Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian in Old San Juan

Carlos Rivera Giusti/GFR Media

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One Saint’s Day

Puerto Rico’s SanSe festival is, first and foremost, a raucous street party named for St. Sebastian. But its history reveals the island’s waning Catholic identity, and the enduring legacy of America’s ‘splendid little war.’

by
Maggie Phillips
February 05, 2025
Religious Literacy in America
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Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian in Old San Juan

Carlos Rivera Giusti/GFR Media

The royal Spanish flag was at half-mast in January for the death of late U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The National Park Service maintains two 16th-century Spanish forts in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the lowered flags on display were an eloquent witness to the U.S. territory’s contradictions and complexities. From these ancient hilltop strongholds, visitors could see and hear Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian, affectionately known as “SanSe.” Although the four-day street party is a relatively recent tradition, it is the end of San Juan’s Christmas season, a lively expression of Puerto Rican cultural identity, and to a lesser extent, a religious festival.

San Sebastian, or St. Sebastian, is the patron saint of athletes, soldiers, archers, and against disease. According to the saint’s legend, he was a third-century CE Roman soldier who roused the Emperor Diocletian’s anger when he refused to abandon his Christian faith. Sebastian initially survived a hail of arrows when the emperor ordered his death, but eventually met his end when he was beaten to death by his fellow soldiers. Beginning in the late 19th century, despite a lack of virtually any historical evidence about Sebastian beyond his existence, the saint emerged as a queer icon, adored by Oscar Wilde and later by artists from Yukio Mishima to David Wojnarowicz.

San Juan holds the festival in his name every third weekend in January, just before his Jan. 20 feast day. But while SanSe includes religious processions of a statue of St. Sebastian, these days, the festival’s Catholic origins are almost incidental. SanSe is a boisterous celebration that weaves its way through Old San Juan’s streets, where parades seem to pop up almost spontaneously. SanSe puts the island’s complex past, present, and future on vivid display.

Many streets in Old San Juan are named for saints and sacred objects; apparently at one time it was not uncommon for every street to host a patronal saint festival. The first documented St. Sebastian procession to take place on the island was held in the early 16th century. But as a local TV segment ahead of the 2025 festival pointed out, few of the nearly 1 million visitors who descended on Old San Juan for the party were likely to be aware of its religious origins.

This year, festivities kicked off on Thursday, Jan. 16, with multiple free concerts at each of Old San Juan’s plazas, and food and beverage vendors seemingly every few feet. On Friday, men wearing the ubiquitous neon-colored shirts indicating that they worked for the city bore aloft on their shoulders a flower-bedecked bier, itself carrying a bloodied St. Sebastian. Preceded by a police escort, they traveled down the cobblestones of St. Sebastian Street (the Calle San Sebastian for which the festival is named) accompanied by live bands, traditional dancers in colorful dresses and shirts, people on stilts, masked vejigante dancers from the predominantly Black town of Loiza, and cabezudos (representations of characters and people from Puerto Rican culture with oversize papier-maché heads). The procession, which also included robed priests and altar servers swinging incense thuribles, ended at San José church, where a statue of former Spanish Governor Ponce de Leon stands outside in the courtyard.

In the 1950s, San José’s parish priest organized a street festival on St. Sebastian Street around the saint’s feast day. He wanted to raise money to restore the 16th-century church, the second oldest in the U.S. (the oldest is down the street). Although the San Sebastian festival of the 1950s fizzled out after the priest moved on, Puerto Rican anthropologist and sociologist Ricardo Alegria helped revive it in the 1970s as a celebration of Puerto Rican identity.

Alegria founded the Instituto Cultura Puertorriqueño (ICP) in the 1950s, and is in some ways the godfather of Puerto Rican cultural studies. He suggested resurrecting the San Sebastian festival to a Puerto Rican labor leader, Rafaela Balladares, who had emerged as a San Juan community leader after growing up in New York City and coming to the island in the 1960s. Balladares saw in Alegria’s suggestion an opportunity to attract spending and investment in her neighborhood, including a school for poor children on St. Sebastian Street.

But despite the prevalence of Catholic iconography and churches in San Juan, the most recent Pew Research religious demographic data for Puerto Rico from 2014 reported that only 56% of the island was Catholic.

These numbers may in part be a legacy of America’s victory in the Spanish-American War, which introduced freedom of religion and weakened the Catholic Church’s grip on Puerto Rico.

