year; during the 1980s, more than 1 mil-
lion per year were deported. Uncounted
numbers eluded deportation and stayed in
the United States.A NEW DAY FOR
PUERTO RICOIn the first two decades after World War
II, a tremendous number of Puerto Ricans
moved to the mainland United States in
what became known as the Puerto Rican
“Great Migration.” At the same time,
those who remained behind in Puerto
Rico experienced different kinds of rapid
change. Under the leadership of Governor
Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico became a
commonwealth with full self-government
and it experienced industrialization and
economic uplift through a program called
Operation Bootstrap. Even so, poverty
and the overpopulation that exacerbated it
remained chronic features of daily life in
Puerto Rico, as did political unrest. Some
Puerto Ricans remained dissatisfied with
commonwealth status and continued to
press for full independence from the
United States. A few even turned to ter-
rorism to support their cause. Among
these were activists associated with the
Nationalist Party who wounded several
congressmen and attempted to assassinate
President Harry S Truman (1884–1972;
president 1945–1953).Luis Muñoz Marin
Luis Muñoz Marín (1898–1980) was born
in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the year of
the Spanish-American War, when the
United States won possession of the island
from Spain. He was the son of Luis
Muñoz Rivera, the patriot who at the
time was seeking self-rule for his home-
land. The younger Muñoz spent much of
his childhood in the United States, receiv-
ing his education at Georgetown
University in Washington, D.C., and
working afterward in New York City as a
writer and translator. Conscious of his
desire to carry on his father’s legacy, he
wrote: “I would be a giant, to embrace the
mountains that he contemplated in his
boyhood, the mountains that shelter his
countrymen... a giant to complete the
work of Luis Muñoz Rivera.”In 1926, Muñoz returned temporari-
ly to Puerto Rico, where he edited La
Democracia, a newspaper founded by his
father. After another stay in the United
States, he returned to Puerto Rico perma-
nently in 1931. There he joined the
Liberal Party and served as a senator in the
Puerto Rican legislature. He advocated
independence but even more urgently
wanted to improve the economic condi-
tion of Puerto Rico’s poor. The issue led
him to break with his party in 1936, when
he would not support the Tydings Bill,
a proposal in the U.S. Congress that would
have given Puerto Rico immediate inde-
pendence at the cost of all economic assis-
tance from the United States. After that
bill failed, Muñoz founded the Popular
Democratic Party (PDP), with its base in
the poor rural farmers known as jibaros.
Crisscrossing the island in search of their
support, he was the first Puerto Rican
politician to make a sustained effort to
identify with the jibaros—so much so that
their characteristic pava, or straw hat,
became the symbol of his party. In 1940
the PDP won a majority in the senate,
with Muñoz as president of the senate.
In the 1940s Muñoz came to believe
that independence was not the best way to
achieve economic uplift. Instead, he
believed the island should become a self-
governing commonwealth linked to the
United States, with Puerto Ricans manag-
ing their own internal affairs but drawing
on the massive resources of the United
States for economic support.
After World War II ended, as a move-
ment for decolonization swept the world,
changes in Puerto Rico’s governance hap-
pened swiftly. In 1946 the United States
appointed the first native Puerto Rican as
governor, Jesús T. Piñero. In 1948 Muñoz
Marín became the first governor
(1949–1965) to be elected rather than
appointed; he would be reelected three
times. Under his leadership, the
Commonwealth of Puerto Rico came into
being on July 25, 1952, with a new consti-
tution putting the island’s internal affairs in
the hands of its own elected governor and
legislature, though foreign policy would
still be in Washington’s hands.
Muñoz remains one of the most hon-
ored figures in Puerto Rican history, not
least for his decision not to run for reelec-
tion in 1964, on the view that no one per-
son should remain in power for too long.
His handpicked choice, Roberto Sánchez172 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY
PLANE WRECK
AT LOS GATOS
In early 1948, a charter plane carrying
28 Mexican farm workers crashed en
route from Oakland, California, to a
federal deportation center in El
Centro, in the Southern California
desert, killing all aboard. In a brief arti-
cle about the crash, the New York
Times reported merely that “the crash
occurred 20 miles west of Coalinga,
75 miles from Fresno.” The article
neglected to mention any of the
names of the victims, only calling
them “deportees.”
The tragic accident likely would
have been lost to history if not for the
reknowned folksinger Woody Guthrie.
Best known for his anthem “This Land
Is Your Land,” the Oklahoma-born
Guthrie often combined social com-
mentary and a sympathy for working
men and women in his songs. After
reading about the crash and noting
that even in death the victims were
recognized not as individuals but sim-
ply as anonymous deportees, Guthrie
penned a poem titled “Plane Wreck at
Los Gatos (Deportees).” His words
were later set to music by a former
school teacher named Martin
Hoffman, and the song has become
one of Guthrie’s best-loved works.Woody Guthrie (Library of
Congress)