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Centrales Azucareras de Puerto Rico, 1974-1992

Black and White Series

During the 1970s, at an early age, Méndez Caratini began to explore, as a metaphor of the progress that was being felt during that historical epoch in Puerto Rico, the theme of the "sugar cane". In 1974 he documented the sugar mill Hacienda del Marqués de la Esperanza, in Manatí -one of the most productive plantations in the Island during the Nineteenth Century. Méndez Caratini also captured the reminiscences of those decades when he photographed an oxen driven cart in the sugar cane fields of San Germán; as well as, the workers who cut the cane in Salinas and Guánica; and lastly, the coffee plantations, which thrive in our mountains.

[Extract]

Adriana Teresa Hernández
Curator
New York
December 2007