Evolutionary populism in a place where nothing happens: Coamo, Puerto Rico, 1930--1969

This dissertation explores the evolution of populist politics in Coamo, a historically conservative, agricultural town in Puerto Rico's central-southern region. Within the context of mass mobilization during the Depression era throughout the 1930s, Coamo quickly became a bastion of munocista populism after the Partido Popular Democratico's (PPD) first electoral victory in 1940. Agricultural and urban workers as well as sympathetic professionals were instrumental in this apparent political shift as they expressed their demands and claims to meaningful citizenship. These struggles inspired Luis Munoz Marin's social justice rhetoric and the PPD's founding political platform.;Coamo's designation as un pueblo popular is not unthinkable when considering the importance of popular demands for socioeconomic justice once championed by the Socialist Party and Liberal sympathizers since the 1920s. Yet, in order to capture a broad support base and consolidate its local power, the PPD embedded itself within an entrenched patronage political culture. This implied appeasing Coamo's elites by retaining their power and privilege on one hand, while extending select infrastructural improvements, land reform, and employment opportunities for rural and urban working people on the other. As the PPD altered its economic development model by the late 1940s toward modernity via industrialization at the expense of Puerto Rico's agricultural sector, popular sectors voiced their concerns first through petitions insisting that the party deliver on the social justice platform for which they voted. By the late 1960s, increasing disillusionment among party supporters over the PPD's technocratic direction prompted a significant portion to seek political alternatives in the Partido Nuevo Progresista's (PNP) rebranding of social justice under estadidad jibara, or creolized statehood also centered in the island's mythical symbol, the displaced rural peasantry.;Within municipal politics, however, I argue that the party has remained dominant in Coamo because of its ability to appropriate popular demands and claims by strategically promoting infrastructural improvements and extending political patronage in order to secure sufficient support to ensure an electoral majority in all but two elections since 1940. This dissertation demonstrates not only the fluidity of populist politics in Coamo in adapting to existing and changing socioeconomic and political circumstances both within the national and local levels. It also attempts to focus on the demands, challenges, and the degrees of complicity through which popular sectors have contributed in sustaining PPD hegemony in that town over time.