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.
Balzac v. Porto Rico, 1922
The Sixth Amendment jury does not extend by its own force.
The founding of the Nationalist Party
A small independence club became a confrontational political force once Pedro Albizu Campos took command.
Category five
The only hurricane to hit Puerto Rico at full Category 5 strength left half a million people homeless.
San Felipe II, September 13, 1928
The strongest hit to Puerto Rico in the modern record until María, making landfall at Category Five near Guayama with 312 dead on the NHC list.
From boom to bust
The 1920s sugar boom collapsed almost overnight, and a well-intentioned wage law shut down the island's textile factories.
San Ciprián, 1932
A September storm through Ceiba and the north coast, Category Two on the later scale, 225 dead on the Hurricane Center list.
The San Ciprián hurricane of 1932
A second catastrophic storm hit an island already sliding into the Depression; its exact toll remains uncertain.
Antonio Pedreira's Insularismo
A University of Puerto Rico professor asked what really makes someone Puerto Rican.
The sugar collapse, 1930s
Depression prices, quotas, and centrals that could mill more cane than the market would pay for.
Pedreira, Insularismo, 1934
A 1934 essay that made isolation a national mood.
Chi-Chi Rodríguez and Puerto Rico's sporting rise
A boy who carved his first golf club from a guava branch became the first Puerto Rican in the World Golf Hall of Fame.
The New Deal on the island
Roosevelt's New Deal reached Puerto Rico through a dedicated federal agency, built to fight the Depression there.
Shots at the university
A police shooting on a university campus led, four months later, to a colonel's murder and a weighty trial.
La Operación: the sterilization era in Puerto Rico
For decades, sterilization was the dominant form of birth control on the island, encouraged by a government worried about population growth.
Palés Matos
Tuntún de pasa y grifería, 1937, from Guayama.
Palm Sunday, 1937
A peaceful march commemorating the abolition of slavery ended in one of the deadliest days of the era.
Ponce Massacre, March 21, 1937
Hays: at least 14 dead and 64 wounded; later counts, 19-21 dead.
The founding of the Popular Democratic Party
A breakaway faction of disillusioned liberals would come to dominate island politics within a decade.
Julia de Burgos
Poem in Twenty Furrows, 1938; the river as a public voice.
Nazi submarines in the Caribbean
German U-boats hunted Allied shipping in Caribbean waters, with Puerto Rico sitting inside the contested corridor.