the late-colonial welfare state: federal aid programs, subaltern mobilization, and the "status...

8/3/2019 The Late-Colonial Welfare State: Federal Aid Programs, Subaltern Mobilization, and the "Status Issue" in Puerto Rico

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Jos A. Laguarta RamrezThe U.S. as a Welfare StateFinal Paper

The Late-Colonial Welfare State: Federal Aid Programs, Subaltern Mobilization,and the Status Issue in Puerto Rico

Federal relief funds were first made available to Puerto Rico (including its inhabited sister

islands, Vieques and Culebra) in the late 1930s, when New Deal legislation was partially

extended to the territory, a colonial possession of the United States since 1898. The provision of

federal aid to Puerto Rico was significantly expanded in the 1970s, when the Commonwealth

(the official name adopted by the territory in 1952) was included in the federal Food StampProgram (FSP). Today, Puerto Ricans have been made eligible for most federal grant and cash

transfer programs. Total federal assistance to Puerto Rico (including tax credits to corporations)

amounted to $18.5 billion in 2002, of which the Nutritional Assistance Program (PAN), which

replaced the FSP in 1983, accounted for 10% (Odishelidze and Laffer 2004: 65-66). This paper

seeks to address the question of why federal aid programs were extended to Puerto Rico when

and how they were. It will explore possible avenues for future empirical research by suggesting

a strong historical correlation in Puerto Rico between moments when challenges to colonial

hegemony are ascendant among subaltern actors and the expansion of federal aid programs.

Introduction

By the summer of 1898, Puerto Rico and Cuba were all that remained of Spains empire in the

Americas. On July 25, as a result of U.S. intervention in the Cuban war of independence, troops

under the command of Brig. Gen. Nelson A. Miles disembarked in southern Puerto Rico, routed

the squalid Spanish defenses, and proceeded to proclaim their authority over the island, meeting

little resistance from any quarter. Soon, the Treaty of Paris ratified the handover of Puerto Rico,


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along with Guam and the Philippines, to the U.S. Although Cuba had been the main object of

U.S. designs, the existence of a popular, experienced, fervently patriotic liberation army made

direct control of it over an extended period impossible. This was not the case in Puerto Rico,

where the efforts of creole separatists throughout the century had failed to unleash a mass

movement of any significance. In any case, the occupiers were often seen by Puerto Ricans of

all classes as the harbingers of freedom, justice, and humanity, 1 or at the very least a definite

improvement over the preceding regime. Many among the elites harbored hopes of immediate

annexation, which were soon dashed, as military rule was extended for the next two years.

The Foraker Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in April of 1900, establishing a civilgovernment for Puerto Rico whose officials, with the exception of the 35-member House of

Delegates (the lower court of a legislature whose laws could be vetoed by the U.S. Congress)

were all appointed by the U.S. President, and a short-lived tariff provision protecting U.S.

producers from Puerto Rican imports. When this tariff was legally challenged, a series of

Supreme Court decisions decided on May 27, 1901, known collectively as the Insular Cases, 2

found the Foraker Act to be constitutional. In his concurring opinion in Downes v. Bidwell

(which has prevailed as the rule of the Insular Cases), Justice White declared Puerto Rico not to

be an incorporated territory 3 of the U.S., thus creating a new category which distinguished the

new unincorporated territories from incorporated ones destined for entry into the Union.

The main implication of this precedent, which stands today, was that the U.S. Constitution would

not follow the flag into the new territories (Torruella 1985: 40-62). In the case of Puerto Rico,

most of the rights and immunities of citizenship were in fact eventually extended via the First

1 Brig. Gen. Nelson A. Miles, Proclama del Ejrcito de los Estados Unidos , Ponce, Puerto Rico, July 1898.2 De Lima v. Bidwell , 182 U.S. 245; Goetze v. United States , 182 U.S. 221; Armstrong v. United States , 182 U.S.243; Downes v. Bidwell , 182 U.S. 245; Huus v. New York & P.R. Steamship Co. 182 U.S. 392.3 Supra , p. 339.


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Jones Act of 1917, 4 which bestowed U.S. citizenship upon all Puerto Ricans, but not, however,

the right to representation in the U.S. Congress or to elect the Presidenta slight which has

endured into the twenty first century.

. In 1948 and 1950, Congress amended the Jones Act to allow the election of a Puerto

Rican governor and authorize a constitutional convention. The Commonwealth Constitution of

1952, approved by Congress (after amending it to eliminate Article 20, which guaranteed the

right to work) and ratified by popular referendum, established a local government composed of

an elected Governor and bicameral legislature, and a judicial branch headed by a Supreme Court.

Although this arrangement provided local elites with a broader degree of self-government, the basic premises of the Jones Act and the Insular Cases remain unchanged to this day. The

Constitution, laws, and court system of Puerto Rico are subject to the legal and juridical system

of the U.S. through the Federal District Court for Puerto Rico (as well as a federal prison), which

is subject to revision by the 1 st Circuit Court in Boston. Federal jurisprudence has increasingly

treated Puerto Rico virtually as a de facto state of the Union, which has simultaneously meant the

gradual extension of certain constitutional rights and a diminution of the Commonwealths

original powers of self-government. As we shall see, this institutional setting has conditioned the

uneven extension of federal aid in Puerto Rico, as demonstrated by the relatively recent U.S.

