We Are Left without a Father Here: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico
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We Are Left without a Father Here: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico
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| ISBN-13: | 9780822376118 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2015 |
| Series: | American Encounters/Global Interactions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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We are Left Without a Father Here
Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico
By Eileen J. Suárez Findlay
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7611-8
CHAPTER 1
FAMILY AND FATHERHOOD IN "A NEW ERA FOR ALL"
Populist Politics and Reformed Colonialism
Believe in yourselves! Don't think of yourselves as tiny or weak or inferior! The light of God is in the nature of all those men and women whom God has created in this world. Believe in yourselves! Have faith in your own strength and power to make justice and ensure your own futures. • Luis Muñoz Marín, "En la víspera de las elecciones," radio speech, 1940
Muñoz Marín] put his ear to the ground, then dressed in shirt-sleeves without abandoning his lordly linen.... He transformed the ancient rhetoric ... into phrases of frothy custard and succulent metaphors ... into sparkling, economical verbs, inaugurating a new politics, disguising the society of old.... To what point did he console himself with the role of benevolent overseer? • Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Las tribulaciones de Jonás
The decade prior to the Michigan crisis of 1950 marked an era of mass organizing in Puerto Rico, of great popular hopes for change, and of the refashioning of politics. By 1940, vast numbers of urban and rural working- and middle-class people joined together to elect and maintain in power a new political party, the Partido Popular Democrático, which pledged to forge fresh political options on the island and to make "Bread, Land, and Freedom" available to all Puerto Ricans. Never before had a political party inspired such a massive mobilization of the Puerto Rican population. In its early years, the PPD was a sprawlingly inclusive organization, welcoming socialists and independence supporters of all kinds, working closely with the fledgling but bustling Communist Party of Puerto Rico, encouraging women to political action, and speaking passionately of the wounds of slavery that permeated many Puerto Ricans' hope for final deliverance into "freedom"—a broad term with many meanings. By the late 1940s, however, the PPD had begun to suppress autonomous political action within its ranks, its leaders simultaneously triumphant in their electoral success and anxious about the escalating demands made by laboring Puerto Ricans who organized as workers, veterans, consumers, housewives, and community residents. Beginning in 1950,PPD leaders worried particularly about winning popular endorsement of their plans to reform U.S. colonialism on the island, embodied in a referendum on a new political constitution. The protests from and about the Michigan sugar beet fields that exploded in mid-1950 surfaced out of and further fueled this complex political stew.
The PPD was led by the charismatic Luis Muñoz Marín, whose father had helped to found the Liberal Autonomist Party during the 1870s and had continued as a major player in Puerto Rican politics throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of the formally educated PPD founders had participated in the U.S. government's New Deal attempts to restructure the island's economy and provide a social service safety net to its poorest residents. In the process, they had accumulated experience in building relationships and hammering out policies with U.S. officials and politicians. Other party founders were seasoned union organizers, disillusioned with the island's stagnant politics and the intransigence of large, absentee-owned U.S. sugar corporations.
Puerto Rico's populist movement simultaneously legitimized "the people" as a historical force and exhorted them to focus their political energies on the compelling figure of Luis Muñoz Marín. Muñoz Marín persistently presented himself as the great father of "the new Puerto Rico" and used a rhetoric that sidestepped racial differences while exalting national unity through gendered stability. He offered empathetic partnership with women, promised men paternal dignity and empowerment, and insisted that Puerto Rico's feminized colonial degradation could be transformed into a respectful international pact between modern, deracialized fathers. As he elaborated the PPD's vision of an all-inclusive Puerto Rico, Muñoz Marín forged a deeply personal, even passionate relationship with laboring Puerto Ricans. Among them were the men who headed north to Michigan in 1950, hoping to achieve the PPD ideal of prosperous domesticity through migration.
