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...