In March 1951, the Aguadilla District Court sentenced a 22-year-old white agricultural laborer from nearby Isabela named José Sánchez Rodríguez to 12 to 18 months at Puerto Rico's Oso Blanco (officially, the Insular Penitentiary), for a “crime against nature.”Footnote 1 Sánchez Rodríguez had sexually assaulted an “insane” boy, aggressively “ripping” the child's clothing in the act. Legal proceedings, however, revealed that the circumstances of the crime went beyond the purported unsavory encounter between the future convict and his victim. In fact, the accused man claimed that his rival, Ludovino López Mercado, played a role in fabricating the egregious charge against him. The two men had recently brawled over a woman, with Sánchez Rodríguez stabbing and almost killing his competitor in the process.Footnote 2 The penitentiary Classification and Treatment Board officials who studied Sánchez Rodríguez displayed as much interest in his rural upbringing, socioeconomic history, and mental health as they did in the more dramatic aspects of his case. In the “personal data” portion of their report, they stressed that he was born, raised, and on the eve of arrest still lived in the neighborhood of Arenales Altos, a “healthy rural environment” on the doorstep of Puerto Rico's mountainous interior. Regardless of the pristine setting Sánchez Rodríguez's family inhabited, they faced numerous economic challenges. Poverty prompted them to send young José off to work at age seven. He never attended school, and years later entered the penitentiary illiterate.Footnote 3
Spanish psychiatrist Rafael Troyano de los Ríos, who arrived in Puerto Rico by way of the Dominican Republic in 1945, went a step further and literally branded Sánchez Rodríguez a “typical jíbaro”—the iconic, light-skinned, mountain peasant who over time has been cast by different constituencies as a symbol of genuine Puerto Rican-ness.Footnote 4 Specific physical and cultural traits confirmed Sánchez Rodríguez's jíbaridad. Classification and Treatment experts documented that, growing up, the convict had worked in agriculture alongside his father. He sang and played the guitar and cuatro, the national instrument of Puerto Rico associated with jíbaros. Further, he was undernourished, “quiet,” “withdrawn,” attracted to vices like drinking and smoking, and came from a large family (seven siblings).Footnote 5 These cumulative psychiatric and classificatory descriptions encapsulate how penitentiary health practitioners routinely narrated jíbaro convicts at the time. They often referred to agriculture, geography, musicality, and certain aspects of character, some of which defined the jíbaro as noble (humble, hardworking, and so on) while others denigrated him (feeble-minded, hot-tempered, and others).
Troyano did not find a scintilla of psychosis or psychopathology in Sánchez Rodríguez's family history. A psychological assessment of the inmate—ascertained through a “drawing” exam—revealed his “intelligence” was “near average.”Footnote 6 University of Puerto Rico psychologist Juan B. Picart, who administered the test, observed the prisoner's “good disposition, interest, and accuracy.”Footnote 7 Picart's findings helped convince Classification and Treatment Board officials that this particular jíbaro was a “minimum-security” risk and thus “trustworthy” and “rehabilitable.” They believed Sánchez Rodríguez would benefit from primary education and an agricultural labor assignment at the Guavate penal encampment near Cayey. Yet, an ominous cloud loomed over the inmate. Oso Blanco health professionals viewed him as “irascible.”Footnote 8 His proclivity for explosive anger concerned them, so they stressed his need for socialization, guidance, and a labor role that suited him. Otherwise, the results would be disastrous not only for Sánchez Rodríguez, but for society, especially if they were duplicated by other jíbaros and arose in conjunction with radical nationalist violence.
Oso Blanco psychiatrists and social health personnel exhibited what Ann Zulawski has called “tortured thinking.” In Puerto Rico, health experts wanted jíbaro and other rural convicts to abandon disagreeable habits in favor of civilized etiquette, but at the same time restricted their rehabilitative options. Although penitentiary health officials contributed to a rehabilitation program designed to ameliorate the historically tragic situation of jíbaros and similarly positioned prisoners, they blamed rural nescience for the inability of these people to quickly earn (re)entry into modern society.Footnote 9 They did not label all rural inmates jíbaros, as in the case of Sánchez Rodríguez, but they did consistently underscore bodily and psychological traits that were associated with jíbaridad. The same or related traits were applied to jornaleros (day laborers), campesinos (peasant farmers or rural people), and agregados (those attached to someone else's land), terms that functioned as synonyms for jíbaro in populist social science and social work circles in the mid twentieth century.
Using criminal-legal records and other sources, I argue in this article that mental and social health experts used the penitentiary as a laboratory to pinpoint the perceived inner and interactive deficiencies of jíbaro inmates. Psychosocially pathologizing the jíbaro was an exercise in domesticating a racialized, potentially seditious population for the purposes of long-term populist constituency-building. Indeed, Oso Blanco health practitioners hoped to salvage jíbaro convicts and redirect them toward full citizenship. For the professionals involved, most if not all rural prisoners were somehow linked to the essentialized trope of the docile jíbaro. As antiquated understandings of the jíbaro increasingly appeared too simplistic in the mid twentieth century, however, new forces and realities obligated health experts to stretch the term and the jíbaridad ideology it helped spawn in novel directions. The psychiatrists and others diagnosing rural folk behind bars eschewed the terminology in favor of the modern science they sought to develop, but they also became foot soldiers of the socio-scientific reformist creed of the Partido Popular Democrático (Popular Democratic Party, or PPD). Even when the term ‘jíbaro’ was not splashed over everything they produced, they were often attuned to the social goals of the PPD as these pertained to Puerto Rico's rural population. However, despite their biases, they attempted to prepare incarcerated jíbaros for a promising civic future.
The mental and social dissection of jíbaro convicts in Oso Blanco between the 1930s and early 1950s preceded their populist folklorization in museums and elsewhere in the mid 1950s and beyond. Corralling the jíbaro body and consciousness behind bars in this way, and studying and (re)imagining him there, allowed health professionals to standardize knowledge about jíbaro minds and behaviors. Psychiatry, social science, and social work served as tools for the elaboration of the jíbaro's inner and social self, which complemented the nascent populist political program. This collective enterprise foreshadowed and contributed to subsequent and concurrent research on the jíbaro by sociologists and anthropologists. Armed with these insights on the eve of industrialization, modern life, and, later in the period, a new political pact with the United States (commonwealth status), populists and their partners not only co-opted the jíbaro icon, but also they together groomed it for universal distribution and consumption.
History of Prisons in Puerto Rico
During the Spanish period, colonial authorities struggled to manage Puerto Rico's agrarian labor problem, and by extension, the jíbaro population. Like those in many Latin American societies in the nineteenth century, officials in the Puerto Rican archipelago sought to fuse jíbaros, ex-slaves, and other marginalized groups to the colonial-national body through the prison system. With the decline of slavery and other coercive labor regimes, and the growth of markets, the penitentiary offered a “scientific” and “humane” alternative for cultivating social discipline, one that could integrate stubborn populations into new national bodies.Footnote 10 However, Puerto Rico and neighboring Caribbean societies were among the last in the Americas to erect modern penitentiaries.
