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This chapter describes the expansion of the sugar industry in the Spanish Caribbean in the twentieth century. The change was so dramatic that it changed the economic balance between regions in each island, established new demographic patterns of settlement, and resulted in the settlement of lands that had hitherto remained largely depopulated. As new regions were opened up to the cultivation of sugar, the demand for labor, particularly in the agricultural phase of the process, which was labor intensive and required dedicated labor during the zafra, propelled workers into the new plantation zones. While the sugar industry experienced expansion everywhere, the supply of labor power for the plantations varied considerably from region to region.

Although 1619 stands out as a landmark year in early American history, Virginia was not the first English colony to import African laborers; that dubious distinction belongs to its Atlantic sister colony, Bermuda. The first arrived in 1616, and, by the time Jamestown's "twenty and odd negroes" landed, Bermuda had a hundred or more black residents. This essay examines why and how Bermuda's English colonizers deliberately imported African experts from the Spanish Caribbean to solve the problem of properly curing island-grown tobacco and argues that their contributions were critical to the colony's success. Integrated into the island's fledgling society as farmers, neighbors, knowledgeable consultants, and fellow Christians, black islanders were highly visible participants in Bermuda's full settlement. As Virginians wrestled with the novelty of incorporating Africans into their colony, they needed only to look to the east to see Bermuda's nascent slave system emerging.

Brazilian Portuguese and Caribbean Spanish have independently undergone two types of change: a) loss of referential null subjects and loss of the order VS in wh-interrogatives. This chapter proposes that what triggered the change in both domains was the change from pronominal agreement to free weak pronouns. The latter requires the projection of Spec of IP, yielding the expression of the subject pronouns, which was not required by the former. The chapter also assumes that strong pronouns used to appear in either the Spec of a projection higher than IP or adjacent to VP, but the new grammar restricts its position to the sentence periphery. Contrary to previous analyses, DPs are proposed to occupy the same position as strong pronouns only partially.

Historian Anthony Pagden has illustrated that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European explorers often appealed to their personal experience in the Americas to validate their authority on New World topics. In historical methodology, however, appeals to documents as authoritative statements generally take precedence over the experiential knowledge of investigators. This creates an immense paradox for historians of tourism: the need to work in stuffy archives in order to establish the evolving reality of an activity best suited to sun, sand, and tropical landscapes. The preceding chapters have established a documentary basis for understanding the packaging of tourist poles in the Spanish Caribbean. This epilogue integrates on-site observations from around the world, as if from a beach chair, or from a 135-degree angle, with a final comparative analysis of three of the major poles discussed in the book: Varadero in Cuba, Punta Cana-Bávaro in the Dominican Republic, and Cancún in Mexico.

This chapterpaper analyzes changes in the null subject parameter in Caribbean Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese varieties. These varieties have mixed null -subject properties that diverge from the null -subject varieties of General Spanish and European Portuguese. Assuming a Minimalist framework that ascribes parametric variation to differences in lexical settings, change is triggered by an increased frequency of overt pronominals and driven by an anti-locality principle that prohibits a Spec, head configuration when the head and the specifier share agreement features. As a result of this principle, subject–-verb agreement with shared phi-features requires the subject to move to the periphery of the clause. When overt pronominals increase in frequency, they become semantically indistinguishable from null ones, inflection shifts from interpretable to unintepretable, the EPP is no longer satisfied, and subjects are displaced from Spec, TP to the left periphery, the morphological and pronominal systems are reorganized and generic null subjects become possible…

This chapter analyzes the understudied, multidimensional relationship of New York Jews with Latin music. Jewish engagement with Latin music took place throughout New York beyond the Palladium Ballroom, and the chapter presents the dance announcements in New York newspapers from 1947 to 1961 in order to show the extent of activities. It also details the historical depth of Jewish New Yorkers' involvement in Spanish Caribbean music by examining performance venues and events beyond the Catskills as well as the specific contributions of Eydie Gormé, Abbe Lane, Barry Rogers, and the dancer Ira Goldwasser. Ultimately, the chapter explores Jewish self-representations in Latin music and portrayals of Jews by non-Jews in Latin music. While there have been Jewish performers of Latin music throughout the Americas, Jewish New Yorkers' ongoing and nuanced relationship to Latin music has been unique and distinct.