Why Puerto Rico?

 

 

“There were too many Puerto Rican laborers and poor and not enough men of capital.”

– Governor Charles Allen, First Governor of Puerto Rico

 

 

 

 

 

During the 1920s and 1930s, the sugar production industry was introduced to Puerto Rico in order to inject “men of capital” into Puerto Rico. Roughly thirteen percent of the land in Puerto Rico was owned by sugar manufacturing industries by the early 1930s. (7:13-7:30)

https://stanford.edu/group/womenscourage/cgi-bin/blogs/familyplanning/2008/10/23/forced-sterilization-in-puerto-rico/

 

As the Great Depression ensued in the early 1930s, Puerto Rico suffered tremendously as mass layoffs and the rate of unemployment increased as it was forced to become heavily dependent on jobs from US industry. All of this occurred while Puerto Rico was trying to recover from the Hurricane of San Felipe that ravaged the island only a year before the start of the Great Depression.

–

Porta de Tierra, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Photographed by Edwin Rosskam. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

 

In 1937, the unemployment rate had risen to 37 percent. Since a large amount of Puerto Rican land was given to the sugar manufacturing industry and the Great Depression took away jobs, the US government considered these landless and jobless Puerto Ricans to be “excess population”. (7:37-7:50)

 

-Image from “La Operacion”

 

“In 1937, Blanton Winship approved Law 136 legalizing sterilization influenced by principles of Eugenics which advocating the breeding of the wealthy whites and the weeding of the poor and non-whites. Winship stated his reasons for passing this bill was “to fill the urgent need to avoiding the menace of the ever-growing population.” (7:47-8:01)

 

Who Benefits?

Private Corporations

 

As World War 2 wreaked havoc across Europe and destroyed the European garment industry, there was an increasing demand for garment production. As a result, needlework and garment manufacturing companies began hiring Puerto Rican women and paying them less wages than men. With the sterilization of Puerto Rican women, there was lessneed for Puerto Rican women to work in the home raising children. As a result, there was an increase demand for women in the workplace because they were a source of cheap labor. (14:24-14:40)

 

“Operation Bootstrap as the industrialization model was called offered US companies tax free operations, cheap labor and handsome profits… this new economic model further reduced the need for workers, this increased the so-called “excess population”. (7:30-7:45)

 

“A whole series of catastrophic images were created about the population in Puerto Rico to make you think that it was teeming with people climbing like ants on each others backs at the time there were about 654 people were square mile in Puerto Rico. Most of the people that left Puerto Rico landed in Manhattan where the population was 90,000 per square mile.” (12:48-13:16)

“So when people say that there is a surplus population some place, you always have to ask “too many people for what?” too many people for in particular with respect to how production is organized and how production is shared.” (14:04-14:20)

“It was known that the number of jobs that Bootstrap was going to create would never be enough to occupy the number of people entering the labor force each year. So that from the beginning the very earliest plans that a very intensive campaigning birth control, sterilization, and other forms of reducing birth were going to have to be put into place.” (15:44-16:10)

-Frank Bonilla, Director of the Graduate Center for Puerto Rican Studies at City University of New York

“This migration (of Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico to New York) was spontaneous in as much as the workers decided to migrate in search of jobs. But it was also planned, a confidential report by the islands government suggested that in 1956 that 60,000 should leave, shipping people out was in fact an official policy.” (13:32)