Author Description

Presented through a series of lectures interspersed with letters and other historic documents, The Renunciation chronicles a pre-arranged marriage plotted to pacify the slave population and to save Puerto Rico from certain rebellion. The story of Baltasar Montanez, an eighteenth-century Puerto Rican hero and the son of a slave leader, unfolds deliberately, as the lecturer shares with his audience the details of Montanez's life. In 1753 Montanez renounced his own people and married the daughter of the secretary of state. Her hand was offered by the colonial government, with the backing of the Catholic Church, in an effort to create for the slaves an illusion of freedom and social mobility - and to ease growing tension between the two opposing classes. The plan worked, for a brief period, then backfired. This Caribbean Othello, who had so willingly adopted the social, cultural, and religious mores of colonial Puerto Rico's white society, was unable to sustain the charade. Montanez, whose insane visions increasingly preoccupied him, gave in to his consuming madness, abandoning his marriage and renouncing the position to which the marriage entitled him. As the final lecture draws to a close, the audience learns that this archetypal mad genius sided with neither the government and church, which gave him the power he so wanted, nor the slave revolters, whose bloody uprising in his defense brought the Puerto Rican government to its knees.