In this clear and concise study of Puerto Rico in the 1930s and 1940s, Geoff Burrows effectively connects the substantial historical literature on the New Deal in the United States to that of modernization and development in Latin America. Burrows focuses on the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (1935–55), part of the Second New Deal. The PRRA established the foundations upon which the better-known Operation Bootstrap, launched in 1947, would accelerate processes of industrialization and migration on the island and become a blueprint for subsequent programs around the hemisphere, such as the Alliance for Progress. Both through this genealogy of modernization policy ambitions and through the material circulation of Puerto Rican cement, Burrows demonstrates the pivotal position of Puerto Rico in the mid-century political economy of the Americas.

In this first institutional history of the PRRA, Burrows argues that the agency grew out of targeted disaster recovery efforts following a series of hurricanes to launch a much wider and more ambitious modernization and public works program. Along the way, the PRRA not only bridged this transition “from relief to reconstruction” (11), but it also transformed the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico. Through the PRRA, the New Deal in Puerto Rico became the Puerto Rican New Deal, setting the stage for the rise of Luís Múñoz Marín and the establishment of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1952.

Burrows divides this short book into an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction orients readers to broader contexts, including the trajectory of U.S. colonialism and competing Puerto Rican political parties, the sequence of changes within New Deal politics, and three distinct phases in the history of the PRRA. Defined by the leadership and goals of the agency in particular times, Burrows emphasizes the second phase, between 1937 and 1942, as the most consequential in the history of the PRRA. During this period, the PRRA headquarters moved from Washington D.C. to San Juan, and the agency was effectively led by Puerto Rican engineers and planners. As the PRRA became more Puerto Rican in its operations, its material impact through projects such as cement production and electrification grew significantly.

Two devastating hurricanes upended Puerto Rico in 4 years, ushering in an era of federal relief. The San Felipe hurricane in 1928 and the San Ciprián hurricane in 1932 caused approximately $3.7 billion of damage in today’s dollars. In Burrows’ words, the disasters “touched nearly every community on the island and affected nearly all aspects of daily life for the rest of the Great Depression” (22). As described in chapter one, the storms help explain the reshuffling of Puerto Rican politics in the 1932 election, when the awkward alliance, known as the Coalition, between pro-business Republicans and the Socialist Party ascended in the Puerto Rican legislature. Against the Coalition, the Nationalists embraced a more radical form of revolutionary politics under the leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos, while the Liberal Party positioned itself in a pragmatic alliance with Roosevelt’s New Deal. Scientifically minded Liberals, such as the mycologist and university chancellor Carlos Chardón, became important voices in the latter, proposing the Chardón Plan in 1934 to breakup and redistribute large sugar plantations.

The land reform ambitions of the Chardón Plan overlapped in time with the federal New Deal program known as the Puerto Rico Emergency Relief Administration (PRERA), a subset of the Federal Emergency Relief Agency. The Chardón Plan offered an insular vision of long-range economic reconstruction, which ultimately led Roosevelt to intervene and create the PRRA in 1935 to circumvent Coalition opposition to the Chardón group within Puerto Rico. Chapter two argues that the shift from disaster relief under PRERA to reconstruction and planning under PRRA demonstrates how Puerto Rico experienced the changing New Deal, as well as how federal intervention transformed colonial politics on the island.

Chapters three through five offer case studies of some of the most consequential projects connected to the engineering division of the PRRA. First, chapter three traces how the opening of the Cataño cement plant in 1938, and its transfer to the public Puerto Rico Cement Corporation the following year, literally reconstructed the island with reinforced concrete made from Portland cement. Cataño also positioned PRRA engineers as central actors in the broader Caribbean, as Puerto Rican cement became both an ingredient and a motivator in subsequent modernization schemes around the region. Chapter four then examines the public works projects made possible with locally made cement. Hospitals, housing, agricultural cooperatives, schools, roads, and recreation sites changed nearly every aspect of daily life on the island. Finally, chapter five examines the construction of hydroelectric facilities and the electrification of rural Puerto Rico. Among the major contributions of this important chapter, Burrows provides an in-depth archival analysis of the PRRA’s land purchases for its rural electrification program. The source record leads Burrows to a nuanced assessment in which individual and family losses are balanced “with the improvements in public health, communication, and quality of life experienced by the larger society” (129).

In a well-constructed conclusion, Burrows evaluates the implications of the PRRA for our own times. “The most durable lesson of the New Deal in Puerto Rico,” he writes, “is that the PRRA was a locally run agency that could not have existed without the meeting of federal capital and Puerto Rican expertise” (139). This contrasts significantly with the subsequent history through which the PRRA-era Water Resources Authority became the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) in 1979 and then, after 2020, the multinational corporate ventures LUMA Energy and Genera PR. The Puerto Rico Cement Corporation, for its part, was sold to a private corporation in 1951 as part of a series of maneuvers that accompanied the inauguration of Commonwealth status in 1952. The history of privatization and debt in contemporary Puerto Rico reflects what Burrows describes as “the ongoing neoliberal transition from the New Deal to today” (143). Burrows is a worthy guide for helping us understand the contexts of these changes.