Supreme Court decisions Califano v. Torres 5 and Harris v. Rosario .6

Institutions alone, however, cannot explain the extension of the U.S. welfare state to

Puerto Rico, any more than they can fully account for its rise, extensions, and contractions in the

U.S. itself. Historical-institutionalist approaches tend to favor a causal relationship often called

4 A Second Jones Act followed soon thereafter for the Philippines, confirming the tendency betrayed in numerouscongressional debates, legal journals, and court opinions, to treat Puerto Rico as a political and juridical testingground for the more pressing concernthe Philippines (Torruella 1985: 34-39, 51).5 435 U.S. 1 (1978)6 446 U.S. 651 (1980)


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complex interplay between local and metropolitan political elites, organized labor, and

transnational capital, and the price each of these actors paid in Puerto Ricos radical

transformations during the twentieth century.

Like institutionalism, however, structural analyses that focus too narrowly on political

coalitions and cost-benefit calculations rapidly come to rely on elite-biased, static models.

Subaltern actors, cohesively or not, act politically not just by participating in elite-led coalitions,

but also by confronting them, while the price they pay for such participation, more often than

not, is co-optation. As Frances Fox-Piven and Richard Cloward argue, the most powerful (and

often only) weapon subaltern actors count to bring about significant political change is their ability to disrupt the normal functioning of social and economic institutions ([1977] 1979).

Opportunities for disruptive action are heightened when the legitimacy of dominant institutions

is undermined by social end economic forces such as depression and rapid modernization. Relief

programs are usually expanded when civil disorder resulting from the weakening of social

control, in the form of crime, mass protest, or riots, threatens to overturn existing social and

economic arrangements (Fox-Piven and Cloward [1971] 1993: 7). For Fox-Piven and Cloward,

the expansion of the U.S. welfare state in the 1960s responded to the rise in forms of mass

defiance which were not initially organized or led (464-465). In this view, there is a dialectical

relationship between the institutions of social control, social and economic structures of

accumulation, and the disruptive effect of mass defiance.

The interplay of these three aspects is also evident in the extension of federal aid in

Puerto Rico, where economic downturns and rapid modernization both played an important role

in the eruption and structuring of both organized and unorganized mass protest. In the case of

Puerto Rico, an additional, key element is the ongoing colonial relationship with the United


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States. The centrality of this relationship, known locally as the status issue, is such that each

of the three contemporary electoral parties represents one of the three recognized status

optionsthe Popular Democratic Party (PPD) supports the status-quo Commonwealth, the New

Progressive Party (PNP), federal statehood, and the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP),

independence. 7 Federal aid programs have played a strong role in the discourse of all actors in

the status conflict. Statehood and status-quo advocates have long exploited fears of losing

existing benefits to weaken the independence movement, while the latter, for its part, tends to

blame its own stunted growth (and often any number of social and economic ills as well) on the

peoples dependence on federal handouts.This last position is often articulated by pro-independence academics as a symptom of

colonial pathology. 8 Recent poststructuralist critics of the independence movement have argued

instead that rejecting independence is simply a rational cost-benefit alternative for poor and

working-class Puerto Ricans, who have historically sought strategic alliances with the metropole

against nationalistic local elites (Negrn-Muntaner and Grosfoguel 1997). One such critic,

Ramn Grosfoguel, argues that this has in turn been possible because of the strategy of

incorporation the U.S. has pursued in Puerto Rico, making political and economic concessions

to popular sectors (which have rarely been made to any other colonial or postcolonial peoples)

because of the islands military and symbolic value, (2003: 45). For Grosfoguel U.S. colonial

policies in Puerto Rico have responded to economic, military, and symbolic interests

(represented by U.S. corporations, the Pentagon, and the State and Interior Departments,

7 There have been occasional, short-lived splinter parties (the PNP itself grew out of a split in the now-defunctStatehood Republican Party in 1967) and a smattering of small, non-electoral, and occasionally armed groups of theradical pro-independence Left, but the three tendencies embodied today by the PPD, PNP, and PIP have beenconsistent since 1952.8 See for example Manuel Maldonado Denis, Puerto Rico: una interpretacin sociohistrica (Mxico D.F.: [1969]1980).


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respectively), which may reinforce or contradict each other, and which alternate in priority

according to the changing historical contexts. In his analysis, symbolic and military interests

dominated U.S. policy in Puerto Rico during the twentieth century, to the point of at times

overshadowing economic interests (45-46).

Grosfoguels structural analysis of U.S. interests in Puerto Rico is useful, but incomplete.

He takes for granted that once U.S. policymakers make the decision to offer concessions, it is

simply rational for Puerto Rican subaltern actors to align themselves with the metropole. On the

other hand, he does not account for the political dynamics in Puerto Rico which made these

concessions possible and/or necessary. Crucial to this process in the first half of the twentiethcentury is the emergence of the PPD as the vehicle of a new historic bloc in Puerto Rico led by a

sector of U.S.-educated professionals (descended from the old hacendado classes) with

hegemonic aspirations, who managed to secure the support of key sectors of the U.S. elites.

Most importantly, however, waves of disruptive protest set off by cyclical economic downturns

in the 1930s, and again in the 1970s, eroded the legitimacy of dominant institutions, opened

political opportunities for new actors, and threatened dominant interests in both Puerto Rico and

the U.S. In the Puerto Rican context, the insertion if anti-colonial politics in subaltern protest

movements meant that these mobilizations threatened the colonial relationship itself, eliciting

strategies designed to sustain a labor force increasingly squeezed out of the labor process.

Federal Aid in Puerto Rico

Under the Spanish colonial regime, relief programs in Puerto Rico were limited to the casas de

beneficiencia , public charities attached to certain town councils, charged with providing for the

worthy poor, established during the periods of the nineteenth century when Liberals were in

power in the metropole (Martnez-Vergne 1999). These periods also nurtured the growth of


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mutual aid societies among artisans and an embryonic urban working-class, which proliferated

during the first Spanish Republic (1868-1873), when voting rights and freedom of association

were briefly extended. Many among the elite viewed these early educational and associational

efforts among the laboring classes favorably, as a palliative for vagrancy and other ills (Garca

and Quintero Rivera 1982: 1-27). The first several decades of U.S. rule did not bring expanded

public assistance programs. Until the New Deal was extended to the island in the late 1930s,

relief efforts in Puerto Rico were largely constrained to civil society.

In 1929, when Theodor Roosevelt, Jr. was appointed Governor, Puerto Rico boasted the

highest death rate in the Western Hemisphere. Appalled by the situation, the Roosevelts directedthe attention of American charities towards Puerto Rico, securing $7 million over five years.

Roosevelt also procured $8 million from Congress for hurricane relief, and Puerto Rico was

included along with the 48 states as a recipient of federal aid for road construction and repair for

the first time (Matthews 1976: 17). These efforts reflected a broader change in metropolitan

attitudes toward the long-neglected colony. A number of socioeconomic studies conducted in

the 1930s, including one by the conservative Brookings Institute argued that Puerto Ricos

economic problems demanded immediate attention from the U.S., and identified the absentee

sugar corporations as the main culprit (9-10). 9 The Great Depression, combined with the effects

of hurricane San Felipe in 1928 and San Ciprin in 1932, further devastated the islands open

economy, causing a drop of nearly 30% in per capita income between 1930 and 1933, and a

decline which increases if changes in purchasing power are considered (Dietz 1986: 139).

The 1932 elections were won by a Coalition of the Socialist Party (PS) and the

Republican Party, which represented sugar capital. The newly-elected Resident Commissioner,

9 Although the Foraker Act expressly prohibited ownership of more than 500 acres of land, this provision which waswillfully ignored for over 30 years.


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PS leader Santiago Iglesias Pantn, discussed Puerto Ricos unemployment situation with the

newly-elected U.S. President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who suggested using funds from the

Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which eventually loaned over $1 million in self-

liquidating projects for Puerto Rico, creating far less jobs than Iglesias hoped for and remaining

firmly out of local control (Matthews 1976: 118-120). Iglesiass goal was to extend all federal

relief programs to Puerto Rico, but federal officials, including the Director of the War

Departments Bureau of Insular Affairs, strongly disagreed. The Federal Emergency Relief Act

(FERA), approved in May of 1933, did include Puerto Rico, but it was several months before the

program, which pledged $1 in federal aid for every $3 provided by the states, could be extended, because local politicians were slow to meet the programs requirements (121-122).

The announcement, by the newly appointed Governor Robert Hayes Gore, that the New

Deal would be extended to Puerto Rico, was received with enthusiasm by most of the population,

but not by local politicians, including Iglesiass Republican partners in the Coalition. Only a

small sector of young, U.S. educated professionals, many of them descended from the displaced

coffee-growing hacendado class, embraced the New Deal. Politically and economically

unconnected to the Coalition, these reformers entered the Liberal Party (Villaronga 2004: 16-17).

Founded by a dissident faction of the old Union Party before the 1932 election, the Liberal Party

explicitly supported independence, and received more votes than either the PS or the

Republicans, but not enough to defeat the Coalition (Matthews 1976: 27, 43). Having little

experience of Puerto Rican politics, Gore sided with the Coalition in the local struggle for

patronage. Once the Puerto Rican Emergency Relief Administration was finally set up in August

of 1933, Coalitionists began to complain it was being staffed by active Liberal politicians, and


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were not entirely without reason. Through his contacts in Washington, 10 Muoz was busy

lobbying for appointments.

Under the direction of James Bourne, PRERA distributed direct aid to poor families,

handling 50,000 cases at the height of its operations. It also built roads, promoted malaria

control programs, and set up needlework centers (Villaronga 2004: 21). Perhaps most

importantly, however, under the auspices of Bournes wife, a professor at the University of

Puerto Rico, PRERA recruited social work students, training them in survey, census, and other

techniques. According to economist James Dietz, this training ground for Puerto Ricos own

brain trust was perhaps the PRERAs most enduring contribution to the island, (1986: 147).Despite it all, PRERAs measures were merely temporary by any measure of Puerto Ricos

problem, and it was generally agreed that more comprehensive measures were needed

(Matthews: 130-131). Two other early New Deal programs, the National Industrial Recovery

Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, were eventually extended to Puerto Rico despite strong

opposition by local businesses and landowners, and Governor Gore (131-142). In the former

case, businesses merely sidestepped the new laws application by cutting back on labor costs,

which intensifying ongoing labor struggles (Villaronga 2004: 21).

