We Are Left without a Father Here: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico by Eileen J. Suárez Findlay (review)

In June 1950, 5,000 working-class Puerto Rican men boarded airplanes and travelled from the island to the sugar beet fields of east central Michigan. Initially, many considered this a great opportunity. However, Operation Farmlift was a tragic disaster.

The fathers who travelled to the United States were fulfilling their responsibility as heads of households: in the sugar beet fields they meant to earn their family’s “daily bread” (p. 171). The representatives of Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor and the island’s new governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, were hopeful that many more men would join them to work in Michigan or in other locations throughout the United States. Indeed, the success of the island’s Popular Democratic Party’s (PPD) economic project depended on the emigration of working-class men and women. The owners of the private sugar beet farms in east central Michigan, fearing that without migrant laborers their crops would be lost, welcomed the Puerto Rican workers, who, together with seasonal Tejano migrant laborers, would save the harvest. In theory, Operation Farmlift promised to benefit workers, their families, the PPD’s new economic project, Michigan farmers, and the rural economy of the Midwest.

In practice, the labor contracts were a cruel farce. Puerto Rican men on the sugar beet farms faced working and living conditions worse than those in Caribbean sugarcane fields. Their US citizenship did not protect them from the inhumane labor practices, “structural exploitation and capricious abuses” of Michigan’s agricultural economy (p. 142). The men and their wives on the island called on Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor and the island’s governor to intervene, demanding that farm contractors honor their promises and that Muñoz Marín defend the Puerto Rican workers and fathers, if necessary, by bringing the men back home. Operation Farmlift became an embarrassment to PPD representatives, who by 1950 were working with the US Congress to reform Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States. In the end, the PPD’s failed response to the workers’ appeals broke the social contract between working families and Muñoz Marín, the “Father of the Poor”.

Findlay’s history of Operation Farmlift is a study of the state, colonial populism, domesticity, labor, and transnationalism. Engaging Latin American and Caribbean scholarship on 1940s and 1950s populist states and leaders, Findlay examines how working-class families interpreted discourses of domesticity and modernity. The Puerto Rican populist project was “deeply masculinist” and “constructed by both working people and political elites” (p. 5). Working parents understood their responsibilities to each other, their children, and their households. Popular definitions of manhood and fatherhood informed the men’s decision to travel to the United States as migrant workers seeking to fulfill their duty to their families. The fathers’ labor and wages promised to secure new homes and a modern form of domesticity. “The power of the ideal of the family man and his benevolently patriarchal reign over an idealized domesticity… was key to the development of the PPD’s colonial populism” (p. 182).

Chapter one examines the emergence of Puerto Rico’s colonial populism and highlights the island’s long history of working-class activism and mobilization. In chapter two, Findlay analyzes ideals of domesticity and modernity, including the challenges that popular sectors posed to elite visions. Chapter three examines the Puerto Rican state strategies for exporting workers, making it clear that mass emigration formed a necessary and integral part of the PPD economic project. Chapter four follows rural migrants to Michigan and examines the Midwest farming industry’s long history of dependence on “exploitable foreigners” (p. 139).

The Puerto Rican workers, however, brought with them a long tradition of labor activism and rejected abuse and...