Is a Book Needed? Felix Cohen and the Department of the Interior in Puerto Rico, 1944–46

This poster will complicate the relationships between farmers, agrarian reform movements, and the Department of the Interior in Vieques, Puerto Rico, between 1944 and 1946. The Department was a network of New Deal ideologies and relationships that undertook economic planning, administration, and legislation in Indigenous and island territories – scaffolding a single American colonialism. This poster is a collaboration with borderlands farmers (including and not limited to: Indigenous, migrant, islander, and Black farmers) to think through shared bureaucratic histories.

This project began studying the forms and interpersonal articulations of U.S. empire in the 1940s New Deal through Felix Cohen and Lucy Kramer Cohen's papers at the Yale Beinecke Manuscripts and Archives Library. Felix Cohen wrote the Federal Handbook of Indian Law, codifying for the first time the American government’s legal relationship to Indigenous peoples. While at the Department of the Interior (1933-47), he worked with New Deal planners and island elites to industrialize Puerto Rico. Even Felix Cohen’s recent biographers have not discussed his work through the Department of the Interior in Puerto Rico.

In 1946, Cohen litigated against an American sugar company in Vieques on behalf of landless farmers – with little context, he writes in correspondence and strategic language about People of Puerto Rico v. Eastern Sugar Associates (1946). This case elucidates and complicates a historical gap (1944-46) between the two Naval expropriations on Vieques. Through archival research at the First Circuit John Moakley Courthouse Library in Boston and oral histories with landless farmers and property owners in Vieques, this project will track the economic geography of Vieques, the path of land redistribution litigation, legal contentions between American capital, and American administrators' contentions about social democracy and colonialism at the end of the New Deal. This history precedes Puerto Rico's failed industrialization and movements for land reclamation in Vieques.

Studying this land rights case will clarify how Felix Cohen and the Department of the Interior administered a New Deal American empire across Indigenous and island territories. The archives should reveal patterns of engagement between federal functionaries, American sugar companies, local elites, and landless farmers' practices of localized agrarian sovereignty.