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.
The Borinqueneers go to war
The regiment later famous for Korea first saw real combat fighting through Italy, France, and Germany.
Land Law, 1941
Act 26 of April 12, 1941: a five-hundred-acre rule, a Land Authority, and a coastal plain still ruled by the mill.
PRIDCO, 1942
Two years before Operation Manos a la Obra, the corporation that would drive it was already quietly in motion.
Jaime Benítez and the University of Puerto Rico's mid-century rise
One chancellor led the University of Puerto Rico for nearly 30 years and grew it eightfold, while helping write the Bill of Rights of the Estado Libre Asociado.
Jesús T. Piñero
The first governor born in Puerto Rico was appointed, not elected, and signed one of the era's most repressive laws.
The Great Migration: The Guagua Aérea to New York
Between the late 1940s and the mid-1950s, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans boarded propeller planes to New York, the largest move off the island in the twentieth century.
Doña Fela: San Juan's long-serving mayor
For 22 years a woman ran San Juan, the first woman ever elected mayor of a capital city in the Americas.
Operation Bootstrap: Manos a la Obra
How does an island go from among the poorest in the Caribbean to a manufacturing hub in about fifteen years? A deliberate, aggressive tax deal.
Industrial incentives, 1947, Manos a la Obra
A tax exemption for factories, not a New Deal agrarian program. Manos a la Obra means hands to work, and the work was industrial.
Elective Governor Act, 1947
Congress lets the island elect its governor; first election in 1948.
Law 53, June 10, 1948
The Gag Law: speech, the flag, and advocating independence became crimes.
The vote that changed everything
The same year the Gag Law was approved, Puerto Ricans elected their own governor for the first time.
Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico's first elected governor
One man's name is stitched into nearly every thread of this era: industrialization, migration, the Constitution, for better and worse.
Fomento and the hotel that sold an island
Manos a la Obra needed a face, and Puerto Rico's development agency built one, in the shape of a beachfront hotel that later claimed to have invented a cocktail.