“Informative, comprehensive, and written in accessible style …”
— El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico’s largest daily newspaper)
“… a work of substantive scholarship and meticulous research that provides a much needed balance to traditional histories that understate (or all too often simply ignore) the role indigenous natives and imported Africans played in developing this Caribbean nation … it challenges the notion that the Tainos (native inhabitants) simply capitulated to the colonizing Spaniards, presenting evidence that they fought back against the colonizers for more than sixty years after the battle of Yaguecas. The role of Africans in Puerto Rico, both slaves and free persons, is also discussed.”
— Midwest Book Review
“This work is an excellent example of a new trend in Puerto Rican historiography seeking to present a more balanced account of our past. It contains a detailed analysis of Puerto Rican society during the Spanish colonial period that highlights the roles and contributions of women and workers. The section on women, based on the latest historical investigations, provides an account of women revolutionary leaders, the movement to educate women, and of the first feminist attempts at emancipation from male patriarchy.”
— Altagracia Ortiz, John Jay College; author of Eighteenth-Century Reform in the Caribbean