The New Old Deal: Colonial Social Welfare and Puerto Rican Poverty During the Great Depression, 1928-1941

Abstract

The New Old Deal: Colonial Social Welfare and Puerto Rican Poverty During the Great Depression, 1928-1941

Abstract

In 1941, at the end of the Great Depression, continental observers noted that Puerto Rico's urban shantytowns were expanding despite the US government's efforts to alleviate poverty through New Deal programs such as low-income housing and slum eradication initiatives. Their consensus was that working-class Puerto Ricans had it far worse than many poor Americans—including African Americans in the Jim Crow South. And yet, over the course of the 1930s, policymakers in Washington, D.C. came to conclude that a large portion of the Puerto Rican population were deserving, “white” American citizens. One would expect that, as they became increasingly categorized as “white” in the national census, federal aid to Puerto Rico would have followed the same patterns of racialized welfare that historians have associated with the New Deal. Why then were so many islanders moving to city squatters’ settlements while the white, continental working class benefitted from New Deal housing and employment initiatives? This conundrum prompted the following exploration of how Puerto Ricans' access to New Deal labor legislation, jobs creation and housing programs influenced the reinforcement of the island’s class structure, entrenched poverty, and the dramatic growth of its urban shantytowns. This dissertation considers how an analysis of island squatters’ settlements and housing programs for the island’s homeless can contribute to our understanding of how the Great Depression unfolded in a U.S. colonial territory as well as the race and class-based exclusions of New Deal aid programs. It also reveals that some U.S. officials did attempt to increase federal aid to the island during the 1930s. However, in addition to a relative lack of funding from D.C., local resistance to the New Deal fomented by insular politicians sympathetic to the colonial sugar industry prevented any meaningful aid from reaching the pockets of the island’s working classes for the bulk of the decade. And finally, this dissertation explores how exclusion from federal programs led to popular unrest that threatened to destabilize colonial rule and eventually caused a political sea change in Puerto Rico beginning in the late 1930s. This work will add to a growing body of transnational literature addressing New Deal scholarship which overlooks Puerto Rico as a topic of analysis. Including the colony in discussions about the discriminatory policies that reinforced the spatial isolation and poverty of mainland minorities will provide a new perspective on the ways power was maintained in America during an era of socioeconomic crisis. The following research also responds to works that privilege Puerto Rico's rural class struggles and agricultural capitalism while obscuring their effects on the island’s urban areas. Rural unemployment fueled migrations that swelled Puerto Rico's shantytowns, which became key sites for policy implementation battles between local and federal authorities. Such factors call for an analytical focus that includes the island's cities more fully. This approach will provide a holistic look at the interplay between the island's rural and urban regions and the mainland during the 1930s while broadening our understanding of class and racial dynamics during the American depression.