Land Reform in Puerto Rico

Ismael García-Colón’s Land Reform in Puerto Rico: Modernizing the Colonial State, 1941 – 1969 is a generally well-written and cogent historical anthropology of Puerto Rico’s transformation from a primarily agricultural to urban society. García-Colón examines in detail the Popular Democratic Party’s (PPD) milestone Land Reform Law of 1941 and the Agrarian Resettlement Program (ARP) that it institutionalized for decades thereafter. In particular, he focuses on the finca that became Parcelas Gándaras, a resettlement community in Cidra, a municipality located in the east central highlands near San Juan, where García-Colón grew up. Drawing on extensive archival and secondary research, ethnographies, and discourse analysis, García-Colón argues that the ARP served a dual purpose: It was at once an effort to modernize Puerto Rico along welfare capitalist lines inspired by the New Deal, and a means to perpetuate the PPD’s long-term political hegemony. By distributing land, the PPD sought to make “agregado/as” (landless workers) into home-owning “parcelero/as” (small landholders) and thereby loyal supporters. The objective of the land reform was thus to empower these subalterns to become active participants in the process of state-led industrialization known as “Operation Bootstrap.”While much has been written about land reform in Puerto Rico, García-Colón aims to fill some of the gap left by what Eric Wolf described as the “failure” of the influential People of Puerto Rico project “to deal with the complex interplay of hegemonic and subaltern cultural stances in the Puerto Rico situation.” His study is thus in part an effort to explain some of this complex interplay using “an ethnographically grounded approach and bottom-up analysis” (pp. 3 – 4). Accordingly, García-Colón intersperses his analysis with numerous references to Antonio Gramsci, William Raspberry, James C. Scott, and David Harvey, among others, to explain how the colonial state neither entirely succeeded nor failed in its modernization project. For example, while thousands of beneficiaries gratefully received small plots of land, many plots were insufficient for increasing agricultural production or for building houses large enough for extended families. As a result families could not depend entirely on the harvest from their parcelas for their household income (p. 65). The government was thus compelled to distribute to individual residents the land reserved for communal pastures. These residents supplemented their income by raising livestock on these lands, causing disputes between neighbors due to deforestation. The government’s efforts to prohibit deforestation or limit house building in compliance with the Land Law, García-Colón explains, “ultimately ran afoul of the social logic of the organization of space in Parcelas Gándaras” (pp. 66 – 67).The ethnographically grounded approach enlivens the sometimes dry social and political history that dominates the book’s six short chapters. Yet García-Colón could have made his interviews enrich his narrative far more. In one typical instance, after describing the Mutual Aid Program designed to help parceleros build houses using sturdier materials, he writes: “Some parcela residents did not participate in the program because they could not pay the costs, or provide labor, or because they had to migrate to the United States. This was the case of Ramón and María. Ramón immigrated to the United States, leaving María with a large family to feed. Instead of building through the Mutual Aid Program, they built a wooden house little by little over many years” (p. 86). Such a description conveys little of the emotional drama and hardship this couple surely experienced, leaving this interested reader wanting to know far more about their life stories.There are also other important topics that García-Colón highlights in the introduction but treats only cursorily in his chapters. Foremost is the role of the United States, for which he subsequently uses the descriptive terms “agrarian capitalism” (p. 14), “colonial agrarian capitalism” (p. 22), and “corporate capitalism” (p. 56). Were these all the same? Did this capitalism differ significantly from US economic penetration of Central America, for instance? García-Colón documents that US sugar companies vehemently opposed Puerto Rico’s land reform in the 1940s (pp. 50, 80). Unlike Guatemala’s 1952 land reform that enraged the United Fruit Company and was manufactured into a Communist “threat,” he shows that Puerto Rico’s reform became a showcase for the United States, especially after the Cuban Revolution. Might Puerto Rico’s situation thus be more comparable to US-sponsored land reforms in occupied Korea and Japan in the late 1940s and 1950s? García-Colón also briefly references Mexico, whose land reform was the most extensive in all of Latin America for 75 years. Did the Mexican Revolutionary Party advise the PPD at all, or did PPD members study its land reform, and if so, how?These stylistic and substantive concerns notwithstanding, García-Colón has made a valuable contribution to the historical anthropology of Puerto Rico and land reform in Latin America. While likely tedious for undergraduates, the book should be useful to graduate students, faculty, and other researchers specialized in the topic

Agriculture · Archaeology · Colonialism · Geography · Land reform · Political science · State (computer science) · Cuban History and Society