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This chapter investigates different dimensions of the “Chicago experiment,” the employment campaign intended to bring low-wage Puerto Rican maids to the city and also to serve as a form of birth control to reduce the population growth of the island. In doing so, it reveals not only the competing interests of the Puerto Rican government and the US government in regulating women’s bodies and the role of women in altering those schemes, but also the intellectual rivalries of scholars and institutions in producing gendered and racialized knowledge about migration and modernization.

During the 1910s suffragists followed closely the congressional debates over political independence for men in the Philippines and Puerto Rico and were intent on juxtaposing national legislation that expanded political autonomy for men in these U.S. island possessions against Congress's failure to pass a woman suffrage amendment to the U.S. constitution. By 1916 it seemed, ironically, that the U.S. colonial possessions might be the next site for woman suffrage victories. The revival of the push for the federal woman suffrage amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), took place in the context of U.S. efforts to resolve the political status of Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

The history of the Caribbean provides a clear illustration of the ‘control’ method of imposed democratization and of the comparative effectiveness of three sub‐types of control—incorporation, invasion, and intimidation. It also raises challenging questions regarding the effectiveness of US democratization pressure on the region, with only Puerto Rico (incorporation) existing as a fully consolidated democracy. Other forms of democratic imposition have occurred in Panama (invasion) and Nicaragua (intimidation), using very different methods and producing very different results.

This chapter explores intersections between nurse education and Americanisation in colonial Puerto Rico. It examines overlapping messages of Protestant missionaries and the U.S. colonial government, highlighting U.S. nurses’ active participation in those messages. Nurses’ letters to nursing journals, annual mission reports and colonial government’s annual reports to the Department of War, reveal strong connections between evangelical mission goals and the colonial government’s goals. Trained nursing, gradually became incorporated into ideas of proper American health care. Prior to the American occupation, there was no tradition of trained nursing in these colonies; rather, care was provided by family members, hired nurses with no formal training, or Roman Catholic nursing sisters. The U.S. government promoted the nursing profession as contributing towards successful self-governance for the territories because trained native nurses would minister to their countrymen and demonstrate proper sanitation and health practices. Similarly Protestant missions expected that nurses trained in the mission hospitals would offer health care to their communities, while also evangelising the Protestant understanding of Christianity in the predominantly Roman Catholic colonies. Nurses’ correspondence demonstrates they could not (and did not want to) separate the ‘American’ from the nursing, no matter whether in secular colonial or mission settings.

José L. Bolívar Fresneda, a historian and engineer, assesses the impact of massive U.S. military investment, the use of the New Deal agencies for war purposes, and the fluke of the rum-revenue bonanza. The Second World War brought about major changes in the Puerto Rican economy, hitherto mainly dependent on sugar exports and federal welfare expenditures. Three income streams provided Puerto Rico, an island with a population of roughly 1.9 million in 1940, with almost $1.2 billion dollars between 1939 and 1947, most of these from military related investments which would slowly erode following the end of the war.

As decolonization movements gained ground in the late 1950s and 60s, Americans attempted to exert indirect influence in politically sensitive areas of the world through the ostensibly neutral category of “tropical housing.” Shelter in hot, humid climes could be best improved through aided self-help housing, according to US housing officials, and families only invested in home improvement if they were homeowners. Beginning in the American territory of Puerto Rico, American housing experts attempted to build a “tropical” model for the world. “Tropical” territories and nations like the Philippines and Singapore responded to American advisors and aid with housing programs that included elements of mass homeownership, but in ways that were wholly foreign to American experiences and intentions.

The incorporation of religion and spirituality into mental health care has begun to acquire credibility after more than a century of rejection by mental health professionals providing conventional interventions. This chapter describes an experiment carried out over thirty years ago aimed at integrating the public mental health system and Spiritism—a popular, religious healing system. It traces social changes in Puerto Rico in the last three decades as the context for changes in the mental health care system and the wider use, especially among professional sectors, of complementary/alternative and popular (i.e., “traditional”) medicine.

This chapter focuses on the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA), the creation of which was shaped by the actions of several actors and their different agendas, including Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) head and Puerto Rico Governor Luis Muñoz Marín and PPD resident commissioner Antonio Fernós. It examines the conflicts that shaped the ELA's emergence, with emphasis on the reactions of its opponents such as the forceful written critiques to the Partido Nacionalista's insurrection of October 1950 and the acrimonious debates at the United Nations in 1953. Finally, the chapter discusses some recent developments regarding the constitutional definition of the creation of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1950–1952.

Chapter 1 examines how, in the early years of U.S. military rule, a number of colonial policies, including “coastwise” shipping and trade policy, upended the island economy and spurred Puerto Rican migration to the mainland. Yet even as Puerto Ricans were drawn within the mainland economy, racial nationalists defined them as foreign immigrants unfit for citizenship.

This chapter explores the role played by the Ecumenical Coalition of Churches for Vieques (ECCV) in the formation and struggles of a broad-based civil disobedience campaign being carried out since 1999 by the people of Vieques and Puerto Rico against the U.S. Navy. As a result of the ECCV's leadership, the campaign was conducted in a peaceful manner and contributed to the defeat of the prostatehood administration in the November 7, 2000, local elections. This movement may significantly contribute to the creation of an ecumenical social agenda for the Puerto Rican people. Thus, a group of religious leaders of eight Christian denominations has had a direct influence on the political and social development of Puerto Rico, even though in this religious context social commitment and activism are not seen as the responsibility or the everyday task of the church.

