La Gran Sociedad: State Building and the Remaking of Development in Puerto Rico, 1942-1978

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History

First Advisor

Engerman, David

Abstract

Small, non-sovereign states like Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States located in the Caribbean, are seldom considered important in the nation’s history. However, it was through Puerto Rico where many ideas about economic and social development were first tested by the United States. This dissertation explores how state actors, organizations and communities in Puerto Rico shaped and negotiated US-sponsored developmentalist programs during the second half of the twentieth century. After WWII, the Puerto Rican government embarked in an industrialization effort called Operation Bootstrap. It consisted of granting US manufacturing firms tax holidays if they outsourced their production to the territory. This turned Puerto Rico into a showcase for democratic capitalist development during the Cold War, and it was used by international aid agencies to boost the United States’ image as a benevolent force in the Global South. Operation Bootstrap also coincided with the consolidation of Puerto Rico as a non-sovereign state under US jurisdiction. Against this backdrop, many sectors in the territory, from diplomats to intellectuals to labor activists, proposed different models for economic development. They were informed by mid-century ideas about modernization, the Civil Rights movement, community development and decolonization. This research draws from a wide range of primary sources, including diplomatic correspondence between government officials in Puerto Rico, the United States and Latin America, reports from state planners, periodicals from working class communities, studies from international management firms and oral history interviews. Countries in the Global South figure prominently in literature about international development, but the field’s focus on decolonization has obscured the history of states that remained non-sovereign. My project attempts to fill that void by exclusively focusing on the evolution of Puerto Rico’s developmentalist state between the 1940s until the global crisis of the mid-1970s. In doing so, it advances the argument that economic development and state-formation were interchangeable political projects in the Global South.

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