Puerto Ricans in the Empire: Tobacco Growers and U.S. Colonialism

Puerto Ricans in the Empire

Puerto Ricans in the Empire

Tobacco Growers and U.S. Colonialism

TERESITA A. LEVY

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levy, Teresita A.

Puerto Ricans in the empire : tobacco growers and U.S. colonialism / Teresita A. Levy.

   pages   cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–7133–1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7132–4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7134–8 (e-book)

1. Tobacco industry—Puerto Rico—History.   2. Tobacco—Political aspects—Puerto Rico—History.   3. Puerto Rico—Foreign economic relations—United States.   4. United States—Foreign economic relations—Puerto Rico.   5. Puerto Rico—Politics and government—1898–1952.   6. Puerto Rico—History—1898–1952.   I. Title.

HD9144.P82L49   2015

338.1'737109729509041—dc23         2014014278

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2015 by Teresita A. Levy

All rights reserved

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Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu.

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my late father, Luis Levy Fiol, who taught me about our past

For my sons, Ari Miguel and Ilán Andrés, who imagine our future

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Development of the Tobacco Economy in Puerto Rico

2. Life in the Tobacco Regions of Puerto Rico

3. Politics: Tobacco Growers and Agricultural Organizations

4. Law: The Extension of Federal Agricultural Credit Legislation to Puerto Rico

5. Technology: Modern Agriculture, Home Management, and Rural Progress

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Figures

1.1. Tobacco-Growing Regions of Puerto Rico

1.2. Percentage of Cigars According to Class, 1920–1935

2.1. Percentage of Average Annual Income of Families by Source and by Type of Farm, 1936

3.1. La Justa Revancha . . . y el Porvenir Indeciso de Algunos Comisionados

4.1. Transformación Social del Tabaco

4.2. Los Forcejeos en Washington y la Injusticia de un Reparto . . . !!

Tables

1.1. Tobacco-Growing Regions in Puerto Rico, 1899–1940

1.2. Tobacco Cultivation in Cuerdas and Production in Pounds in Puerto Rico, 1910–1940

1.3. Tobacco Cultivation by Region, 1910–1940

1.4. Exports of Leaf Tobacco from Puerto Rico to the United States, 1900–1940

1.5. Number of Puerto Rican Cigars According to Class for the United States, 1920–1935

1.6. Cigar Consumption in Puerto Rico, 1929–1935

1.7. Cigarette Consumption in Puerto Rico, 1929–1935

2.1. Population in the Tobacco Regions, 1899–1940

2.2. Total Percentage Change in Population and Yearly Rate of Population Growth in Tobacco Regions, 1899–1940

2.3. Population by Agricultural Region, 1899–1940

2.4. Total Percentage Change in Population and Yearly Rate of Population Growth by Agricultural Region, 1899–1940

2.5. Working Population by Region and by Sex, 1899–1940

2.6. Percentage Change in Working Population by Region and by Sex, 1899–1940

2.7. Sex Ratio (Male to Female) of Working Population by Region, 1899–1940

2.8. Child-to-Woman Ratio by Region, 1899–1940

2.9. Average Annual Income of Families by Source and by Type of Farm, 1936

2.10. Average Cultivation Income and Expenses on Tobacco Farms, 1937–1938

2.11. Distribution of Expenses by Type of Farm, 1937

2.12. Number of Farms by Region, 1910–1940

2.13. Number and Percentage of Farms, and Percentage of Land Operated by Owners and Managers by Region, 1910–1940

2.14. Number of Farms by Size (in Cuerdas) and Percentage Change in Regions, 1910–1930

2.15. Farms Operated by Tenants by Region, 1910–1940

2.16. Number of Agricultural Laborers per Crop, 1910–1940

2.17. Percentage of Landless Families by Crop, 1910–1940

3.1. Agricultural Leagues in Tobacco Regions, 1920

3.2. Contributions for Expenses for Washington Trip, 1926

4.1. Percentage of Mortgages Held by Type of Lender, 1935 and 1937

4.2. Production Credit Associations Established in Puerto Rico in 1934

4.3. Farm Price for Tobacco and AAA Payments, 1933–1940

5.1. Lectures Held in Tobacco-Growing Municipalities and Attendance, 1920

5.2. Yield per Cuerda in the Tobacco Regions, 1910–1940

5.3. Visits and Demonstrations Made by Agricultural Extension Agents and Attendance, 1936–1940

5.4. Expansion of Home Demonstration Program, 1938–1940

Acknowledgments

It is a privilege to be part of a community of scholars, artists, friends, and family in New York and Puerto Rico, and a simple gracias is not enough to convey the profound sense of gratitude that overwhelms me as I sit to write this page. Nevertheless, gracias I must give to the people who provided support, wisdom, and laughter while I was working on this project.

