Trajectories of Puerto Rican Migration and Domestic Work

Puerto Rican labor migration to the United States has to be understood in the context of United States intervention on the island. The mass migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States in the twentieth century derived from the US colonization of Puerto Rico after 1898 when Spain ceded the island at the end of the Spanish American War.Footnote ⁶ Subsequently, the United States established a colonial administration in Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans were made United States citizens and drafted into the First World War, which strengthened the colonial bond between the island and the United States. While unable to exercise full citizenship in Puerto Rico because of the island's colonial status, Puerto Ricans could move to the United States in search of work and new opportunities more easily than foreign workers. Migration flows steadily increased during the 1920s, resulting in the formation of a Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City, which blossomed into a fully transnational community over the years.Footnote ⁷ After the Great Depression, growing numbers of Puerto Rican migrants traveled to the United States in search of work, fleeing deepening poverty, unemployment, and land dispossession that resulted from US corporate expansion.Footnote ⁸

On the Puerto Rican mainland, women played a central role as wage-earning workers inside and outside the home during the 1920s and 1930s. Thousands of Puerto Rican women were employed in factories and doing piecework in their homes for US needlework industry.Footnote ⁹ They organized unions and fought collectively for labor regulations when they faced difficult working conditions and low wages. As they worked to reform the offshore needlework industry, labor activists in Puerto Rico in the 1920s and 1930s encountered resistance, and their efforts were undermined as companies sought cheaper labor by steadily withdrawing from the island.Footnote ¹⁰ Many women were left unemployed, and families lost a key source of support, further propelling migration from rural to urban areas and migration to the United States.Footnote ¹¹ The large majority of migrants established new communities in New York City, where Puerto Rican women continued to play central roles in supporting their families. They used their experiences as needle workers to find similar work in the United States. They also performed the caring labor needed to sustain the migrant community by running boarding houses and forming collective daycare centers for their children.Footnote ¹² Many also found jobs as domestic and household workers in the city because these forms of employment could often provide temporary or long-term support for migrant families.

The larger racial politics of Puerto Rican incorporation in US economies and communities during the Depression era framed the experiences of Puerto Rican women workers. Puerto Ricans entered the United States in larger numbers at the same time that US cities were being transformed by the large-scale migration of black workers from south to north. Puerto Ricans faced racism because they were imagined in US society as a nonwhite population, an idea rooted in their status as colonial subjects in need of US tutelage. Migrants encountered new racial classifications in the United States and discovered that claiming multiple or mixed racial heritages (as was common in Puerto Rico) fell outside of a “black” and “white” binary.Footnote ¹³ Like other nonwhite communities, Puerto Ricans faced racial exclusion from the expanded citizenship rights and social services established by the New Deal. Newspapers and government agencies often lumped all migrants together as one nonwhite “other.” City officials’ concern over migration spawned a catch phrase, the “Puerto Rican Problem,” which suggested that islanders were failing to integrate or adjust to US society.Footnote ¹⁴ Racial difference was further inscribed through the labor opportunities available to Puerto Ricans and the exclusions they faced in a declining urban industrial sector, which blocked social mobility or “whitening” previously available to European immigrants.Footnote ¹⁵

In New York, a group of Puerto Rican activists and reformers challenged the treatment of migrants and the denial of services that Puerto Rican citizens often faced at government agencies.Footnote ¹⁶ Social service workers, activists, and migrants also pressured the Puerto Rican government to address these issues. A branch of the insular Puerto Rican government's Department of Labor in New York, the Bureau of Employment and Identification, was developed in response to these efforts in 1930.Footnote ¹⁷ While the office served multiple functions, most importantly it provided identification cards documenting that Puerto Ricans were US citizens. Migrants relied on these when searching for jobs and dealing with employers, landlords, schools, and representatives of social service agencies.Footnote ¹⁸ Though limited by a small staff, this agency expanded the involvement of the Puerto Rican government in the lives of migrant citizens. Its role as an employment service made this government bureau function much like private employment agencies that helped workers find jobs. During this period, most private employment agencies were segregated and assigned jobs based on black/white racial categorizations. The staff of the Puerto Rican agency struggled with classifying and categorizing Puerto Ricans according to their own perceptions and within US understandings of race.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite Puerto Ricans’ attempts otherwise, they were further racialized through their integration into segregated labor markets during and after the Depression. They continued to work in agricultural and service occupations while finding needlework and factory jobs increasingly unstable.

