González begins by arguing that every society has two cultures, the oppressors and those who are oppressed, which he refers to as elite culture and popular culture. Traditionally, the national culture is going to be the dominant one. In Puerto Rican history, even the elite culture has been dominated by another culture. To illustrate this approach, the author compares the layered and complex history of Puerto Rico to that of four floors in a building. First Story The first story developed from 1520 to 1820 and focuses on the impact of the African slaves imported to Puerto Rico. González contends that the first true people to identify themselves as Puerto Ricans, omitting from consideration the aboriginal Taíno, were the enslaved Africans and their children, sold to Spanish colonists early in the island's Post-Columbian history. This is when the first dialectical relationship is born. Interrelations between the dominated islanders—enslaved blacks, freed blacks, descendants of slaves and Indians, and the white peasantry, and the dominant islanders—white descendants of born Spaniards on the island,. had relations which led to what González refers to as popular and mixed culture, primarily Afro-Antillean. In this relationship, by the eighteenth century, the advances of the majority dominated sector stood out. The author points out that the Puerto Rican society, or popular culture, had evolved from then on forward and the national culture at the time would be that popular culture. Second Story The second story is characterized by two great waves of migration. The coffee plantation owners of the nineteenth century. These plantation owners arrived under the special concessions afforded by the Royal Decree of Graces of 1815. The Royal Decree of Graces of 1815 otherwise known as the Cédula de Gracia de 1815 was a legal order approved by the Spanish Crown in the early half of the 19th century to encourage Spaniards and, later, Europeans of non-Spanish origin, to settle in and populate the colony of Puerto Rico. The first stage developed from 1810–1820 and consisted of refugees from the Spanish-American wars of independence. The second stage (1840–1860) consisted of several migratory waves in which came Corsicans, Catalans, Canaries, among others, attracted by the promises of land and economic benefits. Third Story The third story was of townspeople–professionals, managers and bureaucrats brought upon from the American Invasion in Puerto Rico. González catalogs a society so split racially, socially and economically that we should rather talk