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.
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.
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.
Section 936 and the tax law that kept the boom going
Manos a la Obra's tax exemptions were meant to expire. Washington rewrote the federal tax law to keep the pipeline running another generation.
The New York-Puerto Rico roots of salsa
Salsa music was not born in a single place. It emerged from a two-way current between San Juan and the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of New York.
Fomento and PRIDCO
An agency lineage: the Industrial Development Company of 1942, Fomento as the popular name, PRIDCO as the letterhead that survives.
The jíbaro poster and Black Puerto Rico
The official face of the highlands against the African coast.