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Before the turn of the century, while the rich in Madrid, Paris, and Rome capped their sumptuous dinners with sips of Puerto Rico's exquisite black cafe, the anemic men, women, and children who harvested the precious crop lived in squalid huts, and rarely saw a scrap of meat.
Brutalized by grinding poverty, theirs was the harsh world of Manuel Zeno-Gandia's La Charca, widely acknowledged as the first major novel to emerge from Puerto Rico.
In the colloquial Spanish of Puerto Rico's hill country, una charca is a stagnant pond, a body of brackish water. Puerto Rico's Spanish colonial society, says Zeno-Gandia, was an immense charca of human beings, oppressed by poverty, ignorance, and disease. La Charca's outraged cry against oppression and injustice still resonates today.
