“We Must Have the White Girl”: Americanization’s Institutionalization of Racial Hierarchies in Nursing Education in Puerto Rico

• In Event: Whose or What Life?: Medical Knowledge, Social Order, and Imperial Projects

Abstract

This paper examines the construction and institutionalization of racial hierarchies in the early twentieth-century colonial context of Puerto Rico by analyzing two challenges to the Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing’s racially exclusive admission policy. Tracing the evolution of the school’s hiring policies, it shows how race, class, gender, and the political economy shaped the missionary hospital’s policies and Puerto Ricans’ responses to them. It argues that local and metropolitan racial and gender ideologies combined with Americanization’s economic effects (including women’s increased participation in the wage economy) to first include and later exclude Afro Puerto Rican women from nursing education.
The racist policy reflected not only inconsistencies between missionary rhetoric and practices, but also—more tellingly—represented fundamental contradictions within the civilizing project itself. For example, the missionaries who founded the hospital conflated Americanization with conversion to a modern, democratic, and inclusive Protestantism--the antithesis of a Catholicism they construed as backward-looking, hierarchical, and elitist. Yet the racist policy contradicted both religious and political ideologies of universal equality. Afro Puerto Ricans skillfully exploited these contradictions, making claims based on the professed ideologies and using the Presbyterians’ relatively open institutional structure to do so.
This study illustrates not only the power and plasticity of ideology, but also the fluid, contingent nature of imperial relations. It demonstrates the need for carefully historicizing Americanization, for not only metropolitan, but also local actors shaped events in this period of radical, precipitous socio-economic change.

Author

• Ellen Walsh, Governors State University