"Solving the Medico-social Problem of Our People”: Food, Nutrition, and Rural Hygiene in Puerto Rico during the 1930s

• In Event: Food Systems, Nutrition, and Culture in the Spanish Caribbean: Landscapes and Discourses

Abstract

This paper is part of a broader research project that investigates the intersections between agricultural and nutrition history and the history of public health in mid-twentieth century Puerto Rico. Drawing from archival documentation, it examines efforts to attend to the island’s nutrition and food supply problems as part of the work conducted by New Deal relief and reconstruction agencies during the 1930s. Specifically, the paper explores how health and agriculture experts employed by these agencies approached the problems of malnutrition and limited food supply in relation to their rural hygiene interventions. It pays particular attention to the activities of the Health Division and Nutritional Unit of the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA). The paper analyzes these interventions in the context of the local sociopolitical struggles of the decade, particularly the labor movement, as well as international discussions about the relationship between agriculture, nutrition, and health. This discussion shows how New Deal reconstruction work on the island fostered the notion that the deviant configuration of its rural landscape—particularly the hegemony of cash crops agriculture and unchecked population growth—was at the root of the food and nutrition problems. In the assessments of rural rehabilitation experts from multiple professional backgrounds, this deviant rural landscape produced an environment of familial instability, poverty, scarcity, and ignorance that resulted in chronic malnutrition and widespread diseases. By the end of the decade, these notions became powerful rhetorical devices for an emerging political movement and crucially shaped postwar nutrition and development policies.

Author

• Elisa M González, Columbia University