The archival research that informs this book would not have been possible without the assistance of the staff at the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas at the University of Puerto Rico, the Archivo Histórico de Caguas, the Archivo Notarial de Caguas, and the Archivo General de Puerto Rico. I will never forget their hospitality and their patience. I was fortunate to spend many weeks at the library of the Estación Experimental Agrícola de Puerto Rico, immersed in agricultural research and enjoying in equal parts the generosity of the staff and the glorious Jardín Botánico in the complex. I also thank the Asociación de Agricultores Puertorriqueños, who allowed the use of their organization’s materials for this work.

My students at Lehman College have been a source of inspiration and intellectual renewal for the last seven years, and I thank them for joining me in the classroom. I am grateful for the many hallway chats, cafecitos, and debates about teaching and learning that I have enjoyed with my colleagues in the department of Latin American, Latino, and Puerto Rican Studies. I have shared much hard work, and a little desk space, with my dear friends at the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I thank them for the stimulating intellectual debates, their endless curiosity, and their friendship.

My lifelong friends and my family in Puerto Rico, who I am so lucky to see regularly, were a constant reminder that I was not just writing about the Puerto Rican people; I was writing about them, their history, and their legacy, as well as mine, and such an endeavor carried an enormous intellectual responsibility. They made sure I was current on the joys and difficulties of living on the island, and I thank them for keeping me so very connected to mi tierra.

Every day, I am enveloped in the love, confidence, and unconditional support of my husband, Benjamin Lapidus, and our sons, Ari Miguel and Ilán Andrés. I am grateful for their patience and their curiosity, but most of all, for joining me in the adventure that is our life.

Puerto Ricans in the Empire

Introduction

Colonial power, like any other, was an object of struggle and depended on the material, social, and cultural resources of those involved.

—Frederick Cooper

In December 1925, the editors of El Agricultor Puertorriqueño, the magazine of the one-year-old Asociación de Agricultores Puertorriqueños, announced: The time has come to proclaim that we have the undisputed right to intervene, cooperate, and discuss our administrative problems, our economic problems, our agricultural problems that greatly influence the general welfare of the community.¹ With this declaration, the membership of the Asociación publicly affirmed their commitment to advocate in the legislative halls of the colonial empire on behalf of all Puerto Rican farmers. Farmers across the island, especially tobacco growers, heeded the call to action and affiliated with the Asociación and other agricultural groups. Subsequently, they lobbied for legislation and funding, participated in government-sponsored agricultural programs, solicited agricultural credit from governmental sources, and sought scientific education in a variety of public programs, all to improve their opportunities for successful participation in the tobacco leaf market of the United States.

Using the tobacco sector in Puerto Rico as a focal point of research, this book examines the complex and varied ways in which Puerto Ricans participated in and negotiated with the U.S. colonial structures established on the island after 1898. The relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States was undoubtedly colonial in nature, but paradoxically it also conferred a new set of rights, privileges, and freedoms on the Puerto Rican population.² Puerto Ricans were able to take advantage of these new freedoms and, as this study illustrates through the prism of the tobacco sector, they were able to influence legislation and actively promote their self-defined interests to improve their lives. To be sure, there are political, economic, and social limitations on how a colonized people may negotiate with the empire that rules them, and this was clearly the case in Puerto Rico. However, this does not mean that colonial structures necessarily limited the ability to negotiate constantly, passionately, and often successfully. Tobacco growers, through their affiliation with the Asociación de Agricultores Puertorriqueños, repeatedly demanded that U.S. officials in Washington and on the island protect the tobacco sector and the well-being of the people involved in its production. In response, U.S. administrators included Puerto Ricans in decision-making processes, altered and extended legislation to the island, and allocated funding to support scientific experimentation that would improve the quality of agricultural products. The interactions between tobacco growers and the colonial government demonstrate that the colonial relationship between the island and the mainland was not unilaterally defined or manifested. Instead, the colonial process was a dynamic, elastic, and ever-changing one, where local actors often affected colonial policies.

The inclusion of the island in the tariff structure of the United States guaranteed the duty-free entrance of many island products into the U.S. market, and this dramatically accelerated the existing production of agricultural commodities. Tobacco became a major industry in Puerto Rico in large part because tobacco leaf was included in this tariff exemption. Puerto Rican farmers in the highland regions of the island made the cultivation of tobacco for the U.S. market their most important economic activity after 1900.

This book begins, therefore, by systematically exploring tobacco leaf cultivation for the U.S. market in order to understand the intricacies of how the sector expanded and how tobacco farmers (and their families) adjusted to the changes in their lives. Although U.S. economic policies and the dominant role of the American Tobacco Company in cigar and cigarette production had a profound impact on the tobacco sector, the cultivation of the leaf remained almost entirely controlled by Puerto Rican farmers. Tobacco cultivation required a large number of agricultural workers, and together with industrial workers in tobacco shops, they made the tobacco sector one of the largest employers in rural Puerto Rico.