To understand the historical pressures out of which the PPD emerged, we must turn to the preceding decades. In 1898, the United States invaded Puerto Rico and wrested control of it from Spain. The change of imperial ruler from Spain to the United States generated new colonial contradictions between intensified economic exploitation in the sugarcane fields and popular expectations of prosperity, democracy, and modernity. By the 1930s, political life on the island overflowed existing institutions as working families struggled with the gendered immiseration and disruptions of the Great Depression; women successfully agitated for universal suffrage; workers protested against complacent labor leaders and abusive employers; and criticisms of U.S. colonialism escalated. In its calls to social and political change, the PPD appropriated many of these demands, muting their radical edges and presenting them as inventions of the Partido Popular. Popular organizing shifted with the consolidation of PPD power. Plebeian demands for social justice continued, now both trusting in and pressuring the state to fulfill its promises. These autonomous political pressures simultaneously legitimized PPD power and unnerved the party's top leaders.
The Roots of Colonial Crisis
Throughout the nineteenth century, while a colony of Spain, Puerto Rican society was shaped by an economic counterpoint between the sugar-producing coastal regions and the coffee- and tobacco-producing mountainous center of the island. From 1820 to 1840, sugar plantations in Puerto Rico's coastal plains encroached on peasants who relied on informal, untitled land use to engage in subsistence agriculture. The sugar plantation owners imported tens of thousands of enslaved Africans to harvest and cut cane, unable to effectively coerce large numbers of the physically mobile, multiracial rural population into plantation labor. By the mid-1870s, though, Puerto Rico's sugar industry had become rather moribund; slavery was abolished in 1873. Coffee and tobacco production, based in the hilly center of the island, took economic center stage. Impoverished rural Puerto Ricans moved between the coastal and mountainous regions, looking for work in burgeoning towns and in larger landed estates. By the turn of the twentieth century, they had begun to organize labor unions in cigar factories, urban artisan trades, and on the coastal sugarcane plantations.
Working people's frequent physical movement and concomitant family and community building created an interracial society still marked by the island's persistently racialized geography—"blacker" coastal areas dominated by plantation production of sugar and "whiter" central mountainous regions where coffee and tobacco estates alternated with an impoverished peasantry dependent on estate wages as well as their own food crops. By the 1860s, plebeian Puerto Ricans, at least in the coastal areas, recognized that most people were of mixed racial heritage. Working people did not form racially segregated communities, even as the stigmatization of blackness persisted as a powerful current in Puerto Rico. Many laboring people did not identify as clearly black or white, although in their social networks, cultural attributes and styles, or regional identification, they may have tended more toward one end of the spectrum than the other. Racial identities among working people were often determined by one's social status or community reputation as much as by phenotype; they could also change over time or depend on the persons with whom one might relate socially. While maintaining more openness to popular culture than many elites in other colonies of the Spanish Empire, Puerto Rico's moneyed classes anxiously and vociferously asserted their own whiteness during the nineteenth century, distancing themselves from the possible racial impurities of laboring people and their own family histories. Race, then, became an ever-present yet subtle current in Puerto Rican politics, culture, and social relations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sometimes, the racial intimacies, hierarchies, and identities rooted in slavery and complicated through long decades of internal migration, exploited and shared labor, and sexual relationships were discussed openly and overtly politicized. More frequently, they were addressed obliquely through the languages of sexual morality and respectability, wage slavery, merit, and communal belonging.
In 1898, as part of its broader interventions into the Cuban and Philippine independence struggles, the United States invaded Puerto Rico and quickly defeated Spain's forces there. In this era of rising imperialist interests, the United States proclaimed itself Puerto Rico's new colonial ruler and great modernizing agent. Their colonialism, imperialist U.S. politicians and officials insisted, would be like no other—swathed in benevolence and inculcating modernity wherever it reached. The occupying power collaborated with liberal Puerto Rican elites to launch public health campaigns, build schools, and legalize divorce in Puerto Rico. The United States also restructured the island's physical infrastructure and economy; U.S. capital streamed into Puerto Rico for the dredging of ports, the building of roads and bridges, the modernization of sugar mills, and the revitalization of the sugar industry. In addition, U.S. officials centralized political power and international economic dealings in the capital city of San Juan.
In the process, the United States positioned itself as the primary example of modernity for Puerto Ricans. Whether imagined or directly experienced, the United States' economy, culture, and political practices came to represent the essence of modernity for most inhabitants of the new colony. For the rest of the twentieth century, Puerto Ricans' interpretations of modernity, whether utopian, dystopic, or disinterested, remained deeply historically intertwined with their experience of U.S. colonialism.
