Authors: Laird Bergad, Distinguished Professor of History (CUNY, The Graduate Center and Lehman College) & César Ayala, Professor of Sociology (UCLA) 
Discussant: Teresita Levy, Chair, Department of Latin American and Latino Studies (CUNY, Lehman College) 
 
In this book the authors challenge a wide range of well-established myths about the social and economic history of Puerto Rico in the first four decades of the U.S. colonial control over the island. Using a database of tax records for ten municipalities in the sugar, tobacco and coffee producing zones of Puerto Rico, gathered by the authors in the Archivo General de Puerto Rico, together with a new systematic analysis of U.S. Census data that has never been undertaken, the authors show that the idea that a pre-established yeoman peasantry was displaced by U.S, corporate capital, a central tenet of Puerto Rican historiography, is completely erroneous.