Operation Bootstrap Research Articles

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas

Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture by Marilisa Jim�nez Garc�a (review)

Reviewed by: Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture by Marilisa Jiménez García Hilary Brewster (bio) Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture, by Marilisa Jiménez García. UP of Mississippi, 2021. Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture by Marilisa Jiménez García is a complex analysis of the historical, cultural, and artistic relationship between Puerto Rico and its mainland colonizer, the US. Her nuanced study examines authors, actors, playwrights, and librarians and the textual productions of these iconic Puerto Ricans—or Nuyoricans—in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and how each plays a role at the intersection of Puerto Rican and American youth cultures. Jiménez García expertly weaves history, politics, textual and media analysis, cultural critique, and scholarship to demonstrate their connectedness and transnational impact on one another. Although this connectedness is a result of complicated, often fraught and detrimental policies enacted by the United States lauding its colonial power over the people of the (now) territory of Puerto Rico, Jiménez García ultimately urges readers to celebrate the people whose stories are not only art and means of cultural expression but acts of resistance. In the introduction, Jiménez García lays out myriad frameworks as a precursor to the subsequent five chapters. In this rather dense beginning, she details how texts for youth and literacy programs for youth in Puerto Rico have a longstanding history with political protests on the archipelago (4), as well as how "literature for children" and other culture aimed at youth continues to have a seemingly negative standing in the academy, within pop culture, Latinx and Ethnic studies, and literature studies. Furthermore, she outlines the ways in which children's and youth literature is frequently coded as Anglo-British, white, and white [End Page 220] American in academic discourses (7); how picture books in particular play a role in replicating and upholding a racist, colonial hegemony; and also how children's literature has fallen out of the larger realm of Latin literary studies (12). Although Jiménez García notes that the relatively recent public attention to the need for "diverse" literature in the children's publishing world is ultimately positive, she also makes clear that this diversity generally overlooks authors, characters, and settings from Latin America and the Caribbean (16). Perhaps the most important point made in the introduction that becomes a recurring thread—even more than the others, given the nature of the cultural texts examined in the chapters—is that there has been a hesitancy to view the US as an empire, preferring an immigrant paradigm in locating difference rather than a settler colonial model regarding past and present land acquisition, occupation, removal, and continuous displacement of Indigenous populations. Particularly in the case of Latinxs, the dominant discourse lingers on issues of immigration and the border [rather than the US as an empire]. (14) This depiction of the US as "benevolent conqueror" has been a longstanding tradition in US K-12 classrooms (19). Jiménez García's critique of the US K-12 and higher education systems in upholding much of the aforementioned hegemony is perhaps the strongest section of the introduction, although also the thread that disappears most quickly in the other chapters. The first chapter centers two questions: what representations of Puerto Ricans occupied the bookshelves in the New York City public library from the late 1800s through 1960 (after the US invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898 through Operation Bootstrap and the beginning of the establishment of the commonwealth in the 1950s), and how did the general US public learn about Puerto Rico and its people in children's texts? (30). Divided into two sections, this chapter is focused first on early primers and illustrated texts by white US writers, then shifts to discuss Puerto Rican writers responding to US imperialism (31). Drawing on scholars such as Nathalie op de Beeck and Lara Saguisag, Jiménez García argues that the "faux history books [primers especially] contain aspects one has come to expect...

US Imperialism and Puerto Rican Needleworkers: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Women's Labor in a Deep History of Neoliberal Trade

AbstractIn 1898, US occupation of Puerto Rico opened possibilities for experimentation with manufacturing, investment, tariffs, and citizenship because the Treaty of Paris did not address territorial incorporation. Imperial experimentation started immediately and continued through the liberal policies of the New Deal and World War II, consistently reproducing drastic exceptions. These exceptions were neither permanent nor complete, but the rearrangements of sovereignty and citizenship established Puerto Rico as a site of potential and persistent exemption. Puerto Rican needleworkers were central to the resulting colonial industrialization-not as dormant labor awaiting outside developmental forces but as skilled workers experienced in production. Following US occupation, continental trade agents and manufacturers noted the intricate needlework of Puerto Rican women and their employment in homes and small shops for contractors across the island. Their cooptation and adaptation of this contracting system led to the colonial industrialization, generating bureaucratic, financial, and legal infrastructure later used in Operation Bootstrap, a long-term economic plan devised in the 1940s and 1950s. Labor unions and aggrieved workers contested and resisted this colonial industrialization. They advocated their own proposals and pushed against US economic policies and insular business management. Throughout these fights, the asymmetrical power of the federal government and industrial capital allowed the colonial regime to assert US sovereignty while continually realigning exemptions and redefining citizenship for liberal economic objectives. Rather than representing a weakening of the nation-state, this strong interventionist approach provided scaffolding for Operation Bootstrap, which became a model for the neoliberal projects called export processing zones (EPZs).

“Operation Sport”: Puerto Rico’s Recreational and Political Consolidation in an Age of Modernization and Decolonization, 1950s

Abstract Contextualized in a Western push for post-war decolonization and modernization, the development of recreation programs in 1950s Puerto Rico helped consolidate the state’s sport institution and, in turn, legitimize a new political status. The 1950s was a pivotal decade in Puerto Rican history due to the creation of the Commonwealth in 1952 and the innovative economic project known as Operation Bootstrap. The term “Operation Sport” portrays the development of sport and recreation in this decade as collaboration between the government and the working classes to develop recreational/cultural activities to assuage the impact of dramatic industrialization. However, regardless of the perception of progress, critics targeted the program for its centralization and expropriations, comparing it to “Communist” governments. For the newly established Commonwealth, at stake in the popular acceptance of these recreational programs was evaluation of a new political status arising from promises of social justice.

Am�rica's Home : A Dialogue about Displacement, Globalization, and Activism

América's Home:A Dialogue about Displacement, Globalization, and Activism María Célleri (bio), Denise Delgado (bio), Delia Fernández (bio), and Danielle Olden (bio) Introduction The 2012 documentary América's Home, directed by C. A. Griffith and H. L. T. Quan, delves into the history of gentrification and Puerto Rican grassroots community activism.1 The film examines the consequences of policies that privilege progress over individuals, community formation, and cultural memories. Beginning with a brief description of the colonization of Puerto Rico, the documentary focuses on América Sorrentini Blaut (Meca), an activist in both Puerto Rico and Humboldt Park, a Chicago neighborhood. Meca's childhood home, Casa Sofia, is a historical building that faces destruction to accommodate modern development in Santurce, one of the most populated working-class communities in Puerto Rico. América's Home is unique for its woman-centered narrative. Meca's voice guides viewers through the lived experiences of urban renewal, and we see women playing a central role in the grassroots efforts to preserve community and home, although both men and women work to resist gentrification. The editors of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies asked four emerging scholars from different disciplines to collectively review and analyze the film. The resulting discussion centers on several major themes: progress, cultural displacement, community activism, renewal, and affect, as well as the ways in which these themes inform one another in both our historical understanding and our contemporary lives. Danielle: My upbringing as a Latina in Wyoming and my work as a historian of the modern US has stimulated my interest in Manifest Destiny, which celebrates American progress at the expense of colonization and dispossession. In watching the film, I found myself asking what place "home" has in our historical memory, individually and collectively. What role does [End Page 130] "home" play in our understanding of American progress, which has remained a central—though not uncontested—paradigm of the American story? In this narrative "home" is most closely associated with single-family domestic bliss, a gendered and heteronormative construction of family and living that privileges whiteness and ignores the poor and dislocated. Frequently missing is a conversation on the multiple kinds of homes in which people live. América's Home engages us in that dialogue. For the people in the film "home" is community. It is a physical space as well as a network of close ties that provide security and fellowship. I was struck, therefore, by the interconnections I gleaned from this film in terms of questions of progress and home and the ways in which the filmmakers wove these two narratives together to demonstrate the social and cultural demolition that takes place when homes are displaced by so-called progress. Delia: Growing up in a Mexican American and Puerto Rican family in the Midwest, I've always been fascinated by how (im)migrants interact with their surroundings and the extent of their relationships with their culture and places of origin. Consequently, what I found most interesting was the film's comparison between Santurce and Humboldt Park. Both spaces were safe havens—Santurce as a place for runaway slaves and Humboldt Park as a neighborhood for Puerto Rican migrants as they left the poverty-stricken island in the mid-twentieth century as a result of Operation Bootstrap. Now, however, both places are in danger of gentrification. The threat of loss and disappearance goes beyond the physical space. Danielle: Absolutely. It was not simply about Meca's struggle to save Casa Sofia; it was also about her struggle to save Santurce. I like that you brought up the connections between Santurce and Humboldt Park because as I watched the film, I could not help but see this story as the US story as well, depicting the historical struggles that were born out of American notions of progress: expansion, development, capital growth and migration, and the gendered and racialized nature of these processes. This kind of progress actually increases social inequalities. Denise: Right. As a Chicana growing up in Arizona, a state intent on erasing its colonial history, and with my current interest in studying immigration in the context of neoliberalism, I recognize...

Challenges to Solidarity across Multiple Borders: Haiti's Free Trade Zone

Introductioncreated in 2003 with a US$23 million World Bank loan to a private Dominican company, Haiti's Free Trade Zone (FTZ) promised an economically depressed region thousands of well-paying jobs and 'development' to the poor border town of Ouanaminthe. However, the realities were more complex; many peasants lost their land, and factory owners and unions had a long struggle. Haitian workers were ultimately granted rights to unionise, and won a contract signed in January 2006. However, workers' rights remained challenged, in part because of deep socio-racial and political-economic divisions across the Massacre River that forms the border.David Harvey argued that global capitalism entails the strategic use of space in a process of uneven accumulation of capital.1 Nowhere is this phenomenon of what he called 'uneven geographical development' more evident than in border areas. Heavily policed and militarised, where national identity is paramount to one's access to mobility and organisation, national borders play an integral role within the development of maquihdoras, a general term arising from subcontracted, mostly-textile factories just south of the US-Mexico border.2 The FTZ, created on the northern district of the Haiti-Dominican border, provides a rich case for examining the multiple sources of inequality highlighted and exacerbated by its location on the border. Following a brief recap of the events, this article examines the cultural, national, linguistic, and identity differences impeding solidarity. Actors across a range of differences inherited a legacy of mistrust that impeded open communication and collaboration, prolonging the crisis and its resolution. Communication was thus based on prejudice and rumour, preventing the collection of facts that would verify claims. Solidarity, both South-South and North-South, is therefore inherently fragile, as it presupposes acknowledged identities, respect for differences in place, and open communication^ the very conditions that are most difficult to obtain across cultural, national and geopolitical divisions. These prejudices and political identities prevented particular groups within the North American solidarity community from lending crucial support. This article analyses lessons not learned about solidarity, arguing against what I call 'leftwing imperialism', and distils lessons from this experience.Background: The building of the FTZAs scholars have noted, the global economy relegates certain provinces, nation-states, or even regions to marginal positions whereby their 'comparative advantage' is a combination of extremely low wages and proximity to large consumer markets.4 This model of development is firmly rooted in the neoliberal ideology of free-market capitalism, free trade and specialisation, justified by the need for foreign exchange in the global financial market triggered by an uneven exchange and structural debt. Portrayed as a 'win-win' situation whereby transnational corporations and Northern consumers benefit with cheaply made goods and Southern countries gain desperately needed jobs, the export-processing subcontracting model has a long history in the Caribbean, and particularly Haiti (Operation Bootstrap). In the 1970s, dictator JeanClaude Duvalier, whose 'economic revolution' would turn Haiti into the 'Taiwan of the Caribbean', approved a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and World Bank plan to create an export-processing zone near Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. At its peak, the industrial park built next to Haiti's new international airport employed an estimated seventy to eight thousand factory workers. 5 In recent years, certainly following the earthquake, this strategy has increasingly been promoted as a cornerstone to Haiti's economic reconstruction. The Interim Haiti Reconstruction Committee, co-chaired by the United Nations' special envoy for Haiti, former president Bill Clinton, prioritised an industrial park in Caracol, minutes away from the Ouanaminthe site, which was opened in October 2012. …

The Thinking Voice: When Listening Trumps Celebrity

In the brief span of 1952–68, Puerto Rico sped through its industrialization process. Middle-class residential construction dotted the city of San Juan. Hotels replaced the mansions along its Condado waterfront. The spanking new Medical Center promised health for the sickly, undernourished population, a health that the developmentalist program of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico—Operation Bootstrap—desperately needed, as it endeavored to offer a cheap, obedient, and presumably bilingual labor force to American capital. The “Golden Mile,” the financial district established in the area of the sometime royal hacienda, Hato Rey, emerged as the centerpiece of a new downtown. The mythic mall of Plaza Las Américas (formerly a cattle ranch that bred cows for the milk industry) became the social hub of a polis that increasingly turned to consumerism for its exercise of citizenship. Newspapers and magazines were filled with consumer fantasies of every variety. Along with everything else that was dazzling and new, Puerto Rico consumed a new object for sale, the celebrity pop star.

Post-1898 Imaginative Geographies: Puerto Rico Migration in 1950s Film

This essay studies cultural representations of Puerto Rico’s economic boom and 1952 shift in legal status to the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. It suggests that apprehending these events requires the reframing of Puerto Rican migration as global phenomena. Drawing on the historical and cultural scholarship on Puerto Rican migration, Operation Bootstrap, and US empire, Tolentino analyzes the famous musical film West Side Story (1961), but also the Hollywood film Sabrina (1954) and Island productions El Otro Camino (The Other Road, 1955) and Maruja (1958). In contrast to prevailing views, she interprets these films as narratives about migration and modernization that engage the discourse of sentimental modernization, the figure of the jíbaro, and the idea of small town Puerto Rico. In so doing, they reveal the global vision at the center of the Operation Bootstrap development plan and Commonwealth formation. The concluding section suggests how the films take up issues in Puerto Rico’s historiography. Rather than merely illuminating a forgotten historical period of 1950s Puerto Rico, the 1950s films negotiate Puerto Rico’s geographical, political, and cultural locations by rethinking institutionalized meanings of 1898 in discourses of Puerto Rico historiography and US empire. Proposing new ways of interpreting the introduction of the Commonwealth in 1952 makes possible the revision of dominant conceptions of 1898 rooted in nation, government, and constitutional law.

The near northwest side story: migration, displacement, and Puerto Rican families

In The Near Northwest Side Story, Gina M. Perez offers an intimate and unvarnished portrait of Puerto Rican life in Chicago and San Sebastian, Puerto Rico - two places connected by a long history of circulating people, ideas, goods, and information. Perez's masterful blend of history and ethnography explores the multiple and gendered reasons for migration, why people maintain transnational connections with distant communities, and how poor and working-class Puerto Ricans work to build meaningful communities. Perez traces the changing ways that Puerto Ricans have experienced poverty, displacement, and discrimination and illustrates how they imagine and build extended families and dense social networks that link San Sebastian to barrios in Chicago. She includes an incisive analysis of the role of the state in shaping migration through such projects as the Chardon Plan, Operation Bootstrap, and the Chicago Experiment. The Near Northwest Side Story provides a unique window on the many strategies people use to resist the negative consequences of globalization, economic development, and gentrification.

Puerto Rico, negotiating development and change

An Overview of Economic and Social Progress. Puerto Rico's Development Path: A Comparison with East Asia and Latin America. Dimensions of Ownership and Control. Accounting for Economic Growth. The End of Operation Bootstrap. The New Economy.

Global Discourse and Local Readings of Development

/ This article builds upon the definition of development as an ideological field to explore journalism as a site where global discourses of development meet locally grounded meanings to shape social understandings of modernization and progress in developing nations. The Puerto Rican experience during the promotion of Operation Bootstrap (1947—63) was selected as a case study to examine how the local press framed the process of industrialization as a news event of national and international relevance and thus mediated the definition of development as a public affair and redefined boundaries in the public and private spheres. Drawing on the notion of `mediated publicness', and its implications for the transformation of visibility and the organization of hegemony in modern societies, this research also discusses the ideological effects of such reporting in the particular context of colonialism and dependent development in Puerto Rico.

Changing Forms of U.S. Hegemony in Puerto Rico: The Impact on the Family and Sexuality

It has been over a hundred years since the U.S. took control of Puerto Rico. In that time, the way in which the U.S. perceived Puerto Rico has changed from a colony requiring Americanisation to, in the 1950s, its showcase of democracy in the Caribbean, to today, an island that still retains geopolitical importance for the U.S., but represents an increasing economic burden. The failure of Operation Bootstrap, as the Puerto Rican industrialization program was known, resulted in permanent large-scale unemployment, with a population dependent on federal transfers for a living, and a constant source of migration to the mainland, where over half of Puerto Ricans now live. I shall trace the outline of these three stages in U.S. hegemony over Puerto Rico, and argue that throughout the U.S. Congress was reluctant to fully incorporate Puerto Rico, because its population was deemed racially and socially inferior to that of the mainland. Though the removal of Spain from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines was considered part of the its ‘manifest destiny’, the United States never intended to incorporate these people so different from the U.S. as part of the American nation, as was done with its earlier acquisitions in Texas, Alaska or even Hawaii.

A Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez's How the GarcÍa Girls Lost Their Accents

The displacement of Caribbean people from their islands to the United States, for political or economic reasons, has produced a tension between the culture of the country of origin and that of the adopted homeland, one representing the past and the other the future of the immigrant. As time passes, for the immigrant, the rupture with the past, strongest in political exiles, is transformed into a desire to recover a lost moment in time. But the past ceases to exist as an island reality and is interpreted from the perspective of the mainland culture. The political migration of Dominicans from their island of origin to the United States is contemporaneous with the fall of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo and the first wave of Cuban exiles at the beginning of the 1960s. During his dictatorship, Trujillo had absolute control over the military, the economy, and the people and, except for a select group, he prevented anyone from leaving the island. During this stage of Dominican history, those who did abandon the island with or without the dictator’s consent sought political exile. The situation changed radically after the dictator’s death and the U.S. invasion of the island, which foiled any attempt to restore Juan Bosch to the presidency or convert the Dominican Republic into another communist Cuba. With the direct U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of the Dominican Republic and the support of Joaquin Balaguer’s presidency, the number of Dominican exiles increased and their conditions changed in character, from political to economic. The Dominican migration to the United States has steadily risen, making Dominicans, second to Puerto Ricans, the largest Hispanic group in New York. 1 However, as with other immigrant groups, Dominicans found themselves looking back to understand their present and future. If writers on the island were trying to come to terms with the Trujillo dictatorship and the U.S. invasion of their country, those who traveled to the mainland wanted to recover a lost origin. The Puerto Rican economic migration associated with Operation Bootstrap, after WWII, and the Cuban political exodus, related to the Castro takeover in 1959, produced a generation of Latino writers born or raised in the United States. The Dominican migration, which was first political and later economic, would also count among its members a significant number of writers. And just as the other immigrants or sons of immigrants have documented their experiences mainly in the cities in which they live, Dominican-American authors would also do the same, some of them writing in Spanish and others in English. 2 In her How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,

(Un)Designing Mythologies: Puerto Rico and "Operation Bootstrap" Undone

(Un)Designing Mythologies: Puerto Rico and "Operation Bootstrap" Undone

Shattering the illusion of development: the changing status of women and challenges for the feminist movement in Puerto Rico.

In this paper we examine the weaknesses of development strategies which have been applied in Puerto Rico. The process of industrialization by invitation, referred to as Operation Bootstrap, was instituted by the United States of America by the end of the 1940s. This involved tax incentives and subsidies for companies and was dependent on industrial peace and low wages in labor-intensive, low-wage industries, especially those of textile and clothing. Naturally, women's labor was encouraged as a result of the lower cost, as well as assumed dexterity, of the female in such areas. While these new activity areas for women also allowed other benefits in the form of legislation and increased social services, the inherent problems of rapid, labor-intensive industrialization also led to displacement and increased underemployment and impoverization of female headed families from the 1960s onwards. The paper explores some of the changes in gender relations which resulted from these policies and looks at the challenges which the feminist movement in Puerto Rico has made, particularly with regard to state processes to bring about beneficial changes in the economic, legal, political and social status of women in Puerto Rico.

Kicking off the Bootstraps: Environment, Development, and Community Power in Puerto Rico

While small communities in Third World countries usually seem at the mercy of central governments and foreign capitalists, local activists can help exploited peoples correct environmental abuses and social injustices and seize control of their own destinies. Kicking Off the Bootstraps is a powerful case history of such an effort. It describes a grassroots activist movement that emerged in the Puerto Rican community of Salinas to counter the poverty and economic dependence experienced by its citizens in the wake of Operation Bootstrap, a post-World War II industrial development program. Deborah Berman Santana examines the efforts of the community to develop its own economic strategy based primarily on environmentally and socially responsible uses of local natural and human resources. Berman Santana shows how local activists are seeking to empower the Salinas community to make decisions concerning economic development. She evaluates present-day efforts to develop positive alternatives, examining the motivations of the activists, the nature of their projects, their efforts to mobilize the community, their dealings with government and other organizations, and the obstacles they face. In a closing chapter, she addresses the potential roles of community leaders, outside activists, local businesses, and government in actualizing these alternatives. A testimony to one community's efforts to determine its own future, Kicking Off the Bootstraps deals with real issues such as control over productive resources, quality of life, and environmental health. It also extends an examination of community-directed activism to an exploration of policy implications for sustainable development. While this concept is often too vague to be applied to real strategies, the Salinas experience provides a clear idea of what sustainable development can--and should--mean in actual practice.

The myth of the male breadwinner: women and industrialization in the Caribbean

* Gender and Industrialization in the Caribbean Basin * The Male Breadwinner and Womens Wage Labor * Women Workers and the Rise and Decline of Puerto Ricos Operation Bootstrap * The Dominican Republic: Export Manufacturing and the Economic Crisis * Cuba: Revolution and Gender Inequality * Conclusion: Economic Restructuring and Gender Subordination

Operation Bootstra and NAFTA: Comparing the Social Consequences

This study examines the extent to which Puerto Rico's experience with Operation Boostrap, inaugurated in 1948, can be used to predict the social consequences of NAFTA for Mexico. It finds that Operation Bootstrap accelerated a decline in agricultural employment, growth of the surplus population, and massive emigration to the U.S., effects that are likely to be repeated with NAFTA. The study concludes with a comparative examination of Puerto Rican and Mexican-origin persons in the U.S., finding that while the decision to migrate results in significant improvements in their average economic conditions of life, it also results in significant deteriorations of other social conditions of life.

Lessons From Operation Bootstrap

AbstractIn the 1950s, Puerto Rico tied its development strategy to market-oriented reforms and to the U.S. economy. The mixed results of the experience may offer some clues to what Mexico can look forward to in a NAFTA-dominated future.

Industrial Transformation and Labour Relations in Puerto Rico: From ‘Operation Bootstrap’ to the 1970s

During the 1950s and 1960s Puerto Rico's industrial transformation was accompanied by social stability and relatively peaceful labour relations, which were essential for a development programme dependent upon foreign investments. The state took a central role in this process, as it guided economic activity and mobilised vital human and material resources. However, by the late 1960s profound changes in the island's political economy threatened this state-guided development programme. This essay traces the history of Puerto Rican economic change and the relationship between industrial transformation and the state's capacity to manage the operation of the economy, particularly industrial relations up to the late 1970s. Four features of this process will be examined: (1) labour relations during the early phase of industrialisation; (2) the changes in the economy resulting from the expansion of capital-intensive industrial sectors; (3) the impact of these changes on the state's capacity to manage the political economy, particularly its fiscal policy; and (4) how these changes altered the nature of state-labour relations.