In early 1934, Puerto Rico was transferred from the tutelage of the War Department to

that of the Department of the Interior by Executive Order. For Grosfoguel, this transfer signaled

a shift in U.S. interests towards the dominance of symbolic interests over military ones, which

was short lived because of the imminence of war (2003: 56). A visit to Puerto Rico later that

year by Eleanor Roosevelt and the prominent Department of Agriculture New Dealer Rexford G.

10 Through Ruby Black, a good friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and a United Press correspondent who oftenwrote in support for the New Deal in La Democracia , the Puerto Rican newspaper Muoz edited, he gained accessto FERA Director Harry Hopkins, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, and President Roosevelt himself (Villaronga 2004: 20).


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Tugwell, during which they toured several well-known shantytowns, also signaled further

change. On his return, Tugwell recommended, among other things, that sugar production in

Puerto Rico be socialized on somewhat the same lines as a collective farm in the U.S.S.R.,

(cited in Matthews 1976: 162). Although the collectivization of sugar never took place,

Roosevelt immediately moved to establish a three-person Puerto Rican Policy Commission

(PRPC) by UPR chancellor Carlos Chardn, who at a roundtable conference during Tugwells

visit had proposed many of the radical reforms being explored (156-157, 163).

The PRPC represented a radical break in colonial policy insofar as it recruited local New

Dealers as policymakers with the ability to design and implement their own reform initiatives.Its proposal, popularly known as the Chardn Plan was immediately subject to immediate

opposition from the Coalition and from Blanton Winship, a War Department official who had

replaced Gore as Governor, who was reluctant to delegate authority over reforms to locals.

Federal officials spent several months designing an agency that could implement that plan which

was resistant to local politics. As the main liaison between local supporters of the New Deal and

the federal government, Muoz concocted an ambitious plan to run on a New Deal ticket in

1936, building mass support beyond party lines around himself in order to sweep away the

traditional politics of patronage once and for all. President Roosevelt signed the Executive Order

creating the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA) in May of 1935, and Ernest

Gruening, a well-known New Dealer and former editor of The Nation (for which Muoz had

written) was named its Director (Villaronga 2004: 22-24).

Unlike the PRERA, the PRRAs mandate included a broad program for economic

reconstruction. Besides implementing many (not all) of the Chardn Plans proposals , the PRRA

allocated resources for small farms, low-income cement housing, and educational facilities.


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However, the PRRAs mission was cut short by a sequence of events which ended with the

assassination of Chief of Police, Col. E. Francis Riggs, and the arrest of the entire national

leadership of the Nationalist Party. Gruening subsequently purged the PRRA not only of

radical elements, but of anyone with any connections to local politics, including employees as

well as administrators who were discovered to have been involved in collecting funds for the

Liberal Party through the agency. As a result, Gruening increasingly refused to delegate

authority, leading to the mass resignation of Chardn and other top officials in December 1936.

Gruening broke with Muoz definitively, and the latters role as New Deal liaison came to an

end, as did his dreams of a New Deal ticket in 1936 (25-26). Muoz was expelled from theLiberal Party in 1937, after the Liberals lost the 1936 election. The party leadership viewed

Muozs creation of Accin Social Independentista (ASI) as a faction within the Liberal Party to

support his position of social justice with independence as a factor in the defeat.

In July of 1938, the PPD was born, embracing Muozs vision of using the New Deal to

facilitate mass populist movement of national salvation. The PPD gained a legislative majority

in 1940, and Muoz became Senate President. In 1941, Tugwell was appointed Governor. That

year, the PPD-dominated Senate finally created mechanisms for the application of the old 500-

acre law, mostly applicable to sugar corporations, no longer as influential as they had been.

Between 1942 and 1946, the total expenses of the federal government in Puerto Rico totaled

$100 million, as a result of extraordinary war-related activities, growing between 9.3 % of Puerto

Ricos gross domestic product in 1942 to 18.2% in 1945 (Pantojas-Garca: 42, 50). These

expenditures focused on the building of infrastructure projects, including roads and sanitation,

which freed up the funds of the local government for development and social welfare projects,

allowing the PPD to fulfill many of its promises and consolidate its support. By 1944, it


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controlled 64% of the vote. In 1946, the PPDs Resident Commissioner, Jess T. Piero, became

the first Puerto Rican to be appointed Governor, and when Congress approved the popular

election of the Governor for the first time in 1948, Muoz swept the election.

