In the 20 years after World War II , thousands of Puerto Rican boarded planes to the United States, which is known as the "Great Migration" of the island. Many farm workers who rushed to the north to help harvest the mainland were transported by modified military cargo planes, and wooden benches or lawn chairs fixed to the floor were installed on the planes. The vast majority of immigrants on the island have bought tickets for a six-hour commercial flight to New York, believing that a good job and a better life are waiting for them and their families.
Although some agricultural workers were eventually attracted to cities near farm operations, about 85% of the island's post-war population was immigrants. They are citizens from U.S. territory and settled in New York City, according to the Puerto Rico Research Center of New York City. From the 1940s to the mid-1960s, a large influx of immigrants led to the city's population of Puerto Rico's , from 70,000 to nearly 900,000.
This is part of a coordinated plan between the United States and Puerto Rico governments, hoping to alleviate the labor shortage in the post-war mainland while working to alleviate the extreme poverty of in the region.
After World War II , this growing metropolis needed more workers, while farms in the northeast and midwest also needed labor. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico cannot fully feed its population. The island's economic recovery plan "Guiding Action" focuses on the shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy, leaving many workers under silence. What are the solutions to these two problems? Actively promote immigration and force one-third of the population to head north. "To achieve all this, immigration was encouraged to implement sterilization in Puerto Rico to limit the size of the family," said Virginia Coroll, a historian and professor at Brooklyn College, New York City, whose author, from Colonials to Community: History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. "And the United States, especially New York, began to provide job opportunities." The impact of implementing "guidance"
Puerto Rico became American territory after the Spanish-American War in 1898, when Spain ceded the island to the winning United States. But in the first few decades of the 20th century, Puerto Ricans' lives began to deteriorate after American sugar companies bought farmland on which local residents depended for their livelihoods. Instead, they began to grow almost entirely the cash crop sugarcane used to export to the U.S. market.
Islanders not only lost their local food sources. Because sugarcane cultivation has a four-month off-season, it is despised as the "dead season", and workers' wages have dropped sharply. The family fell into even more cruel poverty.
Puerto Rico's first elected governor, Louis Munoz Martin , keenly aware of the challenges workers face in a single cash crop, gave Puerto Rico a federal political status in the 1948 campaign, which happened in 1952. With the help and approval of the United States, he developed a framework for “guided action” that aims to help improve Puerto Rican lives.
For a while, it was an exciting success. As the agricultural-based economy transformed into a modern industrial economy, the overall living standards in Puerto Rico improved. Tempting generous tax benefits and new cheap labor, American companies have opened hundreds of factories on the island to produce everything from textiles, clothing, to petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. According to Koror, from 1954 to 1964, per capita income doubled, life expectancy increased by 10 years, enrollment increased significantly, and birth rate fell by 5%.
Recruitment: Farm workers and female seamstress
June 1, 1950: Puerto Rican immigrant farm workers boarded a special plane to the United States and arrived at the Michigan beet fields before the July 20 deadline. This is part of the so-called "Operation Farm Lift" and is one of dozens of charter flights carrying thousands of Puerto Rican workers. Unfortunately, a few days later, one of the planes crashed off the North Carolina coast, killing half of the passengers.
However, with the development of the tourism economy, new factories cannot create enough jobs for everyone. The great migration has become a safety valve to relieve stress.
About 20,000 farm workers employed as contract workers travel to parts of the northeast and midwest. The government launched an intensive campaign, promising wage increases, inspiring thousands of people to leave the countryside, head to the island towns and then fly to the north every year. The Puerto Rico Government has actively promoted this model of migration by building its air transport infrastructure, strengthening English education in schools, and promoting agricultural labor contracts with the mainland. Some immigrants traveled alone to try their luck and sent their money home; others went and sent someone to call their families.
Puerto Rico's experienced needleworkers made clothing during World War I to fight the German blockade of linen and clothing, which was particularly popular during the Great Migration. Before and during World War II, many seamstresses working independently became the backbone of the island's second largest industry. After 1945, new textile mills in the bustling garment districts of Puerto Rico and New York were eager to find their labor.
In New York City, Puerto Ricans have developed their communities. Small grocery stores and shaved ice vendors suddenly appeared in the community, now packed with newcomers working in factories, docks and clothing areas. Manhattan's Hispanic Harlem becomes the business, entertainment and political center of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rican families also lived in a dilapidated low-rent house called Loisaida in the Lower East Side, from which Germans, Italians and Eastern European Jews had moved.
Population control and discrimination
In the process of helping Puerto Rico achieve economic recovery, there have been some potential changes in the pressure women are under. Economic development officials in the United States and Puerto Rico accused the "overpopulation" of causing extreme poverty on the island. The social and health movement in media, schools and birth control clinics emphasizes that having only two children and sticking to work is a path to the middle class.
Postpartum sterilization, known as "la operación" or "surgery", was legal, frequent, and strongly encouraged in the decades after the war. Critics say poor, uneducated Puerto Rican women were used as guinea pigs in the first large-scale human trial of oral contraceptives in the 1950s.
In New York, the city's political class and media were caught in an increasingly fierce struggle against apartheid and discrimination, and they focused their attention on the "Puerto Rico issue." In 1948, New York Mirror columnists Lee Mortimer and Jack Wright condemned the rough farmers who "have congenital tropical diseases" as "locust plagues", echoing the views of the city's elite. They declared that Puerto Ricans “have no technology, no education, no English, and almost impossible to integrate into this active city of stone and steel.”
In the 1960s, the civil rights movement loudly called for racial and social justice, giving birth to a new generation of “New Yorkers” who became a new force in activism. In 1964, about 1,800 Puerto Ricans protested on Brooklyn Bridge , demanding a better education for their children.
The Young Lords, who transformed from street gangs into civil and human rights organizations, launched a mass education campaign in the 1969 "Garbage Offensive" to promote community power and burn garbage on the streets in protest against El Barrio's failure to collect garbage.
, Hunter College Assistant Director of Development and External Relations at the Puerto Rico Research Center, said: "All of these kids are questioning the situation of our society in the United States, and they are starting to take a more positive and confident attitude to face the situation they are facing."
, Wagus Ramos added: "They asked, 'Why are we so hated? Why are we so poor?' They said: 'No. We won't accept these conditions.'"
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