Land Law, 1941

On April 12, 1941, Puerto Rico enacted Act 26, the Land Law. It created a Land Authority and set a 500-acre limit on corporate holdings of agricultural land, a number aimed at the coastal sugar companies whose mills had gathered more cane than any family farm. The statute is public. It is not a parable. It is acreage, an agency, and a date.

Act 26, April 12, 1941. Five hundred acres is the statutory cap people name when they say the Land Law.

The law did not end sugar. It tried to break up the largest estates and settle parcels in small owners and proportional-profit farms. Enforcement was political and slow. Some land moved. Much of the mill's logic stayed: a central mill still wanted cane delivered on schedule, whoever held the title. Land-title reform without mill reform leaves the colono delivering to the same smokestack.

1941 is also a war date. Federal attention, shipping, and later industrial policy would crowd the same decade. The Land Law belongs with the agrarian New Deal cousins on the mainland, but it is an insular statute with an insular target, the sugar corporation. It is not Operation Manos a la Obra. Bootstrap is a tax-exemption industrialization program from 1947. Fusing the two is how farm policy carries the blame for factory policy.

The cabotage of the Jones Act, the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, still weighed on shipping costs while the Land Authority drew maps. One sentence suffices for that statute: coastal cabotage rules raised the price of imported goods and some agricultural inputs, and Act 26 did not repeal them. The land record and the shipping record must stay distinct.

The Grito, Jones-Shafroth citizenship, and the language law are stories of other sites. This page is acreage in 1941.

Read the law as a coastal document. The coffee farms of the Cordillera were not the 500-acre problem. The problem was the plain visible from the roof of a mill. Whether the Authority succeeded is a later question for the agricultural census. That the statute exists, with a date and a cap, is the assertion.

Sources: Gobierno de Puerto Rico, Ley de Tierras (Ley 26 del 12 de abril de 1941) — Oficina de Gerencia y Presupuesto, archivo de leyes. Freeze 2026-08-22.