As the Puerto Rican government sought to find work for Puerto Rican women, including positions in needlework, they encountered a shifting and increasingly segregated economy in which some women's labor was in higher demand than others for specific jobs.Footnote ²⁰ Growing numbers of European immigrant women were moving outside the home as wage laborers, leading to increased demand for domestic work at the same time that shifting standards of middle-class domesticity and housekeeping intensified the need for caring labor.Footnote ²¹ Puerto Ricans joined black women, many of them recent migrants from the South who became domestics when they faced labor discrimination in other fields and were funneled into these jobs by private agencies and government-sponsored employment programs. A study of Puerto Rican migration in the 1930s reported that “it is not unusual, when a woman calls by telephone to inquire about obtaining a Puerto Rican worker and is asked whether she prefers a white or colored Puerto Rican, for the woman to reply that, since she had asked for a Puerto Rican, of course she wants a colored person.”Footnote ²² Since employers increasingly expected domestic workers to be “colored” and imagined Puerto Ricans as uniformly nonwhite, they judged Puerto Rican women to be suited for domestic work. By agreeing to place migrant women as domestics in US cities in the 1930s, Puerto Rican government policy served to further mark these workers as non-white.

Employer expectations for labor in the middle-class white home further framed the experiences of Puerto Rican women who became domestic workers. But these expectations often diverged from those of the workers themselves. Employers argued that nonwhite women needed training in white middle-class norms of domesticity in order to properly do their jobs. While these ideas stemmed from a longer history of middle-class reformers instructing immigrant women in how to perform household work, African American women increasingly became the targets of these interventions in urban areas.Footnote ²³   Puerto Rican domestic workers faced similar scrutiny. Investigators claimed that “whatever merits of Puerto Rican and American methods of household management may be, they are at least very different. Unless she were employed by a Spanish-speaking family of the lower-income group, the average domestic worker from the island seeking employment in New York, would require training.” Casting Puerto Rican women as needing instruction in white middle-class US domesticity was underpinned by popular discourses of Puerto Ricans’ racial and colonial difference. One observer, for example, charged that they lacked culinary aptitude: “The average Puerto Rican woman knows very little about the cooking of American food. Some of the vegetables found in Puerto Rico are unknown in New York. The Puerto Rican cook uses too much grease or lard to suit the American taste. …”Footnote ²⁴ In the United States, Puerto Rican women found ideas similar to those taught in Americanization programs on the island, restated and reworked as they sought employment as domestic workers.Footnote ²⁵

Some labor reformers and domestic workers also supported the idea of training, but for a different reason. These activists believed that training could lead to the professionalization of domestic work, which would allow workers to claim the status of skilled laborer, making it possible for them to demand higher wages, better working conditions, the regulation of domestic work by state agencies, and access to social benefits and rights under future labor legislation. Although domestic worker training programs in the United States had long existed, these reformers gained more government funding for education in domestic work throughout the 1930s. The majority of this training targeted black women. Under the Works Progress Administration in New York, for example, African American women made up to 93 percent of the workers selected for housekeeping aides training programs.Footnote ²⁶ Puerto Rican women also participated in these educational initiatives and were sometimes referred by the offices to private programs in the city. The Casita Maria settlement house, for example, served the ”Spanish-speaking” community with instructional classes for Puerto Rican migrants.Footnote ²⁷