Tobacco was perfectly suited for cultivation in the mountainous terrain of the highlands of Puerto Rico, where farms were generally smaller than those found in coastal areas. Tobacco could be grown successfully on small parcels of land and, because of relatively low production costs, it was economically viable for farmers with limited capital resources. Puerto Rican tobacco was also well suited for the taste of U.S. consumers, who were accustomed to the mellow flavor and smooth aroma of Cuban tobacco. In fact, exceptional tobacco leaf was being cultivated in the eastern highlands of Puerto Rico by 1888, a decade before the American occupation of the island.³ After 1898, U.S. manufacturers were able to purchase the tobacco leaf that they and their customers preferred from Puerto Rico at a lower cost than that of Cuban tobacco. The ecological suitability of tobacco cultivation to the geography of the highlands, the economic interests of U.S. tobacco manufacturers, and the advantage that Puerto Rican tobacco had in the U.S. market because of the inclusion of the island inside the tariff wall of the United States, led to the fairly rapid expansion of the tobacco sector of the island after 1900.

It is perhaps surprising, then, that historians of early twentieth-century Puerto Rico have largely ignored the cultivation of tobacco. Instead, studies have focused on the development of the sugar industry because of its dominant role in the island’s economy, and the discussion of tobacco has ended after its ritual mention as the island’s second most important product. The impact of the new colonial order on the sugar sector has served, accordingly, as the analytical framework for most discussions of the island’s agricultural development from 1898 to 1940.⁴

This sugar narrative is a story of victimization and imperial abuse, in which economic, social, and political decisions made by colonial administrators were designed to protect the interests of U.S. sugar companies. In this narrative, the unscrupulous accumulation of land by large sugar companies, supported by the colonial state, destroyed the independent land-owning class and displaced Puerto Rican jíbaros (peasants), transforming them into landless wage laborers. Sugar was king, a sick king, and the ills of the coastal sugar economy as described by many scholars became the central characteristics not only of Puerto Rican agriculture, but of Puerto Rico as a whole.⁵ The colonial political status of the island, manifested economically in the plantation system developed by U.S. capitalists in the sugar sector, was converted into the cause of every economic, social, and political problem in Puerto Rico.

These generalizations, however, do not hold up to examination in most sectors of the island’s economy, and this is emphatically true in the tobacco sector.⁶ Although tobacco corporations did purchase some large farms, the percentage of the tobacco acreage under American control was minor. The bulk of American investment in tobacco production was instead in the industrial and marketing phases of tobacco production: establishing stemming plants and factories for handmade and later machine-produced cigars and cigarettes, controlling packing and shipping facilities, and ultimately determining marketing strategies for the vast U.S. mainland consumer markets. It was more cost-effective to purchase tobacco leaf from Puerto Rican farmers than to become vertically integrated; it was more profitable to be the marketer of the finished product than a producer of the raw material. As a result, small-scale, politically involved, independent landowners cultivated most of the tobacco leaf in Puerto Rico. Additionally, from a demographic point of view, the tobacco districts were the fastest-growing regions of the island in the early twentieth century because of opportunities to secure land and participate as independent producers in local economies.

This book adds the cultivation of tobacco leaf to the agricultural narrative of the island by analyzing the expansion of the tobacco sector and the resulting social and economic changes in the tobacco regions, as other scholars have done for Cuba and the Dominican Republic.⁷ Tobacco-focused research has existed for at least a century in Puerto Rican scholarship, although this has been limited mostly to investigations in agricultural technology and the analysis of economic data. Agricultural scientists, for example, have examined particular aspects of the cultivation process, and these have been published in agricultural journals or as research bulletins of the Agricultural Experiment Station.⁸ Other scholars have studied the income and expenses of tobacco farms to determine what, if any, economic benefit was derived from tobacco leaf cultivation.⁹ These studies provide important material for this book, but here the findings are discussed within the larger context of negotiation of scientific technology and advantageous legislation.

Juan José Baldrich’s volume titled Sembraron la no siembra is perhaps the best-known study of the island’s tobacco economy and is worth summarizing.¹⁰ Baldrich presents a socioeconomic analysis of a farmer-led tobacco-planting stoppage during the 1931–1932 growing season, which had the objective of increasing market prices for tobacco leaf. Baldrich argues that, although the strike succeeded in organizing the growers against the local merchants who controlled farm prices, it failed in its efforts to increase those prices.¹¹ It was this failure that marked the beginning of the transition for the tobacco grower from landowner to landless agricultural laborer. Baldrich’s work provides a foundation for a later chapter in this book that discusses Puerto Rican political participation. The no siembra was the culmination of long-standing efforts of the Asociación de Agricultores Puertorriqueños to lobby on behalf of tobacco farmers, and members were key participants in the campaign.