As modernization programs funded by federal subsidies or stimulated by federal

incentives took hold, Muoz moved further away from the goal of independence. In 1946,

members of the Pro Independence Congress were expelled from the PPD. In 1950, the Federal

Relations Act was amended to allow a Constitutional Convention, which culminated in the

creation of the Commonwealth in 1952. The PPD dominated Puerto Rican politics for the next

16 years. By and by, other New Deal programs had been extended to the island, but partially,and often as a direct result of working-class mobilization, as was the case of the Social Security

Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). By the 1970s, the extension of the latter was a

key demand of the Puerto Rican labor movement (Garca and Quintero Rivera: 142). The FLSA

had been extended to Puerto Rico in the 1940s, but unions argued they created runaway shops,

stimulating unemployment (Pantojas-Garca: 102). It was then determined that local minimum

wage boards would evaluate the applicability of federal minimum wages in each sectors. The

demand resurfaced in the 1970s, however, and brought the labor movement closer to the pro-

statehood PNP, which won the Governors seat for the first time in 1968, and made lobbying for

full FLSA extension a campaign promise in 1976, which it achieved the following year

(Torruella 1985: 251).

Two Supreme Court cases decided soon thereafter, however, reaffirmed the doctrine of

the Insular Cases. In Califano v. Torres , the Court determined that a Connecticut resident could

not recover Social Security Insurance (SSI) benefits accrued during time spent in Puerto Rico,

whose residents arent eligible for SSI funds (they do receive regular Social Security benefits,


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which they pay into, but SSI funds are paid out of a separate account). In Harris v. Rosario , the

court determined that it was constitutional to grant less AFDC assistance to the territories than

the states, for similar reasons (Torruella: 110-114).

The most recent significant expansion of federal assistance in Puerto Rico was the

extension to the island of the FSP in 1971. The program came into effect in 1975, and became

the Nutritional Assistance Program (PAN) in 1983, as a block grant managed by Puerto Ricos

Department of the Family. Funding for the program in 1983 was set at a lower level than for

states in the FSP, given Puerto Ricos level of poverty. Nutritional assistance by the year 2000

made up 15.2 % of total federal transfers to individual, which have averaged more than 20% of personal income since the late 1970s. In 1989, Puerto Rico ranked fourth in total number of FSP

beneficiaries in the U.S., after New York, California, and Texas, states with much higher

populations (Dietz 2003: 162-163). According to several economic studies, the consistent fall in

poverty rates the two decades between 1970 and 1990 is due entirely to the impact of the

FSP/PAN. Without it, poverty would have increased slightly in the 1970s, and by most measures

in the 1980s as well, despite the tax-exemptions generated by the approval of Section 936 of the

Internal Revenue Code, which came into effect in 1976 (Dietz 166-167; Rivera-Batiz and

Santiago 1996: 76-77). As with the federal minimum wage, the pro-statehood movement had

actively lobbied for the extension of the FSP.

Subaltern Mobilization in Puerto Rico

Class struggles in Puerto Rico during the second half of the nineteenth century reflected the

demands of proto-capitalist organization of seigniorial hacienda production. Many agricultural

laborers participated in the political struggles of creole autonomists and separatists, which

included demands (fulfilled in 1873) for the abolition of slavery and the infamous sharecropping


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system known as the libreta for the work-journals peasants were forced to carry at all times

(Siln [1978] 1995: 15-22). By the late 1890s, impoverished peasants were carrying out sporadic

and isolated acts of class vengeance focused primarily on haciendas, which grew into insurgent

bands of up to 200 men when the U.S. invasion threw local police forces into disarray (Santiago-

Valls 1994: 78-79). The new regime, not unsympathetic to native laborers who they saw as

the victims of Spanish cruelty, and anxious to remold them into civilized subjects, nonetheless

repressed these uprisings, which continued until around 1903.

Organized class struggle centered largely on urban areas, where associations of artisans

and urban wage-laborers proliferated after 1868. Protests against rising taxes and prices led to astrike wave in 1895 that ended favorably for the workers (Garca and Quintero Rivera [1982]

1986: 19-27). This early success stimulated support for the formation of a workers party, but

the continued illegality of strikes constrained leaders from taking this risky step. Anarchist-

influenced working-class newspapers, however, conducted a fiery campaign denouncing the

working conditions faced by seamstresses and rural workers, and took the side of orthodox

autonomists who opposed pacting with the colonial regime (29). The U.S. invasion of 1898

was received with enthusiasm by the Puerto Rican labor movement, for which the new regime

offered considerably better organizing conditions. The Federacin Regional de Trabajadores

(FRT) was founded in October 1898, proclaiming a socialist program and demanding the

adoption of liberal U.S. institutions (32). In June 1899, a dissident faction split from the FRT

leadership, which supported an electoral alliance with the Republican Party of the sugar

bourgeoisie, to found the Federacin Libre de Trabajadores (FLT).

The FLT adopted the FRTs platform and immediately founded a workers party which

allied itself briefly with the U.S. Socialist Workers Party to preempt electoral alliances with


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bourgeois parties. The labor movements electoral hopes were dashed, however, when the

election rules established in 1900 pursuant to the Foraker Act, for the election of the newly

created House of Delegates and the post of Resident Commissioner, reestablished the requisite of

land ownership or taxpayer status, effectively disqualifying the most laborers. 11 Amidst the

repressive environment that followed, FLT leader Santiago Iglesias Pantn traveled to New York

City, where he approached the American Federation of Labor to request the FLTs affiliation

(Bird Carmona 2001: 20-22). The request was granted in September 1901, and Iglesias returned

to the island a paid AFL organizer. For over a decade, the FLT vacillated between the AFLs

economist line of avoiding bourgeois elections, a policy of alliances with bourgeois parties,and independent electoral participation. The canecutters strike of 1915, sparked by rural

workers who had until then remained at the margins of the FLT, led its leaders to realize the

potential of a mass party. By the end of the strike, the Socialist Party (PS), whose militants were

required to join the FLT, had been founded (Bird Carmona 2001).

