Imagining our Island in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first years of this twentieth century that is now ending inspired us to organize the exhibit titled ENTRESIGLOS, PUERTO RICO 1890-1910. Now as we live through another turn of the century (entresiglo), is a good time to look back and compare.

The exhibition allows us to look into the daily life of a Puerto Rico that already had almost a million inhabitants, an island that was eager to learn about new technological achievements such as the railroad , the electric light, the phonograph, and the marvels of moving pictures, but at the same time faced the reality of a campesino population that could barely "look beyond the river."

With each exhibit that we organize, we find new sources and the new ways of understanding the Puerto Rican situation. These photographs of the last turn of the century illustrate the social and economic transformation of a people which, though exhausted after Hurricane San Ciriaco in 1899, worked wonders in establishing its university in 1903. In 1893 Banco Popular de Economías y Préstamos was founded, with a modest beginning the Bank fought against usury and endured serious economic reverses. In this exhibit we also find that post card that reveals a budding romance, and the rum and cigar labels that illustrate the tastes and economic vitality of that period.

It is thanks to private and public collections that have preserved old telephones, rustic household items and utensils, the photo albums and the arias of the tenor Antonio Paoli that we have been able to recreate that period in our Island's history. To them we owe this opportunity to recover something of our collective memory.

With this exhibit, Banco Popular's Rafael Carrión Pacheco Exhibit Hall once more contributes to a better understanding of our history, this time a period in which the profound changes that occurred in our ways of living and surviving still fascinate us, and provokes many questions. Turn of the Century 1890-1910 serves as a point of reference as we enter the third millenium.

Richard L. Carrión
President and Chief Executive Officer
Banco Popular