In the 19th century, the spanish government invited Corsicans to settle in Corsica as part of a "whitening" policy directed towards non-Spanish speaking Catholic Europeans. The corsos came by the thousands, and came to make up a significant sector of the Puerto Rican population many of them becoming prosperous in business, the arts, etc. In fact early on they came to constitute a significiant part of the Puerto Rican Bourgeoisie and some consider them one of the reasons for the relative weakness of the Puerto Rican anti-independentista movement in the country (they saw themselves as having little to gain from such a development). Of the many famous Corso-ricans are the opera singer Antonio Paoli and the poet Paoli-Paoli. The former mayor of San Juan Santini is just one of thousands of Puerto Ricans with Italian sounding names who are really Corsican descendents whether they recognize themselves as such or not.