This chapter describes the geologic, geographic, and ecological context of the location of Luquillo Mountains, particularly the factors affecting the response mechanisms of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to disturbance. It describes the existing conditions of the physical environment, chemical environment, and the biota of the Luquillo Mountains as they respond to disturbances. It then merges the decade-long research about the Mountains with the other tropical ecosystems around the globe.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of a new political movement in Puerto Rico in the 1940s: the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD). Launched in 1938, the PPD came to dominate Puerto Rican politics during these years under the leadership of Luis Muñoz Marín. The chapter describes the initial victory and internal transformation of the PPD, as well as its evolving relation with the labor movement. It also documents the rise and fall of a new labor federation, the Confederatión General del Trabajo, and its conflict with the PPD. After discussing the intensification of labor activism and Left influence in the late 1930s, highlighted by strikes in which the Communist Party of Puerto Rico played a key role, the chapter turns to the 1940 elections that became a three-way race between the PPD, the Coalición (composed of Republicans and Socialists), and the Unificación Puertorriqueña Tripartita (made up of dissident Republicans, dissident Socialists, and the Partido Liberal). Finally, it considers the clash between Muñoz Marín and the independentistas inside and outside the PPD.

Rodriguez Beruff analyzes the political dynamics of the prewar period. It traces the transition from the stormy Puerto Rican governorship of General Blanton Winship to that of the far more able Admiral William D. Leahy during the opening days of the war. Given the economic uncertainties of the island, powerful political and economic interests, particularly those linked to the sugar industry, demanded that strong handed governor be named to replace Gore. James Beverley, Gore´s predecessor, explicitly recommended a former military officer and mentioned retired General Blanton Winship. It was in this context of a perceived breakdown of order in Puerto Rico that Winship, a former Judge Advocate General of the Army, was named governor in late 1934. However, by 1939, he was substituted by Roosevelt´s closest naval advisor, Admiral William D. Leahy. This constituted not merely a change of functionaries, but was part of a broader redefinition of Washington´s approach to Puerto Rico which created conditions for major political changes in the island´s politics.

Michael Janeway probes the relationship from 1941 forward between newly-elected Senate President Luis Muñoz Marín and Rexford Guy Tugwell, the last continental appointed Governor of Puerto Rico; and, between them and President Roosevelt and his powerful Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes. Janeway brings to bear in this essay his considerable research experience on US-Puerto Rico relations in the context of New Deal policies.

This chapter focuses on the cultural policy and academic and literary debates that accompanied the Partido Popular Democrático's (PPD) economic and political initiatives in Puerto Rico during the 1950s. It describes the trends generated by such debates, including social science research projects, oppositional literary and artistic activity, a semiofficial cultural apparatus, and emergent forms within popular culture in a changing material context. The chapter also discusses public debates on some of the consequences of modernization and government policies on matters such as migration and birth control. In addition, it examines the opposition of some intellectuals belonging to generatión del treinta to the PPD project, the shift from “Americanization” to the institutionalization of Puerto Rican culture during the epoch of PPD hegemony, and the rise of a new type of Afro-Puerto Rican musical expression created by bandleader Rafael Cortijo and singer Ismael Rivera. Finally, the chapter considers author Rubén del Rosario's reflections on Puerto Rican culture in the 1950s and 1960s, with emphasis on his critique of purism in language.

The chapter provides a genealogy of the 2016 CILE (Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española), during which the Spanish officialdom celebrated Puerto Rico's linguistic ties to Spain as a 21st-century mercantile ploy. I review the language debates that raged in Puerto Rico in the 1940s, examining Pedro Salinas' 1948 Commencement Speech at the University of Puerto Rico, which would become his famed "Defensa del lenguaje"; revisiting Gov. Luis Muñoz Marín's 1953 speech "La personalidad puertorriqueña en el Estado Libre Asociado"; and ending with a brief coda on Ana Lydia Vega's 1981 short story "Pollito Chicken," to reflect on the positions shared by both Spanish exiles to the Caribbean and local intellectuals regarding language as a self-evident vessel of identity. The main argument is that a rhetoric of defense, crystallized in the 1940s, was redeployed by successive and presumptively opposite segments of the intelligentsia.

Chapter 5 examines the origins, emergence, and constitutionally entrenched status of the US–Puerto Rico partially independent union. Puerto Rico is a paradigmatic example of a post-imperial state’s use of partial independence to obtain the advantages of empire without its costs. The question of Puerto Rico’s status is highly controversial. Many believe that the territory is a mere colony of the US. Still others believe that the territory’s powers are formally entrenched. This chapter will argue that the territory is indeed a PIT (rather than a colony) and that its powers are entrenched by unwritten convention. The chapter discusses Puerto Rico’s early impoverished status as a US colony, the political rationale and cataclysmic events that helped inspire its emergence as a PIT, its conventionally entrenched status as compared to other views, and the counterequilibrium event of the Vieques controversy. It then concludes by anticipating and refuting some counterarguments to conventional entrenchment theory.

This chapter considers the question of how Puerto Rico, a formerly Catholic island with U.S. funding to biomedicalize its treatment system, become an epicenter for Protestant addiction evangelism? It fleshes out the connections between the moral economy of street ministries and the political economy of post-industrial Puerto Rico by reconstructing two parallel histories: one is a brief economic history of Puerto Rico's evolution from a Spanish colony to its current status as a “territory” of the United States, with partial eligibility for U.S. federal entitlements while serving initially as a labor pool and later as a tax shelter for U.S. industry. Another is the story of more recent debates surrounding the island's drug policy and addiction treatment under health reform, given that health reform has been a key element of the island's efforts to elevate its status in relation to the United States.