Puerto Rico in 1940 and 1965

Watch these two videos from the US that depict Puerto Rico in 1940 and 1965, pivotal years in the economic and political transformation of the island (as well as the rise of the mainland Puerto Rican Diaspora). The videos consist of, essentially, propaganda for US rule and the economic policies ushered by Gov. Marin in the Operation Bootstrap. Thus, the rise of cheap factories and corporations offered tax holidays, the tourist economy, the modernization of plantation agriculture, and the necessity for Puerto Rico to function by exporting nearly half its population to the mainland are discussed here, even as the narrators declare the benefits of Puerto Rico's economic relationship with US corporations. We also hear in the 1965 the repetition of the myth of racial democracy in Puerto Rico, something any informed scholar of Afro-Latin America knows to be false and one of the insidious ways to check the growth of Afro-Puerto Rican mobilization or address racial inequalities. It would seem, as Bellegarde-Smith illustrates in Haiti: The Breached Citadel, that the Puerto Rican economic model can only work because of the special relationship with the US, and even with the touted benefits of the 'Puerto Rican model,' poverty, high dependency on welfare, unemployment, and continued migration are necessary to sustain Puerto Rico.