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Most histories of Puerto Rico's diaspora take place in mainland cities like New York or Chicago. With Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire, Ismael García-Colón explores how, during the (first) great wave of Puerto Rican migration, the postwar colonial state developed policies and bureaucracies to divert migrants away from the big city and onto American farms. García-Colón's two-part study begins in the policy-making corridors of Washington and San Juan. He retells the origins of Puerto Rico's US-based Migration Division (MD) and its Farm Labor Program (FLP, 1947–93). This historiographical ground is well traveled in more concise fashion by Jorge Duany (Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States [2011]), and in greater analytical detail by Edgardo Meléndez (Sponsored Migration: The State and Puerto Rican Postwar Migration to the United States [2017]). Garcia-Colón's historical ethnography builds on that literature—and explains the FLP's challenges and outcome—by following the migrant trail to the labor camps and farm towns of the US Northeast.García-Colón, an anthropologist, previously investigated Puerto Rico's postwar land reform program. Here he proposes to show how contemporaneous migration policy “formed and transformed the lives of Puerto Rican agricultural workers in Puerto Rico as well as the United States” (15). Rather than reiterate how American imperialism shaped migratory patterns to the mainland “heart of empire,” Colonial Migrants foregrounds the role of Puerto Rican bureaucrats who lobbied US labor officials, negotiated FLP contracts, and served as compliance officers. This proves that “colonial entities have more agency” than previously assumed (16). Yet the placement of recruits in Connecticut's tobacco fields built on a precedent set by American occupiers. From 1898 onward, US governors identified “overpopulation” as a social ill, and exporting labor became an early solution and enduring legacy of direct imperial rule. Moreover, García-Colón illustrates how and why “managing migration remained more a goal than an achievement” (100). FLP administrators faced unauthorized recruiters, unscrupulous travel agents, and employer resistance. Puerto Rican citizenship both facilitated and then stymied the FLP as the MD's protective interventions (and migrant activism) led farmers to prefer West Indian guestworkers or unassisted “walk-ins” from Puerto Rico. More importantly, from the migrants’ perspective, citizenship allowed them to “escape” farm labor without risk of deportation (159).García-Colón explains how and why racism, substandard housing, and unmet expectations prompted migrants to skip the FLP or challenge its failures through union organizing. Seventeen photographs from the Migration Division—the author's dominant archival source—contrast a FLP labor camp in Glassboro, New Jersey, replete with a clinic, laundry, and ballfields, with the “prisons in the fields” that housed more unfortunate migrants (131). Observant readers will note that Puerto Rico's own Development Bank actually funded the model housing complex. But the migrants’ lived experience of farm labor—fieldwork, pay rates, pesticides, foremen—merits less than three pages in this ethnography. The final two (of seven) chapters introduce migrant agency, from the mixed results of union drives to protests against police harassment as migrants settle (and discover social justice allies) in rural outposts like North Collins, New York. This introduction to Puerto Rican struggle and settlement in the semirural communities of the Northeast may be this book's key contribution to an already rich historiography.That said, this study's weaknesses—of organization, analysis, and methodology—far outweigh its merits. The author achieves few of his ambitious objectives. A comparative analysis of the FLP and other guestworker programs never develops. Empirical data appear in haphazard fashion. Contextual figures that illustrate migratory patterns arrive belatedly, in chapter 6, where the author finally mentions the crucial FLP “strategy to settle Puerto Ricans outside of New York City” (163). Yet why farm labor, given their right as citizens to free entry and employment? García-Colón only hints at the objectives stated explicitly by policy-makers: that officials intended the FLP as a steppingstone to nonagricultural jobs and permanent settlement. Indeed, it was not a formal guestworker program—guests return home—but one of assisted emigration, the colonial state's answer to the limits of postwar development.Yet policy does not dictate outcome. Migrants did return home, and García-Colón's evidence of stateside hardships indicates why. But he misses the opportunity to explore the neglected history of return and support his claim that assisted migration was “a key strategy for developing and modernizing Puerto Rico” (72). How so? Were the FLP migrants expected to return, like Mexican braceros or Spanish gastarbeiter, with savings and skills to uplift their sending communities? Readers do glimpse migrants who opened shops and purchased land, but their stories pass without explanation or analysis. Oral histories appear far less frequently than promised. But they are key given the author's use of archival sources that privilege the voice of bureaucrats rather than migrants themselves. Who were these men (only) recruited by the FLP? García-Colón alludes to their country roots, but their regional origins, education, family life, occupations, and patterns of landownership remain unclear. Why not relate farm labor up north to his prior ethnography of land reform back home? What were migrants’ motivations to leave and/or intentions on return? García-Colón dedicates one paragraph to remittances, and one line to their uses. A three-page “Returning Home” section neglects to explain the FLP's effects on sending communities. Oral interviews could still fill this historiographical gap.In the end, scholars of guestworker programs will discover a provocative case of comparison here. Those seeking the history of policy, and the FLP in particular, might first consult the above-mentioned sources. But Colonial Migrants does pry open the door to at least two avenues of inquiry: the history of return—and its relation to rural Puerto Rican “development”—and the story of the seasonal farmworkers introduced here who left the fields to settle permanently in cities like Buffalo or Hartford.
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