Puerto Rico's first penitentiary, La Princesa, was built in the 1830s and expanded in 1879.Footnote 11 It never lived up to the reform hype of the era, and by the turn of the twentieth century La Princesa had fallen into decay. With the transition to American rule, US authorities and their creole counterparts hoped to install a modern penitentiary as early as 1902, but funds were not allocated until 1923.Footnote 12 Oso Blanco, a prison with a marked pedagogic aspiration, was finally inaugurated in May 1933.Footnote 13 The institution's objective, scientific apparatus, and self-sufficiency stood out to observers when it opened.Footnote 14 Oso Blanco administrators understood the penitentiary as a site of “physical and mental regeneration” where “healthy moral habits” could be instilled in offenders. To achieve these interrelated goals and to facilitate their return to society as “useful citizens,” they would expose prisoners to multiple strands of science and education.Footnote 15
Once completed, Oso Blanco formed part of a tri-institutional complex—a city of science—that also included a mental hospital and a tuberculosis sanatorium.Footnote 16 Health and agricultural enterprise permeated the everyday routines of these institutions. The penitentiary sat on 112 acres, of which 70 were dedicated to the raising of fruit trees, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, cassava, taro, plantains, corn, beans, and peas.Footnote 17 Oso Blanco's self-subsistence model spread in the late 1940s when the government established agricultural penal colonies in Cayey, Mayagüez, and Río Grande. By the 1950s, other encampments emerged in Arecibo, Jayuya, and Naguabo.Footnote 18 These camps were designed for prisoners familiar with agrarian labor, which is suggestive of the preponderance of rural convicts in the prison system. Mid-century incarceration in Puerto Rico thus provides a unique window into the long history of the main island's notionally white jíbaro tradition, a tradition epitomized by artist Ramón Frade's 1905 “Our Daily Bread,” a painting that depicts an older, barefoot, despondent, yet proud jíbaro carrying a bushel of plantains in times of privation.
The idea that agricultural and other forms of labor served a therapeutic function and could dignify convicts guided Puerto Rican penitentiary science between the 1930s and mid-century.Footnote 19 Oso Blanco health experts underscored rural dynamics and recommended agricultural labor therapy in their assessments of inmates. The entanglement of psychiatry, psychology, social work, and agriculture in the classification and treatment process collapsed different scientific and sociocultural worlds into shared views on health principles and a common health experience; in this context, jíbaro prisoners were both laborers and “abnormal” objects requiring care. The infrastructure linking diverse academic disciplines to the well-being of individual jíbaro convicts and the larger colonial-national body did not fully congeal until after 1945, however, when social reform approaches to prison rehabilitation began to substantively entangle these epistemologies. Oso Blanco's Classification and Treatment Board and Puerto Rico's Parole Board, which were administered by populist-leaning justice officials, health professionals, social workers, and educators, among others, intensified and normalized the relationship between science, pedagogy, and rehabilitation.Footnote 20
The colonial-populist Partido Popular Democrático depended on penitentiary science to excavate the modern predicament and sensibilities of the jíbaro and to remanufacture the term. By “colonial-populist” I mean a blended concept and practice of government that is inspired by policies and forms of politics that one might otherwise assume to be mutually exclusive. Many mid-century Puerto Rican populists claimed to have a social justice-oriented vision and agenda, for example, but persecuted their competitors and political detractors in the mold of colonial-imperial powers. I use the term ‘populist’ to underscore how the PPD appealed to and engaged ordinary people (specifically, incarcerated rural people), while acknowledging that their political project developed within colonial constraints. The playing out of the colonial-populist conflict occurred against a backdrop of renewed political hostility between populists and radical nationalists.Footnote 21 Pathologizing the jíbaro anew in a psycho-socio-scientific light exposed his mental instability, emotional fluctuation, and social ineptness, thereby justifying intervention to improve him.Footnote 22 There have been key studies about Puerto Rican psychiatry and related sciences across historic periods, especially vis-à-vis Spanish colonialism and the political turbulence of the 1950s, but few scholars have explored how jíbaros were ensnared by populist mental and social health enterprise at Oso Blanco.Footnote 23
Redeeming prisoners for roles in civic life involved diagnosing their mental health, quantifying their intelligence, and having them participate in an interactional culture of care that would boost their individual and interpersonal skill sets. These practices aimed to determine whether inmates were corrigible, and whether they could be reintegrated into society on the terms of the ruling PPD. Penitentiary mental and social health experts, especially, contributed to the production and normalization of representations of pathological jíbaros, an internally differentiated group that comprised a large portion of Oso Blanco's population around mid-century. Health professionals drew their insights from jíbaro raw material, even as they constrained and rechanneled jíbaro voices for their own purposes.
The Literary/Political Creation of the Jíbaro
The meanings associated with the jíbaro have changed over time. According to Francisco Scarano, jíbaro was the name given to Puerto Rico's mountain peasants. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the archipelago's elites used the term to describe the rural poor. ‘Jíbaro’ equated “a local ethnicity with a mythologized peasant type,” Scarano maintains. Later, an ascending creole political class elevated the jíbaro to a national icon. Creole elites ambiguously represented jíbaros as salt of the earth and the truest indicator of Puerto Rican identity, but also as rustic men incapable of manifesting “a culturally informed proto-nationalist consciousness.” To distinguish themselves from Spanish and competing elites within Puerto Rico, and at the same time preserve the outlines of colonialism, liberal creoles strategically identified with “the peasant masses.” Before donning the jíbaro as a virtuous mask in their conflicts with fellow elites, however, rationalistic creoles interpreted the tactics of peasant survival as “barbaric, conducive only to vagrancy, crime, and political paralysis.”Footnote 24
This conflictual understanding of jíbaros also shaped the perceptions and political aspirations of late nineteenth-century creole liberals. Like their predecessors, these “masqueraders” used the jíbaro to define the boundaries of their ethnicity and power. They sympathized with the jíbaro, “supported him in his struggles and misfortunes,” and recognized his “moral value,” Scarano writes, yet, they concurrently understood him through “racist sociological prisms.” Intellectuals like Salvador Brau, Francisco del Valle Atiles, and Manuel Zeno Gandía, among others, decried those who “accused jíbaros of immorality and sloth when they themselves exhibited analogous conduct.” Their contributions to the “jíbaro school of thought” tried to capture the racial, anatomical, physiological, and medical features of the peasant masses, and identified education and public health as ways to redeem, civilize, and incorporate them into the body politic.Footnote 25
As jíbaridad discourse assumed form, the Spanish colonial state brought jíbaros into its legal orbit. The increased activity and scope in commercial enterprise and public works in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expedited this process. According to Kelvin Santiago-Valles, the miniscule labor pool available to landowners and the colonial government presented a major problem. Few laborers were willing to work in fields they did not own, or on fortifications and roads that did not benefit them. Land was still so readily available to non-elites that it became difficult to persuade free peasants to work for anyone but themselves. However, as elite landholdings and the colonial state grew, jíbaros who had been occupying the frontier or unregistered lands for generations were made subject to anti-vagrancy laws and corrections. They were compelled to work for elites in exchange for meager wages and subsistence opportunities, or otherwise serve prison sentences at hard labor. Colonial authorities complemented servile peasant labor with the expansion of slavery and the introduction of slave codes and policing measures designed to regulate sugar production and other profitable activities.Footnote 26
In response to the evolving socioeconomics of the nineteenth century, slaves, peasants, artisans, and other marginalized people fled involuntary labor regimes and mounting debts. Once beyond the reach of landowners and the colonial state, these groups reconstituted themselves as independent by returning to subsistence farming and observing criminalized practices (nomadism, clandestine rum production, cockfights, land squatting, and petty theft). The rural majorities also slowed labor extraction by working at a snail's pace. Such recalcitrance led to the pathologization of rural conduct. Rural people were increasingly viewed as a “depository of idleness and vice” and as “wicked, backward persons with evil, thievish, somewhat sadistic tendencies,” Santiago-Valles writes.Footnote 27 As early as the late eighteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth, Spanish colonial authorities were delineating a jíbaro mentality. They held that carceral way stations, hard labor, penal torture, and modern prisons would help extirpate the “rough and wild habits” of Puerto Rico's overlapping peasantries, whose rusticity and desire to be free of assimilation disturbed Spanish, and later, US officials.Footnote 28
The criminalization of jíbaro survival and recreational practices persisted well into the twentieth century. Like their Spanish colonial forerunners, US colonial officials and their creole partners relied on signification systems to construct the laboring poor as wayward subjects requiring subordination, sociocultural engineering, and medical treatment.Footnote 29 These contrived systems became more laboratorial as the century unfolded. Meanwhile, the perplexing ambiguity of the jíbaro continued to shift between epistemic lenses. For some, Scarano asserts, jíbaros were “small and gaunt, but strong; for others frail and anemic, this last word acquiring a central meaning in turn of the century debates.”Footnote 30
