Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception

A History of Birth Control in Puerto Rico

Annette B. Ramírez de Arellano, Conrad Seipp, Annette B. Ram?rez de Arellano

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469640013
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

The authors analyze the tortuous course that Puerto Rico has followed in evolving a population policy, highlighting the island's rapic economic growth, its role as a laboratory for testing different methods of birth control, and the inevitable conflicts between church and state. The strands of colonialism, catholicism, and contraception are woven into a background of profound social change, characterized by shifting values, industrialization, mass emigration, and technical innovation. Originally published 1983. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

1. Puerto Rico as a United States Colony

It was manifest destiny which led the United States to acquire Puerto Rico as a territorial possession. Puerto Rico was to the United States hardly more than a minor episode in the Spanish-American War; to its inhabitants, however, the American conquest of the island was of overwhelming significance and gave rise to problems that are far from resolved today, more than eight decades later.

Early in the summer of 1898 the United States armed forces had already succeeded in crushing the military and naval power of the Spanish crown in Cuba. The scope of the conflict was enlarged in July of that year, when a large American military force landed on the southern coast of Puerto Rico. Although the American invasion was expected by the Spanish authorities, they had been led to believe that the island would be attacked from the northeast. Accordingly, the first contingents of the American army were met by only eleven soldiers of the local Spanish garrison. In occupying the island, the United States forces encountered little military opposition; in fact, they were welcomed by many. The military campaign was notable in its brevity; it lasted but seventeen days. It was also comparatively benign for both the invaders and the invaded. Total American military casualties amounted to seven killed and eighteen wounded.¹

The Treaty of Paris, which concluded the Spanish-American War, was signed toward the end of 1898 and ratified by the U.S. Congress several months later. Among its provisions, it ceded Puerto Rico to the United States. What this country was to do with its newly acquired possession was, however, then at best unclear. Lacking in experience and uncertain in intent, the United States lapsed for twenty-five years into a policy which has aptly been characterized as “the imperialism of neglect,” entailing a “policy of no policy.”²

Often spoken of as “the gem of the Antilles,” Puerto Rico had long been coveted by some Americans as a strategic outpost. With the projected construction of an isthmian canal, its military significance was enhanced. The geopolitical idea of Puerto Rico as “the Gibraltar of the Caribbean” not only commanded influence at the turn of the century, but has persisted to the present day. Thus, large tracts of the island are still the property of the United States armed forces; Puerto Rico has served as a site for army, naval, and air force installations and for missile tracking stations, as well as for a training ground at which Peace Corps volunteers are acclimatized to the indigenous conditions of the countries in which they are to serve.

Most Americans remained ignorant about Puerto Rico during the first half of this century. At best, it has been essentially taken for granted, never commanding more than the marginal attention of the political leaders in the United States. Some Americans have viewed their government’s involvement in Puerto Rico as an embarrassing instance of adventurism. Increasingly, others have come to perceive the island as constituting an excessive and unjustified drain upon the American treasury. Most, however, appear to retain the idea of Puerto Rico as having some kind of strategic, political, and economic importance for the United States. The history of Puerto Rico during the last eighty years is an almost inadvertent byproduct of the new national role that the United States has assumed and the emergence of new views about hemispheric and even global strategy. The expansion of American commercial and financial interests has exercised a decisive influence in defining the options open to the Puerto Rican people.

The American forces that occupied Puerto Rico in 1898 found themselves in possession of a small rectangular-shaped island hardly more than one hundred miles long and thirty-five miles wide. Behind its beaches was a littoral fringe of alluvial land, which in most places rapidly gave way to the foothills of a mountainous spine that ran its entire length. The island was endowed with great natural beauty, a profusion of tropical growth, and an equable climate. Even within the island’s relatively narrow limits, however, contrasting environments could be found. On the northeastern slopes of one of its highest mountains, in excess of three thousand feet, a tropical rain forest thrived, while at its southwestern corner, desert conditions prevailed.

Despite its beauty, Puerto Rico was endowed with limited natural wealth. No mineral resources of major economic significance were known to exist.³ The potentially valuable timbers of its forested areas had been cleared. The waters surrounding the island were restricted in their capacity to produce fish and other seafood that could be easily harvested. The economy of Puerto Rico depended upon only one natural resource, its limited supply of arable land, about half of which was then under cultivation.