The Puerto Rican Employment and Identification Bureau was limited in its placements by the reluctance of Puerto Rican women to accept live-in positions. From the beginning, the bureau noted that many prospective employers sought live-in workers. Puerto Rican women were averse to this type of employment, however, preferring to work first in any other type of job or, if in domestic work, then specifically as day laborers. The demand for day labor positions resembles struggles by black women in the United States, who sought to move away from the exploitation that live-in domestics faced.Footnote ²⁸ Generations of black women distanced themselves from the control of their employers through live-out jobs. Black women's continued aversion to this type of work may have led some employers to seek out Puerto Rican domestics, whose recent migration status and often precarious economic circumstances, employers believed, might have made them more amenable to live-in work. Yet many Puerto Rican women avoided live-in jobs too and pressured the labor agency to explore other options for their placement.

Despite Puerto Rican women's aversion to live-in domestic employment, the Puerto Rican Employment and Identification Bureau's placement and training programs in household work functioned to push Puerto Rican women into positions as domestic workers during the 1930s. According to the agency, domestic workers, trained and untrained, comprised the largest number of laborers placed during the period—three times as many as in needlework.Footnote ²⁹ While women might not have needed an intermediary to find needlework positions, these numbers suggest that domestic work was an important source of employment for Puerto Rican women. The Puerto Rican government's role in placing these workers established a pattern that would continue well after the 1930s as it continued to navigate the politics of placing workers in domestic positions that were increasingly racially segregated, unregulated by labor laws, and that continued to leave them open to exploitation by employers.

“The Chicago Experiment” and Workers’ Resistance

In 1946 the “Chicago experiment,” which brought hundreds of domestic workers to the city, marked a new moment in the history of Puerto Rican labor migration. During the Second World War larger waves of Puerto Rican migration occurred as US employers sought cheap sources of labor. United States agricultural firms and other businesses recruited some; others were fleeing unemployment and poverty on the island; and after 1942 the new ruling party, the populist Partido Popular Democratico (PPD), encouraged migration as a means to lower Puerto Rico's population and reduce unemployment.Footnote ³⁰ The Puerto Rican state particularly targeted intervention into the lives of working-class women through eugenics policies because their sexuality had long been blamed for social problems on the island, such as overpopulation.Footnote ³¹ The PPD developed new migration policies as a part of “Operation Bootstrap,” a modernization and development plan that sought to industrialize Puerto Rico by providing incentives to US corporations, such as tax breaks and cheap labor.Footnote ³² The Puerto Rican government also developed a contract labor program to encourage and regulate emigration to the United States.Footnote ³³ These state policies created a transnational migration flow between the island and the United States, resulting in the rapid expansion of Puerto Rican communities in a number of US cities.

Before the Puerto Rican government developed its own contract labor program, privately owned US agencies conducted most labor recruitment on the island. Domestic workers, for example, were sent to Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.Footnote ³⁴ The largest group consisted of hundreds of women recruited by Castle, Barton, and Associates, Inc., which had offices in Ponce and San Juan; they began arriving in 1944. The majority were sent to Chicago, where they established a new Puerto Rican community.Footnote ³⁵ The employment agency advertised in Chicago newspapers that Puerto Rican domestic workers were available for hire. Potential employers filled out paperwork requesting domestic workers with particular attributes and skills. Meanwhile, on the island, Puerto Rican women also signed contracts that were overseen by Puerto Rico's Department of Labor. Over half of the women were under twenty years of age; younger teenagers ignored the minimum cut-off age of eighteen and signed up. Numerous recruits thought these jobs would allow them time to study or gain other experiences and opportunities in Chicago.Footnote ³⁶

Racial politics stood at the forefront of the incorporation of these domestic workers into Chicago. The first advertisements that the agency placed noted that “Puerto Ricans [White]” were available to work, while later reports noted that “colored” Puerto Ricans had been sent to Florida and Atlanta. Unlike the earlier placement of workers in New York, such racial descriptions may have signaled that Puerto Rican migrant workers were similar to earlier waves of European immigrant workers previously employed in domestic service. Indeed, officials working for the Puerto Rican government also began describing the migration of Puerto Rican women to the United States as being akin to that of European women.Footnote ³⁷ The Puerto Rican government benevolently cast  the program as providing Puerto Ricans with an opportunity to be integrated into the United States, like European immigrants before them. Racial demarcation explicitly set them apart from black and Mexican women already working in domestic service in the city. However, despite company efforts to market these women as white, racial and colonial logics and discourses of both employers and US government officials cast the workers as nonwhite.Footnote ³⁸ When the workers arrived in Chicago and encountered residential and social segregation, the majority navigated this by entering and befriending Mexican and black communities, compounding popular and state perceptions of them as non-white.

