My dissertation draws on a transnational web of archival sources to construct a much-needed retelling of the 1873 abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico with the libertos (freedpeople) at its center and highlights the impacts of their actions both within the colony and beyond its shores. Like most places in the hemisphere, the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico was conditional, requiring that newly emancipated “libertos” (Black Puerto Rican freedpeople) continue to work for their former owners under exploitative conditions. But how did libertos respond to those conditions? Prevailing scholarly and popular narratives maintain that they complied with the requirements and that the process occurred without incident or pushback. My research, across Puerto Rican, European, and U.S. American archives, however, tells a far more complicated story. In fact, I have found a wide range of municipal, carceral, court, and diplomatic records that show that Puerto Rican libertos actively engaged in conflict with the colonial state and the island’s planter class over the conditions of their freedom. From legal cases to labor strikes, the libertos explicitly articulated their demands for better pay or the right to change their employers at will on the same grounds: porque ahora somos libres (because we are now free). Though Atlantic actors at the time publicly reported undisturbed plantation labor and peace in the colony, they privately corresponded about libertos’ noncompliance, in the context of implications for future abolition processes, with interest, concern, and caution. As a result, Puerto Rican libertos’ actions were both heeded as warnings for abolition legislators in Cuba and Brazil and have been minimized in scholarly narratives, museum exhibits about slavery, and public history projects in Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean to this day. In challenging the master narrative about abolition, my dissertation offers a layered interpretation of the impact of the libertos’ actions on not only the conditions of their freedom, but more broadly on late nineteenth-century abolitionism in the Atlantic World.