In the early twentieth century US authorities relied on disease and biomedicine to regulate the Puerto Rican colony. Nicole Trujillo-Pagán shows how US colonial agents deployed their knowledge of hookworm and medical science to discursively incarcerate jíbaros. Whereas in the nineteenth century creole physicians viewed jíbaros as victims of Spanish colonialism and considered their anemia “normative,” after 1898 they began to see them as the sinews of a national identity threatened by US hegemony. Economic crises (for example, a declining coffee industry), political instability, and natural disasters enabled the spread of US “salvation” projects, many of which, Scarano posits, sought to “whiten” jíbaros and convert them into a repository of “patriotic morality,” while continuing to demean them. These projects initially alternated between military, economic, and religious frames.Footnote 31
Jíbaros went from being salvageable peasants to potential agents of their own destiny, notwithstanding the “benevolent” tutelage of the United States.Footnote 32 This played out in several domains beyond biomedicine, including the military—a “proto-penal” institution that in Puerto Rico and other parts of Latin America foreshadowed the rise of the modern prison and the enlightened regulation of convict bodies.Footnote 33 To forge their own path, Harry Franqui-Rivera maintains, elites encouraged jíbaros to participate in the US armed forces. During World War I, they endeavored to mobilize peasant males, believing that the rigors of military training and service would make jíbaros men worthy of citizenship and self-rule in the eyes of the US metropole.Footnote 34 This belied what US officials thought earlier in the century: that Puerto Ricans were too small and frail to handle war, given their widespread anemia.
Social scientists, poets, writers, and other cultural elites also appropriated the jíbaro icon in the early twentieth century. Lillian Guerra asserts they constructed a national identity exalting jíbaro qualities in order to agglutinate Puerto Rico's elite and popular classes, while spurning jíbaro traits that contradicted their sanitized self-image. This construction of identity primarily responded to Americanization policies. Yet, Guerra finds that jíbaros were an internally diverse group as well. They developed class consciousness, but seldom contested how creole elites projected them. Moreover, the elite and popular classes shared gender and race ideas that reproduced asymmetrical power relations.Footnote 35
Puerto Rican educators concurrently developed ideas about national identity. Solsiree del Moral suggests that in the first half of the twentieth century teachers hoped to breach the “ignorance” and illiteracy of jíbaros by having their children attend modern rural schools. Teachers believed schools would transform peasant families and their social relations, and acclimate them to an ever-pervasive sugar-centric economy.Footnote 36 By the 1930s, Del Moral claims, the rhetoric of jíbaro regeneration in educational circles had come to be combined with a new vision for the responsibilities of an emerging activist state. Using Lázaro Cárdenas's post-revolutionary Mexican schools as a blueprint, Puerto Rican educators built a rural school curriculum intended not only to rescue and socialize the jíbaro, but to revolutionize him as well. Schools were thus key sites for post-Depression and post-natural disaster New Deal-era reconstruction efforts in the archipelago. The most famous of these were the Chardón Plan, the Puerto Rico Emergency Relief Administration (PRERA), and the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA).Footnote 37 Educators did not monopolize pedagogical ambitions and techniques within the big island's schools, however. Oso Blanco professionals harbored and deployed them as fervently as did their educational counterparts. Everyone involved in these rehabilitative efforts helped forge a brand of technocratic politics steeped in social reform that paved the way for the birth of the Partido Popular Democrático and its use of the jíbaro as a political icon.Footnote 38
The PPD and the Political Uses of the Jíbaro
In the mid twentieth century, Puerto Rican populists reimagined the jíbaro for the purposes of colonial nation-building. Dissidents of the Liberal and Union Parties and New Deal-era technocrats established the PPD, the Partido Popular Democrático, in 1938. The new party promoted reform-oriented policies both locally and in Washington DC (among them access to daily bread, modest land reform, and an autonomous relationship with the United States), but gradually became more centrist and even reactionary as populists monopolized political power, persecuted nationalists, enacted the commonwealth constitution, and tried to industrialize the main island economy.
As Emilio Pantojas-García pointed out several decades ago, the relationship between populism and the PPD around mid-century operated on at least two levels. The party's populist project represented “the alternative of a fraction of the colonial power bloc to the politico-economic crisis of the colonial system” and was “geared toward laying the basis for the restructuring of imperialist capitalism.”Footnote 39 The concerns of ordinary people were “articulated in its reformist project in a secondary or subordinate manner,” despite the fact that they were projected as the subject of the PPD's dominant interests in broader political discourse.Footnote 40 Educators, health and social scientists, social workers, US-based intellectuals, and others collaborated with governor Jesús T. Piñero, multiterm governor Luis Muñoz Marín, and key party figures like Antonio Fernós Isern and Teodoro Moscoso to make flesh the evolving vision of the PPD, which attempted to merge state-led development and representative democracy.Footnote 41
Just as populists hit their stride around mid-century, they were forced to contend with a resurgent nationalist movement. The Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico was founded in 1922 and sought independence from the United States. Nationalists emphasized the culture, language, and history that Puerto Ricans shared with Latin America to argue that their future lay with Ibero-, not Anglo-America. The party's selection of mixed-race attorney Pedro Albizu Campos as its president in 1930 changed the organization and its tactics. As nationalists became more assertive and openly advocated armed conflict to gain independence, the US-controlled government and its creole collaborators resorted to intimidation, repression, and persecution to deal with them. A series of violent episodes in the 1930s—namely unrest on the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras campus—claimed the lives of several nationalists. The retaliatory assassination of US-appointed police chief Francis E. Riggs led to the incarceration of Albizu Campos, Juan Antonio Corretjer, Clemente Soto Vélez, and other party figures and cadets. Party leaders were accused of attempting to overthrow the US government. For his alleged role in the conspiracy, Albizu Campos served 11 years in prison, mostly in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Facing health problems in 1947, he was released and returned to Puerto Rico. Within a short period, he and other nationalists (re)inserted themselves into Puerto Rican politics, especially the debates about ongoing US colonialism and pending commonwealth status.Footnote 42
Populists politically outmaneuvered nationalists in the decade that Albizu Campos was incarcerated on the US mainland. While nationalists had cultivated relationships with students, women, and workers who toiled for corporate monopolies, for instance, the PPD used performative and symbolic politics to win the political support of the jíbaro masses in the countryside. Jorge Duany has showcased how jíbaro essentialism became a populist folkloric trope in the 1950s. He contends that the jíbaro essence was collected and preserved through material cultural artifacts. Cultural nationalists active in the PPD used the jíbaro to represent and whiten the Puerto Rican people. They deployed the icon in nostalgic fashion and as a unifying symbol, which in turn had the effect of glossing over the archipelago's demographic and experiential diversity.Footnote 43
With the consolidation of PPD power in the 1940s and 1950s, however, the party no longer focused exclusively on revolutionizing jíbaros. Rather, they realized that jíbaros might have to be subdued, corralled, and improved. This meant constituting the jíbaro as a political actor, making him the center of PPD iconography, and shielding his “consciousness” from other potential political suitors.Footnote 44 Muñoz Marín and the PPD understood the importance of nurturing, monopolizing, and mobilizing their political base. There were two Puerto Ricos to consider in this vein: the elite, middle, and urban working classes, which mimicked one another and numbered some 100,000; and the mass of some 1.5 million jíbaros driven by a brew of ideas, habits, and values and known for their “creative neologisms.”Footnote 45
Thousands of politically impressionable jíbaros serving sentences for a variety of crimes against persons, property, and morality, ranging from assault and murder to theft and sex crimes, entered and exited Puerto Rico's prison system between the 1930s and mid-century. During this “age of criminal saturation,” more than half of all prisoners were consistently directed to agrarian day labor while incarcerated, implying their exposure to or reliance on such work before entering prison.Footnote 46 As authorities once again criminalized and pathologized jíbaros, they also had to confront the challenges posed by the nationalist movement. By the 1940s and 1950s, different intellectual currents intersected in the context of the prison, positioning nationalists to compete with populists there. Popular frustration with inept justice policies and penal administration created a window of opportunity for nationalists, but in general they failed to capitalize on it. The notion that jíbaros—the core constituency of the PPD and representative of a significant portion of the penitentiary populace—were vulnerable to political seduction no doubt helped convince PPD top brass to invest in rehabilitative corrections more than they had before.
