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The Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration: New Deal Public Works, Modernization, and Colonial Reform

Online ISBN:
9781683404682
Print ISBN:
9781683404132
Publisher:
University Press of Florida
Book

The Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration: New Deal Public Works, Modernization, and Colonial Reform

Geoff G. Burrows
Geoff G. Burrows

historian of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States

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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
30 April 2024
Online ISBN:
9781683404682
Print ISBN:
9781683404132
Publisher:
University Press of Florida

Abstract

This book considers the history and legacy of Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA), the most important New Deal agency to operate in Puerto Rico and the largest established for any of the U.S. territories. Created by Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, the PRRA was both an immediate relief and a long-term recovery program. While providing hurricane and disaster relief from two major hurricanes and the economic effects of the Great Depression, the PRRA also implemented economic modernization and colonial reform plans that precipitated the island’s transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. On some levels, the agency was characteristic of other Second New Deal initiatives. As a locally run federal agency operating in a Caribbean colony of the United States, however, the PRRA was quite distinct from any other New Deal agency. In providing the first institutional history of the agency and its focus on public works and infrastructure construction, this book also engages with questions about how New Deal agendas in urbanization, rural electrification, and the construction of a new public health infrastructure refashioned U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico, shaped the global impact of the New Deal, and indirectly contributed to the island’s current debt crisis. Despite the voluminous literature on the Franklin Roosevelt administration and New Deal programs, there has yet been little analysis of the PRRA by historians of the United States, the Caribbean, or Puerto Rico.

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