Sunday, January 7, 2018: 11:20 AM
Madison Room A (Marriott Wardman Park)
The 1930s in Puerto Rico were marked by severe socioeconomic and political crises caused by the Great Depression and the San Felipe and San Ciprián hurricanes of 1928 and 1932. Puerto Ricans, who have been US citizens since 1917, actively participated in the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA), a locally run New Deal agency that expended $1.36 billion on a variety of reconstruction projects aimed at repairing the broken infrastructure, rehabilitating the devastated environment, and modernizing the agricultural economy. For Puerto Ricans, who participated in all levels of its labor and management (at least 90% of all administrators and 99% of all workers were Puerto Rican), the PRRA was a means to help the island recover from the Depression, defend the western hemisphere during World War II, and begin a process of rapid postwar economic growth. For the administration, the PRRA was part of a broader strategic attempt to forge closer ties with Latin America via FDR’s “Good Neighbor” policy. The PRRA’s Information and Research division, which was responsible for creating media about the New Deal and distributing it throughout Latin America, was central to these diplomatic efforts. As part of their own strategy, however, Puerto Rican New Dealers used the Information and Research division as a form of colonial diplomacy to cultivate closer intellectual relations with Latin American and Caribbean nations such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. This paper will examine the ways in which Puerto Rican educators, engineers, doctors, and policy planners used the Information and Research division (and the PRRA more generally) to meet both Puerto Rican and administration objectives. By doing so, it hopes to provide a historical perspective on the more recent term of paradiplomacy.