The Picó Papers

The focus on criadas, or Black women and girls who were domestic workers for no to low wages, came from noticing how the histories of Afro-Puerto Rican women within the Fernando Picó papers were in the background. I received the Picó papers in 2020 from my undergraduate research mentor, Francisco Scarano. I emailed Scarano, who is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about his knowledge about possible digital collections of Puerto Rico’s archives because the Covid-19 pandemic cut my dissertation research short before I was able to go to the archipelago’s archivos. The Picó Papers is a PDF of diskettes Francisco Scarano had received earlier in his career from Fernando Picó and then sent to me. 

The Picó Papers is over 1000 pages of biographical sketches that Picó utilized in his seminal historiographies on Puerto Rico. Picó’s research notes were comprised of census records, police records, church records, and newspaper articles that tethered women and children to men.  My research uses bomba, interviews, archival material to construct emotional histories of Afro-Puerto Rican women. So, I was takenaback by how the data, as it was presented, defined women and girls by their relationships to their fathers, husbands, and even employers. What was apparent in initial overviews and remained consistent, was that Black women and girls within the Picó Papers were in close proximity to domestic work and an overwhelming amount of them were tied to the term, “criada.”

You can download the original data here: Microdatos de carolinenses Fernando Pico