Puerto Rico’s agricultural development had been seriously distorted by its status as a Spanish colony. Except for a few commodities, such as ginger and hides, agricultural production was largely oriented to local needs. The larger landowners, however, amassed wealth through production for the overseas market. Trade opportunities were determined in large part by the tariffs and customs duties that the Spanish crown imposed upon that trade. Production for the overseas market became increasingly important after 1804, when Puerto Rico was allowed to trade legally with countries other than Spain. Once the door to foreign commerce was opened, Puerto Rico established an expanding network of trade relationships with other European countries, as well as with the United States and many of the islands of the Caribbean.

In 1898 coffee was Puerto Rico’s most important export, exceeding in value the combined total of all others. Sugar was a poor second and tobacco a still more distant third. Only about one-fourth of its exports went to Spain.⁴ By this time the Puerto Rican economy had already become dependent upon the import not only of manufactured products but also of foodstuffs. The latter, chiefly rice, wheat flour, and hog products, accounted for about two-fifths of its imports.

In 1800 the population of the island had been 150,000. With the expansion of agricultural production for overseas trade during the nineteenth century, the population increased rapidly, numbering close to 500,000 by 1850. The rate of increase slackened during the second half of the century, reaching a total of about 900,000 at the time of the American occupation.⁵

Export-oriented agricultural production arose with the introduction of slaves from Africa in the eighteenth century. However, slaves never constituted more than 12 percent of the island’s population. When slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873, they numbered fewer than thirty thousand, about 4 percent of the total population.⁶ Nonetheless, the practice of slavery had facilitated the expansion of the scale of agricultural production by the large landowners. Following the abolition of slavery the number of haciendas on the island increased. At the turn of the century there were many hundreds of sugar cane haciendas distributed around the island’s coastal lowlands and ten times as many coffee and tobacco fincas, or farms, in the highlands. As many as 250 landowners cultivating cane continued to rely on their own often antiquated and inefficient mills to produce sugar. Others delivered their cane to one of the island’s twenty-two major refineries, or centrales, to be converted into sugar. The central charged them a fixed percentage of the final product.⁷

Puerto Rico’s overseas trade was sufficiently profitable to support a limited segment of the population in comparative affluence. The island had developed not only its own cultural tradition but a local elite that was in most respects already cosmopolitan. At the turn of the century, however, Puerto Rico’s urban population was extremely small. Ponce, on the southern coast, numbered fifty-five thousand inhabitants, while San Juan, the capital, had twelve thousand less. Only three other towns had populations in excess of thirty thousand.⁸ The rural population was highly dispersed in a distinctive settlement pattern. Although the landless agricultural laborers tended to live close to each other in the coastal areas, housing in the mountainous interior was often scattered on steep hillsides with limited access to the very inadequate roads. Houses in both settings were usually flimsy and overcrowded. Very few were of masonry construction, and not too many more were of wood; the majority were made of palm fronds and straw.

The class differentiation of the population was reinforced in complex and subtle ways by its physical diversity. However harshly the island’s one hundred thousand or so native Indians may have been treated by their Spanish conquerors, traces of their genetic influence remain evident in the present population.⁹ The consequences of racial mixing following the importation of slaves from Africa are even more pronounced. Yet many in all strata of Puerto Rican society retain the characteristics of pure European types.

The Americans who came to Puerto Rico at the turn of the century were clearly confused by the absence of the overt forms of racial segregation with which they were familiar in their own country. In many respects this has continued to be the case, for in Puerto Rico the issue of race has been the subject of a peculiar, self-imposed “conspiracy of silence,” which the Americans, over the years, have by and large respected.¹⁰ Although Puerto Rico may be free of the kind of racial discrimination that has marked relations between the races in the United States, race and the nuances of color have strong class associations and remain a major cause of anxiety for many segments of the population.

The Puerto Rican population reflected a mixing not only of races but of ethnic types as well. The island attracted settlers from Spain and, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, from many other Mediterranean countries. The New World contributed French Cajun refugees from Louisiana and Haiti and others to this melting pot.

At the beginning of this century the population of Puerto Rico was exclusively Catholic.¹¹ Dominated by Spanish clerics, the church was simultaneously a central institution of Puerto Rican life and a remote and alien force. The observation of a chaplain of the American army of occupation that the island “was a Catholic country without religion whatever” was unquestionably a gross exaggeration.¹² Yet to an important extent Puerto Rico was then, as it remains today, a Catholic society in a cultural sense only.

