Abstract

This article analyzes the final set of notebooks of Ana Roqué’s Botánica antillana. The project of these notebooks, to which Roqué dedicated some 30 years of her life, presents methodological and statistical innovations while scrupulously observing the practices of the scientific discipline. It combines a standard presentation and analysis of plant species with poems, illustrations, and historical and cultural observations, including information on the local population’s practical uses of plants. In particular, it is a treatise written by a Puerto Rican woman in a context of overt subordination of women, which among other restrictions denied them the right to vote and provided them with only a limited education. The mere existence of these notebooks and the efforts Roqué made to publish them constitute an act and a program of intellectual, feminist, and national emancipation. With its scientific character, methodological eclecticism, and political significance, Botánica antillana crystallizes the multifaceted and systematic character of Roqué’s intellectual project. It is a work in which the author asserts her expectation for a theoretical, aesthetic, and practical synthesis of the multiple scientific, pedagogical, and political initiatives that she developed over the course of her life.