Puerto Rico 1950's

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Let's learn abour Puerto Rico in the 1950's

PUERTO RICO IN THE 1950's

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Learn what the operation was about

OPERATION BOOTSTRAP

Learn about the history of Puerto Rico

HISTORY OF PR

Learn about why Puerto Ricans were moving to the United States

WHY THE U.S.?

Where did they go?

What did they do?

Why?

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EMIGRATION FROM PUERTO RICO BETWEEN 1900-1990

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In the two decades after World War II, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans boarded planes for America, in what has come to be known as the island’s “great migration.” Many farm workers, hastily flown north to help with harvests on the mainland, were transported in repurposed military cargo planes fitted with wooden benches or lawn chairs bolted to the floor.

WHY MOVE TO THE U.S.

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Learn about Puerto Rico's complex history, starting with its Spanish rule to becoming a U.S. territory. See how its eventual commonwealth status, the 2006 recession, and 2017's Hurricane Maria have caused political and economic upheaval.

HISTORY OF PUERTO RICO

For a time, it was a rousing success. As the agrarian-based economy changed to a modern, industrial one, Puerto Rico's overall standard of living rose. American companies, enticed by generous tax incentives and a new pool of cheap labor, opened hundreds of factories on the island, producing everything from textiles and apparel to petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. From 1954 to 1964, according to Sánchez Korrol, per capita income doubled, life expectancy rose by 10 years, school enrollments increased tremendously and birth rates declined by 5 percent.

Islanders not only lost local food sources. Because sugar cane cultivation had a four-month-long off-season, scornfully known as tiempo muerto (“dead time”), workers’ wages nosedived. Families plunged into even more grueling poverty. Keenly aware of the challenges workers faced in a single cash-crop economy, Puerto Rico’s first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, campaigned in 1948 to give the island Commonwealth political status, which happened in 1952. With the United States’ help and approval, he developed the framework for Operation Bootstrap, designed to help better the lives of Puerto Ricans.

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Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory after the Spanish-American War in 1898, when Spain ceded the island to the victorious United States. But Puerto Ricans’ lives worsened in the early decades of the 20th century after American sugar companies bought up farmland that had fed the local population. Instead, they began almost exclusively growing the cash crop of sugar cane for export to the U.S. market.

THE IMPACT OF OPERATION BOOTSRAP

The growing metropolis needed more workers after World War II, while farms across the Northeast and Midwest needed labor. Puerto Rico, meanwhile, couldn’t fully support its population. The island’s economic recovery plan, Operation Bootstrap, focused on shifting from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, leaving many workers out in the cold. The solution to both problems? Actively facilitate migration—and compel one-third of the population to head north.

“For all this to happen, migration is encouraged, sterilization is introduced in Puerto Rico to limit family size,” said Virginia Sánchez Korrol, a historian and professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and author of From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. “And the U.S., particularly New York, begins to offer jobs.”

In the two decades after World War II, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans boarded planes for America, in what has come to be known as the island’s “great migration.” Many farm workers, hastily flown north to help with harvests on the mainland, were transported in repurposed military cargo planes fitted with wooden benches or lawn chairs bolted to the floor. The vast majority of the island's émigrés bought tickets for the six-hour commercial flight to New York City, persuaded that good jobs and a better life awaited them and their families.

While some agricultural workers ultimately gravitated to cities near their farm assignments, about 85 percent of the island’s postwar émigrés—U.S. citizens, from a U.S. territory—settled in New York City, according to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York. Between the 1940s and mid-1960s, this influx grew the city’s Puerto Rican population almost 13-fold, from 70,000 to nearly 900,000.

It was all part of a coordinated plan by the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments, which hoped to ease postwar labor shortages on the mainland while working to alleviate the territory’s crushing poverty.