Juan Cortada y Quitana
Encyclopedia
Juan Cortada y Quitana was Mayor of Ponce
Ponce, Puerto Rico
Ponce is both a city and a municipality in the southern part of Puerto Rico. The city is the seat of the municipal government.The city of Ponce, the fourth most populated in Puerto Rico, and the most populated outside of the San Juan metropolitan area, is named for Juan Ponce de León y Loayza, the...

, Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...

 in 1873 to 1874.

Hacendado

Cortada was an hacendado, a landowner who ran a sugar cane hacienda
Hacienda
Hacienda is a Spanish word for an estate. Some haciendas were plantations, mines, or even business factories. Many haciendas combined these productive activities...

, a estate dedicated to the growing of the produce for sale to sugar cane mill
Sugar refinery
A sugar refinery is a factory which refines raw sugar.Many cane sugar mills produce raw sugar, i.e. sugar with more colour and therefore more impurities than the white sugar which is normally consumed in households and used as an ingredient in soft drinks, cookies and so forth...

s for the production of cane sugar. The workers in such estates were almost always slaves. Thus it is likely that Cortada owned slaves in working his sugar cane farm. In fact, another source confirms that Cortada in fact owned 28 slaves in 1872, one year before the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico.

As with businesses today, each hacienda in those days had a business name, and Cortada's hacienda was called La Mallorquina. It was located in the nearby town of Santa Isabel
Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico
Santa Isabel is a municipality of Puerto Rico located in the southern coast, south of Coamo; east of Juana Díaz; and west of Salinas. Santa Isabel is spread over 7 wards and Santa Isabel Pueblo...

.

Lender

Cortada, together with his brother Ramon, was also in the money-lending business, lending capital to 11 other hacendados in the area. By 1870 Cortada owned five haciendas in the municipality of Ponce.

Legacy

There is a street in Urbanizacion Las Delicias of Barrio Magueyes
Magueyes
Magueyes is one of the 31 barrios of the municipality of Ponce, Puerto Rico. Together with Cerrillos, Machuelo Arriba, Maragüez, Monte Llano, Portugues, Sabanetas, and Tibes, Magueyes is one of the municipality's eight interior barrios. The name of this barrio is of native Indian...

 in Ponce named after him.

See also

  • Ponce, Puerto Rico
    Ponce, Puerto Rico
    Ponce is both a city and a municipality in the southern part of Puerto Rico. The city is the seat of the municipal government.The city of Ponce, the fourth most populated in Puerto Rico, and the most populated outside of the San Juan metropolitan area, is named for Juan Ponce de León y Loayza, the...

  • List of famous Puerto Ricans
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