Contemporary rhetoric suggests that America’s casus belli in 1898 was informed at least in part by a latent sense of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, as well as the so-called “Black Legend of Spain.” The Black Legend attributes a historically negative characterization of Spain to sensationalized anti-Catholic propaganda from Protestant northern European powers in the 16th century. The Protestant Netherlands and England—neither remembered by history as especially socially progressive—undoubtedly had geopolitical and theological interests to portray Catholic Spain as peculiarly cruel, power-hungry, and bigoted around this time. However, Spain also had its detractors among its European coreligionists who harbored racist suspicions toward the Iberian Peninsula. The rabidly anti-Spanish 16th-century Pope Paul IV, for instance, referred to Spaniards as “those dregs of the earth, that breed of Moors and Jews.”

The festival always features cabezudos, oversize representations of characters and people from Puerto Rican culture rendered in papier-maché
The festival always features cabezudos, oversize representations of characters and people from Puerto Rican culture rendered in papier-maché

Alejandro Granadillo/GDA via AP Images

In time, anti-Spanish prejudice would cross the pond with white Protestant elites and mutate into a New World varietal. Prominent American politician and orator Robert Green Ingersoll occasionally discoursed in support of war against Spain in the 19th century. Although he was known as “the Great Agnostic,” Ingersoll was the son of a Congregationalist minister, an English Protestant denominational offshoot. In his oration, Ingersoll referred to Spain’s colonial legacy as “the darkest page in the history of the world,” and contrasted the Anglo-Saxon’s “courage and coolness” with what he characterized as the innate nervousness of the “desperate” Spaniard. Cuba must be liberated, and the Philippines, he contended, must be brought out from under the yoke of “Spanish superstition.” Web Hispania, a site founded to counter what its contributors see as the Black Legend’s continuing influence on historical studies, quoted Ingersoll in a 2018 article, citing his criticisms of Spanish “indolence, pride, cruelty,” and evocation of the fires of the Inquisition, which “destroyed all freedom of thought” and because of which a “great darkness covered Spain.”

In his book Conquistadores, historian Fernando Cervantes wrote that by 1898, the adversarial Protestant narrative of “an unjust and unpopular Spanish monarchy” was to “become a powerful tool in the hands of 19th-century nationalist historians bent on painting the wars of independence against Spain as bitter rejections of what they saw as 300 years of obscurantist oppression.”

Although it is not as widely remembered as the Civil War or either of the World Wars, the Spanish-American War was a crucial exercise in national identity-building for the U.S. Northerners and Southerners fought successfully together in America’s first major conflict since the Civil War, then still a living memory. Fighting in Cuba, an ex-Confederate general named Joseph Wheeler is said to have forgotten himself and inadvertently referred to the Spanish as “damn Yankees” in the heat of battle. With the distinguished service of the all-Black Buffalo Soldiers, the war was an important chapter in America’s civil rights struggle. Optimists painted a flattering self-portrait of a united American society winning a military victory over a centuries-old European empire. Moreover, they affirmed the Monroe Doctrine once and for all. Although the U.S. passed amendments loudly protesting that empire-building was not among their interests in going to war with Spain, their continued military presence in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines blurred the picture.

American involvement in the former Spanish colonies took on a certain missionary character, literally and ideologically. “After the U.S. has control,” Christopher McKnight Nichols, a history professor at Ohio State University, told me, “the U.S. tries to destroy the relationship between church and state.” Throughout the former Spanish colonies, but most notably in the Philippines, the U.S. seized church assets and redistributed them to establish schools and public-private agricultural schemes.

Although America’s war rationale was not explicitly theological, its political elites came from the same cultural and religious milieu as its most prominent Protestant evangelical leaders. They shared their zealous desire to save and uplift the oppressed and benighted peoples of the world. After shoring up the Monroe Doctrine and market access, Nichols said that religious and humanitarian were “somewhere around third” on the list of reasons that America went to war in 1898.

In a way, America’s “splendid little war” was a catastrophic success that left the government scrambling to develop policies for the unique circumstances in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. In this confusion, missionaries were useful to U.S. officials for their linguistic skills, and for their work establishing schools and introducing health and hygiene initiatives. It was part of what Nichols describes as a “progressive modernization campaign,” which had been part of the humanitarian rationale for going to war from the beginning.

“Although there were yearnings for empire,” Nichols said, “the territorial expansion hadn’t really been worked out, so there was no colonial or insular system the U.S. had developed.”

Missionary access is a huge thing in the late 19th and early 20th century,” said Nichols. They were “arguably the most important civil society groups in the U.S.” Just as Puerto Rico had served as a convenient stopover en route to the resource-rich Americas, after the war it became an attractive staging area for American missionaries.

In 1902, American Episcopalian Archbishop of Puerto Rico James H. Van Buren wrote that he was optimistic about the future of the island, and of the United States. “I am sure it will prove a blessing to Porto Rico that our flag has come there to stay,” he said, believing that “not least of the blessings to the people there and at home will be the fact that the Stars and Stripes have been followed so quickly by the Church.”