In the mid twentieth century, populists imagined incarcerated jíbaros as an unlikely though potentially seditious group that would have to be directed to conform. Oso Blanco offered mental and social health professionals a well-equipped laboratory in which to pursue the goals of de-revolutionizing and institutionalizing the jíbaro. Biomedicine remained integral to their formula, but the multiple crises of the time had further disintegrated jíbaro bodies to such an extent that jíbaro minds degenerated. These circumstances prompted Oso Blanco health experts to pathologize jíbaros, once again locking them into health-based forms of discourse and practice beyond their control. Jíbaro bodies, minds, and stories were seen as living artifacts to be gathered, studied, and ossified so that refurbished jíbaros could re-enter society and thrive.
Psychiatry in Puerto Rico
During the Spanish period, colonial authorities managed convicts with mental problems.Footnote 47 However, under US rule, prison psychiatry did not become standard practice until the 1940s, and this despite calls for its speedy implementation by and the thorough contributions of some of Puerto Rico's leading health professionals.Footnote 48 A major mental health initiative in this regard developed on the watch of US-appointed attorney general George C. Butte in the mid 1920s. Butte welcomed the cooperation of university psychology professors who performed “an educational and mental survey” of incarcerated youth, “using, among other tests, the Stanford Test of Ability,” which had also been “used by the Commission from Columbia University in a study made of the children of the public schools of Puerto Rico.”Footnote 49 In subsequent decades, mental tests spread to other main island prisons. They became conventional penitentiary tools of inquiry by mid-century, providing key “evidence” of convict pathologies, including those specific to jíbaros and other rural prisoners.
When Oso Blanco opened in 1933, attorney general Charles E. Winter contemplated the institution's psychiatric promise. He noted that efforts would be made to secure legislation for the establishment of a psycho-pathological clinic to diagnose the mental condition of persons accused of crime with the purpose of fixing criminal responsibility. This clinic would also be used to examine and treat persons with criminal tendencies.Footnote 50 Regulations stipulated that Oso Blanco would provide inmates with in-house mental health care services, but this did not immediately come to fruition.Footnote 51 In the absence of resident psychiatric staff, convicts and psychiatrists moved between tri-complex institutions to facilitate diagnosis and treatment. In early 1931, for instance, psychiatrist Luis M. Morales examined four “demented” prisoners at the request of penitentiary warden Sixto M. Saldaña. These convicts were serving sentences ranging from a few years to 20 years for attempted murder and murder. They hailed from Ponce, San Juan, and Yauco. Morales classified one as dangerous, another as psychotic with suicidal tendencies, another as schizophrenic, and the last as mentally abnormal. He recommended they all be transferred to the nearby insane asylum.Footnote 52
The suicidal psychotic was a mulatto industrial worker in his early 30s from the interior of Yauco named Augusto Rodríguez Jiménez. This man entered Oso Blanco malnourished and suffering from possible tuberculosis. Later, he tested positive for “uncinariasis,” a hookworm infection of the small intestine that leads to anemia.Footnote 53 Of the four men in the “demented” cohort gauged by Morales, Rodríguez Jiménez's geographic origins, malnutrition, and health frailty suggested jíbaridad even though he was never called a jíbaro. The conditions he suffered from had long been tragic markers of Puerto Rico's rural majorities.Footnote 54 His “industrial” background, while not tied to agriculture on paper, likely implied poorly compensated industrial work at a nearby sugar mill, one of the few such opportunities available to men like him.
The attributes of mentally “deficient” jíbaro convicts, including their race, class and geographic backgrounds, similarly surface in the evaluations of other visiting psychiatrists. In mid 1935, for instance, Mario C. Fernández went to Oso Blanco to study a pair of “perturbed” inmates. He determined that the prisoners were “sick,” diagnosing one with schizophrenia (which affects a person's ability to think, feel, and behave clearly). The other inmate, Marcelino López Ramos, an 18-year-old white day laborer from Lares—a mountain community central to jíbaridad discourse—was serving a six-year sentence for a crime against nature and showed signs of psychosis (disconnection from reality) and epilepsy (a disturbance of nerve cell activity in the brain, causing seizures). Fernández encouraged warden Saldaña to transfer both men to the adjacent insane asylum.Footnote 55
Despite the circulation of mental health personnel and psychiatric knowledge, psychiatrists did not become sanctioned fixtures of Oso Blanco until 1941. That fiscal year, attorney general George A. Malcolm declared that psychiatric services were “needed for the treatment of the prisoners of the institution.” Between September 1941 and June 1942, Oso Blanco's resident psychiatrist managed 113 cases. Malcolm also reported that four inmates had been transferred to the insane asylum and three were subjected to “medico-legal-penal” study. As for invasive and diagnostic medicine, five lumbar punctures and a skull X-ray were performed.Footnote 56 However, it was not until 1945 that justice officials recognized psychiatrists as steady Oso Blanco contributors.
By the mid 1940s, psychiatrists were generating more detailed summaries of convict mental health, at least in terms of the various conditions affecting inmates. In 1946, Puerto Rico's attorney general Enrique Campos del Toro recorded that new cases at the penitentiary numbered “138, of which the majority were cases of mental deficiency, psychopathic personality and psychoneurosis.”Footnote 57 Campos del Toro neglected to reveal the identity of the resident psychiatrist, but medical bulletins point to it having been University of Paris graduate José Rafael Maymí Nevares. As of 1941 and perhaps earlier, Maymí Nevares was responsible for Oso Blanco's growing psychiatric caseload.
