An “Enlightened Civilization” Acquires Puerto Rico and Exploits Mexicans

On February 15, 1898, the United States Battleship Maine, anchored at the port of Havana, was suddenly blown up, in an explosion which tore out her bottom and sank her, killing 260 officers and men on board. Claiming that the explosion was an act of sabotage, the American press blamed the Spanish government, and a “Remember the Maine” mentality gripped the country, reminiscent of the “Remember the Alamo” frenzy that had led to the annexation of Mexican territory. Responding to public pressure and its own expansionist ambitions, the U.S. Congress declared war against Spain and invaded Cuba and Puerto Rico. In the end, under the terms of the peace treaty entered into at Paris with Spain, sovereignty over the Island of Puerto Rico and its peoples was transferred to the United States. Thus marked the end of the last Spanish settlement in the New World, as Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam entered the sphere of American life.11

Americans considered the acquisition of Puerto Rico as a saving grace to the people of the island. Upon seizing it, General Nelson Al Miles declared that its people would now have “the advantages and blessings of enlightened civilization.”12 The goal of the U.S. government was to Americanize Puerto Rico and garner the approval of its people to justify American control. English was established as Puerto Rico’s official language, schools were used to inculcate American values and accelerate the adoption of English, and the new colonial government changed the name of the island to “Porto Rico.”

According to Edna Acosta-Belén and Carlos E. Santiago, both Puerto Rico and Cuba became “pawns in a larger plan to consolidate U.S. military and geopolitical interests and its hegemonic power” in the Caribbean and the rest of the hemisphere. While Cuba was allowed to become an independent republic in 1902, its sovereignty was limited by the Platt Amendment, which gave the United States free rein to intervene in Cuban affairs whenever it deemed it necessary. Independence was not offered to Puerto Rico, however, and it was designated as “an unincorporated territory,” essentially a powerless colonial status under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress.13 While few Puerto Ricans migrated to the United States during these early years of domination – in 1910, the total U.S. Puerto Rican population was only 1,513 – the economic dependency and political subordination of Puerto Rico put in place would set the stage for much larger migrations, the first of which began after the Second World War.14

At the time, for its labor needs, the United States turned to Mexico, and the transportation revolution of the early 20th century created the demand for Mexican labor and led to the proliferation of automobiles and trains, which transported Mexicans to the U.S. border and points beyond. By 1900, an estimated 100,000 Mexican immigrants lived in the United States, up from 42,000 in 1870. The number increased to 1,400,000 by the 1930 census.15 Though at the turn of the century, 69 percent of Mexicans resided in Texas, the population in California soared over the next 30 years, particularly in Los Angeles, where many were recruited to work on the railroads. In a 1908 report to the U.S. Department of Labor, economist Victor S. Clark noted an increasing number of Mexicans outside of the Southwest. By the 1920s, Mexicans were used to harvest sugar beets in Minnesota, pack meat in Chicago, assemble cars in Detroit, and can fish in Alaska.16

Until World War I, the labor flow from Mexico to the United States was essentially free, and during the second decade of the century, events on both sides of the border precipitated a relative explosion in the Mexican population within the United States. The Mexican Revolution, which lasted roughly from 1910 to 1920, shook Mexico to its core, led to economic and socio-political upheaval and sparked an exodus from Mexico. In the United States, the irrigation of arid land, the invention of the refrigerator car, and the emergence of a nationwide distribution system led to the growth of agribusiness and a shift from small farm local production to large-scale production for the world market and the demand for Mexican laborers to do the harvesting.

In 1917, the U.S. Congress passed an immigration act that placed restrictions on both Europeans and Mexicans, including a literacy test, a medical examination, a head tax, and an investigation to determine that the potential immigrant would not become a public charge.17 However, railroad, agricultural, and mining companies launched an aggressive campaign to provide exemptions for Mexicans, whom they needed as cheap laborers. The Los Angeles Times, whose owner employed hundreds of Mexicans, carried an article warning of serious consequences due to the “exodus” of Mexicans from Texas. A member of the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange claimed that a serious shortage of workers would hamper the harvest of crops in Southern California. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce sent a telegram to the U.S. immigration commissioner requesting that Mexican laborers be excluded from the provision of the immigration act, which denied admission to aliens who could not read the English language. Despite the strong, often violent, resistance of labor unions, within six months, Congress yielded, allowing the Secretary of Labor to suspend the literacy test and head tax of the law.18

Additionally, the entry of the United States into World War I led to an acute labor shortage, and in May 1917, the United States established a program authorizing the INS Commissioner to “control and regulate the admission and return of otherwise inadmissible aliens for temporary admission,” which led to the arrival of about 500,000 Mexican workers before 1921. After the war, with the continued growth of agribusiness and the implementation of laws restricting European immigration in the 1920s, Mexican workers, beset by mass dislocation due to urban industrialization and the mechanization of agriculture in Mexico, continued to arrive in large numbers.19

In 1924, Congress established the U.S. Border Patrol, whose 450 agents were responsible for patrolling the Mexican and Canadian borders. According to historians Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, the agents used their extensive powers selectively in order to serve the needs of growers and industrialists. When Mexican workers were needed to harvest crops or labor in the mines, regulations were loosely enforced; however, when the supply of Mexican labor exceeded demand, the “strict letter of the law” was enforced. They write:

Although the United State government did not consider the Mexicans a serious immigration threat during the early twentieth century, neither were they greeted or welcomed with open arms. Mexicans were often accorded rude treatment, even when following official procedures and seeking legal entry. Immigration officials consistently displayed disdain and obnoxious behavior … All immigrants, men, women, and children, were herded into crowded, examination pens. As many as five hundred to six hundred persons were detained there for endless hours without benefit of drinking fountains or toilet facilities.20