U.S. imperialists justified their invasion and continued colonial rule in Puerto Rico through gendered and racialized assertions about Puerto Ricans' alleged lack of modernity and consequent unfitness for self-governance. Although colonial officials conceded that there were a "few good men" among elite Puerto Ricans, they generally represented island elite men as either too ineffectual in their efforts to preserve social order on the island or too contaminated with the despotic political practices of their former Spanish colonial masters to govern properly. Thus, according to U.S. officials, male Puerto Rican elites might serve as allies in building the benevolent colonial project, but they clearly needed U.S. imperial tutelage; they were closer to obedient, docile, indecisive women than to the firm masculinity necessary for national sovereignty. Men of the laboring classes did not measure up either; they allegedly did not have the virile strength of character necessary for unrestricted political participation. "Manhood suffrage presupposes a basis of real, true manhood," thundered an early U.S. military governor. Not until 1904 did U.S. officials allow universal male suffrage, a right won by Puerto Ricans during the late 1890s under Spanish rule but revoked by the invading U.S. forces. U.S. colonial personnel also worried about laboring Puerto Ricans' "promiscuous" racial mixing. U.S. observers closely associated working-class Puerto Ricans' racial ambiguity with their propensity for living in consensual unions rather than entering into formal marriage. Colonial officials and observers puzzled over the suspect "reddishness" of white plebeians and the varied hues and phenotypes of children within a single family.
For their part, Puerto Ricans of all social classes and racial identities initially enthusiastically endorsed the U.S. occupation of their island in 1898, although they did so for widely divergent reasons. Working men and women as well as feminists of various social classes saw a chance to build alliances with the United States' growing labor and women's movements. Puerto Ricans of African descent welcomed the connection with a nation that had fought a war to end slavery and where African Americans had organized to press for greater political, educational, and economic opportunities. All groups lauded the United States' democratic ideals, which they hoped to apply to themselves. Seeing that the U.S. political system afforded a good deal of autonomy to entering states, wealthy and professional Puerto Ricans hoped to consolidate greater local political power than that accorded to them under Spain's restrictive colonial rule. They also expected to gain unrestricted access to massive U.S. markets for the island's sugar, tobacco, and coffee. Puerto Rican dreams of the modernity heralded by U.S. rule, then, could take many forms: social justice, economic prosperity, and political power all fit within its widening possibilities. Despite the ominous signs of Jim Crow consolidation in the U.S. South, the restriction of suffrage for working-class men, and the imposition of English as the language of instruction in public schools in Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans across the social spectrum initially welcomed the North American intervention on their island, particularly because the United States was a decidedly more modern, liberal, and prosperous metropolitan power than Spain. Certainly, the United States' inspiring originating ideals, however imperfectly applied, offered a standard to which all civilized polities might aspire.
U.S. imperialists, for their part, also enthusiastically welcomed Puerto Rico into their new 1898 stable of colonial possessions. U.S. capitalists and social reformers alike rapidly developed a great interest in Puerto Rico, which seemed a much less problematic colony to control than Cuba or the Philippines, which had developed broad-based armed struggles for independence from Spain. Sugar magnates bought up failing sugar plantations; the infusion of capital and technology fueled an implacable expansion of sugar production on the island that gobbled up land for decades. Excited by the evangelical possibilities, all the mainline U.S. Protestant churches established bases on the island and sent missionaries to lure Puerto Ricans away from Catholicism. The impressive success of organizing among tobacco workers, cane cutters, urban artisans, and sweatshop laborers in the first decades of the twentieth century caught the attention of the U.S. labor movement. By World War I, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had established an enduring relationship with Puerto Rican labor organizers and institutions.