Puerto Rican psychiatry emerged in earnest in the 1940s and 1950s. A small group of psychiatrists trained in the United States, who became known as the Circle of Psychoanalytic Studies—Luis M. Morales, Juan E. Morales, Juan A. Rosselló, Fernando Canino Pont, and Ramón Fernández Marina—accelerated the discipline's development in Puerto Rico.Footnote 58 Several others who had trained in France and Spain and later pursued their craft in Oso Blanco contributed as well. Maymí Nevares and Troyano were two of the most prominent research scholars working on the intersection between punishment and psychiatry at the time. Although they seldom appear in metanarratives about Puerto Rican psychiatry, they must form part of any such discussion about mid-century incarceration.Footnote 59
Although a robust correctional psychiatric program with mental health staff and services did not appear in Oso Blanco until 1965, justice officials and psychiatrists had laid foundational stones during the previous three decades.Footnote 60 Maymí Nevares and Troyano were principally responsible for breathing psychiatric life into Oso Blanco. The two of them bookended a dynamic decade-plus there, roughly 1941 to the mid 1950s.Footnote 61 During these years, they postulated that one's childhood determined future health, occupational, and civic prospects. They applied ideas reserved for children to adult convicts, not only because they were invested in infantilizing inmates, but because prisoners had gone through many of life's stages, which made them desirable case studies. The period between infancy and adolescence, in particular, was especially formative.Footnote 62 When they were abandoned, endured domestic instability, or lacked a home, the delicate minds of children were aggravated and engendered a deviance that could only be curtailed by corrections.Footnote 63 The problem of “mental hygiene,” Maymí Nevares asserted, commenced with parenting but ended in the child, generating a “vicious circle.” That “neurotic parents” produced “neurotic children” was a cycle that Oso Blanco mental and social health professionals hoped to understand and circumvent.Footnote 64
In addition to a complicated upbringing, deficiencies in education, occupation, and recreation could further accentuate neurotic parent-youth relations. Maymí Nevares sought insights into these patterns in the lives of rural prisoners. He often anchored his evaluations of these convicts in sociology and referred to tangible factors like labor roles, domestic pressure, intelligence, and stimulants to explain what made them mentally “unfit.” For example, in November 1942 Maymí Nevares submitted a neuropsychiatric report to the Parole Board about a syphilitic inmate from the outskirts of Ponce who was serving time for “zoophilia.” Gervasio Troche Torres showed no signs of psychosis, psychoneurosis, or other personality disorders, but he displayed “borderline” intelligence. Somehow the convict managed to survive and socially adapt over the years. Before entering prison, he had earned a living as an agricultural day laborer, helped his mother, and achieved a fourth-grade education.Footnote 65
According to Maymí Nevares, Troche Torres lacked the education that would have enabled him to defend his “moral and social self” against sexual perversion buoyed by “external organic-toxic stimulants” like alcohol. Maymí Nevares believed that Troche Torres's situation was best understood by combining knowledge about his alcoholism and cultural deficits, such as his rough labor background, difficult upbringing, and poor schooling. In short, the convict's rural identity was in itself a pathology. Still, Maymí Nevares felt that Troche Torres was better off free than incarcerated. He had previously proven himself capable of adapting to life beyond prison walls. And since he lacked “subconscious mental conflicts” advanced by “irrepressible neuroticism,” his chronic alcoholism and concupiscence could be deterred.Footnote 66
In subsequent years, Maymí Nevares continued to demarcate rural pathologies. In a spring 1946 essay, he pondered 400 Oso Blanco case files he had been compiling since the start of the decade. Each prisoner exhibited “abnormal” mental tendencies. Maymí Nevares divided the 400 cases into five categories: psychotics, feeble-minded, psychopaths, neurotics, and maladjusted. The majority of the “feeble-minded,” in particular, belonged to what he called the “moron-almost moron” group, that is, those with “borderline intelligence and dull-normal intelligence.”Footnote 67
Maymí Nevares linked feeble-minded convicts to a precise demographic: rural people. They were mostly illiterate, and those who could read and write struggled to attain a fourth-grade level. Most of them hailed from a social stratum where brutish labor predominated and educational opportunities were scarce, Maymí Nevares declared. “Due to their origins or social environment,” many of them self-identified as “campesino types” or “jornaleros”; at the time these terms functioned as synonyms for jíbaro. The feeble-minded, Maymí Nevares wrote, could adapt to their circumstances but buckled under pressure or stress. Nor were they able to persevere in the face of adversity in an “intelligent, planned, and focused” manner. They lacked the “prudence” of an “average” or “normal” person.Footnote 68
Furthermore, Maymí Nevares mused, feeble-minded peasants and day laborers could be divided into additional categories based on diagnosis and treatment. First, there were so-called stable morons who demonstrated “good conduct.” Convicts meeting this criterion were at their core “inoffensive” or “harmless.” They carried themselves with integrity, worked hard, possessed a basic moral code, and understood society's rules. Emotional inconsistency and “low intelligence,” however, predisposed them to criminal behavior. Their immature attitude toward life was why they always needed someone's help in organizing and managing their affairs. These individuals, Maymí Nevares continued, tended to qualify for work in penitentiary agriculture, for it was a world they knew well. The most “behaved” among them received positive recommendations when they went before the Parole Board.Footnote 69 In the end, these jíbaros were socializable.
On the other hand, Maymí Nevares professed, there were also “unstable” jíbaro “morons.” These “hypersensitive” convicts were “deficient intellectually.” Many of them suffered from fleeting disorders. Some showed symptoms of “genuine psychosis.” They bothered their cellblock mates and were admitted to the penitentiary's neuropsychiatric unit. Maymí Nevares concluded that both “moron” types constituted a numerous demographic in Oso Blanco. Only “objective” psychological and psychiatric methods could ascertain their intelligence and mental capacities.Footnote 70 If a rural “moron” empirically demonstrated that he could adapt to the psychosocial standards of the Partido Popular Democrático, then he might be made a model populist citizen. Psychiatrists and psychologists were thus charged with mapping the jíbaro's mind so that other health experts could act on the data and focus on improving him socially.
A few years later, in 1949, Maymí Nevares proposed that some 20 to 25 percent of all Oso Blanco convicts be psychiatrically evaluated.Footnote 71 Oso Blanco at the time housed almost 2,500 prisoners, well beyond the institution's capacity of about half this number.Footnote 72 Maymí Nevares identified 500 to 625 of these convicts who he felt warranted study. If the “feeble-minded” represented a collective measuring stick in terms of who exactly was being probed several years earlier, then one can deduce that rural peasants and day laborers (other terms for jíbaro) comprised a large chunk, if not the bulk, of those under psychiatric scrutiny in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
By the mid twentieth century, jíbaros had mentally and cognitively degenerated enough to necessitate psychological profiling and psychiatric treatment. But even as they pathologized jíbaros, psychiatrists still quasi-idealized them. They at times echoed the Agriculture Department, for example, which in 1947 trumpeted that the jíbaro class could take pride in “never having gone to prison.”Footnote 73 This was a fallacy, of course. The Agriculture Department perpetuated a nostalgic view of the jíbaro, which was central to immediate PPD constituency-building. Those collaborating with the Justice Department, however, articulated a long-term socio-scientific view to prepare the jíbaro and the PPD for the future. Oso Blanco mental health professionals reproduced the notion of jíbaro “purity” and considered him redeemable, but also perceived him as intellectually faulty. Psychiatry was a crucial tool in populist attempts to overcome this dilemma.