Women responded to the difficult labor conditions, including long hours and low pay, by walking away from jobs as domestics. They did so as soon as they created networks of friends and alliances in the city, which made it possible for them to move out of employers’ homes and into temporary housing in hotels provided by the recruiters. When they did so, workers  immediately encountered state organizations and agencies that viewed them as subject to the same regulatory regimes as immigrant communities and communities of color in Chicago. Social agencies, upon realizing they couldn't deport them because they were US citizens, denied them social assistance based on the same Illinois residency requirements often used to discriminate against black communities and particularly against migrants from the South. They also became the targets of local police, who were conducting an antiprostitution campaign.Footnote ³⁹ A number of the women were arrested, likely after socializing at dance and social clubs in the city. Reporters suggested that because of the low wages received in Chicago, the Puerto Rican women had begun working as prostitutes. Concern over Puerto Rican women's integration into black and Mexican neighborhoods and their socializing with men from these communities framed these accusations.Footnote ⁴⁰

The domestic workers found cross-class and cross-race allies. The YWCA invited them to social events and teas where they shared their experiences. Gathering with other domestic workers provided a forum for the Puerto Rican women to make friends. They began traveling together to other gatherings, sometimes meeting up with Puerto Rican men who were also in the city as contract workers.Footnote ⁴¹ The YWCA long had served as a site for discussions on the conditions of household labor, its regulation and professionalization through training.Footnote ⁴² At the YWCA, Puerto Rican women compared their work experiences and wages with other domestics; they realized that they were making half as much as the normal rate for household work in the city, while working longer hours and getting less time off. The Puerto Rican workers also learned that the agency was trying to undercut the wages of local household workers by bringing Puerto Rican women to the city.Footnote ⁴³

At the YWCA, Puerto Rican workers also found out about the ongoing struggle of household workers, particularly black women, to attain better working conditions. They met women who were already organizing to create labor standards for domestic work. Among them was the “Household Employees League,” a group representing domestic workers that met at the YWCA. Its members joined in seeking better working conditions for Puerto Rican women and later joined the picket lines when the workers organized the strike. Puerto Rican women quickly learned that, despite numerous attempts by domestic workers to organize for inclusion under protective labor legislation, state and federal standards excluded this job category. In coming to the United States to work as domestics, they had entered a contentious political field that was in the process of extensive political mobilization and the subject of much debate.

These workers developed allies among Puerto Rican graduate students at the University of Chicago who had connections to Puerto Rican political leaders on the island, notably Elena Padilla, a young anthropologist, and her roommate, Muna Muñoz Lee, the daughter of the leader of Puerto Rico's senate.Footnote ⁴⁴ The students used their personal connections to raise awareness about the labor conditions that the workers faced through an already existing network of Puerto Ricans in the United States They argued that the terms of the contracts were exploitative and that the contracts themselves could not legally be enforced; there were no US laws specifically regulating domestic work, and when workers attempted to contact the Puerto Rican government about contract violations, there was little response. Together the students and more than fifty domestic workers organized labor strikes, picketed the offices of a private employment agency, and documented the experiences of the women.Footnote ⁴⁵ The students also reached out to established social activists and labor leader Jesús Colón in New York, who arranged for some of the Chicago domestic workers to travel to the New York Puerto Rican community to discuss the conditions they faced.Footnote ⁴⁶ The student allies both brought public attention to what had happened and demanded that the Puerto Rican government investigate the case and intervene in the situation. They insisted that the colonial state had an obligation to address the conditions that domestic workers had experienced and to ensure that similar cases didn't occur in the future. Puerto Rican officials responded by coming to Chicago to investigate, a result of the networks that the students had on the island and their ability to reach officials.

