Book contents
- Agrarian Puerto Rico
- Agrarian Puerto Rico
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Maps
- Introduction
- 1 The Myth of the Disappeared Legion of Proprietors
- 2 The Coffee Economy
- 3 The Sugar Industry
- 4 The Tobacco Industry
- 5 Economic Transformation and Demographic Change
- 6 Land Concentration/Fragmentation Using Land Tax Records
- 7 Rates of Landownership in Rural Puerto Rico
- 8 Land Tenure Patterns Using Census Data
- 9 Land Use
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - The Myth of the Disappeared Legion of Proprietors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2020
- Agrarian Puerto Rico
- Agrarian Puerto Rico
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Maps
- Introduction
- 1 The Myth of the Disappeared Legion of Proprietors
- 2 The Coffee Economy
- 3 The Sugar Industry
- 4 The Tobacco Industry
- 5 Economic Transformation and Demographic Change
- 6 Land Concentration/Fragmentation Using Land Tax Records
- 7 Rates of Landownership in Rural Puerto Rico
- 8 Land Tenure Patterns Using Census Data
- 9 Land Use
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
During the crisis of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Pedro Albizu Campos, the president of Puerto Rico’s Nationalist Party, repeatedly stated that the island had to “reconstitute the legion of proprietors that existed before 1898.” Puerto Rico’s export sector was heavily dependent on sugar, and the sugar-producing zones of the island were characterized by great social inequalities. The concentration of landownership was acute and was paralleled by large-scale rural landlessness and the proletarianization of workers. What stands out in Albizu’s denunciations of US colonialism is not the very real social and economic inequalities of the 1930s, but the assertion that these began in 1898, the year the United States invaded Puerto Rico.
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- Information
- Agrarian Puerto RicoReconsidering Rural Economy and Society, 1899–1940, pp. 15 - 40Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020