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SEVEN: Turning Point in the Forties: Rise of the Partido Popular Democrático
- The University of North Carolina Press
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TRANSFORMATION AND RELOCATION: PUERTO RICO'S OPERATION BOOTSTRAP Both politically and economically, the evolution of Puerto Rico after 1945 is a study in continuity and discontinuity. Politically, the creation of the Estado Libre Asociado marked a significant reformulation of the claims to legitimacy of the insular government within apersistent colonial framework.Similarly, in the economic sphere, changes unfolding since before the creation of theELA radically transformed the insular productive landscape without altering its underlying colonial and dependent nature. Puerto Rico's postwar economic transformation took place in a specific international context. While decolonization began to gather speed, by the late 19403 world capitalism was embarking on a long period of expansion that lasted until the late 19603. The reorganization of the world economy during the postwar boom included the semi-industrialization of some underdeveloped and raw material-producing areas aswell as considerablemigration from less to more developed regions. Puerto Rico was a very visible participant in these trends. After 1947, the economic shifts that reshaped Puerto Rican society were propelled by a new wave of U.S. investments in an expanding manufacturing sector, almost exclusivelyoriented to the U.S. market. U.S. capital was attracted to the island by a mix of incentives that included exemption from insular and federal taxes, relatively low wages, and open access to the U.S. market. If wages remained low by U.S. standards, they were higher than those paid by the sugar, needlework, and tobacco industries before World War II.At the same time, beginning in 1945-46, a massive number of Puerto Ricans, unable to find employment in Puerto Rico, left for the United States in search ofjobs and higher pay. While Partido Popular Democratico leader Luis Muftoz Marin presided over this process as governor between1948 and 1964, it was Teodoro Moscoso, head of the government program to attract U.S.investors, who came to embody the 9 official drive to increase manufacturing and export production. Originally groomed to pursue his family's drugstore business, Moscoso began his career in government as one of Governor Rexford G.Tugwell's young collaborators in the early 19403. The material shape of modern Puerto Rico was to come closer to the vision of this rather colorless technocrat than to that of any other single PPD leader, including Muftoz Marin. The features of the postwar period in Puerto Rico are hardly unique. This epoch, according to Eric Hobsbawm, witnessed "the most dramatic, rapid and profound revolution in human affairs of which history has record."1 All aspects of this shift were in exhibit in Puerto Rico: the generalization of literacy and urbanization, the shrinkage of the peasantry, the incorporation of women into new areas of public life, and the transformation of domestic work and of leisure by consumer durables. The urban layout was altered by the automobile; sex and reproduction were transformed by contraception. Views on the family evolved with the growing acceptance of divorce and of sex out of wedlock. These were not instant changes, nor were theywelcomed by all, but they gained ground relentlessly. In twenty years, the island was transformed from a largely agricultural district into an export-oriented manufacturing platform with decaying agricultural activity. This inversion bypassed the possibility of a more balanced and complementary relation between industry and agriculture. The adoption of the North American model of an automobile-centered life meant a rapid passage from rural and semirural settlement to suburban sprawl. By1970, photographs of pre-i94O and even pre-i95O Puerto Rico had acquired the aura of images from a distant past, and the lived experience of the younger generations felt a world apart from that of their grandparents and even their parents, who had reached adulthood as Operation Bootstrap picked up pace in the 19503. Meanwhile, mass migration transformed the Puerto Rican colonia in New York. By the mid-igyos, 12 percent of the population of New York was Puerto Rican. Puerto Rican areas in New York,which were never limited to East Harlem , emerged in new locations, with sections of the Bronx becoming large and visible boricua neighborhoods. By the 19703, almost 40 percent of the Puerto Ricans in New York lived in the Bronx, followed by 33 percent in Brooklyn and 23 percent in Manhattan. But Puerto Ricans did not settle only in New York. Many found employment in the manufacturing sector in the mid-Atlantic, New England, and midwestern states: the garment industry in Philadelphia and the steel and related mills and factories in Chicago...