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

Eileen J. Suárez Findlay’s new study of a barely known episode in Puerto Rican–US migration history is an excellent example of 1) why the small stories count; and 2) how the work of historians can enrich research and teaching in literary and cultural studies more broadly. She frames her account of the movement of thousands of Puerto Rican men to the sugar beet fields of Michigan in 1950 as a case study of bregando, using Arcadio Díaz Quiñones’s book-length elaboration of that peculiarly Puerto Rican form of negotiation. The decision of the populist government of Luis Muñoz Marín to reduce unemployment and perceived overcrowding on the island by convincing agricultural workers to do seasonal labor in the US and elsewhere exemplifies the brega as a strategy of juggling internal and external demands while avoiding open conflict on any front. The Muñocista government bregó by spurring human workflow out of the island at the same time that it was feeding localized expectations of “dignified labor, political empowerment, and domestic prosperity.” Within this discursive edifice, the “sugar beet field migration . . . lay at the nexus of a complex network of colonial alliances and dependencies, all portrayed . . . as part of a new relationship of reciprocity between Puerto Rico and the United States” (133).

When the thousands of agricultural workers who traveled to the fields of Michigan were summarily denied weekly pay, daily meals, and other conditions stipulated in their contracts, they held the Puerto Rican government responsible, creating a maelstrom that laid bare the weaknesses and resources inherent in the populist model—and in el arte de bregar itself. Professor Findlay’s book synthesizes the forgotten paper and image trail of this brega, highlighting the ways in which the discourse of paternalist provision constructed by Muñoz Marín and his Partido Popular Demócratico offered the wronged migrant workers a platform from which to demand due recourse. Adopting the silhouette figure of a jíbaro wearing the characteristic pava or straw hat as a party icon, Muñoz Marín had portrayed himself both as a leader and a co-laborer with the common man, and the PPD as the apparatus through which colonialism could be refashioned as a familial pact (47). Increasingly though, the PPD would defend a version of modernization and forward progress built on a radical reorganization of everyday life that included shifting energies from agriculture to industry and removing “excess” populations from the arrabales so that these marginal communities could be refashioned as modern urbanizaciones. Thus began the massive migrations of this “eminently mobile people,” not just to New York and Chicago, but to far-flung (and until now understudied) corners such as the Michigan beet fields. In that particular case, islanders found deplorable working conditions very much like the Caribbean cane fields under slavery. The Michigan landowners’ refusal to honor the terms of the workers’ contracts left the Puerto Rican migrants out in the cold (literally) with insufficient resources to meet their own basic necessities, let alone send money to support the precarious economies of their families. Findlay’s study documents the rate at which the men began to abandon the Michigan beet fields, seeking paid work in Chicago, New York, and other enclaves. It shows how most of the “seasonal” laborers were unable to return to Puerto Rico, although the terms of their contracts included round-trip airfare. Those who could go home reappeared emptyhanded, their pockets bulging only with shame, frustration, and dashed hopes. Professor Findlay argues that the failed labor collaboration was mirrored in these men’s failure as padres cumplidos within the model of midcentury domesticity and modernization that Muñoz Marín had so successfully mobilized. The mistreatment and breach of contract the workers faced in Michigan was particularly egregious, perhaps, but We Are Left...