The family was the key social unit. The position of the father as the authoritarian master within the family was reinforced by the belief in the inferiority of women. The twin ideals of virginity in unmarried women and machismo in men served both to enforce a profound psychological separation between the sexes and to give rise to the practices necessary to maintain different codes of behavior. This authoritarian family ideal was approximated most fully among the jíbaros, those living in the mountainous interior and engaged in subsistence farming and the production of tobacco and coffee. Lowlands families were more egalitarian.¹³ Women within such families exercised greater freedom within the home. Differences in family structure appear to have been associated with differences in a family’s relation to the land. The lowlands family, for example, was less likely than its jíbaro counterpart to own its own land.

At the turn of the century more than half of all Puerto Rican families were consensual unions, that is, those not officially consummated by the state. While it remains unclear whether such unions were more or less stable than marriages, consensual unions did make it easier for a woman to have children by more than one sexual partner. Thus such unions provided women with a greater measure of security by giving them entry to larger kinship networks.

Most Americans viewed the conditions that they encountered in Puerto Rico as appalling. The people were seen as dirty, ignorant, and lazy. There was a general lack of sanitation, and most families relied upon contaminated sources of water supply. Less than one-fifth of those ten years of age or over were literate.¹⁴ Health hazards were acute, as the commanders of the American army of occupation rapidly discovered. After six months in Puerto Rico, nearly one-fourth of the troops were ineffective owing to syphilis, gonorrhea, or chancroid.¹⁵

Tuberculosis was rampant, a major cause of suffering and family instability as well as death. Although fewer Puerto Ricans died of malaria, its prevalence was even greater and its debilitating consequences no less devastating. Both the maternal death rate and infant mortality were at frightening levels. It is estimated that approximately one out of four newborns died during the first year of life.¹⁶

A member of the Army Medical Corps, Bailey Ashford, who remained in Puerto Rico throughout most of his military career, pioneered medical work to identify hookworm among the population. In 1902 he advanced the estimate that “90 percent of the rural inhabitants of Porto Rico were infested with hookworm” and that 90 percent of these “were actually sick as a consequence.”¹⁷

Not only for infants but for adults as well diarrhea and enteritis appears to have been the leading cause of death. Widespread anemia, the combined result of chronic malnutrition and parasitic infection, seriously undermined the vitality of the society. To the Americans, the population of the island appeared lethargic and apathetic, the victims of a cultural lack of concern about time. Few apparently appreciated the extent to which the tendency toward procrastination and indifference to the present was an inevitable consequence of the population’s health status.

Puerto Rico was beset with profound problems. Yet, as the end of the nineteenth century approached, many of the island’s most prominent citizens felt hopeful about the future. Throughout the nineteenth century Puerto Rico, no less than Spain’s other New World possessions, had been agitated by the call for independence. Puerto Rico’s armed uprisings against Spain, however, had been limited and easily suppressed. Nonetheless, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century Puerto Rico had more opportunity to win concessions from Spain. As Spain lost its empire in America, Puerto Rico’s strategic importance declined. This was also a period of relative economic stagnation on the island. Puerto Rico stopped attracting substantial numbers of new settlers, and Spain’s domination of the island’s export and import trade decreased. Puerto Rico was no longer as important to Spain as it once had been.

Ironically, a year before the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico’s leadership had successfully concluded negotiations with the Spanish crown to alter its status. The island was to be constituted as an autonomous province of Spain. Most Puerto Ricans incorrectly assumed that the United States, which existed only by virtue of its successful struggle against colonial oppression, would at least allow them to retain the degree of autonomy that they had already secured from Spain. Instead, in 1900 the U.S. Congress decreed that Puerto Rico should be maintained essentially as a ward of the American presidency. Under the terms of the Foraker Act, all basic executive and judicial authority over the island was to be exercised by a presidentially appointed governor, who would appoint his own officials. Administratively, Puerto Rico remained under the jurisdiction of the American War Department until 1934.

One of the provisions of this first law defining the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States was the restriction of land ownership to five hundred acres or less. While this provision was motivated by a populist concern within the U.S...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Puerto Rico as a United States Colony
• 2. A Raft Adrift
• 3. “Meddling Experiments” and the New Deal
• 4. Private Initiatives and Legal Encounters
• 5. Uphill!
• 6. The “Battle of Production”
• 7. The TVA of the Tropics
• 8. Turning Off the Faucet
• 9. An Answer to the Quest?
• 10. More Technological Fixes
• 11. A Single Instance of Inconvenience
• 12. A Matter of Conscience
• 13. Out of the Closet
• 14. Unfinished Business
• Notes
• Index