Colonial Bodies: The Politics of Welfare and Work in Puerto Rico

My discussion will focus on the interconnected history of capitalism and colonialism by examining the extension of social welfare policy and, by proxy, the U.S. welfare state to Puerto Rico. After Puerto Ricans were made U.S. citizens in 1917, the bodies of the island’s people became the subject of imperialist modernization discourses and interventions. I will examine how, after the New Deal, Puerto Rican workers and reformers organized to demand both labor rights and access to federal social welfare provisions that excluded territorial subjects.  My research in the archives of Puerto Rican welfare offices and their case files sheds light on how workers and reformers struggled over the relationship between welfare and work. Examining these case files, I show how social workers manifested the abstract political ideologies of the colonial state into concrete social policy, in turn locating their clients within gender, class and race categories. The resulting struggles largely revolved around the bodies, reproduction, and intimate lives of the working class as they became “clients” of the colonial state.