One of the first Puerto Rican representatives involved in the case was Carmen Isales, a social worker who had been trained at the University of Chicago and helped build social welfare programs on the island.Footnote ⁴⁷ As a student in Chicago she had worked with local social agencies that served Puerto Rican workers. Although she worked for the Puerto Rican government as a social worker on the island and therefore was a state agent, her interest in the case in the beginning was personal. Isales first learned about the domestic work program when she saw the advertisements seeking workers that were placed in Puerto Rico. She was skeptical of the offers that she saw in the papers, which suggested that workers would receive thirty-five dollars a week, much more than the ten or twelve dollar a month average that a domestic worker could make on the island. However, Isales knew that in the United States most domestic workers received closer to fifty dollars a month because while she was a student she had tried to hire help and was told by friends it was too expensive. Curious about the intensions of the employment agency, Isales decided to look into the situation when she traveled to Chicago on a vacation, which doubled as an opportunity to check in with administrators at the Chicago School of Social Work about the possibility of finishing her degree.

When she arrived in Chicago, Isales discovered that the Puerto Rican domestic workers were living in “horrible” conditions. She judged their situation to be a “system” of “indentured servitude” that had been formally supported by the Puerto Rican colonial government itself. Isales noted that the Department of Labor agents had a relationship with the private agency and that their primary loyalty was not with the workers.  She noted that when the Commissioner of Labor traveled to Chicago, he was picked up in a company car hired by Castle, Barton, and Associates. When she began her investigation of the workers’ conditions, the company immediately accused her of being a communist, something that she recalled was then “the quickest way to stop social justice.” Despite the denunciations she received from the company, she found support from the YWCA, which she noted “had always been a pioneer in these cases” and which offered her an office. She then gained the secretarial support of a friend, Juanita Aldea, who helped her to investigate the cases and begin corresponding with United States and Puerto Rican government agencies. She also met up with the Puerto Rican students who were already working to organize the domestic workers and joined them in organizing the workers and pressuring the Puerto Rican government to respond to their needs.Footnote ⁴⁸

Employers frustrated by absconding workers organized to try to recuperate the loss in transportation costs they had paid to the private agencies for the domestic workers to come to the United States. They had planned to gradually deduct these costs from salaries, and when they could not, they demanded that Castle, Barton, and Associates, or the women themselves, repay them. Some employers threatened workers with deportation or arrest by the police if they did not pay for transportation costs. As tensions escalated and the private agency argued it was not responsible, the employers began to sue the workers for breach of contract and for expenses. Isales went to court with the women in order to help them to get the charges dropped.

Isales began her investigation into the case by interviewing thirty of the domestic workers who had participated in the program.Footnote ⁴⁹ In her report to the Puerto Rican government, she specifically described how employers sought to exploit Puerto Rican women by paying them less than US workers, undercutting even the relatively low wages that they had offered black women for these same jobs.Footnote ⁵⁰ Isales also drew attention to the lack of coverage of domestic work by US labor legislation, suggesting that women's participation in this type of work made them vulnerable because there were no labor standards. After receiving Isales’ report, Fernando Sierra Berdecia, the commissioner of labor of Puerto Rico, arrived in the United States to further investigate the domestic work program.Footnote ⁵¹ Meanwhile, workers and their allies continued to call attention to the state's complicity in placing Puerto Ricans in unregulated, low-paid, and dangerous occupations. Isales played a central role in relating information about the problems with the contract labor program to the Puerto Rican government and presenting them with information about the broader discussion. What had begun as a vacation, turned into a full inquiry and resulted in presenting a persuasive argument to the Puerto Rican government that changes in migration policy needed to be addressed.

