Puerto Rican Labor History 1898-1934: Revolutionary Ideas

Carlos Sanabria, Puerto Rican Labor History 1898-1934: Revolutionary Ideas and Reformist Politics (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 162 pages, $90.00.

Like other colonized nations Puerto Rico has a highly contested labor history. In this short but informative and detailed account, Carlos Sanabria, a former professor of Caribbean Studies at the City University of New York, helps explain why. Organized into five thematic chapters, the book traces the evolution of the island’s organized labor movement from the American Spanish War of 1898, when the United States took control of the island, to the Great Depression of the early 1930s, when the American economic crisis spearheaded new labor upheavals and realignments.

The effects of U.S. colonial domination on Puerto Rican society and the accompanying capitalist transformation of the island’s rural economy—particularly the spectacular expansion of sugarcane production and the development of tobacco and needlework industries —have been well documented. Scholars have also fully studied the rapid proletarianization of the rural and urban population that followed the U.S. occupation and the impact of American influence on the development of the Puerto Rican labor movement. Unlike other labor organizations of the same period, Puerto Rico’s most important union, the Federación Libre de los Trabajadores de Puerto Rico (FLT), established in 1899, embraced a fundamentally reformist outlook, focusing on moderate trade union demands, participation in electoral politics and collaboration with the United States. Indeed, as early as 1901 the FLT became an affiliate of the main U.S. conservative trade union, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which provided political, financial, and organizational support to the island’s main labor leaders, including substantial salaries for their organizing efforts. Scholars have tended to explain this coalition in light of the island’s colonial relationship to the United States, and have, for the most part, interpreted the support of the AFL and its president, Samuel Gompers, of Puerto Rican workers, as a way to ‘Americanize’ Puerto Rican labor attitudes, structures and methods.

However, as Sanabria recounts in his introduction, starting from the late 1970s social historians such as Gervasio Garcia, Angel Quintero Rivera, Miles Galvin, and Francisco Scarano began to challenge this prevalent view, bringing attention to Puerto Rican workers’ own agency and independence of action. According to these revisionist studies, organized labor in Puerto Rico did not subserviently follow the political dictates of the AFL but pursued decisions outlined by its own leaders according to distinct political, social and economic circumstances as they evolved on the island. In contrast to previous interpretations, these works also characterized the early Puerto Rican labor movement as more radical and militant than had been assumed.

Sanabria takes a moderating position in this debate, considering the two interpretations outlined above as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. He posits that “European socialist and anarchist ideas influenced the labor movement in Puerto Rico from its inception but that reformist policies became dominant.” (2) Using hitherto neglected Spanish language archival sources, Sanabria effectively reconstructs the political culture of the early labor leaders, confirming their initial radical bent. As the second and third chapters of his book detail, they produced a wide body of written works, including theoretical treaties and political pamphlets, as well as novels, plays and poems that articulated a vision of an alternative and egalitarian society based on socialist and anarchist ideas. Labor leaders such as Ramon Romero Rosa, Manuel Francisco Rojas, Juan Marcano and the well-known anarchist and feminist Luisa Capetillo, among others, clearly denounced capitalism and advocated the overthrow of private property, participation in general strikes and other forms of direct action as a way to achieving these goals. Furthermore, these writers also stressed the importance of educating workers and raising workers’ class consciousness, bringing particular attention to the exploitation and oppression of women. These messages were perhaps most effectively conveyed via recitals and short didactic allegorical plays that dramatized the workers’ social and economic conditions and the eventual triumph of socialism.

But according to Sanabria, these radical positions coexisted with those of more moderate labor leaders who focused on specific and immediate trade union demands for better wages and working conditions, participation in electoral politics and collaboration with American allies. This orientation, he suggests, eventually became predominant in the course of the twentieth century, as evidenced by the official programs of the Federación Libre and its political wing, the Partido Socialista (established in 1915), which are the focus of chapter four. A review of the documents and proceedings of the FLT and PS conventions indicate that, while anarchist and socialist ideas informed their critique of capitalist society, they clearly embraced a reformist political program to be achieved within legal bounds. While Sanabria emphasizes a genuine reformist tendency within the FLT from very early on, he also concedes that Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor played a critical role in consolidating the moderate position.

