Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration
The Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA) was one of the alphabet agencies of the New Deal established by the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Created on May 28,1935, the PRRA's first directors included American journalist and politician Ernest Gruening and Puerto Rican educator and politician Carlos Chardón. Falling under the authority of the Department of the Interior and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) its primary goals were to establish long term economic stability in Puerto Rico during the Great Depression through job creation, land distribution, public works projects, as well as environmental and health initiatives. The agency was officially liquidated on February 15, 1955.
By time the Great Depression arrived in 1929, working class Puerto Rican citizens, especially rural agricultural laborers, were already facing economic hardship. After Spain ceded sovreignty of Puerto Rico to the United States following the 1898 Spanish-American War the island increasingly became economically dependent on the United States through an unbalanced colonial trade relationship that favored U.S. sugar, tobacco, coffee, and fruit companies. By 1910, four U.S. sugar corporations held near monopolies on sugar cane cultivation and sugar production had multiplied by 331%. By 1921, the United States Tobacco Trust also held monopolies on cigarette and cigar markets in Puerto Rico, giving them an economic advantage over small scale tobacco farmers. While American companies expanded and profited, sugarcane and other agricultural workers saw little to no change in wages between 1898 and 1920 and Puerto Rican laborers generally experienced a poor standard of living. Malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of sewage systems, and dangerous working and living conditions led to high mortality rates due to workplace accidents and diseases such as dysentery, diarrhea, malaria, and tuberculosis.
In the years immediately preceding the depression, negative developments in the island and world economies perpetuated an unsustainable cycle of subsistence for many Puerto Rican workers. The 1920s brought a dramatic drop in Puerto Rico’s two primary exports, raw sugar and coffee, due to a devastating hurricane in 1928 and the plummeting demand from global markets in the latter half of the decade. 1930 unemployment on the island was roughly 36% and by 1933 Puerto Rico’s per capita income dropped 30% (by comparison, unemployment in the United States in 1930 was approximately 8% reaching a height of 25% in 1933). Average wages for employed agricultural workers in 1931 ranged from roughly 23 cents per day for children, 25 cents per day for women, 60 cents per day for men, a number that varied due to the seasonal nature of their employment. Since the majority of Puerto Rico’s arable land was reserved for export crops, 98% of Puerto Rican family income was spent on food and other necessities, which were imported from the United States and sold at inflated prices. In 1930, agricultural exports to U.S. comprised 94.3% of total Puerto Rican exports and food accounted for roughly 33% of total imports by 1935.
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