Buena Vista

This book traces the history of Buena Vista an estate located in the southern foothills of Puerto Rico's central mountain range. Now a popular living history museum Buena Vista flourished in the nineteenth century--first as a farm that furnished food for the city of Ponce and surrounding plantations later as a producer of corn and cornmeal ground at the estate's water-powered mill and finally as a coffee plantation.<br/>Drawing on an impressive range of primary sources Guillermo Baralt portrays the estate's history as a series of overlapping changes: from slavery to salaried labor from primitive processing techniques to the latest in mill technology from Spanish rule to American control and from hard-scrabble country life to life as part of the world marketplace. Richly illustrated and written in a lively narrative style <i>Buena Vista</i> paints a compelling portrait of an era an island a family and an estate bringing a period in Caribbean history to vivid life.