Coming of Age in the 1960s

In New York, a circle of Puerto Rican students read a Black Panther newspaper interview with Cha Cha, took a road trip to meet the Chicago gang leader turned revolutionary, and got permission to launch a chapter of the organization in New York. In search of an organizing agenda in East Harlem, they discovered who their parents were and why over 1/3 of them had left Puerto Rico. In 1947, Operation Bootstrap, A US-led industrialization project of the island displaced more farmers than it absorbed into the new economy. A contingency plan encouraged their mass migration to cities like New York, where 70% of Puerto Ricans became proletarianized as superexploited workers in the city’s garment industry. Soon, they encountered displacements in housing and due to urban industrial decline. They wrestled with medical discrimination in the public hospitals and overt racism in the classroom. In 1967, the killing of a Puerto Rican man by police led to the East Harlem riots. The early childhood experiences of the Young Lords in the streets, in the schools, and as language and cultural translators for their parents radicalized them emotionally and compelled the evangelical commitment with which they launched their activism as young adults.

US Imperialism and Puerto Rican Needleworkers: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Women's Labor in a Deep History of Neoliberal Trade

In 1898, US occupation of Puerto Rico opened possibilities for experimentation with manufacturing, investment, tariffs, and citizenship because the Treaty of Paris did not address territorial incorporation. Imperial experimentation started immediately and continued through the liberal policies of the New Deal and World War II, consistently reproducing drastic exceptions. These exceptions were neither permanent nor complete, but the rearrangements of sovereignty and citizenship established Puerto Rico as a site of potential and persistent exemption. Puerto Rican needleworkers were central to the resulting colonial industrialization-not as dormant labor awaiting outside developmental forces but as skilled workers experienced in production. Following US occupation, continental trade agents and manufacturers noted the intricate needlework of Puerto Rican women and their employment in homes and small shops for contractors across the island. Their cooptation and adaptation of this contracting system led to the colonial industrialization, generating bureaucratic, financial, and legal infrastructure later used in Operation Bootstrap, a long-term economic plan devised in the 1940s and 1950s. Labor unions and aggrieved workers contested and resisted this colonial industrialization. They advocated their own proposals and pushed against US economic policies and insular business management. Throughout these fights, the asymmetrical power of the federal government and industrial capital allowed the colonial regime to assert US sovereignty while continually realigning exemptions and redefining citizenship for liberal economic objectives. Rather than representing a weakening of the nation-state, this strong interventionist approach provided scaffolding for Operation Bootstrap, which became a model for the neoliberal projects called export processing zones (EPZs).

The Thinking Voice: When Listening Trumps Celebrity

In the brief span of 1952–68, Puerto Rico sped through its industrialization process. Middle-class residential construction dotted the city of San Juan. Hotels replaced the mansions along its Condado waterfront. The spanking new Medical Center promised health for the sickly, undernourished population, a health that the developmentalist program of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico—Operation Bootstrap—desperately needed, as it endeavored to offer a cheap, obedient, and presumably bilingual labor force to American capital. The “Golden Mile,” the financial district established in the area of the sometime royal hacienda, Hato Rey, emerged as the centerpiece of a new downtown. The mythic mall of Plaza Las Américas (formerly a cattle ranch that bred cows for the milk industry) became the social hub of a polis that increasingly turned to consumerism for its exercise of citizenship. Newspapers and magazines were filled with consumer fantasies of every variety. Along with everything else that was dazzling and new, Puerto Rico consumed a new object for sale, the celebrity pop star.

Changing Forms of U.S. Hegemony in Puerto Rico: The Impact on the Family and Sexuality

It has been over a hundred years since the U.S. took control of Puerto Rico. In that time, the way in which the U.S. perceived Puerto Rico has changed from a colony requiring Americanisation to, in the 1950s, its showcase of democracy in the Caribbean, to today, an island that still retains geopolitical importance for the U.S., but represents an increasing economic burden. The failure of Operation Bootstrap, as the Puerto Rican industrialization program was known, resulted in permanent large-scale unemployment, with a population dependent on federal transfers for a living, and a constant source of migration to the mainland, where over half of Puerto Ricans now live. I shall trace the outline of these three stages in U.S. hegemony over Puerto Rico, and argue that throughout the U.S. Congress was reluctant to fully incorporate Puerto Rico, because its population was deemed racially and socially inferior to that of the mainland. Though the removal of Spain from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines was considered part of the its ‘manifest destiny’, the United States never intended to incorporate these people so different from the U.S. as part of the American nation, as was done with its earlier acquisitions in Texas, Alaska or even Hawaii.