While she was in Chicago, Isales also collaborated with field agents from the Women's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor. The Women's Bureau representatives noted that situations like those created by the Chicago program could be averted if the US government regulated domestic work and if migrant labor was managed by state agencies.Footnote ⁵² On October 8, 1946, a “committee representing public and private agencies,” explained Bureau Director Frieda Miller, contacted the agency for “both facts on the rights and responsibilities of employers, workers, and community agencies involved, and help in dealing with the human problems of the workers.” This group included welfare agencies, civic and religious groups, individual employers, and later the Puerto Rican workers themselves, who “complained of their conditions of work, deductions from their pay which they did not understand, and of other misrepresentation.”Footnote ⁵³ One of the main issues that the Puerto Rican workers faced was that most of the workers in social and government agencies did not understand or respect that Puerto Ricans were United States citizens and were afforded the same legal protections as other workers.

The Women's Bureau agents worked alongside Isales and the Puerto Rican students to intervene on behalf of the Puerto Rican workers. As Frieda Miller noted,

But United States citizenship did not mean that Puerto Rican women would have labor protections as domestic workers because, as Isales and the other reformers had learned, such labor fell out of the purview of labor standards. As Miller explained, because “[t]here are no laws of any State—with  one possible exception, in the State of Washington—which limit the hours of women employed in domestic service,” that “in the case of this particular group of migrants what was done to improve their conditions had to be by way of the acceptance of voluntary standards and the understanding of the importance of those if there was to be a good working relationship…” In Miller's vision, the best the Women's Bureau and the other reformers could do was try to negotiate the best possible conditions for workers outside of formal legal protections.

Despite the inability of women reformers to regulate Puerto Rican contract labor or help the workers gain better working conditions, the scandal generated major changes. The workers’ strike, the organizing of domestic workers with professional women, and calls for reform by various US officials all pressured the Puerto Rican government to intervene. In response, the Puerto Rican colonial political apparatus mobilized, propelled in its own right by the populist government's desire to continue using emigration as a means of depopulation. It worked to stave off another scandal. The Chicago field agent from the Women's Bureau was invited to Puerto Rico to discuss the case and Miller happily reported that in the future the Women's Bureau agents would take up central roles as intermediaries between US employers and migrant laborers, like the Puerto Rican domestic workers. The Puerto Rican government enlisted these representatives to join them in creating an insular program that would regulate contract labor using the laws of the colonial state to intervene into the lives of migrant workers while the United States remained disengaged. The organizing and resistance of the domestic workers, local students, and seasoned reformers like Isales and Women's Bureau agents led to this change. The women reformers involved in the Chicago case were quickly enlisted to create a new state-sponsored household worker training program that emerged within a year of the workers organizing and strike.

Extending the Reach of the State: Household Worker Training and the Migration Division

In response to calls for an investigation into the experience of domestic workers and other Puerto Rican laborers in the United States, the Puerto Rican government instituted a new set of policies to regulate contract work. They formed a Migration Division of the Puerto Rican Department of Labor in New York to expand the activities of the earlier Bureau of Employment and Identification and to create other branches in the United States. Demands made by workers, unions, and labor reformers in Puerto Rico and the United States resulted in the expansion of the Puerto Rican colonial government's role in the US administrative apparatus regulating labor. The colonial government responded to demands for supervision of labor recruitment while it broadened the ongoing activities of its New York agency. Thus, the agency expanded, owing to government plans to promote out migration, labor organizing, and mobilizations recently institutionalized in the Puerto Rican Department of Labor, and workers’ and citizens’ protests that labor agencies be regulated.Footnote ⁵⁴

