In the two decades following World War II, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans boarded planes for America in what became known as the island’s “great migration.” Many farm workers, rushed north to help with crops on the mainland, were flown in repurposed military cargo planes outfitted with wooden benches or lawn chairs bolted to the ground. The vast majority of the island’s emigrants bought tickets for the six-hour commercial flight to New York, believing that good jobs and a better life awaited them and their families.
While some farm workers eventually gravitated to towns near their farming assignments, about 85 percent of the island’s postwar emigrants—US citizens, from a US territory—settled in New York, according to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York. Between the 1940s and the mid-1960s, this influx increased the city’s Puerto Rican population nearly 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 alleviate post-war labor shortages on the continent while working to alleviate the territory’s crushing poverty.
The growing metropolis needed more workers after World War II, while farms in the Northeast and Midwest needed labor. Puerto Rico, meanwhile, could not fully support its population. The island’s economic recovery plan, Operation Bootstrap, focused on shifting from an agrarian to an industrial economy, leaving many workers out in the cold. The solution to both problems? Actively facilitate migration and force a third of the population to move north.
“For all of this to happen, migration is encouraged, sterilization is introduced in Puerto Rico to limit family size,” said Virginia Sánchez Korrol, historian and professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and author of From Colony to Community: The Story of Puerto Ricans in New York. “And the United States, especially New York, is starting to offer jobs.”
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The impact of “Operation Bootstrap”
Puerto Rico became a US territory after the Spanish-American War in 1898, when Spain ceded the island to the victorious United States. But life for Puerto Ricans deteriorated in the early decades of the 20e century, after American sugar companies bought up farmland that had fed the local population. Instead, they began growing the cash crop of sugar cane almost exclusively for export to the American market.
The islanders have not only lost their local food sources. Because the cultivation of sugar cane had a four-month off season, contemptuously called timeout (“dead time”), workers’ wages fell. Families plunged into even more grueling poverty.
Aware of the challenges faced by working people in an economy with a unique commercial culture, Puerto Rico’s first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, campaigned in 1948 to give the island the political status of the Commonwealth, which was produced in 1952. With the help and approval of the United States, he developed the framework for Operation Bootstrap, designed to help improve the lives of Puerto Ricans.
For a time, it was a resounding success. As the agrarian economy evolved into a modern, industrial economy, Puerto Rico’s overall standard of living rose. American companies, lured by generous tax incentives and a new pool of cheap labor, opened hundreds of factories on the island, producing everything from textiles and clothing to petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. From 1954 to 1964, according to Sánchez Korrol, per capita income doubled, life expectancy increased by 10 years, school enrollment increased dramatically, and birth rates fell by 5%.
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Wanted: farm laborers and seamstresses
June 1, 1950: At San Juan’s Isla Grande airport, Puerto Rican migrant farm workers board one of the special planes that took them to the United States to meet the July 20 deadline in the beet fields Michigan sugar mills. As part of what was called “Operation Farmlift”, it was one of many charters ferrying thousands of Puerto Rican workers north. Tragically, a few days later, one of those flights crashed off the coast of North Carolina and half of its passengers perished.
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But the new factories, along with the developing tourist economy, could not create enough jobs for everyone. The great migration became the safety valve to release the pressure.
Some 20,000 farm workers hired as contract labor traveled to the Northeast and parts of the Midwest. Intense government campaigns, promising higher wages, prompted thousands of people each year to leave the countryside for the island’s towns and villages and then fly north. The Puerto Rican government has actively facilitated this pattern of migration by developing its air transport infrastructure, increasing English language teaching in schools, and facilitating agricultural labor contracts on the mainland. Some emigrants traveled alone to try their luck and send money to their families back home; others went and then brought their families.
Skilled seamstresses from Puerto Rico, who had made clothes to counter German blockades of linens and clothing during World War I, were particularly sought after during the Great Migration. Seamstresses, many of whom worked independently from home, became the backbone of the island’s second-largest industry just before and during World War II. After 1945, new textile mills in Puerto Rico and New York’s bustling garment district eagerly sought their labor.
In New York, Puerto Ricans have developed their communities. Wineries (small grocery stores) and piragüeros (shaved ice vendors) have popped up in neighborhoods now filled with newcomers working in factories, shipping docks and the garment district. Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem, called El Barrio, has become the center of Puerto Rican business, entertainment, and politics. Puerto Rican families have also occupied dilapidated buildings on the Lower East Side, called Loisaidawhich the Germans, Italians and Jews of Eastern Europe had gotten rid of.
Population control and discrimination
The pressure on women to contribute to Puerto Rico’s economic recovery has taken insidious turns. US and Puerto Rican economic development officials have blamed “overpopulation” for the island’s grueling poverty. Social and health campaigns in the media, in schools and in birth control clinics emphasized that having only two children and staying at work was a path to the middle class.
Postpartum sterilizations, known asthe operacion‘ or ‘the operation’, were legal, frequent and strongly encouraged during the post-war decades. And poor, uneducated Puerto Rican women were used as guinea pigs, critics say, in the first large-scale human tests in the 1950s of oral contraceptive pills.
In New York, the city’s politicians and media, at the time caught up in the growing battles against segregation and discrimination, turned their collective gaze to the “Puerto Rican problem.” Echoing the sentiments of the city’s elites, New York mirror in 1948, columnists Lee Mortimer and Jack Lait denounced the “locust plague” of wholesalers “subject to a congenital tropical disease”. They proclaimed Puerto Ricans “unskilled, uneducated, non-English speaking, and nearly impossible to assimilate in a bustling city of stone and steel”.
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Puerto Ricans gain voice as “Nuyoricans”
March 1, 1964: Puerto Rican protesters march in silence from Manhattan City Hall across the Brooklyn Bridge to the offices of the Board of Education during a demonstration. Sponsored by the National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights, the march demanded improved educational facilities for Puerto Rican communities in the city.
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During the 1960s, the civil rights movement, with its strong demand for racial and social justice, gave rise to a new generation of “Nuyoricans” who became the new forces of activism. Some 1,800 Puerto Ricans demonstrated on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1964 to demand better education for their children.
The New York chapter of the Young Lords, a street gang turned civil and human rights organization, conducted mass education campaigns, promoted community empowerment and burned trash in the streets during their “Garbage Offensive” in 1969 to protest substandard garbage collection service in El Barrio. .
“You have all these children who are questioning our social conditions in the United States and they have started to take a more aggressive stance and a more assertive posture towards the conditions that they face,” said Carlos Vargas- Ramos, assistant director of development and external relations for the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College.
Vargas-Ramos added: “They asked, ‘Why are we so hated? Why are we so poor? And they said, ‘No. We are not going to accept these terms.
