ceased operations, too, after first suffering bankruptcy and then failing at an attempt to modernize the plantation’s sugar production with state-of-the-art machinery. The zinc hip roof and solitary stairs and railing of the old master’s house, enclosed in growing vegetation, unveil the passage of time in the photograph—entropy entwined in colonial history’s fading traces. Subsequently, the area has re-emerged as a large nature reserve, a mixed monument of local heritage and educational and tourist effort where the landowner's house stands in cultural discussions of historical interpretation.

English Rights. (hyperlink)

Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín

JPEG

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