Power and development: The Puerto Rico Emergency Relief Administration and the emergence of a new colonial order, 1933--1936

The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the Puerto Rico Emergency Relief Administration (PRERA) was conceived and implemented as a modernizing development project during the 1930s. The PRERA did nothing less than provide a new basis for U.S. colonial domination over Puerto Rico a condition which is still prevalent today. For decades, however, traditional U.S. and Puerto Rican historiography has ignored the extension of the PRERA to the island and its impact on Puerto Rican society. Other historiographical approaches have explained the PRERA as a simple and short-lived New Deal agency simply limited to the distribution of emergency relief aid among the needy population. This dissertation advances beyond those misleading generalizations. The PRERA was conceived as a development project that aimed to transform the socio-economic conditions of Puerto Rico. In order to accomplish such an ambitious goal, the U.S. officials in charge of the PRERA engaged in defining and distributing biased representations of Puerto Rico's culture, people, and the socio-economic situation with the intention of legitimizing the presence of this agency in the island. In sum, the U.S. "regime of representation" articulated an image about Puerto Ricans as individuals lacking in initiative to overcome their society's critical socio-economic conditions. They depicted themselves, U.S. representatives, as the only source of knowledge and modernity able to transform the chaos caused by the Depression into a new order of progress and prosperity.; The programs of the PRERA, as an outgrowth of the metropolitan state, embodied a form of developmental colonialism. They were designed to penetrate all aspects of Puerto Rican society in an effort to profoundly change the material conditions of the country. The successes of such projects depended not only upon Washington, but upon the support of Puerto Rican professionals as well. Many of these professionals shared with the Americans a strong belief that the developmental initiatives and progressive programs of the PRERA would bring a new order of prosperity to Puerto Rico under U.S. tutelage.; The PRERA also changed the perspective that subaltern sectors of the Puerto Rican population held about U.S. colonial presence on the island. For thousands of Puerto Ricans, the United States had traditionally represented a distant entity unaware of the hardship that they experienced daily. The PRERA and its programs in agriculture, education, infrastructure, and social services, however, contributed to building a new image of the federal government as a paternalistic institution concerned with popular well-being in Puerto Rico. Such a transformation made the presence of the United States more tolerable if not welcomed, thus strengthening its colonial relationship with Puerto Rico.; The PRERA constituted the base for future initiatives of developmental colonial domination. Programs as the Puerto Rican Reconstruction Administration (PRRA) in the 1930s and the agrarian and social reforms of the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) during the 1940s were designed and implemented under the developmental lines proposed by the PRERA during the early 1930s. Whether these programs were successful or not remains subject to intense debate by scholars; what it is important to note, however, is that the PRERA constituted a precedent in which the discourses of development, modernity, progress, and prosperity represented powerful strategies for colonial domination.