On June 18, 2018, Puerto Rican social worker, Vega Otero, decried the compounded poverty in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, Otero argued that “The island’s financial crisis and burgeoning debt, and the subsequent imposition of austerity measures, had had a negative effect on basic rights such as health care, food, education, housing and social security.” For Otero, and generations of predominantly Puerto Rican women in social work, the colonial relationship of the archipelago to the United States exacerbated the political and economic changes in Puerto Rico. These changes to Puerto Rico’s political and economic landscapes, even nearly a decade after Maria, turned toward connecting social work and the care of the state to the archipelago’s rural hinterlands. The political organizing and advocacy work of Otero and her colleagues follow generations of Puerto Rican women’s labor to demand social services and public health resources for vulnerable communities.
Emma Amador’s The Politics of Care Work: Puerto Rican Women Organizing for Social Justice tells the intertwined story of social work and political activism — one rooted in the articulation of citizenship on the archipelago and in the diaspora. Social workers and clients of social welfare programs became chief proponents “to demand better coverage under US social policy” since 1917. Initially, this endeavor saw a class of professional women become — as Amador argues — “agents of the colonial states.” Through their employment with social welfare programs, these women played a pivotal role in building these programs and enacting their work across the archipelago. Increasingly, as social workers, these women and their clients advocated for equitable access to benefits and services, challenging their second-class citizenship that stemmed from the continued ambiguity of Puerto Rico’s political identity. However, by the 1970s, social work, as a profession, became an important space for Puerto Rican women to connect their work with struggles for civil rights, women’s rights, and independence. Specifically, as more working-class women entered the profession, they emphasized accountability to their communities and centered their work in solidarity with their neighbors.
The book’s chapters are organized chronologically to focus on Puerto Rican social workers’ care work and political activism across multiple generations of Puerto Rican women. Amador also writes about the advocacy of working-class women care workers from the aftermath of the Jones Act of 1917, which granted Puerto Ricans a form of statutory citizenship, until the community-based activism of the 1970s. Amador utilizes biographies of social workers to emphasize their professional field “as a complex terrain of politics” that allowed Puerto Rican women to contribute and make history. Aside from these generations of social workers leaving a rich archive in their knowledge production, the myriad studies and survey work offer insights into how institutions racialized and characterized domestic work. However, these contributions were not limited to just the women who navigated these policies but also the clients that solicited their services.
Regardless of the restrictions imposed on Puerto Rico by U.S. colonial officials, Puerto Rican women leveraged their professional status as care workers to organize politically. In the 1920s, the United States brought renewed attention toward the archipelago as the social sciences engaged in colonial knowledge production. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Children’s Bureau and Puerto Rican government officials collaborated on a crucial study to demarcate the working relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico in pursuit of developing social welfare programs. Under colonial capitalism, working-class women found caring for their children difficult. Early studies claimed that labor migration of men to the United States facilitated “abandonment,” as women’s domestic work offered inadequate support. Reformers associated with the Children’s Bureau argued for state support of women’s labor in the home and a protected childhood.
While a politics of maternalism, which was concerned with regulating child labor and reinforcing local populations, shaped the early interactions concerning social welfare projects, the New Deal state offered a fruitful arena for Puerto Rican rights and citizenship. Under the reformist New Deal state, the Puerto Rican government recruited and trained women to work in New Deal agencies and vocational education programs. These institutions served as the catalyst for a diverse cadre of Puerto Ricans to politically organize and articulate their inclusion in the New Deal. However, this inclusion rested not on relief but the demand for work as social workers “recognized that women’s labor, within and outside the home, would be essential to producing the social changes they envisioned.”
As Amador recounts, the expansion of the social welfare state in the 1940s and 1950s offered working-class women care workers opportunities to contest the regulatory state and political discourses from framing them as undeserving citizens. The Department of Public Welfare (DPW), established in 1943 by the Puerto Rican government, established an economic system program on the archipelago that left an extensive record of state-sponsored social welfare programs. For decades, social workers and feminists advocated for such an agency, which “heralded an even more expansive role” for professional women within the state. Initially, the expansion of services outpaced the applicants, as the expansive agencies needed dozens of applicants to staff facilities and connect individuals with resources. These consultations led to the creation of numerous case files. While these case files revealed the myriad ways that social workers visualized the archipelago’s racial hierarchies, such as skin color, hair texture, and various phenotype, the working-class clients refuted some articulations, particularly to emphasize that their “social reproductive labor counted as an important form of labor” for the archipelago. For instance, domestics refuted how social workers recorded their resources within the informal economy as these were unreliable and their low wages should qualify them for social welfare programs.
The relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico was not defined to just the archipelago, as the expansion of social welfare programs heightened the interest of social scientific studies and migration off the archipelago. U.S. scholars offered competing studies into the role of women’s labor in Puerto Rico, such as Oscar Lewis’s La Vida, which framed working-class women as nonworkers supported by social welfare benefits. While debunked by the work of other scholars, like Helen Safa, the negative association with working-class women and welfare dependency continued to circulate. During this period, the mass migration of Puerto Ricans also occurred through state-sponsored labor migration programs and the contract-labor agreements that facilitated the movement of these communities. As a component of Operation Bootstrap, a development program of the Partido Popular Democrático to industrialize and modernize the archipelago through incentivizing U.S. corporate involvement (often through tax breaks and cheap labor), new migration policies encouraged movement to the United States.
The Migration Division also served an important site not just to facilitate the movement of people but to intertwine the work of Puerto Rican and U.S. social welfare programs. As a regulatory agency, the Migration Division leveraged the expertise of Puerto Rican women educated in the United States and served as “a crucial bridge between the Puerto Rican government and local agencies in US cities.” The rapid expansion of Puerto Rican communities in U.S. cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago posed new opportunities for women involved in social work. While these workers contributed to understandings of working-class livelihoods in their communities, others leveraged their professional expertise to imagine alternative futures alongside nationalists and Pedro Albizu Campos, president and spokesman for the Nationalist Party and a leading figure in the Independence Movement.
As residents of urban metropolitan communities, Puerto Rican women became vital agents of community organizing during the 1960s and 1970s. This turn toward the community stemmed from — according to Amador — an increasing frustration “with the continued sponsorship of migration by the Puerto Rican government without ample or adequate reform of the conditions faced by Puerto Rican migrants in the United States.” This generation of women professionalized as social workers to advocate for community control over social service and public health institutions. By inviting their work to coincide and work in tandem with working-class communities, this generation of social workers served as educators and intellectuals that built lasting contributions to their field’s scholarship. As a cohort that highlighted the importance of “feminine leadership,” this generation included prolific Afro-Puerto Rican organizers and educators, like Antonia Pantoja, Yolanda Sánchez, and Esperanza Martell. Through a plethora of organizations, these women emphasized a way that invited collaboration and fostered dialogue between social workers and their communities.
Amador’s work masterfully highlights the racialized and gendered role of social workers to note that their labor and political activism were far from separate and became increasingly intertwined throughout the 20th century. In fact, social work proved an insightful arena to explore the day-to-day interactions between Puerto Ricans and the state over the demands of care for the families and communities. Whether bureaucratic offices affiliated with state-sponsored programs, or repurposed storefronts of urban communities, Puerto Ricans arrived to these doors as employees and clients to articulate their demands for care and dignity.
Politics of Care Work is an important volume to trace the often-neglected role of Puerto Rican women’s caregiving and activism in sustaining communities, both in the United States and on the archipelago. Aside from contributing to the often-invisibilized labor of Latinas in the United States, Amador’s work raises new questions rooted in our understanding of the state in the 20th century. As she offered in her conclusion, the economic policies that cut social services in the United States in the second half of the 20th century, also adversely affected Puerto Ricans on the archipelago. Ongoing debates that offered residents on the archipelago “unequal and provisional access” only reified Puerto Ricans to “second-class social welfare benefits.” Certainly, aspiring scholars of Puerto Rican history should explore these decades of history and their drastic impact on Puerto Rican communities on the archipelago.
Emiliano Aguilar is a U.S. historian at the University of Notre Dame specializing in the 20th century. His research interests include labor, the Midwest, migration, politics, and urban history.