In its 1917 debut, the PS became the countrys third electoral force, capturing nearly a

third of the electorate. Soon, however, it was forced into a series of highly unequal alliances

which mined away its capacity to represent an independent class position. In 1924, the

Republicans and the Union Party formed an electoral alliance to stop the red menace. A

dissident faction of the Republican Party refused to join the Alliance, proposing a coalition to the

PS, which accepted in order to soften the blow represented by the Alliance. The latter fell apart

in 1929, and the PS became part of a governing coalition known as the Good Government

Group with the two Republican factions. In 1932, a second Coalition of the PS and the reunited

Republicans won the election against a dissident faction of the old Union Party, reborn as the

Liberal Party. The Liberals received more voted than the Republicans or the PS alone, but not

11 The Autonomic Charter granted by Spain in 1897 guaranteed universal male suffrage for those over 25.


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enough to defeat the Coalition. The PS candidate, Iglesias, became Resident Commissioner, and

FLT leader Prudencio Rivera Martnez became Commissioner of the newly created Department

of Labor (Garca and Quintero Rivera 1982: 101-104).

For the 1933-1934 sugarcane harvest, the FLT leadership agreed to a national contract

with the Association of Sugar Producers, embracing a policy of industrial peace. The contract

was flatly rejected by the rank and file, who turned to the leader of the Nationalist Party (PN),

Pedro Albizu Campos, for organization and leadership (TFP 1982: 119-168). Albizu toured the

island addressing the striking workers in fiery speeches that explicitly linking capitalist

exploitation to colonialism in his speeches. However, a series of factors, including its rigidhierarchy, authoritarian style, and class perspective 12 prevented the PN from consolidating a

significant following among the working class (Garca and Quintero Rivera: 108-109). Two

other organizations emerged from the 1934 strike with decidedly more organic ties to the

working class, both of which favored independence. The first, an internal dissident faction of the

PS, highly critical of the partys pact with the Republicans, was expelled from the party for its

active leadership of the striking workers, and ceased to exist within two years (106-108). The

second was the Communist Party (PC), which would be instrumental in the founding of the

Confederacin General de Trabajadores (CGT) and the PPD (110-111).

From 1935 to 1939, the PC did not challenge the PS-FLT for leadership of the labor

movement. Its first mass activity was a march of the unemployed in the city of Ponce, which

gathered 10,000 people. The PC also participated in early land rescues and, indirectly, in all of

the major strikes of the decade, the most important of which was the dock workers strike of

12 Albizu envisioned the patria as a nation of smallholders. Addressing the striking workers, he told them: each of you must own property The legion of property owners we had in 1898 must arise again, (cited in Garca andQuintero Rivera 1982 108-109). Attempts to found a Nationalist Association of Puerto Rican Workers toorganize the workers, placing men of stature, responsibility, and patriotism to lead them, under the leadership of Dr. Eugenio Vera, a dentist, failed utterly (109-110).


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1938 (112-113). The significance of the 1938 strike, which lasted 37 days and involved over

7,000 workers, nearly paralyzing the entire economy, is manifold (TFP 1988). On the one hand,

it was one of the first major strikes to reflect the new tendency of organizing workers by shop,

which paralyzed the entire docks and made it harder to use scab labor. On the other, the

participation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, founded two years earlier, was crucial,

as crewmen on board of ships arriving from the U.S., belonging to the CIO-affiliated National

Maritime Union, refused to unload their cargo (Garca and Quintero Rivera 1982: 120-121). As

the FLT demonstrated its increasing incapacity to represent workers interests, new unions

shunned the old federation. In 1940, a number of non-FLT unions came together in the CGT,declaring their support for the newly founded PPD.

In the all of the key labor of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the PPD presented itself as a

party of the people. It also courted non-traditional organizations of the poor, such as public car

drivers (owners of private vehicles who transported passengers along publicly approved routes)

and the unemployed, both sectors with strong PC influence. The Protective Union of the

Unemployed (UPD), particularly, focused on demanding the extension of additional New Deal

measures, such as the Social Security Act (SSA), the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), and the

National Labor Relations Act, to Puerto Rico. A 1939 Petition sent to Federal Authorities

expressing these demands was signed by several organizations, including the dock workers

union, the drivers union, and the UPD (Villaronga 2004: 53). As the party of the New Deal

the PPD worked itself into position as the party of labor, marking its distance from the PS-FLT

leadership during the CGT-led 1944 canecutters strike against the FLT/APA contract, when the

PPD-controlled Minimum Wage Board (created to regulate the partial implementation of the


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FLSA in Puerto Rico), negotiated higher retroactive salaries than those originally agreed to by

the FLT (Garca and Quintero Rivera 1982: 124).