Blending Rural Identities
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, social scientists not only used their disciplines to pathologize jíbaros, but they also drew a figurative line between jíbaros and other rural groups. Writer Miguel Meléndez Muñoz, for example, published an essay in 1916 about the state of the Puerto Rican campesino, a figure he believed stood in for jíbaro. Meléndez Muñoz claimed that peasants followed the evolutionary rhythm of Puerto Rican society at large. He posited that “external factors” like climate and soil fertility influenced their psychology. Certain ills—such as poor working conditions, malnutrition, the absence of charitable and hygienic services, pauperism, alcoholism, illiteracy, and ignorance and superstition—degraded peasants and left them in “a submental state.”Footnote 74
Meléndez Muñoz saw the modern jíbaro as an amorphous entity. In another essay he contemplated exactly when in the nineteenth century and under which conditions jíbaros became agregados or day laborers, and even when they became seditious.Footnote 75 He asserted that the jíbaro in the nineteenth century still was not totally “the agricultural laborer (italics in original) he will be viewed as in later epochs, when alienated from his land, large agricultural concentrations are created in the country, our population grows and spreads[,] and that situation precipitates their entry into the proletarian masses.”Footnote 76 As Meléndez Muñoz predicted, by the 1940s and 1950s the term “jíbaro” encompassed a range of “species,” including autonomous peasants, sharecroppers, peons, and other rural laborers. The amalgamated, pathologized jíbaro advanced by penitentiary health professionals in the 1940s and 1950s reimagined the jíbaro prototype by merging interrelated, recognizable parts. Fernando Picó's complex work sifts through these layers of rural identity, although he hesitated to think about jíbaros as anything but meat-and-bones common folk, not icons or types. Instead, he opted for “Yahweh's anawim”—the vulnerable, marginalized, and dispossessed who depended on a Higher Power for the little they had.Footnote 77
In the 1930s, however, local intellectuals were still sorting out whether jíbaros existed in a universal sense. Scholars like José Colombán Rosario, for instance, wrote several influential books and papers on the jíbaro as an essential “type.” He applied the term “jíbaro” to the native Puerto Rican who lived in the countryside, which according to the 1930 census amounted to about three-fourths of the total population.Footnote 78 Educator Antonio S. Pedreira, for his part, viewed the jíbaro as a combination of several “types.” There were “jíbaro citizens,” or all native-born Puerto Ricans; “jíbaro-jíbaros” from the mountains who conserved the psychological inheritance of their ancestors; and “intermediate jíbaros” who moved between the first two groups.Footnote 79 Still, Pedreira oversimplified rural conditions and pertinent social geographies by suggesting that three-fourths of Puerto Rico's population could be neatly subdivided into jíbaro-jíbaros and intermediate jíbaros.
Local social scientists continued muddling modern jíbaro identity into the 1930s, and beyond. In 1939, for instance, Colombán Rosario and Justina Carrión divided jíbaros into groups based on the agricultural labor they performed. In a study of several hundred rural families, they documented the existence of “coffee” and “sugar” jíbaros.Footnote 80 Like Pedreira's analysis, however, the distinction failed to account for those who bridged, split, or transcended these identities due to itinerancy and their status as transient laborers. To trace the differences, deeper hands-on exchanges with jíbaros became desirable.
Meanwhile, distinct racial visions of the jíbaro crystallized. Populists imagined him as white. Penitentiary health practitioners did as well, but they also presented the jíbaro as racially ambiguous. Since their work was not as unmistakably political as that of the Partido Popular Democrático leadership, prison psychosocial health experts were exposed to data that encouraged them to see the elasticity of jíbaro racial identities. Temporary and permanent migration to traditionally black- and mulatto-populated sugar plantations and urban centers, for example, disrupted the idyllic picture of humble, isolated light-skinned jíbaros working and surviving in the countryside. Oso Blanco professionals helped fill the knowledge gap with regard to these issues of racial and rural identity by investigating the dynamics and contingencies shaping the movements, crimes, and rehabilitation of jíbaros.
Inside Oso Blanco Penitentiary
Oso Blanco health practitioners narrated rural convicts in ways that accentuated their pathologies and intersecting identities. A 30-year-old anemic white day laborer from Moca named Ramón Hernández Pérez, for instance, who was serving a short sentence for smuggling liquor into a municipal jail, told the Classification and Treatment Board in the late 1940s that he had grown up pastoring animals and picking coffee before transitioning to the sugar industry at the Coloso mill in nearby Aguada. Although never referred to as a jíbaro, this convict fit the health and labor profile of one. He also exhibited jíbaro psychological traits, namely presumed deficient intelligence. Hernández Pérez impressed social worker Ligia Dávila as “ignorant and clumsy,” not because of an organic defect but because of a serious head injury he suffered as a child (a horse had kicked him).Footnote 81
Other rural convicts’ labor histories began in alternative industries altogether, yet authorities called them jíbaros. A 24-year-old white day laborer from Jayuya named Ángel Miranda Ayala, who was serving a few years for mutilation (viciously disfiguring someone), started cultivating tobacco at age 12. Classification and Treatment officials deemed him “a serious and hardworking man,” ashamed of what he had done. They called him a “typical jíbaro from the countryside” who “lost control of his impulses.” This did not mean he was a habitual criminal, so authorities considered transferring him to Guavate or the Zarzal encampment near Río Grande.Footnote 82 In this case geography, a stern attitude, hard work in the fields, an explosive loss of self-discipline, and repentance signaled jíbaridad.
Health insights like these were mineable in Oso Blanco. This work was carried out by penitentiary psychiatrists, but also Classification and Treatment and Parole Board professionals.Footnote 83 The Classification and Treatment Board's goal, specifically, was to provide “favorable conditions to the prisoners,” and to initiate “treatment programs based on their individual knowledge to ensure their rehabilitation.”Footnote 84 To follow up on inmate “life plans,” Oso Blanco health experts interviewed convicts several times. These interviews resulted in deep socioeconomic histories of prisoners and their extended communities.
The discursive dissection of incarcerated jíbaro specimens by penitentiary Classification and Treatment practitioners involved the excavation of prisoner childhoods and family histories. Authorities were confident that such data would clarify prisoners’ attitudes and explain why they suffered from certain pathologies. When Oso Blanco health professionals unpacked the lives of rural convicts, they often found traces of the jíbaro. Rafael Muñoz Álvarado's report was typical: age 29, white, from the rural outskirts of Santa Isabel, day laborer (he cut sugarcane and planted minor fruits), and his criminal record was extensive (breaking and entering, disturbing the peace, carrying a concealed weapon, assault and battery, and a crime against nature). Aside from taking note of his long rap sheet (not always linked to jíbaros), Classification and Treatment Board members avowed that the convict was representative of the typical peasant man: uneducated, with a fairly low mental level. Moreover, his body bore the scars of poverty: anemia and eye, lung, and skin conditions, and “bad teeth.”Footnote 85 Muñoz Álvarado was a jíbaro in everything but name. In his case and others, health experts triangulated a rural lifestyle, bodily infirmity, and mental incompetence.
