These with
the yucca from which they made their casabe or bread, maize, yams, and
other edible roots, constituted their food supply.
There were in Boriquen, as there are among all primitive races,
certain individuals, the embryos of future church functionaries, who
were medicine-man, priest, prophet, and general director of the moral
and intellectual affairs of the benighted masses, but that is all we
know of them.[60]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 60: For further information on this subject, see Estudios
Ethnologicos sobre los indios Boriquenos, by A. Stahl, 1888. Revista
Puertoriquena, Ano II, tomo II.]
CHAPTER XXIX
THE "JIBARO," OR PUERTO RICAN PEASANT
"There is in this island a class of inhabitants, not the least
numerous by any means, who dwell in swamps and marshes, live on
vegetables, and drink muddy water." So wrote Dr. Richard Rey[61] a
couple of decades ago, and, although, under the changed political and
social conditions, these people, as a class, will soon disappear, they
are quite numerous still, and being the product of the peculiar social
and political conditions of a past era deserve to be known.
To this considerable part of the population of Puerto Rico the name of
"jibaros" is applied; they are the descendants of the settlers who in
the early days of the colonization of the island spread through the
interior, and with the assistance of an Indian or negro slave or two
cleared and cultivated a piece of land in some isolated locality,
where they continued to live from day to day without troubling
themselves about the future or about what passed in the rest of the
universe.
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