Colonial laboratories, irreparable subjects: the experiment of ‘(b)ordering’ San Juan's public housing residents

Abstract

This article provides a genealogy of the discourses that shaped the public housing policies of the mid-twentieth century in the US island colony of Puerto Rico. In the 1950s and 1960s, a conversation arose between government officials, social science experts, and the local press about how to fix social inequalities by ‘ordering’ mostly black and mulato, economically dispossessed families residing in shantytowns and barrios. This led to the establishment of caseríos (housing projects) as places where the government would attempt to ‘modernize’ residents through architectural design, planning, and social betterment programs. Because the caseríos did not address the structural causes of inequalities of power and wealth in the island, they failed in lifting residents out of poverty. From the mid-1960s onwards, a host of writings blamed caserío dwellers for the failure of the projects, attributing it to their purportedly dysfunctional – and nearly incorrigible – ‘culture of poverty’. This perpetuated a particular characterization of Puerto Rican economically dispossessed people as incapable of political or social agency without the guidance of elite Puerto Ricans and the ‘benevolent’ American colonial metropolis. It also led to the subsequent ‘bordering’ of caseríos spaces with walls and checkpoints, which in turn reproduced the branding of public housing residents as irreparably dysfunctional and ‘criminal’.

Keywords:

• public housing
• shantytown
• caserío
• colonialism
• culture of poverty
• modernization
• Luis Muñoz Marín
• racial democracy
• Puerto Rico
• San Juan

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the feedback on previous versions of this work provided by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Yen Le Espriritu, Robert Álvarez, Ross Frank, Natalia Molina, my colleagues at UCSD's Department of Ethnic Studies, and my partner, Jade Power Sotomayor. I would like to also thank Oscar Oliver and also Zaire Dinzey-Flores for sharing their unpublished work with me when I began to do this research. I am, of course, solely responsible for this article's content, errors and limitations.

Notes

1. All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. The term criollo here denotes the Creole class consisting of white inhabitants of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas – in this case Puerto Rico – who were born in the American continent. During colonial times, this was a racial category of identity since in order for a person to be considered criollo, that person would have to attest for their ‘purity of blood’ (i.e., pure European ancestry). Some mulatos were considered criollos but only if they had attained sufficient wealth and social status to be considered white (see Carrera, 2003).

2. For copies of Guillermo Rebollo Gil's work, email: [email protected]. For copies of Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia's work, email: [email protected].

3. For example, between 1900–1904, under the protection of a prominent Afro-Puerto Rican politician, Dr. José Celso Barbosa, the leader of the local Republican Party, a series of ‘republican mobs’ (‘turbas republicanas’) physically attacked members of the criollo hacendado elites and sabotaged or robbed their properties. These mobs were made up of a racially heterogeneous collection of workers. During the early twentieth century, the socialist party and various labor organizations became powerful political forces. Large worker's strikes became common. Also, under the leadership of Pedro Albizu Campus, a mulato lawyer and revolutionary political organizer, the Nationalist Party became a powerful foe of the criollo beneficiaries of US colonialism.

4. El Mundo was founded in 1920 and quickly became the most widely circulated and influential newspaper in the island throughout the 1970s. Other popular newspapers of the time were El Imparcial and La Democracia.

5. The development model implemented by the US and the local colonial state in the 1950s delivered some impressive short-term GDP growth. However, in the 1960s, growth began to subside. More importantly, wealth did not trickle down to those who needed it the most. As Colón Reyes points out, ‘it was evident that industrialization would not automatically solve poverty, since even when the indicators for modernization had changed favorably, those that reflected the redistribution of wealth had stayed the same and in some cases, had worsened’ (Colón Reyes, 2005, p. 211). Not only does the island's economic trajectory designate who gets to be rich and who gets to remain at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It also leads people to seek a means of sustaining themselves and their family in the underground economy. As Puerto Rico's economic downturn began in the 1970s, the amount of criminalized subsistence activities – and the violence these bring with them – steadily increased. According to Rodríguez-Beruff (1998), in a 1975 survey, 87% of all respondents said that violence had gotten worse than before and 28.5% attributed it to ‘drugs and vice’, although another 18.9% mentioned other causes like ‘unemployment’ and ‘inflation’. Later on, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, ‘the estimated volume of the underground economy oscillated between 3.5 and 4 billion dollars’. This meant that ‘more than a quarter of the island's gross production went to the outlawed sectors of the economy’. Whereas in 1950 ‘the percentage of people of employment age but formally located outside the labor force constituted 31.8 percent of the entire population, by the 1970s this demographic sector had risen to 35.2 percent, reaching 40.8 percent in 1985 (Rodríguez Beruff, 1998, p. 196; Santiago Valles, 1996, p. 48)