Seeking to prevent another scandal like that in Chicago, the Puerto Rican government decided to hire Frances Phillips, an experienced domestic worker and labor organizer from the United States, to help develop a new state-sponsored household worker program to regulate contract labor.Footnote ⁵⁵ Phillips, an African American woman, was chosen for the post because of her experience working with black domestic workers and her central role as a labor reformer with the New York Department of Labor. She knew the New York case, had connections with the US Women's Bureau, and was known for participating in national forums on the reform of domestic work. Phillips was to oversee collaboration among her office, the Puerto Rican government, the Women's Bureau, and local agencies like the YWCA that helped place workers. The Puerto Rican government charged her with creating a training and placement program to professionalize Puerto Rican domestic contract labor along lines that she had developed for African American women's work. Training would occur in Puerto Rico before the women were placed in homes in New York. Phillips’ official title was “Assistant” to the Commissioner of Labor of Puerto Rico in the United States. Phillips also worked alongside a group of professional Puerto Rican women in home economics, education, and social work. These women made up an expanding network of reformers eager to develop the program and showcase their expertise.Footnote ⁵⁶ All the Puerto Rican instructors who developed the program were trained in the United States. These programs allowed professional Puerto Rican women to claim new roles in state institutions that regulated the lives and labors of working-class women and not merely monitor labor migration to the United States.

Phillips’ work for the Puerto Rican government began with a trip to Caguas where she helped establish a new training program for household workers, grafting it onto an older home economics program. Puerto Rico already had vocational education programs within the public education system that provided training to girls and women in home economics.Footnote ⁵⁷ Students learned about US concepts of domesticity and standards for housework and were instructed in the performance of caring labor. These programs drew on contemporary ideas about scientific motherhood that were also a central component of the island's ongoing modernization and development program. The household worker program, which opened in October 1947, was similar in many ways, though it specifically prepared women for employment in the United States. It provided language classes in English and vocational classes about domestic and family life in the United States, both of which were meant to prepare students for placement in US homes. It would “help mature houseworkers improve their skills and give younger workers a sounder methodical approach to housemaid's tasks.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Students attended classes on the use of appliances like washing machines, infant and child care, and female grooming, which included instruction in how to do one's hair and nails and how to dress for work.Footnote ⁵⁹

Upon placement of contract workers in mainland jobs, the Puerto Rican state turned to developing a positive public relations campaign about labor migration, though migrant women were still largely unhappy working as domestics and many quickly abandoned their jobs. When the first group of twenty-one women traveled to Scarsdale on their labor contracts, Phillips met them at Newark Airport, along with Commissioner Sierra and a group of social workers who would become leaders of the Migration Division.Footnote ⁶⁰ Shortly after, the Puerto Rican government reported that the “Pilot Project of Training and Placement of Household Workers” was going well and that it planned to expand the program.Footnote ⁶¹ However, the employers and workers involved in the newly regulated program were not as enthusiastic about its outcome. Domestic workers still complained of generally poor conditions, and many of the women left jobs after short periods.Footnote ⁶² In the end, the government decided to suspend further professional training of domestics. Despite its short life, the Puerto Rican government still judged the program a success because it had portrayed the state and Puerto Ricans positively in the US press. Migration Division agents also had been successful in establishing themselves as experts who would continue to work to regulate and organize Puerto Rican migration through programs of vocational training in Puerto Rico and by providing assistance to workers on the mainland.

While the program only lasted for a brief time, it provided a bridge for a number of women to migrate to the United States, forging communities that would grow in US cities. The fact that women did not stay in these jobs suggests how undesirable most live-in situations were; this work provided women with little time off or personal freedom and left them vulnerable to exploitation by their employers. Like black women in the US before them, Puerto Rican women sought to move out of household labor into more flexible occupations.Footnote ⁶³ The contract workers additionally took issue with the deductions from their wages to pay for transportation costs as well as clothing, food, and other items provided by employers. In leaving such jobs, they deployed a weapon of the weak to protest unsatisfactory and degrading conditions. The abandonment by Puerto Rican domestic workers of live-in contract labor positions, as well as their refusal to continue to have wages deducted from their pay for transportation costs, was a form of resistance and rejection of the conditions workers faced in the United States.Footnote ⁶⁴ Their actions also suggest that despite attempts at regulation, the Department of Labor contract program failed to create jobs in domestic work that Puerto Rican women wanted. Instead of a sustainable form of employment, the programs actually provided a pathway for women to migrate and, in turn, seek opportunities outside of state control.

