First Published: The Call, Vol. 3, No. 6, March 1975.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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“Imperialism–not overpopulation– is the cause of hunger, unemployment and inequality.” This slogan, being put forward in celebrations of International Women’s Day across the country this month, has burning relevance to Puerto Rican women.
Borinquen (Puerto Rican) women in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico today are facing an intensified onslaught from the imperialists. But these attacks can only heighten the struggle of the Puerto Rican people for independence of their homeland and full democratic rights here in the U.S.
The main form of the attacks on Puerto Rican women has been:
–a massive sterilization campaign unleashed on the island (and to some extent practiced in cities in the U.S.) that is virtually without parallel in the world; –forced migration to the U.S. which breaks up families, most often forcing the men to come to the U.S. in search of work while the women and children are left behind. An astounding 40 percent of the Puerto Rican people (2 million out of 5 million) have been forced by economic necessity to come to the U.S.
–a U.S. plan to build a superport and a related petrochemical industrial complex on the island. If this plan goes through, thousands more jobs will be wiped out. This will force even more migration to the U.S. and cause severe pollution of the island’s water, air and land. The stage will be set for the UJS.-owned companies (which own 85 percent of the island’s industry) to make even more gigantic superprofits from the labor of the Puerto Rican people, take these profits out of the country and leave the island and its people in an even worse situation. All Puerto Ricans–men and women–face this threat of national subjugation by imperialism. But the women are hit the hardest.
In 1970, the average weekly income on the island was $70 while the cost of living was 20 percent higher than in the U.S. Part of the reason the prices are so high is that the U.S. has wiped out a large portion of the island’s agriculture and destroyed the indigenous industry. The result is that the Puerto Rican people, who have the means to be self-sustaining, are dependent on the U.S. for the majority of the products they need, from canned goods to other basic necessities.
Unemployment on the island hovers at a constant 30 percent. Add to this the fact that only 25 percent of the island’s work force is unionized–and most belong to U.S. international unions that have never had the interests of the Puerto Rican workers at heart–and a desperate economic picture is seen.
Puerto Rican women, holding two jobs when they work outside the home, are usually found working in the island’s most unskilled, low-paying areas. They are found working as servants in the many U.S.-owned homes and as maids in the luxury hotels mainly serving foreigners; as tobacco strippers and pickers, as seamstresses and as embroiderers.
When they come to the U.S., they find themselves in similar kinds of work: as garment workers, food-processors, on assembly lines in light industry, and the like. These jobs all pay the minimum wage and take advantage of the fact that the women may speak little or no English.
Where the women are unionized in the U.S. it is often in racist, reactionary-led unions like the International Ladies Garment Workers Union which have done little or nothing to win good wages or working conditions for the garment workers.
Federal aid programs are all provided in lesser amounts or not at all on the island. For example, a mother and child in Ponce, P.R., received approximately $2,040 in 1974, as compared to $4,400 in Boston, $3,696 in New York City, or $3,678 in Newark.
The economic crisis on the island–which began to take hold when the U.S. began its investments there in earnest-has brought the U.S. to claim that it is “overpopulation”–not imperialism–that is the cause of the island’s problems. In order to “solve” the crisis (actually defuse the workers’ militancy) the U.S. through its colonial puppets in 1973 put forward a program to “reduce the working sector” of the population. Innocently titled “Opportunities for Employment, Education and Training,” the plan says that the population on the island must be no more than 2.2 million by 1985, and that without a “plan” the population will number 3.3 million. The plan is a joint program of combined further forced migration to the U.S. and a massive program of forced sterilization.
In fact, 35 percent of Puerto Rican women on the island between the ages of 20 and 49 years old have been sterilized already. This is the highest rate in the world. The rate in most Third World countries where the U.S. has carried on extensive population reduction schemes is about 5 to 7 percent. There is no question that the working class women have borne the brunt of these attacks, for 40 percent of all women sterilized came from homes where the income was between $4,000 to $5,000 per year.
The tragic consequences of this program are fully revealed by official figures published by the Puerto Rican health department showing that 2/3 of the women sterilized were between 20 and 29 years old–destroying the child-bearing ability of those women who would be among the most likely to want to bear children.
Clearly, imperialism’s rape and control of Puerto Rico is the cause of the massive unemployment on the island. Washington’s attempts to “solve” the problems with sterilization and forced migration create more hardship for the Puerto Rican women and the Puerto Rican people as a whole. The irrationality of capitalism and its placing of profits above everything is seen in that, alongside the plan to reduce the “surplus” working population, the construction of the capital-intensive superport will only throw even more workers out of their jobs as many industries will be destroyed by the superport.
But where there is oppression, there is resistance. Due to the character of colonial oppression in Puerto Rico, and national minority oppression in the U.S. as part of the U.S. working class, Puerto Rican women are to be found on almost every front. For almost everywhere they turn, from communities, workplace, schools, hospitals, welfare offices, they face the most intense national oppression and superexploitation.
In their communities, Puerto Rican women have been active against police repression, which has wounded and killed many of their sons and daughters, and for elementary necessities such as street lights, more frequent garbage collection and tenants’ rights. These necessities often denied to the Puerto Rican communities in the same measure that they are given in most white communities, have often brought on mobilization and protest by the entire community–in Newark, East Harlem, Hartford, Boston, Chicago, Springfield, Mass., and others. The September 1974 uprising in Newark was a typical example. A police attack on a community park led to several days of rebellion by the Puerto Rican community.
At the workplace, the struggles of the Puerto Rican women are gathering momentum. They form a large part of the hospital workers union on the East Coast (Local 1199) which went on a militant strike in the spring of 1974. In heavy industry, while they are a small minority, they have also fought alongside Black and white workers such as at the Standard Motors strike in the fall of 1974 in New York, where the United Auto Workers misleadership was forced to recognize the strike.
Education has been one of the most outstanding areas where Puerto Rican women have struggled. Their battles for daycare have stretched from New York City to many other cities on the East Coast particularly in 1969-72 when President Nixon was continually coming up with new plans to cut back what few centers there were.
Struggles led by Puerto Ricans in New York City’s Lower East Side for community control and bilingual education have been going on for several years, involving mass marches of up to 1,000 people and boycotts of the entire school district or of particular schools that have been up to 98 percent effective. Their struggle in New York’s Lower East Side has pitted them against Albert Shanker, the racist head of the American Federation of Teachers, who brings the weight and support of the most reactionary sectors of the labor aristocracy in his attempts to crush what small gains the parents have won for their children. Puerto Rican students make up 78 percent of the school population in the Lower East Side.
Puerto Rican women, like Black and other Third World women, are part of the core of the anti-imperialist united front in this country. They serve as a bridge between the struggles of the working class as a whole, the women’s movement, and the movement of the oppressed nationalities. The demand for democratic rights for the Puerto Rican people here, and the demand for independence of their country must also be linked to demands to end the special oppression of Puerto Rican women.
The uniting of the working class in the U.S. with the oppressed people of Puerto Rico and especially with the Puerto Rican women, will provide a powerful army of fighters against the system of imperialism which is the cause of the problems which the people of the whole world face today.