Fantasy Island, page 5
Albizu Campos most likely grasped much of this structural injustice and, coupled with his personal discomfort with what he experienced in New England in the 1920s, refused to remain in the belly of the beast, preferring instead to make it his life goal to free Puerto Rico from the United States’ grasp. When he returned to Ponce he maintained a law practice, staying in close contact with local struggles. From that vantage point he began to see the effects of how the United States dealt with the major crisis of the 1930s Depression. In this way Albizu Campos began to see clearly the connection between global finance capital, represented by Wall Street banks such as the City Bank of New York, and the sugar cane industry it controlled. In a not-unsurprising precedent for the actions that the FOMB would impose in 2017, the major companies began to cut sugar cane workers’ wages almost in half.
The chain of events resulting from the formation of the Nationalist Party was decisive as Puerto Rico transitioned from near-total US domination to its semiautonomous “Showcase of the Caribbean” period, which America found particularly useful during its Cold War with the Soviet Union. According to Nelson Denis, author of War Against All Puerto Ricans, Albizu Campos had lunch with E. Francis Riggs, the chief of the Puerto Rico Police and heir to the Washington, DC-based Riggs Bank fortune. According to Denis, Riggs offered Albizu Campos the backing necessary to become Puerto Rico’s first native governor—if he backed off from his leadership role in the growing momentum of strikes, which had spread from agricultural workers to tobacco, needlework, and other laborers.
According to Denis, Albizu Campos responded by saying, “Puerto Rico is not for sale, at least by me”—in Spanish, “no se vende”—a slogan activists still use today when protesting the government’s potential sell-off of Puerto Rican–owned land and resources to private investors in the aftermath of Hurricane María. This refusal to compromise led to a series of violent confrontations that resulted in Riggs’s death at the hands of nationalists, Albizu Campos’s imprisonment, and the infamous Ponce Massacre of 1937, during which seventeen civilians and two police officers were killed. The photographs from Albizu Campos’s prison confinement as well as his numerous hospitalizations, where he was allegedly subject to radiation treatments, would go on to dominate the way Albizu Campos maintains a public presence. His legacy was permanently intertwined with the violence of the nationalist movement, including the two famous 1950s shootings in Washington, DC—an assassination attempt on President Truman at Blair House and a shooting attack on Congress itself by nationalists like Lolita Lebrón.
Albizu Campos also famously weighed in on another US intervention in Puerto Rico, one whose deleterious effects were clouded in debate. In 1937 a sterilization law favored by American eugenicist Clarence Gamble (of Proctor and Gamble fame) and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger went into effect. Albizu Campos saw the increased availability of birth control and the at-times coerced sterilization of women as an example of the United States “trying to invade the very insides of nationality.” The law established a eugenics board, and scholar Laura Briggs claims that although there were many involuntary sterilizations of women in Puerto Rico, most were not ordered by the Eugenics Board created by the 1937 law.
The roots of mass sterilization in Puerto Rico can be found in Thomas Malthus’s pronouncements about the poor and overpopulation. Some writers, like Iris Ofelia López, have theorized that Margaret Sanger saw the eugenics movement as an opportunity to support women’s birth control while also creating a racial and class divide between privileged white women, who had the option to use birth control, and poorer and nonwhite women as well as some who were “feeble,” who would all be encouraged to use it.14
The ambivalence about how much of this was a pernicious genocidal plot and how many Puerto Rican women actually wanted to take advantage of birth control does cloud the issue: What is the role of “Americanization” here? La Operación, a chilling 1982 documentary by Puerto Rican filmmaker Ana María García, appears to show evidence of women being steered toward being used as guinea pigs for previously untested birth control pills. There is considerable documentation of verifiable sterilization campaigns against African American and Mexican women in California, which passed eugenics-friendly Asexualization Acts in the early twentieth century, with Virginia and North Carolina following suit. Awareness of this agenda may have intersected with Catholicism in Puerto Rico and the patriarchal essence of Latin American administration to create a militant narrative that the Sanger/Gamble campaign was genocidal in nature. Nationalist Puerto Rican groups as well as the US-based Young Lords Party helped build the momentum to condemn sterilization practices as attempts to “erase” Puerto Ricans.15 The data documenting the unusually high sterilization rates and the fact that many of the birth control pills had not passed FDA tests are evidence of the abuse of Puerto Rican women.