Penitentiary health practitioners emphasized the interplay between rural identities and rectifiable violent tendencies. For example, in 1948 Classification and Treatment Board members described Santiago Nieves Orama, a 24-year-old white day laborer from the Aguada neighborhood of Atalaya serving time for mutilation, as a reliable “working-class peasant.” Throughout his youth, he had toiled on farms and in the sugar and needle industries. He was “loquacious” and “expressive” but “isolated.” Despite his violent crime and “puritan” ideas about friendship and recreation, penitentiary scientists believed that the prisoner was a “jíbaro without malice.” This made him a candidate for the Guavate encampment, exposure to which would remind him of his docility and teach him about harmonious social relations.Footnote 86
The perceptions of Oso Blanco psychiatrists permeated the findings of the Classification and Treatment Board. This is hardly surprising, given that they were among the most active board members. Therefore, when considering the board's reports, one must view them as extensions of penitentiary psychiatry and social science, not merely social work artifacts. The contributions of social workers were nonetheless crucial. The collective and entangled efforts of Oso Blanco health experts disclosed that scrutinizing prisoners’ first life stages and experiences—parentage, poverty, disease, education, occupation, social relationships, and traumas—gave them authentic knowledge about why inmates made certain decisions when they entered adulthood. This emphasis was compounded by the wider problem of socially conservative radical nationalism in a Cold War climate, which re-emerged in the 1950s in bloody fashion.
Shortly after the violence of fall 1950, which included an attempted assassination of President Harry S. Truman and a short-lived insurgency spanning multiple main island municipalities and Oso Blanco by pro-Independence activists, Muñoz Marín delivered a radio address. In it he informed the public that their mental health was now a security issue and that radical nationalists were vectors of infectious insanity.Footnote 87 Psychiatrists like Morales helped develop and disseminate the idea that state-sponsored “psycho-hygienic” intervention could “break the circle” of neurotic parents producing neurotic children, or neurotic nationalist leaders producing neurotic followers. But by the time Morales recognized this pattern, Oso Blanco health experts had been pathologizing jíbaro convicts in this way for nearly a decade.Footnote 88
Whereas Oso Blanco Classification and Treatment reports mainly present convict lives leading up to crimes, psychiatric evaluations provide snapshots of their being and character. Troyano's transcripts comprise the bulk of Oso Blanco psychiatric evaluations in the early 1950s. Their general composition includes, in one section, inmate names, “groups” ranging from at least “A-E” (that is, from minimum-security cases to cases of vulgar sexuality), ages, civil statuses, and geographic origins. A lengthier second section consists of a paragraph that builds on these basic vital data by alluding to the domestic and familial circumstances of convicts, as well as their appearances, mannerisms, and personalities.
Troyano often concluded evaluations by recommending labor therapy and announcing the best treatment path.Footnote 89 For most convicts this meant agriculture, but animal care, cleaning, cooking, carpentry, and other vocations were also options. The heavy emphasis on agriculture reflected statewide and individual economic concerns, as well as the majority rural convict pool at Troyano's disposal. He and other penitentiary health professionals tried to convince prisoners that they had to see with the brain, which meant knowing what the body could do and accepting the kind of labor it was predisposed to perform. Agrarian labor therapy thus became a central element of rehabilitative corrections in mid twentieth-century Puerto Rico, reflecting the state's appetite to preserve the skills “intrinsic” to jíbaros.Footnote 90
Screening inmates for disease and biological “defects” formed another part of Troyano's approach. Left unchecked, physical problems would inevitably affect prisoners’ labor prospects and psychosocial health. Troyano referenced diseases like anemia and tuberculosis, unhealthy skin complexions, and the state of nourishment of “sickly” prisoners’ bodies.Footnote 91 He studied body glands that could affect mental health, the pituitary for example.Footnote 92 Troyano also documented several organic “types,” encountering everything from “cynical” and “psychopathic acromegaloids” and “adenoids” to “eunuchoids,” “feminoids,” and “mildly psychopathic oligoids” with “affective frigidity.” Each of these types purportedly said something substantive about a convict's biology, mental health, and social worth and potential.Footnote 93
Though Troyano and Classification and Treatment specialists analyzed convict bodies of all origins, they focused on rural people. Besides occupation, certain traits distinguished jíbaro inmates from other convicts. Language, for example, gave authorities access to the jíbaro psyche. A 74-year-old white agricultural worker from San Sebastián named Eustaquio Pérez González, who was serving time for corrupting a minor, was so “simple” that Classification and Treatment officials had to explain the questions they asked him. In response, they noted, Pérez González used “jíbaro language,” which gave them the impression he was “clumsy” and unversed in communicating with learned folk. Yet, he was “serious, honorable, and hardworking.” Born in 1876, Pérez González came from a tightknit family. His father worked in agriculture. Hurricane San Ciriaco had killed his mother. Over the years, he pulled weeds, planted coffee, and sold surplus crops for marginal profit. He was illiterate and appreciated strolling in the fields, smoking, patron saint festivals, and spirited funeral wakes. Most importantly, he was ashamed of his crime.Footnote 94 Pérez González's assumptions, comportment, labor history, poverty, and sensibilities qualified as jíbaro even though authorities referred only to his language as such.
Particular generational conditions shaped Pérez González's jíbaridad. His case contrasts sharply with those of younger jíbaros. Acasito García González, for instance, an 18-year-old trigueño (wheat-colored) day laborer from Juana Díaz serving a short sentence for a crime against nature, grew up in an impoverished rural area. At age 13 he started working at sugar colony Amelia in Río Cañas, where he earned a few dollars a week. Classification and Treatment officials noted that he impressed them as “an ignorant youth,” “a typical young jíbaro from our countryside.”Footnote 95
Countryside did not always connote mountainous highlands, however. It also meant the interior of coastal municipalities. Miguel Silva Fuentes, a blanco-trigueño (white-wheat colored, or mixed-race) 28-year-old handicapped convict from Río Grande serving time for mutilation, was deemed a “jíbaro from the countryside” by social worker Gloria L. Umpierre.Footnote 96 He came of age “attached” to someone else's property, where his family planted root crops on small plots of land and raised animals. That Silva Fuentes was from Río Grande is noteworthy, as it is a part of Puerto Rico usually linked to blackness, not the “white highlands.” But as these cases indicate and a 1941 painting by artist Oscar Colón Delgado visually conveys, well-equipped jíbaros of color were in wider circulation in mid-century Puerto Rico than was presumed then and is today.Footnote 97
Like Sánchez Rodríguez, Silva Fuentes took the Goodenough drawing exam. It revealed he was supposedly a “mentally weak moron type” with “poor perception of common objects.” Nonetheless, Umpierre emphasized his nobler traits: he had a healthy preference for agriculture, communicated well with the Classification and Treatment Board, and was “cooperative.” The inmate “seemed trustworthy” and unlikely to be a “recidivist,” though he had a prior conviction. Silva Fuentes banked on the rehabilitation process and asserted that he held “no grudges,” not even against the person responsible for chopping off part of his left arm. In addition to being meek, a central jíbaro attribute, he was selfless. He hoped to live with his poor, desperate, sick, aging parents when released from prison. Complicating matters was that nine of their 13 children had already died, which put extra pressure on Silva Fuentes to care for them.Footnote 98 The socioeconomic and health vulnerabilities of jíbaro convicts and their families are thrown into sharp relief in this case.