Most other studies that deal with Puerto Rican tobacco focus on the industrial side of the process and on the workers who transformed the tobacco leaf into aromatic cigars and cigarettes.¹² The important struggles of the tobacco factory workers have been well documented and comprehensively analyzed, and this book does not offer a new interpretation of their struggles. Tobacco workers were a well-organized, politically active labor sector. Although the leaders of the Asociación de Agricultores were familiar with tobacco workers’ efforts and politics, especially their involvement with the Socialist Party and the Federación Libre de Trabajadores, this was not always an amicable relationship. The particularities of the relationship between tobacco growers and tobacco workers deserve more research, but they are beyond the scope of this study, which intentionally focuses on the cultivation process. It is worth mentioning, however, that the militancy of tobacco shop workers may have contributed to the responsiveness of legislators and administrators to tobacco growers’ demands.

The meteoric expansion of the tobacco sector was accompanied by the unprecedented involvement of Puerto Rican tobacco growers in the structures of the U.S. colonial state both at the insular and the federal levels to promote and protect their self-defined economic interests. This history of activism and participation in the empire has not been among the dominant themes in the scholarly literature of early twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Instead, many scholars have interpreted the annexation of the island through the Foraker Act of 1900 as the creation of a colonial state in which American economic, political, and social structures were omnipresent and subjugated the island to the interests of the new imperial power.¹³ This is a long-standing historical interpretation that began when American and Puerto Rican researchers, provoked by the effects of the Great Depression on the island, began a systematic evaluation of whether social or economic progress had been achieved after thirty-plus years of U.S. colonial rule.

Among the many studies that argued that the U.S. occupation of the island caused destructive effects was Porto Rico and Its Problems by Victor S. Clark, a former commissioner of education in Puerto Rico. The 1930 study, published by the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, was a comprehensive study of the economic and social conditions on the island from agricultural development to public health.¹⁴ Clark argued for the existence of indicators that life for the rural inhabitant was indeed better in 1930 than during Spanish colonial times: there were more students in schools, better housing, improved transportation, and sewage and potable water systems. But ultimately, Clark emphasized the negative effects of U.S. control of the island, such as the alleged increase in commercial agriculture at the expense of subsistence production, poor living conditions among agricultural workers, and corporate investments in land, which, he argued, had displaced local farmers.

Just one year later, Justine and Bailey Diffie’s Porto Rico: A Broken Pledge offered the most outspoken indictment of American policies on the island.¹⁵ The Diffies argued that there had been no sign of social progress for most Puerto Ricans in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The sugar areas of the island, with their high concentration of land ownership and masses of unskilled laborers, were symbolic of the failures of the colonial economic system. The United States had broken their pledge to lift Puerto Ricans out of a life of poverty and cultural darkness and instead had put in place economic policies that perpetuated the dreadful living conditions of the jíbaro, sentencing the island to economic serfdom. Interestingly, several months before the publication of the Brookings Report, José Enamorado-Cuesta, a Puerto Rican scholar, published Porto Rico, Past and Present.¹⁶ Although Enamorado-Cuesta made many of the same observations as Victor Clark and Justine and Bailey Diffie, it was these later studies that became the classic volumes for the study of early twentieth-century Puerto Rican history.

The themes of economic, social, and political subjugation continued into the 1960s, and Puerto Rican historiography followed two distinct but related paradigms, each focusing on the benefits or shortfalls of control by the United States. One was the transformation of Puerto Rico from a stagnant backward economy in the nineteenth century to one defined by the dynamic and efficient capitalism of the United States.¹⁷ The other was the transformation of Puerto Rico from a romanticized traditional nineteenth-century economy, where paternalistic socioeconomic relationships protected even the poorest of the jíbaros, to a colonial economy defined by the separation of land and labor. In the first paradigm, it was asserted that the United States brought order and logic to a chaotic and primitive economy.¹⁸ The second contended that the United States destroyed, intentionally or not, a particular way of life and replaced it with one that was alien and damaging to Puerto Ricans.¹⁹ In both of these interpretations the colonial relationship between the island and the mainland was defined as monolithic and unilateral, and the ability of Puerto Ricans to negotiate on their own behalf was dismissed as ineffectual, or never considered. This emphasis on the absolute power of the United States has had the unintended effect of overlooking the activities of common Puerto Ricans in their efforts to effect or influence the dynamics of their daily lives. Puerto Ricans were transformed into passive victims of a capricious empire and were characterized as a people without recourse.

To discuss but one example, Manuel Maldonado-Denis, a well-published and often cited Puerto Rican scholar who wrote during the 1960s and 1970s, argued that the colonial status of the island was more obvious under the American flag than it ever had been during Spanish colonial times, and that only Puerto Rico remained in colonial bondage in the Americas.²⁰ Like scholars before him, Maldonado-Denis decried the disappearance