What became clear to the US government as the militant nationalism in Puerto Rico grew through the late 1930s and 1940s is that the United States was losing its grip on the hearts and minds of Puerto Ricans. US-appointed governors like Robert H. Gore and Blanton Winship were the objects of scorn and derision for their various heavy-handed tactics as they sought to Americanize Puerto Ricans and repress labor strikes. As a result, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes planted the seeds of a new transition for Puerto Rico’s sociopolitical future.
In 1941 Roosevelt appointed as governor of Puerto Rico Rexford Tugwell, who had worked in the Department of Agriculture under the ultra-liberal Henry Wallace. With his more liberal and reformist ideas gaining favor, Tugwell also worked to get Jesús Piñero appointed as the first-ever Puerto Rico governor in 1946.
But Piñero’s appointment carried with it an antinationalist “Gag Law” that was in part inspired by a new insidious development in the United States: McCarthyism. According to this law—“La Mordaza,” as it was known—advocating for violent action against the Puerto Rico government in speech or writing became a felony, echoing the United States’ Smith Act (a.k.a. the Alien Registration Act) of 1940, which set criminal penalties for anyone advocating for the overthrow of the US government by force or violence and also required all noncitizen adult residents to register with the federal government. The Smith/Alien Registration Act was one of McCarthy’s many tools during the infamous hearings with which he exposed and delegitimized members or sympathizers of the Communist Party at the dawn of the Cold War.
Although the text of the law makes it a felony to “print, publish, edit, circulate, sell, distribute, or publicly exhibit any writing which encourages, pleads, advises, or preaches the necessity, desirability or suitability of overthrowing the insular government,” officials also used it to intimidate Puerto Ricans from playing “La Borinqueña,” the unofficial anthem that was played in Ponce right before the massacre, or displaying the single-star Puerto Rican flag that had been conceived as a symbol of anti-Spanish colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century.
Reviled as it has become, La Mordaza was part of a strategy that attempted to enact something other than the pseudo-fascist trappings of McCarthyism. Fueled by the progress of liberal FDR/Ickes interventionism, the United States was intent on putting a human face on its colonial experiment. With the cooperation of Luis Muñoz Marín—a privileged member of the Puerto Rican elite, sometimes referred to as “café poet” because of his bohemian tenure in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1930s—a new political party called the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) was created. It fused elements of socialist, independentista, and liberal politics to create a different narrative that would put a beneficent gloss on the United States’ continuing possession of the island while also permanently demonizing militant nationalism.
In Mexico Spanish colonialists built their churches directly on top of Aztec and Mayan temples, erasing their spiritual power while at the same time promoting the creation of new sacred objects of worship that fused Catholicism with indigenous religion. La Virgen de Guadalupe, a mestiza version of Virgin Mary, became one of the most powerful religious symbols in Mexico because she so successfully commanded a sense of Mexican national pride. So was the case when the FDR and Truman administrations orchestrated the emergence of Luis Muñoz Marín, the son of Luis Muñoz Rivera, the third resident commissioner of Puerto Rico. An unimpressive orator with connections to the United States’ governmental and literary elite, Muñoz Marín became the perfect moderate spokesman for a Puerto Rico that rejected the nationalist violence of Albizu Campos, who had been in prison since 1936.
