Land Reform in Puerto Rico: Modernizing the Colonial State, 1941 – 1969

Ismael García-Colón’s Land Reform in Puerto Rico: Modernizing the Colonial State, 1941 – 1969 is a generally well-written and cogent historical anthropology of Puerto Rico’s transformation from a primarily agricultural to urban society. García-Colón examines in detail the Popular Democratic Party’s (PPD) milestone Land Reform Law of 1941 and the Agrarian Resettlement Program (ARP) that it institutionalized for decades thereafter. In particular, he focuses on the finca that became Parcelas Gándaras, a resettlement community in Cidra, a municipality located in the east central highlands near San Juan, where García-Colón grew up. Drawing on extensive archival and secondary research, ethnographies, and discourse analysis, García-Colón argues that the ARP served a dual purpose: It was at once an effort to modernize Puerto Rico along welfare capitalist lines inspired by the New Deal, and a means to perpetuate the PPD’s long-term political hegemony. By distributing land, the PPD sought to make “agregado/as...