The Afterlives of Puerto Rico’s Sugar Mills: The Dismantling, Selling, and Exporting of Sugar Making Machinery, 1945–90s

Between 1945 and the 1990s, Puerto Rico’s sugarcane industry underwent two intertwined transformations. In the postwar decades, the island gradually shifted from an agricultural export economy, especially sugar, toward light industrialization. This economic realignment contributed to the steady closure of sugar mills (centrales), which had long dominated rural landscapes and employment. At the same time, sectors of the sugar industry resisted relinquishing their historic position as the island’s principal economic engine, even as broader economic forces made the industry less viable.

Historical scholarship over the past forty years has concentrated largely on the rise of the U.S.-dominated sugar sector and its implications for labor relations, land concentration, and Puerto Rico’s long-standing dependence on a single cash crop. While numerous historical and anthropological studies have explored how the closure of centrales affected workers, often leading to migration to urban centers or the continental United States, far less attention has been paid to the fate of the mills themselves.

Recently, new documentation from the Archivo de Arquitectura y Construcción de la Universidad de Puerto Rico (AACUPR), drawn from the ABARCA company collection, has shed light on this understudied process. The collection contains extensive records detailing the assessment, dismantling, sale, and shipment of machinery, including complete mill systems, to destinations around the world, such as Mexico, the Philippines, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Haiti, Venezuela, and Guatemala. These materials offer insight into the logistical and economic decisions involved in relocating industrial infrastructure and reveal the global reach of the secondhand sugar machinery market.

The collection also shows that even as the industry contracted, some centrales continued to invest in machinery upgrades and repairs, attempting to modernize production rather than close. This study examines both the international afterlives of these exported mills and the local efforts of remaining mills to resist the industry’s decline.