During the 1920s, large numbers of Mexican Americans formed enclaves in farm-producing areas or moved to cities; by 1930, 51 percent of the Mexican population in the U.S. lived in urban areas, which spawned racist nativism among Anglos. In Santa Paula, located in Ventura County, California, immigration ignited fears in the Anglo community, and White supremacists expressed their displeasure through a campaign of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) intimidation. KKK meetings were held in public, often at the top of a hill overlooking the Mexican zone, and were used to repress and intimidate the Mexican community. An article in The Ventura Daily Press in July 31, 1923 reported: “The Klan is an organization for all native born White Americans. It believes in the tenets of the Christian religion, White supremacy, protection of our White womanhood, preventing unwarranted strikes by foreign agitators, limitation on immigration, and that much needed local reform, law and order.” The Klan organized a membership drive in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, and over 400 new members were initiated. Klan activity took place throughout Ventura County, with membership ceremonies held in the Ojai Hills in 1923 and in the Santa Paula Hills in 1924.21

Mexican American children were often forced to attend segregated schools employing a “No Spanish” rule; this was often justified by the increased application of I.Q. testing, always administered in English, which frequently resulted in Mexican children being relegated to special classes for the mentally inferior or mentally retarded.22 William Sheldon of the University of Texas at Austin used I.Q tests to measure the mental ability of Mexican Americans in Texas and concluded that Mexican students had only “85 percent of the intelligence” of White students. Thomas Garth of the University of Denver found that the median IQ of those tested was 78.1, and concluded there was a connection between Mexican children’s heritage and their low I.Q. According to scholars Martha Menchaca and Richard R. Valencia:

Language was the most common rationale used to segregate Mexican students. Allegedly, Mexican students were not permitted to attend classes with Anglo students because they needed special instruction in English. The pedagogical rationale was that the limited – or non-English-speaking – Mexican children would impede the academic progress of Anglo children. The racial overtones of these practices were blatantly seen when Mexican-American students who did not speak Spanish were also forced to attend Mexican schools. The need to acculturate Mexican students in special Americanization classes was a second major excuse used to justify segregation. Mexican students were characterized as dirty, dull, un-Christian, and lacking any social etiquette. Therefore, the educational belief was that Mexicans needed special classes where they would learn to emulate their Anglo-American peers.23

At the same time, attempts were made by churches and community organizations and in agricultural areas, grower exchanges, to assimilate the Mexican population. Still, sentiments were strong that Mexicans were unassimilable and undesirable. Said Congressman Albert Johnson in 1929, “The time [has] come again when it [is] necessary for Congress to save California for Californians.” Sociologist W. Garnett argued: “Negroes and Mexicans, of course, constitute our main non-assimilable population elements…” and would “bring racial complication to a section which heretofore [has] been blessed with freedom from this vexatious problem.” Other opponents of Mexicans warned of health problems, racial miscegenation, and the displacement of Anglo workers. Saturday Evening Post writer Kenneth L. Roberts declared: “One can see the endless streets crowded with the shacks of illiterate, diseased, pauperized Mexicans, taking no interest whatever in the community, living constantly on the ragged edge of starvation, bringing countless numbers of American citizens into the world with the reckless prodigality of rabbits.”24

Yet as historian George L. Sanchez points out, there was another side to Mexican urban life. During the 1920s and 1930s, Mexicans living in Los Angeles had a vibrant cultural life, and Mexican music thrived, given the advent of radio. As commercial interests took hold, advertisers found a booming market for Spanish-language broadcasts, and although many Anglos felt that only English should be heard on American airwaves, they were silenced by Corporate America’s goal of reaching Mexican consumers. During the 1920s, the number of hours dedicated to Spanish exploded. Sanchez writes:

Key to the success of Spanish-language broadcasting was its appeal to the thousands of working-class Mexican immigrants within the reach of a station’s radio signal. Radio, unlike La Opinión and other periodicals, reached Mexican immigrants whether or not they could read. In addition, the content of radio programming focused … more on [the tastes] of the masses … Programming was dominated by “traditional” music from the Mexican countryside, rather than the orchestral, more “refined” sounds of the Mexican capital and other large urban centers. “The corrido, the shouts, and all that stuff was popular with working people,” remembered [disk jockey Pedro J.] González. Although some bemoaned the commercialization of the corrido tradition and its removal from its “folk tradition,” most Mexican immigrants found this transformation to their liking because it fit well with their own adaptations to urban living.25

1.      Acosta-Belén, Edna and Carlos E. Santiago. Puerto Ricans in the United States: A Contemporary Portrait. (Boulder, CO: Lynee Rienner Publishers, 2006), 35.

2.      MacDonald, Victoria-María. “Hispanic, Latino, Chicano, or ‘Other’?: Deconstructing the Relationship between Historians and Hispanic-American Educational History,” History of Education Quarterly. Vol. 41, No. 3, Autumn, 2001, 371.

3.      Acosta-Belén and Santiago, 41.

4.      Ibid., 48.

5.      Balderrama, Francisco E. and Raymond Rodríguez. Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 9.

6.      Ibid., 8.

7.      Sánchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993), 55,

8.      Romo, 121.

9.      Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door, 89.

10.   Balderrama and Rodríguez, 11.

11.   Menchaca, Martha and Richard R. Valencia. “Anglo-Saxon Ideologies in the 1920s-1930s: Their Impact on the Segregation of Mexican Students in California,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), 236.

12.   Acuña, 176,

13.   Menchaca and Valencia, 230.

14.   Romo, 129.

15.   Sánchez, 184,