ABSTRACT

The 400-year-plus history of Puerto Rico is really a very simple story of greed and amorality. The men who ventured to cross the great Atlantic arrived greedy for gold and the acquisition of land, and in their wake they left whole generations of people, whole tribes of people, dead and without any semblance of a history because all historical records were destroyed. And then, in 1917, we were all made U.S. citizens by the Jones Law so that by 1946 Puerto Rico was allowed to have its first Puerto Rican-born governor. With appropriate reforms in the Jones Law it was possible for Puerto Ricans from the lower classes to come to the mainland looking for bread, land, and liberty. This maxim really is the thing under which the idealized trip up North is sold, and so, in 1948, the Department of Labor initiated the migration to the North that was to result in a mass evacuation of the island of Puerto Rico.