Employing the Protestant sound : a study of the first Protestant hymnals in Spanish used in Puerto Rico after 1898

The early twentieth century is one of the main periods of Puerto Rican colonial history characterized by a dramatic change in politics, culture, and religion. After the victory of the United States in the Spanish-Cuban-American war, Puerto Rico became a US colony, ending 400 years of Spanish colonial rule and dramatically changing the Puerto Rican political panorama with the rise of the United States as a twentieth-century empire. Immediately after, several US-based mainline Protestant churches drew plans to start mission projects in Puerto Rico and among the distinctive features of the new missionaries was the arrival of hymnals. While US Protestantism in Puerto Rico has received notable scholarly attention, the musical practices of the missionaries and, later, the first congregations have barely been addressed. Through the study of the first hymnals and hymn books more widely used in Puerto Rico during the first decades of the twentieth century, we can observe trends of musical aesthetics and theological dogma that Puerto Ricans were exposed to during that time. I suggest that, in terms of music, the ontology of these hymnals is characterized by the Anglo-American hymnody tradition, a condition made more complex when inserted into the colonial context of institutionalized Protestantism in Puerto Rico. Drawing from previous historiographic scholarly works done on Protestant hymnody in Puerto Rico, this study explores the origins and contents of the first five Protestant hymnals in Spanish used in Puerto Rico from 1898 to 1924, while also providing a more comprehensive groundwork for future research on this topic. The hymnals under study are the 1893 and 1895 editions of Himnario evangélico, Nuevo himnario evangélico (1914), Himnos de gloria (1921), and Cantos sagrados (1924). The website luispabonrico.com serves as the digital component of this report. Among other features, it includes infographics of textual analysis of hymn texts and timelines and maps of the trans-atlantic genealogies of the hymnals. As a repository of public scholarship, its principal aim is to be an auxiliary resource for the report’s contents and to reach a larger audience interested in Protestant hymnody in Puerto Rico.Musi