Borinquen MadePeriod
1900-1949
The entries in this magazine that fall in these years, in the order the events occurred. Freeze 2026-08-22. Not current events in these History essays; News is. Not original historical research.
English-only classrooms and the language wars
A four-decade push to make English the primary language of the classroom ultimately failed.
Before New York
Decades before the postwar migration to New York, Puerto Ricans first left the island for the cane fields of Hawaii.
English-only classrooms
English as the language of instruction in the early American era.
The Foraker Act and the Standard Oil money
The senator who wrote Puerto Rico's first civil government received payments from Standard Oil worth nine times his salary.
Foraker Act, April 12, 1900
Organic civil government; Puerto Rican citizenship without U.S. citizenship.
The resident commissioner
A seat in the House that can speak and cannot vote on final passage.
Foreign in a domestic sense
A 1901 Supreme Court doctrine decided that the Constitution does not fully follow the flag, and it still governs Puerto Rico today.
Downes v. Bidwell, 1901
The tariff case that named the unincorporated territory.
El Yunque, 1903
President Roosevelt's proclamation of January 17, 1903: the Luquillo Forest Reserve.
From ingenio to central
The estate mill gives way to the big central that crushes colonos' cane across a whole coastal belt.
Twenty thousand soldiers
A regiment raised on the island guarded the Panama Canal, while thousands of new citizens were drafted into the wider U.S. Army.
Ana Roqué de Duprey
An educator and botanist led, and split from, Puerto Rico's own suffrage movement.
Citizenship on the eve of the draft
Congress granted U.S. citizenship in March 1917. Weeks later, the draft reached the island's new citizens.
Jones-Shafroth Act, March 2, 1917 (citizenship)
Statutory U.S. citizenship through Jones-Shafroth, not by becoming a state.
Statutory citizenship, not the 14th Amendment
Citizenship here is statutory, not the jus soli of the Fourteenth Amendment as in a state.
Selective Service, May 18, 1917
The new citizens were drafted that same spring.
The ground shook twice
A major earthquake and a tsunami struck Puerto Rico's west coast: a real disaster that rarely makes the short lists.
Plena
The newspaper in song of Ponce and Santurce, distinct from bomba.
Merchant Marine Act 1920, section 27 (cabotage)
Cabotage under the Merchant Marine Act, not under the 1917 citizenship statute.
Nationalist Party, Albizu, the legal path
The Nationalist Party's legal path, and Albizu as lawyer turned president.