Puerto Rican expectations of economic prosperity, democratic empowerment, and social justice had begun to wither by the end of the second decade of U.S. colonialism, however. U.S.-sponsored construction of roads and ports seemed designed to serve only the interests of U.S. sugar corporations. U.S. citizenship, granted in 1917 to all Puerto Ricans, did not guarantee equal political voice in Washington or on the island. Puerto Rico's laws still could be abrogated at will by the U.S. Congress or president. The island's governors remained federal appointees, all of them North American and for the most part incapable of or uninterested in speaking Spanish. To add insult to injury, Puerto Ricans were drafted into World War I by the United States. Sugar plantations reigned supreme in the island's economy, pumped up by U.S. capital and easy access to the United States' vast markets. The coffee industry, on the other hand, after its late nineteenth-century dynamism, lay moribund under U.S. rule. Small farmers and squatters rapidly lost access to land as the great sugar plantations consumed nearly all available flat land and brought new acreage under large-scale sugar production. The "dead time" of eviscerating unemployment for sugarcane workers between planting and harvest now stretched for more than six months of the year. Colonial officials sided consistently with U.S. corporations and Puerto Rican elites in labor conflicts. Likewise, they opposed broadening suffrage rights to Puerto Rican women.
Nevertheless, Puerto Rico's labor movement made steady membership gains during the first two decades of the twentieth century, launching a great island-wide organizing drive, leading a number of mass strikes in the cane fields, and actually garnering over 20 percent of the vote for the Socialist Party in the 1920 elections. During the 1920s, though, the leaders of the Puerto Rican labor movement turned away from their radical origins by privileging electoral politics over organizing for better work and living conditions, deepening their dependence on the funding and guidance of the increasingly conservative AFL, and eventually allying with the political heirs of the elite Liberal Autonomists of the nineteenth century. Encouraged by the AFL and its wealthy Puerto Rican political patrons, the Socialist Party even refused to endorse strikes by aggrieved workers during the 1920s.
Both the alienation of the top echelons of traditional Puerto Rican labor leaders from the island's rank-and-file sugar workers and growing popular dissatisfaction with U.S. rule intensified during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Sugar prices dropped and male unemployment soared frighteningly high, even during the harvest months. Long-standing political allies such as the Socialist Party no longer consistently defended working-class interests. Many working-class families' only income came from the few cents that adult women and their daughters could earn sewing piecework for long hours each day or caring for wealthier women's homes and children. Don Rubén del Pilar, who grew up during the 1930s, remembered feeling as though "my stomach were one great, aching hole, never to be filled," as his father traveled from town to town looking unsuccessfully for work and as his mother's fingers bled from her never-ending sewing. He and his six siblings counted themselves lucky if they ate meagerly once a day. Crowds of men gathered desperately to seek work in the sugar fields. Even during the harvest, many were unsuccessful; during the seven months of dead time men were lucky to get a morning of work a week, to be paid with a few yuccas or sweet potatoes. Cash payments were unthinkable in many parts of rural Puerto Rico.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from We are Left Without a Father Here by Eileen J. Suárez Findlay. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Bregando the Sugar Beet Fields 1
1. Family and Fatherhood in "a New Era for All": Populist Politics and Reformed Colonialism 25
2. Building Homes, Domesticity Dreams, and the Drive to Modernity 59
3. Removing "Excess Population": Redirecting the Great Migration 90
4. Arriving in Michigan: The Collapse of the Dream 118
5. The Brega Expands 148
Conclusion. Persistent Bregas 173
Notes 191
Bibliography 257
Index 295
What People are Saying About This
"In this fascinating study, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay reinterprets Puerto Rican history in the mid-twentieth century by placing labor migration, populist politics, and gender at the heart of her narrative. Thousands of Puerto Rican migrant workers, seeking modernity and an escape from the harsh colonialism on their home island, journeyed to sugar beet fields in Michigan. There they found exploitation harsher than they had known. Findlay eloquently explores their travels and travails and shows how they reshaped both U.S. colonialism and Puerto Rican populism."
"Eileen J. Suárez Findlay's new work illuminates a forgotten chapter of Puerto Rican history—the 1950 'Operation Farmlift,' which ended in protests by migrant workers in Michigan's sugar beet fields. Findlay's analysis is meticulously documented, imaginative, and insightful. It is also sensitive to the multiple intersections among gender, race, and class in postwar Puerto Rican economic development, colonial reforms, and mass migration. I learned much from reading this admirable book."