The fifth and last chapter of his book provides a detailed analysis of American labor influence on, and support of, the Federación Libre based on Gompers’ correspondence with Puerto Rican labor leaders and other official labor documents. The AFL provided crucial financial support to the FLT, paying for a full time labor organizer, Santiago Iglesias Pantín (one of the highest paid organizers for the AFL between 1901-1929), and other part time organizers, and offering financial assistance to FLT members in the form of strike, unemployment, sickness and death benefits. For their part, FLT leaders, such as Iglesias and Eduardo Conde, strategically sought the support of the socialist and trade unions movement in the United States, believing that a close association with a liberal democratic and economically advanced nation would help bolster their demands, safeguard democratic rights for their people, and strengthen their organizational position. Sanabria tells us that Gompers made two extensive visits to Puerto Rico at the invitation of the AFT leaderships, and during both trips he “expressed a high regard for the Puerto Rican people and a genuine concern regarding the plight of the men, women and children of the island,” promising “to do everything in his power” to help improve their conditions. “For the next twenty years—writes Sanabria—he lived up to the pledge” (103).

Sanabria notes that Gompers also “campaigned tirelessly for the extension of U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans” (108) and “sought to guarantee their voting rights without any restrictions” (111). But how do we reconcile his concern for Puerto Rican “brothers and sisters” with his well- known nativist and imperialistic stances? And why did the AFL provide help and support to Puerto Rican labor organizers, when at home they openly discriminated against, and excluded unskilled workers (such as the Italians, Chinese and nearly all blacks) from craft unions for moral, cultural and racial reasons? Whatever genuine compassion Gompers may have felt for Puerto Ricans, as a strong advocate of his era’s “business culture” he also sought to forge closer ties with progressive corporate leaders willing to negotiate better contracts with unions in order to stabilize working relations and to protect the political and economic interests of its members in the United States (the AFL policies he pioneered were known as “business unionism”). A celebratory conviction of the superiority of the United States, particularly the democratic republicanism embedded in the free-enterprise mentality, likely underpinned Gompers’ desire to help out Puerto-Rican workers, in the hope also perhaps that improved conditions in the island would prevent a massive exodus to the mainland.

Another question that this book raised for me is whether the emergence of syndicalism and the creation of the Industrial Workers of the World, the revolutionary union founded in the United States in 1905 in opposition to the AFL exclusionary and reformist policies, had any echo on the Puerto Rican labor movement. In both the United States and Europe, syndicalist theories, based on the ideas of Georges Sorel in France and Arturo Labriola in Italy, who stressed working class direct action, general strikes, and revolutionary struggle, found large support among disaffected industrial workers and intensified the ideological split between revolutionary and reformist socialists. Was there no debate on this among Puerto Rico labor leaders?

This ambitious synthesis might also have been further enriched had the author proceeded one step further to consider the transnational dimension of Puerto Rican organized labor. Puerto-Rican migration to the United States began after World War II, but the reasons for the massive exodus that took place in the post-war period (by 1955, nearly 700,000 Puerto Ricans had arrived), lay in the accommodationist policies of the FLT, in addition, of course, to American colonial exploitation. While a discussion of the Puerto Rican labor movement in the United States would have been outside the immediate scope of the book, a reflection on the transnational connections between Puerto Rican early labor leaders and later activists in the United States would have made the importance of this study more apparent.

Significantly, the book opens with the story of the sugarcane strike of 1934, in which enraged workers rejected a contract signed by the FLT that favored the sugar corporations, setting the fields ablaze in protest. This strike represented an important turning point for the Puerto Rican labor movement: feeling betrayed, sugarcane workers repudiated their union leaders and gave rise to a new labor organization, the Asociación de Trabajadores de Puerto Rico (ATPR) which advocated not only social and economic justice but also political independence. As Sanabria notes, the unification of the labor movement and the independence struggle never materialized: the strike was quickly suppressed by the sugar corporations with the help of the island government and, lacking resources and experienced leaders, the ATPR failed to develop into an effective organization. Its failure notwithstanding, the sugarcane workers’ strike signified the widening divide that had developed between the leadership of the labor movement and its rank-and-file workers. It also, and perhaps most importantly, underscored the lasting legacy of U.S. colonialism in shaping the island’s economic choices and future, often with terrible consequences for Puerto Ricans. In fact, despite the belief of early labor leaders that a close association with the United States would benefit workers, American domination of the island, as Sanabria acknowledges in his conclusion, “had grave consequences for all social classes.” (129)

By placing the island’s organized labor movement in a broad cultural, social and political context, Sanabria ultimately provides a more nuanced history of Puerto Rican labor history, its main leaders and its most important institutions. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in Puerto Rican history and labor studies.

Marcella Bencivenni
Hostos Community College/CUNY
mbencivenni@hostos.cuny.edu