The Taíno genocide represents Puerto Rico’s most extreme case of modern emptying to date. But given the lack of investment by Spain in the island, retaining European settlers in the early decades of the colony was nearly impossible. In 1529, with the slogan Dios nos lleve al Perú (God take us to Peru), settlers in Puerto Rico started leaving in such large numbers that the Spanish Governor Francisco Manuel de Lando feared the island would lose most of its white population. Consequently, in 1531, he ordered Puerto Rico’s first census, which recorded “387 Spanish, 1,148 Indians and 1,523 black slaves” (Encyclopediapr.com). Five years later, as out-migration persisted, the governor threatened fleeing settlers with summary death by hanging (Pierce Flores 2010, 38). Into the seventeenth century, narratives such as Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora ([1690] 2011) continued to detail the poverty and hunger suffered by many of Puerto Rico’s inhabitants and their wish to abandon the island.