The Struggle: Roots of Puerto Rico's Colonial Status

Why A Marxist Analysis

The Puerto Rican migrant experience must be looked at from a Marxist perspective in order to expose the historical socio-economic oppression that the island continues to endure as a modern day colony of the United States. This assertion is made by the History Task Force in El Centro de Estudios Puertoriquenos, located at Hunter College in New York City.

From Jibaros to U.S. Corporations

Prior to the arrival of United States corporations, Puerto Rico’s social and economic systems were agrarian. The majority of Puerto Rican families during this time lived off of subsistence farming, which meant they grew crops for personal consumption and local trade. As a result, many Puerto Rican farmers, jibaros, were self-sufficient and survived relatively well in their stable society. Once Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States, the island fell prey to capitalist corporations that quickly moved in. Thanks to newly passed laws that favored the expansion and profits of U.S. industries, Puerto Rico became the favored site for building factories to produce commodities. That is, it was cheaper to produce on the island than to produce in the United States. Cheaper production rates meant greater profits for those who owned the means of production.

The jibaro community could not compete with the economic power of American corporations. The small subsistence farms were sold to those companies, leaving many Puerto Ricans without any means to support themselves in the countryside. Thus, masses of Puerto Ricans migrated to the island’s newly forming urban centers, where the U.S. corporations controlled employment opportunities. The limited supply of factory jobs did not meet the overwhelming amount of migrant laborers in need of employment. “The Marxist approach recognizes population changes as indicative of general and dominant tendencies within a particular social formation…The tendency to convert part of the working class into a surplus population is a demographic “law” of the capitalist mode of production,” (El Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos 1979: 37). In other words, the surplus population came as result of Puerto Rico experiencing a shift from an agrarian mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. The main differences between both systems are that the former allows for workers to be self-sufficient, while the latter requires workers to be a floating population that can be exploited at the will of those in power. Economic control in the former lies with the farmers while the latter system requires wealth of ownership of the means of production to be solely in the hands of a few, namely corporation executives.

The Myth of Overpopulation

Why did so many Puerto Ricans migrate from the country side to the cities and from the cities to the mainland (U.S)?

One of the most controversial issues in Puerto Rican studies deals with explaining Puerto Rico’s history with “overpopulation” during its various stages of early and mid-20th century industrialization. According to Malthus economic theories, this over-population was simply a result of Puerto Rico having more people than available resources to sustain comfortable living for the island’s inhabitants (El Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos 1979: 33). The lack of resources available to the masses spurred displacement and ultimately migration to the United States. The danger in accepting this version of history is that it provides the United States’ government and corporations with a self-serving justification for conducting the capitalist exploitative policies that plagued Puerto Rican migrants with poverty, exploitation, and oppression. However, this justification is most commonly stated as, “Puerto Ricans emigrate because they are too many to be feasibly maintained in their own country. It is therefore necessary to reduce the population on the island to match available ‘resources,’” or “population transfer,” (El Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos 1979: 33). El Centro agrees with a Marxist interpretation of Puerto Rico’s crisis with “overpopulation.” According to their history task force, overpopulation happened for very specific reasons dealing with shifts in the division of labor and in who owned the means of production.