We Are Left without a Father Here

Eileen Suárez Findlay examines the labor and migratory policies of an emerging colonial-populist state in Puerto Rico under the leadership of Luis Muñoz Marín's Partido Popular Democrático (PPD). In order to carry out the socioeconomic and political restructuration of the island, the PPD leadership deemed as vital the mass migration to the US mainland of what it considered excess population. Though this is a well-known story, Suárez Findlay presents a fresh take by focusing on the understudied Puerto Rican labor migration to rural Michigan. This is an important contribution in itself, since, with few exceptions, works on the Puerto Rican diaspora have focused on the postwar mass migration to urban centers in the Eastern Seaboard.Suárez Findlay presents us with a gender analysis of the familial narratives used by the PPD leadership to highlight the central role that migration played in the party's plans for the island. The familial language and metaphors used by PPD officials, she argues, made the reformed colony more palatable to Puerto Ricans: “Puerto Rico as a nation was growing up into manhood, and deserved to be treated as such” (p. 48). Puerto Rico would remain within the family of the United States but as an equal partner, a respectable, responsible grown-up man. The PPD presented its political project as transforming the colonial relationship with the United States into a familial one. Within this context, Muñoz Marín emerges as “papá Muñoz,” the quintessential father figure heading a paternalistic state. That new state would provide the space and opportunities for Puerto Rican males to become responsible breadwinners and would step in if men proved unable to fulfill their roles as fathers.Ironically, to become respectable fathers, Puerto Rican males had to spend long periods of time away from their families. As part of Operation Airlift, over 5,000 Puerto Ricans, many of them loyal PPD supporters, were sent to the sugar beet fields of east-central Michigan in 1950. Once there, they faced harsh conditions and mistreatment. Savvy regarding union and political organization and “relatively politically empowered” because of their relationship with the PPD (p. 163), these men fought back. They joined, and learned from, Mexican American workers and religious groups, and they wrote to newspapers in Michigan denouncing overly onerous work conditions and breached contracts; many left the sugar beet fields and sought employment elsewhere. More importantly, these men, as well as their wives and mothers, wrote letters to the island's Department of Labor demanding the state's intervention.Operation Airlift seemed to be collapsing, threatening the PPD's plans on the eve of the vote that would eventually lead to the creation of the Estado Libre Asociado. Wary government officials labeled the workers' plight “the Michigan Affair.” Under pressure, the Puerto Rican legislature passed Law No. 1 of 1953 to provide some relief for the migrant laborers' families, the return to the island of workers “medically certified as ill and unable to work,” and “payment to beet workers of transportation costs to other jobs” within the United States (pp. 165–66). But these workers were not to be returned to the island. Suárez Findlay aptly identifies the unwillingness to pay for the workers' repatriation as an “ignominious expulsion from the nation” (p. 171). The Michigan Affair remained a thorn in the PPD's side. However, as the Nationalist revolt in late October became the dominant topic in Puerto Rico, the farmworkers' ordeal disappeared from the island's press, which may have eased the eventual creation of the commonwealth in 1952. Forgotten and betrayed, but not defeated, many of these men escaped the fields, seeking permanent work in industrial centers and eventually breaking their ties to the paternalistic Puerto Rican government.This is a compelling argument, even if one is left wondering to what extent gender narratives transformed into actual practices and policies, especially in view of the PPD's reliance on women's political mobilization and labor. Further, did the PPD create or reproduce gender and familial discourses? Were there any counternarratives?Suárez Findlay has managed to weave a transnational history in which the diaspora and the island are equally important for understanding the Puerto Rican experience. The research is transnational in scope, and the sources are rich and varied, going from personal letters and oral interviews to government documents and newspapers. While remaining accessible to undergraduate students, this work is aimed at labor and gender specialists. It also contributes to both our understanding of populist movements (in this case, within a colonial setting) and the creation of the modern Puerto Rican colonial state. Her work joins recent Puerto Rican scholarship, such as works by Solsiree del Moral and Teresita Levy, that has recovered the voices of groups traditionally imagined as completely disenfranchised

Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Diaspora · Ethnology · Geography · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Cuban History and Society · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy