Mobile Social Workers and Migrant Domestics: Stretching Puerto Rico's Welfare State, 1955–65

The creation of social welfare programs and the welfare state in the Puerto Rican context was a transnational process forged in imperial context after the 1930s. The creation of a multi-sited social work practice was led by bilingual social workers that stretched public assistance programs, and their bureaucratic structures, between the island and the United States. After the 1950s public assistance programs were intertwined with reformist measures aimed at displaced migrants. State interventions took on gendered political forms, defining and working to control juvenile delinquency, prostitution, and homosexuality. Social workers working for the Puerto Rican Government established programs that stretched between their offices on the island and the Migration Division of the Department of Labor, established in New York. This paper uses the administrative and case file archives of social welfare programs, focusing in particular on a group of case files of teenage domestic workers who applied for benefits. A close reading of these case files revels how the sexuality and gender performance of these working youth was regulated by casework intervention. Young women were encouraged to perform domestic work and other feminine work, while young men who worked as domestics were pushed away from these jobs towards occupations defined as masculine. In both groups the regulation of sexual practice became a central concern. Young people devised innovative ways to navigate these state interventions while also rebelling. Some subverted rules, wrote letters, developed allegiances with community members, and other escaped or incited rebellions within reformatory institutions. These histories reveal how the gendered and sexualized contours of citizenship were forged within the imperial and transnational context of welfare state formation. Moreover, these case studies show how social workers and clients (women and the poor) were instrumental in shaping the welfare state and the contents of Puerto Rican citizenship.