Silva Fuentes's story also demonstrates that penitentiary health professionals stressed a jíbaro upside as opposed to just a downside. Jíbaro “laboriousness” and “humility” proved they had socioeconomic potential and worth. In early 1951, for example, social worker Gloria Otero de Rodríguez identified a 34-year-old mixed-race day laborer from Coamo named Ángel Colón León as a “simple jíbaro.” During the sugar-harvesting season, he cut cane at the Aguirre mill. In the dead season, different haciendas hired him as a field hand. Although serving time for attempted murder, the result of a “fit of rage,” the convict was “hardworking,” “humble,” and committed to his Pentecostal faith. Troyano indicated that Colón León was “athletic,” “serious,” “quiet,” and “discreet.” What is more, he scored 83 percent on a Rorschach exam. This meant he had “low intelligence” but was “mature.” The Guavate encampment awaited him.Footnote 99
In another case dating from the early 1950s, the Classification and Treatment Board appraised a 23-year-old white agricultural day laborer from Vega Alta named Lady Rosado Mercado, who was serving time for introducing contraband into a prison. C. Bravo Abreu reported that the inmate grew up in a “desirable and tranquil” rural environment, not a “vicious or depraved one.” Overall, Rosado Mercado impressed Bravo Abreu as serious, honorable, and hardworking. He was the “true jíbaro type.” When he responded to something in error, he was ashamed, covered his face and asked for forgiveness. The “true jíbaro” was white, close to nature and laborious, and prostrated himself before an honor-shame complex. Troyano added that Rosado Mercado was “malnourished,” “quiet,” “reticent,” and “shy.” As the convict did not exhibit criminal tendencies, Guavate was an option for him.Footnote 100
Mental and social health experts pathologized jíbaros by linking them to certain defects, qualities, and rehabilitative routes. Oso Blanco proved to be fertile soil for their attempts to decipher and re-engineer the minds and comportment of jíbaro convicts. Psychiatrists’ observations stood alone, but also shaped how the Classification and Treatment Board operated. While penitentiary health professionals generally agreed that jíbaro prisoners had been neglected and should be qualified for rehabilitation, they trivialized these inmates and (re)defined them in ways that undermined jíbaro agency and reiterated their subordination. The resulting “truths” about incarcerated jíbaros justified the multipronged socio-scientific interventions of the Partido Popular Democrático. From the cradle to Oso Blanco, then, jíbaros were considered both national resources and malleable living artifacts.
Conclusion
The scientific and ethnographic work of Oso Blanco mental and social health experts foreshadowed the major mid twentieth-century social science studies about Puerto Ricans.Footnote 101 Populist authorities hoped to apply this research and knowledge to public policy. In fact, the University of Puerto Rico's Center for Social Research was established in 1945, around the same time as Oso Blanco's Classification and Treatment Board. The center pursued studies that, its proponents believed, would shed light on the Puerto Rican population, contribute to resolving local socioeconomic woes, and facilitate cultural and social change.Footnote 102
Mid-century penitentiary health professionals delved deep into the intersecting rural identities, psyches, and behavioral dualities of convicts. Marcelino Nieves Reyes, a white day laborer in his mid 60s from Quebradillas, is a case in point. He was born in 1885 and worked alongside his impoverished campesino parents in agriculture. As a child, he “pulled, hoed, watered, and fertilized sugar cane.” This made him “an honorable and dutiful laborer” with an “industrious spirit.” As an adult, however, he drank too much and became “antisocial,” tendencies which led him to commit violent crimes. According to parole officer Bibiana Corneiro, Nieves Reyes flowed between rural identities. He was at once a day laborer and a peasant, both of which implied jíbaro. Moreover, he exhibited what made jíbaros virtuous (honor and commitment to work), but also what made them frustrating puzzles to solve (antisocial demeanor and violent outbursts).Footnote 103
The racial identities of jíbaro convicts were just as ambiguous, despite the fiction of their transparent highland whiteness. Like much of Latin America, Puerto Rico has been historically subject to a color-class pyramid, with darker complexions at the bottom and lighter ones on top. Class background inflected racial identity, especially during the Spanish colonial period but also well into modern times.Footnote 104 In the eighteenth century, several observers considered Puerto Rican jíbaros a maroon-like mulatto people.Footnote 105 By the mid twentieth century, the typical jíbaro was imagined as white. One might assume that light-skinned jíbaro convicts were thus advantaged, but penitentiary records suggest otherwise. Their rural roots, lifestyles, and “obtuseness” downgraded their whiteness. Broken whiteness did not preclude redemption, however.
Oso Blanco health professionals communicated this racial ambiguity in the categories they deployed to classify jíbaro convicts. They often used variations of “mixed-race,” which bolstered the sullied and increasingly pathologized backgrounds of many rural prisoners. A mixed-race category also permitted health experts to shift between intersecting rural identities. A white day laborer in his early 40s from Bayamón named Ricardo Sánchez Cruz, who was serving time for incest, illustrates this point. Parole officer Dolores O'Neill recorded in April 1947 that prior to landing in prison, he had lived and worked as an agregado and married a peasant woman. Most importantly, O'Neill declared that Sánchez Cruz possessed a central jíbaro trait—he had “sun-toasted” skin.Footnote 106 So he was white, but not quite.
The Puerto Rican highlands were not the exclusive domain of rural identities. The urban shanties phenomenon that exploded in Puerto Rico in the mid twentieth century was largely the result of rural-to-urban migration. This, in turn, evinced dwindling seasonal labor opportunities and the implementation of Operation Bootstrap, a series of US-backed projects designed to turn Puerto Rico's agricultural economy into a developed industrial economy.Footnote 107 As jíbaros traversed the boundaries distinguishing highlands and lowlands, their identities evolved accordingly.
Penitentiary psychiatrists and social health experts produced thick scientific descriptions of jíbaro convicts, and not just because they cared for them. Mapping rural psychology and sociology in the laboratorial and knowledge-producing space of Oso Blanco proved valuable for the Partido Popular Democrático, which at the time heavily invested in consolidating its rural base while competing with radical nationalists for the future and soul of the Puerto Rican nation. As is well known today, the PPD hyperbolized the essentialized trope of the amenable jíbaro. Concurrently, the work of Oso Blanco health practitioners from the 1930s to the 1950s paved the way for the populist folklorization of the jíbaro via institutions like the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, established in 1955, and set the stage for further cutting-edge social science research.Footnote 108
In Oso Blanco psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and parole officers pathologized the jíbaro to affirm what they already knew about him and to chart the still elusive crevices of his mind. Health experts insisted that observation, interviews, socioeconomic histories, mental tests, labor therapy, and so on would shine the brightest light possible on Yahweh's anawim and serve as tools to raise them from social and civic death. Their efforts normalized the “proper” work roles and behaviors for prisoners linked to rural areas and legacies, while exposing the pathologies that made jíbaros susceptible to incarceration in the first place.
Pathologizing the jíbaro was an exercise in regulating a suffering, “simpleminded,” potentially rebellious population. Behind the walls of Oso Blanco, jíbaros became racialized living artifacts. For better or worse, their ascriptive journey has since reduced them to popular music, the holiday season, and indigenous retentions. However, completely ossifying the jíbaro has proven difficult, as the creative uses of the jíbaro icon in diasporic art and literature suggest. Indeed, the jíbaro has stood the test of time and remains a pliable, iconic figure in Puerto Rican culture.
