Between Cane Fields and Concrete: Puerto Rico in the 1930s and 1940s
Updated: Sep 21
On Palm Sunday in 1937, a peaceful parade in the southern city of Ponce ended with police firing into the crowd for more than ten minutes. Nineteen people were dead by the end of it, including a seven-year-old girl. That one afternoon shows how tense Puerto Rico had become, but it was only one chapter. Between the Great Depression and the end of the 1940s, the island went from hunger and cane fields to hydroelectric dams, factories and its first elected governor.
Quick Answers
• What hit Puerto Rico in the 1930s? Collapsing sugar prices, hurricanes in 1928 and 1932 and mass unemployment on an island that relied heavily on one crop.
• What was the PRRA? A New Deal agency set up in 1935 that built housing, schools, clinics, roads and hydroelectric dams across the island.
• What was the Ponce Massacre? Police shot into a Nationalist march on 21 March 1937, killing 19 people and wounding more than 200.
• Who was Luis Muñoz Marín? The founder of the Popular Democratic Party and the first elected governor of Puerto Rico, who took office in January 1949.
• What was Operation Bootstrap? A post-war push to industrialise the island, with factory tax exemptions approved in 1947.
A Sugar Island Meets the Great Depression
The United States had ruled Puerto Rico since 1898, and by the 1930s sugar was the engine of the economy. Much of the best land sat in the hands of large American-owned companies, and cane workers were often employed only for the harvest, then left with little or nothing during the slack months. When the Depression pushed sugar prices down, the whole island felt it. Hurricanes in 1928 and 1932 had already flattened homes and crops, according to a CUNY study of the New Deal in Puerto Rico, so families were hit from two directions at once. Hookworm and tuberculosis were widespread in the countryside.
Governor Theodore Roosevelt Jr. arrived in 1929 with a famous surname and a fast-growing crisis. He was the half-brother of the famously sharp-tongued Alice Roosevelt, but the family name couldn't feed anyone. Relief would have to come from Washington.
The New Deal Arrives
Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration answered with a string of relief schemes, then with something bigger. The Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration was created in 1935 through Executive Order 7057 and ran until 1955, as JSTOR Daily explains. It built rural housing, schools, hospitals, roads, water systems and even a cement plant, and it put many islanders on the payroll for the first time in years.
The showpiece was hydroelectric power. Seven dams went up in the Cordillera Central between 1935 and 1943, a project nicknamed the island's "little TVA". When Rexford Tugwell, the last governor sent from the mainland, dedicated the Dos Bocas plant in 1941, he promised "No man will profit from it; but all Puerto Ricans will share its services."
Health work mattered just as much. Clinics spread through rural districts, and Library of Congress photographs show children being examined for hookworm at a PRRA centre. The agency also tried to enforce a 500-acre limit on corporate landholdings, according to Britannica, though it ran into administrative problems. Critics argued that the New Deal softened poverty without changing a colonial economy still built around sugar.
The Photographer Who Stayed
Much of what we know visually about this era comes from one couple. Jack Delano, born in Ukraine, and his wife Irene, born in Detroit, arrived in 1941 to work on the Farm Security Administration photography project, the same programme behind Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. According to the Library of Congress, Jack took more than 1,000 photographs of coffee, tobacco and sugar cane life, covering music, religion, family, work and politics.
They liked the island so much that they decided to make it their home in 1946. Jack went on to write music inspired by Puerto Rican folk traditions, and Irene made screen prints and posters. Decades later he went back to rephotograph some of the same places in the 1980s.
Palm Sunday in Ponce, 1937
Politics was heating up too. Pedro Albizu Campos and the Nationalist Party wanted full independence and described US rule as economic exploitation. By 1936 Albizu Campos was in prison, convicted of advocating the overthrow of the US government. On 21 March 1937 his supporters gathered in Ponce to march in protest.
What happened next is laid out in detail in this detailed account of the massacre. About 200 police were positioned around the march route, blocking escape routes, and they fired for over ten minutes. Nineteen people died, among them a woman and seven-year-old Georgina Maldonado, and more than 200 were wounded. Many victims were shot in the back as they ran. Two policemen were also killed, by their own side's machine gun fire.
The cover-up started almost immediately. The police chief reportedly staged photographs using the body of a dead officer to suggest the police had been returning fire. It didn't hold. An independent commission investigated for ten days and ruled it "a police massacre" rather than a riot, and more than 20,000 mourners attended the funerals. For many Puerto Ricans the lesson was blunt: calls for independence would be met with force.
War, Bases and a Temporary Lift
The Second World War changed the island's value overnight. Puerto Rico sat in the middle of the Caribbean sea lanes that protected the Panama Canal, so Washington poured money into bases, roads and construction. Thousands of Puerto Rican men were drafted or volunteered, many serving in the 65th Infantry Regiment. Construction jobs and military wages gave some families their first steady income in a decade, and wartime demand helped steady sugar prices.
Yet the war also underlined who was in charge. Decisions were still made in Washington rather than San Juan, and the island had almost no say in how it was governed.
Bread, Land and Liberty
The man who tapped into that frustration was Luis Muñoz Marín, son of the independence leader Luis Muñoz Rivera. Instead of demanding independence first, he argued that poverty had to be tackled before the political status question. His Popular Democratic Party, which he helped found before the 1940 election, campaigned under the slogan "Bread, land, and liberty", according to Britannica.
The party won tenuous control of the legislature in 1940 and was overwhelmingly backed in 1944. With Tugwell as governor it was allowed to pursue land redistribution, labour law enforcement and progressive taxation. In 1946 President Truman appointed Jesús T. Piñero as the island's first Puerto Rican governor, and in 1947 Congress agreed that islanders could elect their own. Muñoz Marín won in 1948 and took office in January 1949.
From Cane to Concrete
The next chapter was Operation Bootstrap. Tax exemptions for factories were approved by Puerto Rico's legislature in 1947, and according to Encyclopedia.com, Muñoz Marín first used the name in 1949 while giving testimony to a US House committee. Teodoro Moscoso became the first director of Fomento, the island's economic development agency, and started courting American manufacturers.
The human cost showed up in the census. In 1940 about 96 percent of Puerto Ricans lived on the island. By 1960 that had dropped to 72 percent, as thousands left for the US mainland in search of work. Cane fields still stretched across the countryside, but concrete factories were rising beside them. The old rural Puerto Rico was fading, and what replaced it brought new jobs, new anxieties and an unresolved question about sovereignty that hasn't gone away.
