In June 1950, 5,000 working-class Puerto Rican men boarded airplanes and travelled from the island to the sugar beet fields of east central Michigan. Initially, many considered this a great opportunity. However, Operation Farmlift was a tragic disaster.
The fathers who travelled to the United States were fulfilling their responsibility as heads of households: in the sugar beet fields they meant to earn their family's “daily bread” (p. 171). The representatives of Puerto Rico's Department of Labor and the island's new governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, were hopeful that many more men would join them to work in Michigan or in other locations throughout the United States. Indeed, the success of the island's Popular Democratic Party's (PPD) economic project depended on the emigration of working-class men and women. The owners of the private sugar beet farms in east central Michigan, fearing that without migrant laborers their crops would be lost, welcomed the Puerto Rican workers, who, together with seasonal Tejano migrant laborers, would save the harvest. In theory, Operation Farmlift promised to benefit workers, their families, the PPD's new economic project, Michigan farmers, and the rural economy of the Midwest.
In practice, the labor contracts were a cruel farce. Puerto Rican men on the sugar beet farms faced working and living conditions worse than those in Caribbean sugarcane fields. Their US citizenship did not protect them from the inhumane labor practices, “structural exploitation and capricious abuses” of Michigan's agricultural economy (p. 142). The men and their wives on the island called on Puerto Rico's Department of Labor and the island's governor to intervene, demanding that farm contractors honor their promises and that Muñoz Marín defend the Puerto Rican workers and fathers, if necessary, by bringing the men back home. Operation Farmlift became an embarrassment to PPD representatives, who by 1950 were working with the US Congress to reform Puerto Rico's colonial relationship with the United States. In the end, the PPD's failed response to the workers' appeals broke the social contract between working families and Muñoz Marín, the “Father of the Poor”.
Findlay's history of Operation Farmlift is a study of the state, colonial populism, domesticity, labor, and transnationalism. Engaging Latin American and Caribbean scholarship on 1940s and 1950s populist states and leaders, Findlay examines how working-class families interpreted discourses of domesticity and modernity. The Puerto Rican populist project was “deeply masculinist” and “constructed by both working people and political elites” (p. 5). Working parents understood their responsibilities to each other, their children, and their households. Popular definitions of manhood and fatherhood informed the men's decision to travel to the United States as migrant workers seeking to fulfill their duty to their families. The fathers' labor and wages promised to secure new homes and a modern form of domesticity. “The power of the ideal of the family man and his benevolently patriarchal reign over an idealized domesticity... was key to the development of the PPD's colonial populism” (p. 182).
Chapter one examines the emergence of Puerto Rico's colonial populism and highlights the island's long history of working-class activism and mobilization. In chapter two, Findlay analyzes ideals of domesticity and modernity, including the challenges that popular sectors posed to elite visions. Chapter three examines the Puerto Rican state strategies for exporting workers, making it clear that mass emigration formed a necessary and integral part of the PPD economic project. Chapter four follows rural migrants to Michigan and examines the Midwest farming industry's long history of dependence on “exploitable foreigners” (p. 139).
The Puerto Rican workers, however, brought with them a long tradition of labor activism and rejected abuse and exploitation. In Michigan, they workers created alliances with Tejanos, church organizers, and labor leaders (chapter 5). They took their stories of exploitation to the local Michigan press. Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, their wives publicized the scandalous abuses—through personal letters addressed to Puerto Rico's Department of Labor, Governor Muñoz Marín, and the island newspapers. At the same time, the PPD government struggled to appease the beet workers and suppress media coverage. Although the Puerto Rican legislature passed a bill to aid the Michigan migrants and their families, the island's department of labor and Muñoz Marín refused to budge on one demand: helping the men return to Puerto Rico. Instead, the Department of Labor renegotiated contracts with sugar beet farmers and tried—unsuccessfully—to recruit more migrant laborers to the Michigan fields. The Puerto Rican workers, however, walked away. In her conclusion, Findlay examines how workers—who found themselves “left without a father here,” betrayed by the “Father of the Poor,” and abandoned to their fate on the mainland by Muñoz Marín and the PPD—persisted. They struggled to claim their rights, recover their wages, and reconstitute their families.
The book provides many opportunities for discussion and debate among historians and graduate students. First, students of transnational labor migration can learn from Findlay's methodology: follow the workers. Centering the migrant worker requires analysis that moves beyond neatly bounded nationalist histories. The story of Operation Farmlift challenges historians of Puerto Rico and of Puerto Ricans in the United States to expand their methods. Like Jesse Hoffnung-Garskoff in the Dominican case, Juan Flores and Gina Pérez in Puerto Rican examples, and Jorge Duany for the broader Hispanic Caribbean, Findlay follows migrant workers to different locations and examines how the tools they brought with them (a history of labor organizing; ideals about domesticity and modernity) informed their new local bregas (negotiations).
Second, historians of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States will appreciate Findlay's extensive archival work and intensive use of sources. Findlay collected letters written by migrant workers and their spouses, newspaper reports from Puerto Rico and Michigan, government reports and memos from the sugar beet fields, police records, and written and oral histories. She also reflects on how Puerto Rico's archives both reveal and conceal histories. Findlay frankly discusses the difficulties of securing oral testimonies of painful or “failed” stories; the struggle to identify women's voices in a story shaped by masculinity and manhood; and the need to revisit the relationships between race and class in each historical instance. Third, scholars of populism in Latin America and the Caribbean will benefit from Findlay's examination of popular understandings of gender and the state. Moving beyond discursive analysis of elite actors, Findlay examines how promises of domesticity and modernity also informed the actions of working-class actors. Fourth, labor historians and scholars of the Midwest and of the Puerto Rican diasporas will be stimulated by Findlay's uncovering of new “origin stories.” When these Puerto Rican men were denied justice in the beet fields of east central Michigan, they left. Unable to return to the island, the men traveled to other industrial centers, joining the labor forces of Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Gary, New York, and Cleveland, Youngstown, and Lorrain, Ohio (p. 190). When possible, their wives and families met them at the new locations.
These sugar beet workers became founding members of multiple diasporic communities throughout the mainland, and brought with them an important history of labor militancy. Operation Farmlift was a tragic disaster. But the men and families who were transformed by that disastrous experiment carried its history and lessons to new locations, where they rebuilt homes, families, and communities.
