In the country the custom has remained, with little change, due to the
fact that the isolation of the country people and the comparatively
small number of children in the rural schools has given little
opportunity to work against the existing situation. Of the children from
the ages of one to ten years there was only an increase of 1,397 white
illegitimate children between 1899 and 1910, which was not anywhere near
the rate of increase of the white population as a whole. During the same
period there was an actual decrease in the number of colored
illegitimate children between the ages of one and ten years, amounting
to 7,717, or a total decrease of illegitimate children under 10 years of
age of 6,320, which would lead us to believe that within the last ten
years the births of consensual marriage and the number of illegitimate
children have decreased much more rapidly than the total census figures
would indicate.
In addition to the question of consensual marriages, we find that under
the Spanish administration, when ecclesiastical marriage was the only
form recognized, there were no divorces registered in the Island of
Porto Rico. With the introduction of the civil marriage after the
American occupation, and the institution of divorce laws and the
recognition of divorce by the civil authorities, the question of divorce
began to demand attention, and in 1910 we find a total of 1,246 divorces
among the people in the Island of Porto Rico. About two thirds of these
were women,[2] and the divorce question will undoubtedly in time bring
as many problems in Porto Rico as it has in the United States.
[2] This would indicate that many of the divorced men had remarried
and were listed in the census as married instead of divorced.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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