Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW: Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, California

Chapter 1. Colonizing a Movement: The Federación Libre de Trabajadores in Puerto Rico

CHAPTER 1 Colonizing a Movement: The Federación Libre de Trabajadores in Puerto Rico The workers must unite under the red flag of the Federación Libre to defend their rights and enjoy a better world, more in harmony with true justice. lUisa capEtillo, FEDEración librE DE trabajaDorEs In 1918, a report by the American Federation of Labor on the organizing campaign in Puerto Rico conducted by its affiliate, the Federación Libre de Trabajadores (Free Federation of Workers; the Federación), complained that the “industrial colonization” of the island by the sugarcane industry was advancing “a dense cloud of sordid interests.” Federación leaders in Puerto Rico were in their fourth year of a sustained effort to organize workers in the cane fields as well as the centrales (sugar processing factories), leading strikes in which tens of thousands participated each year. Working closely with President Samuel Gompers, they established locals of the AFL Unión Agrícola (Agricultural Workers Union) in sugarproducing districts throughout the island where workers had organized. But as the AFL complained, employers and a repressive colonial state were blocking workers’ dreams, “barring the way of democratic institutions , social justice and human redemption” in the Puerto Rican colony.1 This chapter examines the resurgence of the sugarcane industry of Puerto Rico in the early twentieth century and its relations with workers in the Federación, whose unions dominated organized labor in Puerto Rico between the turn of the twentieth century and 1940. I argue that actions of the Federación in the first two decades of the twentieth century belie interpretations that the AFL and its affiliates, which typically catered to the skilled trades, were unconcerned with agricultural workers or simply functioned as a tool of U.S. foreign policy. The view is unduly linear and simplistic, as evident in its early campaigns to empower 26 Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW agricultural workers, create a democratic workers’ movement, and challenge metropolitan corporations and colonial rulers. During its heyday, the Federación had a progressive and varied constituency and over time had an uneven and complex relationship with workers in Puerto Rico’s cane fields, the industry, and colonial and metropolitan governments. Sugar Cane Colony The Puerto Rican sugar industry languished during the quarter century following the abolition of slavery in 1873. Writing in 1898, when the nation was at war with Spain, U.S. Consul Philip C. Hanna lamented “the ruins of once valuable sugar estates. The great sugar factories have fallen down, the machinery has been eaten by rust, and the land has passed into the hands of those who held the mortgages.” Many prominent Puerto Rican landowners envisioned a recovery of the industry and economic prosperity facilitated by a closer political relationship with the United States through tariff-free access to its huge market. Hacendado Ricardo Nadal acknowledged that duty-free entry of Puerto Rican sugar “has been the determining point in favor of annexation to the United States.” Industry insiders feared that “if Puerto Rico were independent, its sugar could never compete successfully in the American market” because it would not gain favored access.2 The immediate dreams of the sugar interests came to quick fruition as a result of plans begun during the military occupation of Cities, towns, and sugar centrales in Puerto Rico, 1920. From E. Fernández García, ed., El libro de Puerto Rico: The Book of Porto Rico (San Juan: El Libro Azul, 1923), p. 1103. Courtesy of the Puerto Rico Department of Agriculture and Labor. Colonizing a Movement 27 1898–1900 to stimulate the industry. Production soon soared, and sugar enjoyed an unprecedented boom lasting more than thirty years. New plantations quickly appeared along the coast and interior valleys, extending into “the most improbable places, right up over the hills, and even high up in the mountains,” taking over former farms, pastures, and even fallow lands. By the early 1940s, Miguel Lugo López confirmed that, “with few exceptions, sugarcane occupies at present all the best Puerto Rican soils.” Between 1899 and 1934 sugar production soared from 39,000 to more than 1 million tons, and in 1940 sugar accounted for about 62 percent of the total value of Puerto Rican exports. Already by the 1920s the industry employed over half the island’s working population, and it continued to dominate its economic, political, and social life for another generation...