Co-opting the Mexican Revolution’s slogan of “Pan, Tierra y Libertad” (Bread, Land, and Freedom), the old Nationalist single-star flag (which had been overshadowed by Albizu Campos’s Nationalists’ use of the black-and-white “cross” flag) and the straw hat (pava) of the rural jíbaro, Muñoz Marín constructed a Virgen de Guadalupe–like symbol for a new Puerto Rico that believed in an economic coexistence with the United States that would eventually lead to independence. To accomplish this, he worked with the Truman administration to create a meaningless new status for Puerto Rico that would change nothing regarding the US Constitution’s “Territorial Clause,” through which Congress would continue to have complete authority over territories.
Through the efforts of Antonio Fernós Isern, who took office with Piñero as resident commissioner in 1946, the Puerto Rican Congress drew up Public Law 600. This law would allow Puerto Ricans to elect a Constitutional Assembly that would then draft a constitution. Fernós and Muñoz Marín believed that language used in PL 600 indicated that the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico would be substantially changed. In fact, the PDP placed pretty much all of its political stock in this notion until recent Supreme Court rulings regarding Puerto Rico’s ability to write its own bankruptcy law to renegotiate its debt.16
In reality, the language of PL 600 did nothing to change anything about the Territorial Clause of the Constitution, which allows Congress complete control over territories. The creation of the Puerto Rican Commonwealth, or ELA (Estado Libre Asociado, or Free Associated State), was always a kind of fantasy whose main purpose was to solve the nationalist problem in Puerto Rico and satisfy the newly formed UN requirements for decolonization. This fantasy was essential to help Puerto Ricans avoid the cognitive dissonance between their view of their cultural and national identity and their legal status as colonial subjects with second-class citizenship.
There were, however, some positive aspects of the creation of the Puerto Rican Constitution. Unlike the US Constitution, it was written after the International Declaration of Human Rights and, thus, included some of its provisions, such as a ban on the death penalty and an explicit provision against discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, birth, social origin or condition, or political or religious ideas. When Puerto Ricans elected Muñoz Marín as governor, the island seemed to have more autonomy and the illusion of self-determination. But, unsurprisingly, there was considerable backlash from the Nationalist Party.
In October 1950 there was what many have described as a “revolution” but is perhaps more accurately termed an “insurrection” in Puerto Rico. With the passage of PL 600, the Nationalist Party began to ramp up its rhetoric, amass arms, and plan for armed conflict. Sporadic incidents like a prison break in Oso Blanco, the island’s largest prison located in Rio Piedras just outside of San Juan, and the bombing of the house of a nationalist leader, Blanca Canales, in the mountain town of Jayuya became legendary for their level of violence. But the Nationalists never intended to win an armed struggle with Puerto Rico’s police, national guard, or the US military; rather, they hoped to create a political crisis that would discourage the UN from recognizing the process PL 600 had put in motion.
Then, when the Puerto Rico National Guard and the Puerto Rico police attacked towns like Arecibo, Jayuya, and Utuado—all west of San Juan—the center of the struggle moved away from the metropolitan area. Campos had designated these western areas, particularly Utuado, as potential strongholds because their agricultural base was intact and productive and because once the mountainous roads between these towns were secured, an uprising could effectively control movement across the western half of the island. In Jayuya the Nationalists declared an independent Republic of Puerto Rico, prompting the National Guard to aerial bomb the town and, subsequently, occupy it.
For most Puerto Ricans these events, which resulted in twenty-eight mortalities, are almost completely forgotten. There are no national holidays in memory of them, no well-funded historical revisitings of this period, no stadiums or street corners named after the protagonists. An independent 2018 documentary about it, 1950: La Insurrectión Nacionalista does not have distribution in the US. Yet there is an undeniable sense among the people that there were those who sacrificed for some idea about national honor, something that is not attainable under commonwealth or statehood. It’s a kind of unfocused collective memory that was reactivated when an FBI squadron gunned down radical independentista Filiberto Ojeda Ríos of the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, or National Armed Forces of Liberation) in 2005 or when Oscar López Rivera, another FALN member whose sentence was commuted by President Obama in 2016, was released. The political ends or consequences—militant resistance and a desire for national autonomy—seem extreme or unattainable, but the desire for a national spirit remains strong. On the western half of the island in particular, its relative independence from colonial control still resonates today when Puerto Ricans talk about having roots in the area or buying property there. When someone suggests they are from Utuado; or Lares, the site of the 1868 rebellion against Spain; or San Sebastián; or Cabo Rojo, they either make a subtle coded gesture or openly discuss that their town has strong independentista roots. Sadly, these towns were among the most badly hit during Hurricane María, dealing a severe blow to the potential for the revolutionary roots in the western soil to reactivate political action.
The new commonwealth’s constitution was put into effect on July 25, 1952, which also happened to be the fifty-fourth anniversary of when the US Navy landed in Guánica—the beginning of the US occupation and territorial control. On that day Luis Muñoz Marín raised the once-prohibited single-star Puerto Rican flag during a speech and effectively erased the symbolic power of that US landing, which Nationalists had used as a rallying cry for at times violent protests. When the remnants of the Nationalist Party or disaffected independentistas rally at Guánica to commemorate the invasion, ceremonies held to celebrate the 1952 Constitution and Commonwealth in San Juan distract most of the island’s attention. Although the new commonwealth was granted a considerable degree of autonomous self-government, Muñoz Marín oversaw its creation, declaring it a means for Puerto Rico to build the kind of economy that would make independence possible. The label “commonwealth” was intended to erase “colony,” but it effectively assured that the island would remain a US colony indefinitely. The economy that the Muñoz-Marín/US partnership would create would become a bonanza for US corporations, but little was reinvested locally to ensure the island’s stability and growth.
Part of the creation of the new Commonwealth of Puerto Rico was the implementation of Operation Bootstrap (Manos a la Obra, or “Let’s Get to Work”), which transformed the island’s agricultural economy into an industrial one. Muñoz Marín led the effort to attract US corporate investment to the island so as to establish textile, clothing, and other manufacturing operations. This economic transformation also included a long process of consolidating agricultural production, which eliminated jobs and land for rural residents, who were tied to it through wage labor and subsistence farming.
While living standards for many improved, Bootstrap’s success depended on exporting surplus labor to the United States, and this created a wave of migrant Puerto Rican workers to the mainland. Earlier migrations had seen thousands migrating to Hawaii to be employed by the California and Hawaii Sugar Corporation as well as to New York and Tampa, Florida, to work as tabaqueros, or cigar-factory workers. But the Great Migration of the post–World War II era was a definitive one for Puerto Ricans because it firmly established them as a growing population in urban centers like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.
The Great Migration to the North for Puerto Ricans closely paralleled that of African Americans, as Puerto Ricans came to live in large urban centers in the North just a few years after African Americans began their migration to escape Jim Crow laws. Puerto Ricans and African Americans became neighbors in the same segregated areas. Because many—if not most—of the Puerto Ricans forced to flee northward were darker skinned and not part of the island’s white-ish elite, there was some cultural crossover between the two groups: they faced parallel forms of race discrimination, lived in the same or bordering neighborhoods, and began to influence each other’s culture. In addition, because Puerto Ricans were already American citizens, their experience aligned more with the established African American status of second-class citizenship than that of Latin American immigrants from other countries.
While there was considerable exchange between Puerto Ricans and African Americans, racist attitudes from the island created a kind of ambivalence that placed Puerto Ricans in a kind of nether-ground between black and white. Earlier Cuban immigrants like jazz musician Mario Bauzá had begun to fuse African American jazz techniques with Afro-Cuban ones, so when Puerto Ricans arrived they heard music that allowed them to build bridges with American blacks. Fusion music like bugalú combined Afro-Cuban music with R&B and was promoted by mostly Puerto Rican groups. But the variations in Puerto Rican skin tones and appearance had a tendency to be something “other” than African American while also clearly racially distinct from white Americans.
