“How They Ignore Our Rights as American Citizens”: Puerto Rican Migrants and the Politics of Citizenship in the New Deal Era

Abstract

In the spring of 1936, following a spate of political violence amid Nationalist agitation in Puerto Rico, US Senator Millard Tydings proposed a bill granting the island independence from the US. Many Puerto Ricans had been pushing for independence since the US takeover in 1898, but the Tydings bill did not represent a concession to those demands. Rather, its impossibly punitive terms—involving the end of all New Deal federal assistance programs, the quick implementation of a full US tariff on Puerto Rican goods, and the withdrawal of all US government infrastructure and military within six months—advertised it as a quick fix to the political embarrassment due to Puerto Ricans’ intensifying anti-American sentiment.