Efficiency, modernity and bureaucracy: the New Deal or alternative strategies of colonial domination in Puerto Rico

Abstract

The article presents a projective vision of the Puerto Rican situation at the thirty’s on its political relations with the United States which offers some clues to see the present time. The author explains due to colonial nature of the political relations between Puerto Rico and the US the joint programs of the US administration, to face the great Depression reach the Island. Those programs are known as New Deal, and constitute an experiment where US has been hold the main force of several important social items. US pretends re-design the colonial links with Puerto Rico in getting a major control of subjects. The article remarks some conditions that shows how the New Deal agents presence established in Puerto Rico speed the limits of the Welfare State and articulate a modern developed project within a very complex burocratic model, and how this one appropriates itself, with a modern and progresist rhetoric, the national speech to give mean to the expansion of its developed projects. The author explains some issues of one the most permanents programs of New Deal: Puerto Rican Emergency Relief Administration (PREPA).