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