Puerto Rican Radio and the Cold War Surveillance State

Puerto Rican radio exists in a “no-man’s land” historiographically. Histories of US radio routinely ignore Puerto Rican radio, while histories of Puerto Rico downplay the role of radio in politics and culture. The Puerto Rican radio histories that do exist are rarely cited in a historiography that tends to focus on party politics, the conflicts over statehood and independence, and a shifting but persistent colonial status. The dissonances multiply. Largely Spanish-speaking, it drew much of its programming from Cuban, rather than US radio. Yet Puerto Rico does not register as Latin American for the purposes of radio scholarship. This paper tracks the silences that riddle Puerto Rican radio histories.

Drawing on two early Cold War episodes, the paper also suggests that Puerto Rican radio’s liminality created the conditions for uses that exceeded the bounds of ‘normal’ programming and ventured into territories both repressive and violent. As soon as Puerto Rico implemented its Gag Law of 1948, the FBI began its surveillance of radio, recording broadcasts of deemed dissidents in order to archive and concretize evidence that would subsequently contribute to their conviction. At the same time, news broadcasts, which had largely relied on announcers reading newspaper articles, shifted to ‘live reporting’. During a period of rising police violence against nationalists, radio came to witness rather than merely report on the news. A five hour long shootout in 1950 was broadcast in full, violating norms about programming, sonic registers, and radio’s purportedly civilizing mission.