For their part, Puerto Ricans were divided after the war on what role they wanted the United States to play in their new, post-Spain reality. An incipient Puerto Rican independence movement can be traced back to the mid 19th century, and there was initial enthusiasm in some quarters when the American military appeared on its shores in 1898. After the United States brought Spain’s four-century empire to an end, some in Puerto Rico preferred total independence, while others wanted a continued relationship with the United States.

Thus began what Nichols calls “the long project of 1898.” Between 1898 and 1900, the U.S. military governed the island. They established a public school system, as well as transportation and sanitation infrastructure. America rescinded the military governmental structure with the Foraker Act in 1900, and granted U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans with the Jones Act in 1917, even though it wasn’t until 1947 that the island could elect its own governors, instead of the U.S. president appointing them. Although Puerto Rico is mostly self-governing today, and its citizens who live on the island can vote in U.S. primaries, they cannot in federal elections. Puerto Ricans pay into Medicare and Social Security, but their single representative in Congress may not vote.

There had been no religious liberty under Spanish rule. Nichols described the formerly Spanish Caribbean as a “sort of a free-for-all with the Americans who come in” in the early days after the war. While the Catholic Church and other institutions wanted to maintain and preserve existing structures, “they have kind of a lot of free-wheeling Americans coming,” he said, “setting up businesses, evangelizing, messing up society, prospecting.”

Although Spain had prohibited Protestant religious practice in its colonies, Puerto Rico’s importance to trans-Atlantic trade meant that Protestantism had already been quietly introduced on the island and adopted by a small minority. In the minds of many of the American Protestant missionaries, theirs was as much a patriotic as theological project. They saw Catholicism’s hierarchy as nurturing an antirepublican dependence on authority, while the Protestant tradition encouraged an individual relationship with God and interpretation of the Bible. “There’s a very American rugged individualism to that,” Nichols said.

Based on an apparent Freudian slip by Republican lawmaker William Henry Stafford, this idea seems to have persisted as late as 1931. That was when Stafford argued against changing the island’s official spelling from “Porto Rico” to “Puerto Rico,” appealing to the latter spelling as the accepted “Anglican” name.

Spanish-speaking Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists descended upon the newly opened Puerto Rican mission field. Indeed, it was a matter of some anxiety for Episcopalian Archbishop Van Buren, who wrote in 1902 that “there is now no considerable town on the island where these denominations, or some of them, are not represented,” and “are expending much larger sums of money there than [the Episcopal Church].”

The Episcopal Church survives in Puerto Rico to this day, and a handful of representatives from the Chapel of the Divine Savior on Calle San Francisco (St. Francis Street) in Old San Juan could be found selling water to partygoers during SanSe. Most recently, Pew’s 2014 data reported that 33% of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million residents identified as Protestant.

But Catholicism remains the dominant cultural denomination: Before her swearing-in ceremony in January, pro-statehood, GOP-aligned Gov. Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon publicly attended Mass in San Juan with her family. During SanSe, just down Calle San Francisco from Divine Savior, a Catholic parish opened its doors to the nearly 1 million partiers. Its little parish store was transformed into a snack shack, and both parishioners and robed Franciscans stood outside, chatting amiably with prospective customers. In the spirit of SanSe’s origins as a neighborhood fundraiser, San Francisco parish did a brisk business selling food and soft drinks to raise the money to renovate their 18th-century church. The attached sanctuary remained open morning to night for anyone who might stumble in. And they did.

On SanSe’s opening night, a group of bros entered, all pastel collars and shorts. One was still carrying his to-go drink. The young men sat quietly in the back while one of their friends walked up to a pew, genuflected, and knelt for a while. In the span of about five minutes, with the music from the street still pouring in, around 20 people—girls with bare midriffs, tourists in baseball caps—wandered in quietly to sit reverently for a few minutes. It’s arguably more passive than the 16th-century approach to religion, when Catholicism was the only legal option in Puerto Rico, or even than that of the modernizing 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant missionaries. “Catholicism” and “a good time” aren’t always popularly associated, but the priests reverently walking in the raucous St. Sebastian procession and the Franciscans selling snacks to late-night partiers both take the revelry in stride. Coincidentally, that Sunday, SanSe attendees who went to Mass heard the New Testament story of Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding. Sometimes, an invitation to a party can be an invitation to something more.

This story is part of a series Tablet is publishing to promote religious literacy across different religious communities, supported by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

Maggie Phillips is a freelance writer and former Tablet Journalism Fellow.