Borinquen MadeA history magazine in Spanish
The history of Puerto Rico in one order of time
Puerto Rico is the easternmost island of the Greater Antilles, a Caribbean territory whose history reads as a single arc: the first Taíno peoples, the centuries of colony under Spain, the transfer of the island to the United States, the territory and the Free Associated State. Current events on that arc are dated on News. This magazine arranges that arc by the time of the events, with no sections breaking the reading. Choose the years you want to read and start there.
Freeze 2026-08-22. Not current events in these History essays; News is. Not original historical research.
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.
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.