As PPD hegemony among the laboring classes increased, however, so did calls for

loyalty and attempts at co-optation. By the next CGT Congress in 1945, the federation had

split into an authentic and a pro-government faction. In 1947, the Taft Hartley Act

prohibited support strikes, and banned PC members from occupying leadership positions in the

labor movement. Taft-Hartley, which coincided with the shift towards a capital-intensive export-

oriented industrialization (EOI) strategy, placed Puerto Rican unions at a clear disadvantage

against U.S. based internationals which, invited by the local government, began a massiveunionization drive in Puerto Rico, where average manufacturing wages in the 1950s were 27% of

the U.S. average. (Garca and Quintero Rivera 1982: 137-138). The PPDs carrot-and-stick

labor control strategy after 1947, benefiting from the political approach of the earlier decade,

when hundreds of party faithful joined the ranks of the leading unions (Surez 2001), worked.

As a result of Taft-Hartley and the invitation of the internationals, the number of workers on

strike per year declined from the record high 46,206 in the 1947-1950 period to 7,631 in the

1956-1962 period.(Melndez 1993: 80).

The International Teamsters Union, feared by the Puerto Rican government for its

reputed militancy, also arrived in Puerto Rico in the mid-1950s and soon protagonized a series of

violent clashes with police and strikebreakers. The Teamsters militancy would influence the

development of the independent Puerto Rican unions (Siln 1978: 134-135). Labor conflicts

intensified in the second half of the 1960s, when 53,117 workers took part in a total of 290

strikes. In November 1969, the General Electric strike in Ro Grande, involving 1,200 workers,

inaugurated an era known as the new unionism in the history of Puerto Rican labor (Siln


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1978: 161-63). Labor conflicts intensified even further in the first half of the 1970s, when the

average number of man-days lost per year was over 300,000, triple the 1965-1970 average

(Garca and Quintero Rivera 1982: 145). By the end of the 1970s, 45.6 % of unions participating

in NLRB-supervised elections would be independent Puerto Rican unions, and 38.6% would be

AFL-CIO affiliates, in contrast to 51% in the 1965-1969 period (Santiago in Melndez and

Melndez 1993: 146-148). The influence of the pro-independence left also grew significantly

during this period, best illustrated by the rise of the Unified Labor Movement (MOU), presided

by Pedro Grant, a well-known militant of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP). 13 Efforts at

unity, however, were marred by high levels of fragmentation, with the proliferation of a number of labor federations.

Like the PC in previous decades, in the 1970s, the independence movement was also

active among subaltern movements outside of organized labor as well. Emblematic among these

is the wave of land rescues which took place between 1968 and 1976, which mobilized a total

of 84,104 people, according to one estimate. Land rescues consist of poor communities of urban

squatters which occupy privately owned idle land in protest and as an immediate solution to

the lack of affordable housing. Both the PIP and the PSP gave broad support to the rescue

movements, as did religious and civic groups of different persuasions. At least some of the

leaders of the movement itself promoted coordination and support, as well as collective

resistance, among different communities, envisioning the rescates as part of the wider struggles

of the working class (L. Cotto in Melndez and Melndez 1993: 121-123). The electoral support

of the pro-independence parties grew considerably during this period, from a low of about

20,000 votes in the 1960s to a combined total (PSP and PIP) of nearly 100,000 by 1980. The

13 A self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist, pro-independence party founded in the early 1970s, unrelated to the PS of theearly decades of the twentieth century.


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PIP, the largest and oldest of the two parties, had turned left and adopted a social-democratic

platform in 1972. In response, the PNP published a pamphlet by then-candidate Carlos Romero

Barcel, entitled Statehood is for the Poor which was a direct reply to the PIPs campaign

slogan (C. Romero Barcel [1972] in Ramos 1987: 126).

By the 1980s, the PSP had turned to a strategy of stopping statehood by voting for the

PPD, while the PIP focused on purely electoral nationalism. The following two decades saw the

weakening of the left in general, as neoliberalism took hold and state assets were privatized. The

failure of the independence movement to connect with subaltern movements are reflected in the

PIPs dismal electoral turnouts of recent years, a failure directly related to the success anincorporation strategy which intentionally sustains a highly profitable accumulation model which

is unable to generate stable employment. The late 1990s saw a resurgence of labor, with the

massive (yet unsuccessful) Peoples Strike against the privatization of the public phone

company by then-Governor Pedro Rossell of the PNP, followed almost immediately by popular

mobilizations which successfully forced the U.S. Navy out of Vieques. The latter boded well for

the PIP, which received more votes in the 2000 election than it had since 1952, but these were

cut down by half in 2004, when Rossell returned to local politics, sending thousands flocking to

vote for the PPD candidate. On the other hand, the successful disaffiliation of the Puerto Rican

Teachers Federation, one of the most powerful on the island, from the AFT during the past year

may mark the growth of future working-class militancy.

