San Juan (extra)muros : Displacement and community in la Perla and Ballajá

• Key Concepts:

  • Cartography and maps

  • Historical and contemporary displacement

  • Heritage sites and National Park Service

  • Free, enslaved, and maroon black men and women

  • Working-class women’s history

  • Indigenous history

  • Bourbon reforms

  • Spanish-American War (1898)

  • Militarization (Spanish and American)

  • Gender roles

  • Afro-descendance and ancestry

  • Urban horticulture

  • Puerto Rican bomba music

The walls that surround San Juan were initially erected by the Spanish to protect settlers from numerous external threats such as neighboring Caribs, French buccaneers, British fleets, and Dutch corsairs. But the walls didn’t just keep outsiders at bay, they also became an internal boundary between those perceived as desirable and undesirable.

They demarcated (other)ness and (sub)alterity, a (border)land between life and death. The walls kept Indigenous Peoples, Protestant pirates, the quarantined, the infected, the butchered, the criminal, the poverty-stricken, and rotting corpses outside the city of San Juan. This (de)tour tells the story of two communities, Ballajá and la Perla, one within and the other outside the edges of the city walls. The first housed the city’s working-class, particularly women, and has since disappeared due to military expropriations. The second formed alongside a fort for which it owes its name, a slaughterhouse, a cemetery, a quarantine center and a tuberculosis hospital.

This (de)tour explores legacies of displacement and marginalization through oral histories of resistance on the periphery of another cruise ship stop along the Caribbean visitor economy. La Perla is a (border)land that sprang to life surrounded by institutions of death. Join us to learn alongside its residents how it continues to defy its lawless (shanty)town reputation through art, culture and community organizing, a (de)tour away from (des)pacito tourist traps.

This (de)tour was designed together with community members from la Perla and has been authorized by its Board of residents. At (De)colonial Memory we believe in responsible and sustainable forms of visitor economies (tourism). For this reason, part of the proceeds from this (de)tour will be donated to the “Huerto comunitario de la Perla” and will also help sponsor participation in la Plaza del Negro so people can reconnect with their ancestors through land, dance, and music. 

* This (de)tour accommodates a maximum of 30 adults, divided into two groups.