Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Abstract
In 1946, three Boston judges decided that the Puerto Rican legislature could redistribute American-owned sugar plantations to workers. Though deemed legal, the redistribution never happened. The unreported 1946 land rights case, People of Puerto Rico v. Eastern Sugar Associates, entangles how self-proclaimed socialist and anti-colonialist officials at the Department of the Interior administered a New Deal empire across Indigenous and island territories. In conjunction with the Department of the Interior’s published reports and Felix S. Cohen’s Papers at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, case files from the Boston First Circuit Library reveal engagement between federal and military functionaries, American sugar companies, Puerto Rican political elites, and localized experiments in agrarian sovereignty to characterize the postwar United States empire in the transition from the New Deal to the Cold War.
This combination of archival and oral research connects fractured histories of American colonialism and imperialism in Latin American and Indigenous nations through a study of land use and litigation in Puerto Rico between 1941 and 1947. This paper begins to explain the tenuous legal and political relationships which have systematically deconstructed agriculture on the island. The project suggests that historical attempts at food sovereignty failed when they framed their claims in dominant terms and through colonial structures. Still, they created legal precedent and necessitated strategic shifts which make land reclamation and autonomous food production possible. Entwining these unreported facts with interdisciplinary literatures might affect how well-intentioned Americans can interact with the nation’s colonies and how colonial subjects in Puerto Rico, Latin American and Indigenous nations might strategically entangle and reject some United States institutions in pursuit of localized land and food sovereignty. This paper explores how farmers and government officials could exercise their principled intentions within an arbitrary colonial regime, it contextualizes an ongoing economic order and variegated land occupations in Puerto Rico, and proposes strategies for ongoing land use negotiations.
Recommended Citation
Lopez Villamil, Carmen, "Litigating Landlessness: The U.S. Department of the Interior and First Circuit Court’s Appropriations of Self-governance and Socialism in Puerto Rico, 1934-52" (2025). Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections. 36.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/mssa_collections/36
This Article is Open Access