Las fuentes hemerográficas como vía para hacer aflorar las vivencias humanas en el conocimiento históricoel sector azucarero de las Islas Canarias en las inmediaciones del estallido de la I guerra mundial

Abstract

In this article, we aim to recreate in experiential terms of the time the profound change that, between the months prior to and following the outbreak of World War I, the sugar sector of an economy as dependent on the outside world as the Canary Islands experienced. To this end, we have proposed to delve into the contemporary island newspapers, not only in the information related to the editorial lines as is common in works on the media, but also in the complementary informa- tion that, for the most diverse reasons, the pages of all of them contain. Thus, in the face of the traditional monolithic visions that, in economic issues such as the one at hand, conventional archival sources generate by being limited to official records and documentation bequeathed by the elites, we have set out to recreate how the popu- lation as a whole island lived that chaotic situation that, from one day to the next, changed the socioeconomic dynamics of the Archipelago. In the events studied, a central role was played by the series of articles that the Palma journalist Hermene- gildo Rodríguez Méndez (1870-1922) published in the spring of 1913 in the Diario de La Palma and, after compiling all of them in a pamphlet, in La provincia of Gran Canaria and Diario de Tenerife at the beginning of the following year.