Conclusion


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Despite notable dissenting opinions in recent cases, the precedent set by the Insular Cases in the

first years of the U.S. occupation has been consistently upheld by all the Supreme Court. 14 As

statutory citizens from an unincorporated territory, federal constitutional rights dont apply to

island-born Puerto Ricans uniformly. Federal entitlements, including all means-tested aid

programs, only take effect in Puerto Rico when specifically foreseen by law. Such was the case

in the late 1930s, when New Deal programs were first extended to the island, and again in 1970,

when Congress approved the extension of the FSP to Puerto Rico. These extensions of federal

aid, therefore, have by no means been foregone conclusions. The institutional framework

established by the Insular Cases explains to some extent the uneven and delayed way in whichthese extensions took place, but not the decision or the timing of the extension itself. A

comparative survey of the historical and economic data of the two periods reveals the correlation

of several factors, including the rise and rearrangement of hegemonic historical blocs, industrial

and labor control strategies, and U.S. geopolitical interests.

In the late 1930s, as the islands population reeled from the devastation caused by the

Great Depression and the permanent decline of the sugar industry, a reformist cadre of U.S.-

educated professionals organized the PPD to forge a populist bloc with the laboring classes, in

part by successfully lobbying for the extension of New Deal programs to Puerto Rico, in what

was to be a first step in the radical transformation of its economic and social structure.

Organized labor, through the CGT, played a central role in the construction of this bloc, in turn

enlisting the support of metropolitan unions. The PPD strategy of labor incorporation and co-

optation would later lead to a split between the more radical sectors, who favored labor

autonomy, and the pro-government sector. As the U.S. prepared to enter the Second World War,

14 The Report of the Presidents Task Force on the Status of Puerto Rico , published in the course of writing this paper, reaffirms the territorial definition of the status quo outlined in the Insular Cases and the Federal Relationswith Puerto Rico Act.


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and later the Cold War, which precluded independence for a number of strategic and symbolic

reasons, these coalitions provided a means of curtailing the increasingly militant and anti-

imperialist mobilization of workers and the unemployed.

Starting in 1947, the PPD leadership turned to a capital-intensive EOI strategy based on

attracting U.S. FDI through local tax breaks and infrastructure subsidies, making use of the

forms of labor control designed during the earlier incorporation phase. The EOI model

encountered serious difficulties in the 1970s. Faced with stagflation and increasing working-

class mobilization and autonomy, the political elite of both dominant parties opted to discipline

labor through market mechanisms and overt repression. Puerto Ricos already wide-openeconomy was opened even wider with the federal enactment of IRC Section 936 in 1976, which

inaugurated a high-tech, high-finance stage in the Commonwealths development strategy,

following the disbursement of the first FSP funds in 1975. The influx of FSP funds, most of

which were spent on imported foodstuffs, provided a failsafe for the capital-intensive

accumulation strategy, which failed to stimulate employment or economic growth. This period

also coincided with the rise to power of the pro-statehood PNP, which actively lobbied for the

extension of federal aid, and the increasing electoral support, radicalization, and influence within

organized labor of the independence movement.

I have attempted to suggest in this paper that the disruptive power of mobilization among

the organized working class and other subaltern movements (most notably the unemployed in the

late 1930s and the land rescues of the early 1970s), compounded by the threat to colonial

hegemony, determined when and how New Deal programs were extended to Puerto Rico. The

impact the Great Depression in the 1930s (a product of the dynamic of capitalist accumulation),

generated mass discontent, unraveling of the electoral hegemony of the Coalition by 1940. The


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PPD leadership seized the opportunity to build a historical bloc and to lobby anxious U.S. elites

for relief aid, which gradually set off the transformation of Puerto Ricos social structure, leading

to the rise of urban classes receptive to the pro-statehood message of the PNP. The latter was

able to break the electoral hegemony of the PPD in 1968, which in turn loosened that partys

dominance over the labor movement, setting off another wave of mobilizations as the economic

crises of the 1970s deepened and the government turned to repression and further opening the

economy to capital-intensive FDI. In both cases, the extension of aid programs coincided with

the growth if the independence movement and its insertion in subaltern struggles.

Thus, while the extension of federal aid programs to Puerto Rico responds to diverse andcomplex factors, one constant correlate has been the threat posed to the hegemony of both U.S.

colonialism (dominated by strategic and symbolic interests) as a combined effect of anti-

colonial and subaltern mobilization. Evidence for this correlation is strengthened by the way

these extensions actively complement and supplement increasingly capital-intensive

development/accumulation strategies, together with free transit to the mainland as a pressure

valve for the population, which intensifies the metropolitan apprehensions about economic

pressures which might open that valve. One of the historical effects of this appeasement strategy

has been to constrain the growth of the independence movement, while stimulating that of the

statehood movement. Causal explanations that rely too heavily on either dependence or

rationality, however, are prone to miss the complexity of the class and political dynamics

involved in the process.

Nationalist sentiment, which the PPD has learned to exploit masterfully, seems to have

set a ceiling on the growth of the pro-statehood vote at around 50%, which most formal models

would consider irrational. With the end of the Cold War, the elimination of 936, and the


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shutdown of the Vieques bombing range, the economic, symbolic, and strategic interests of the

U.S. no longer seem invested in holding on to Puerto Rico. The general retrenchment of the U.S.

welfare state since the 1996 Clinton reforms, together with a deepening crisis of governability on

the island, make it worth wondering whether a pivotal moment for colonial hegemony in Puerto

Rico, such as that of the late 1930s or early 1970s, might not be rapidly approaching.

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