Even though the training program in household work created by Phillips was short-lived, the Puerto Rican government's Migration Division offices in the United States expanded after 1948. The agency continued to place workers in jobs and help migrants facing discrimination and lack of access to good jobs, housing, education, and social services. Even as it built other offices dedicated to employment services, agents of the Migration Division in Chicago and elsewhere worked specifically to place former domestic workers in new jobs, some of them still in domestic work, but for different families. In New York City, Petroamerica Pagán de Colón, one of the Puerto Rican social workers who had overseen the household worker program, headed a revamped New York “Employment Division.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The Migration Division kept a list of open positions in domestic work that were sent to them by potential employers who had heard that the agency provided referrals. The agency continued placing women as the employment agencies had done in the 1930s. However, now placement was under the direction of social workers with experience in regulating labor migration, many of whom had helped develop the domestic work training program.

In the 1950s the Migration Division formalized its “Household Worker” program and began recording and keeping track of its placements.Footnote ⁶⁶ Working mothers in New York advertised for childcare and attendants for elderly, sick, and disabled people. Requests from this period display subtle variations in job titles: employers asked for live-in and live-out workers to serve as a “babysitter,” “mother's helper,” or “nursemaid.” Increasing numbers of Puerto Rican families also turned to the agency to find household and care workers. These records illustrate how the Migration Division came to broker care work needed to sustain the migrant community itself. In short, the Migration Division helped facilitate emerging labor patterns in the Puerto Rican community by placing women in domestic work occupations, many of which were later subsidized by state programs. The Employment Division of the Migration Division also began collaborating with the Social Service Division that helped Puerto Rican clients with social welfare needs via individual casework and referrals to local social agencies.Footnote ⁶⁷ They began forwarding the cases of women who arrived in their offices for help with applications for social welfare or public assistance to the employment section of the agency.Footnote ⁶⁸ The majority of these women were then placed in positions as domestic workers.

In placing potential applicants for social welfare in jobs as domestic workers, the Migration Division mirrored other United States programs of the time that encouraged women who applied for assistance to participate in vocational training programs in low-paid caring labor. The Bureau of Public Assistance sponsored programs that trained welfare recipients, or potential applicants, in “Homemaker Service.”Footnote ⁶⁹ These workers were paid to tend to other public assistance recipients, giving in-home care on the cheap. These programs targeted African American women and Puerto Ricans who joined other poor women in new care work positions first as employees of the welfare state and increasingly as workers for private social welfare agencies.Footnote ⁷⁰ The Migration Division, like other organizations of the time, touted the power of vocational rehabilitation in care work to help migrant women to adjust to mainland life and avert welfare dependency. In the 1960s the Puerto Rican government continued to place Puerto Rican women in positions as domestic workers as demand for home workers grew in the United States. In this way, domestic and caring labor remained a central way that Puerto Rican migrant women experienced inclusion and exclusion within US economies. Over the next two decades, as governmental reforms restricted access to social welfare and services in US cities, Puerto Ricans demanding economic justice in their communities joined new coalitions of organizers and activists in the welfare rights movement and other social justice and civil rights organizations.Footnote ⁷¹

The long history of Puerto Rican women's role as domestic workers illuminates how the creation of the contract labor programs represents one moment among many when Puerto Rican women organized for better labor conditions in the United States. If we look for only traditional labor organizing, however, we miss their protest. Workers in Chicago, along with professional allies, protested conditions of a privately-run, for-profit contract employment scheme and pressured the Puerto Rican government to establish its own “Household Worker” program and employment service. Still, this path to migration proved unsatisfactory, and Puerto Rican workers continued to seek other forms of employment, walking away from jobs when they faced exploitative conditions. Even with regulation and reform, these workers could not escape the legacy of racialized occupational segregation by sex that had linked them with black women at the lowest levels of an expanding care work economy.