Ambassadors of Empire: The Puerto Rico Planning Board and the Geography of American Capital, 1942-1960

FAIN: FT-270555-20

Joaquin Villanueva
Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, MN 56082-1485)

Research for a history of the Puerto Rico Planning Board, focusing on how the program transformed the island’s landscape after World War II to attract American investment.

The project is a historical geography of Puerto Rico's postwar urban planning program. The project documents the extent to which the Puerto Rico Planning Board helped transform the island's physical landscape in order to attract American investment capital in the 1940s and 1950s. Similarly, the project tracks the PR Planning Board's international engagement across Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, a role that facilitated the entrance of American capital in those regions.

Associated Products

Urban Planning with Fanon: The Puerto Rico Planning Board and Alienation in San Juan, 1942-1955. (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Urban Planning with Fanon: The Puerto Rico Planning Board and Alienation in San Juan, 1942-1955.
Abstract: The Puerto Rico Planning Board (PRPB) was established in 1942 by the last North American governor of colonial Puerto Rico, Rexford Guy Tugwell, and fellow white planners and consultants from the United States. The PRPB envisioned and planned the transformation of the colony’s capital, San Juan, into a modern, industrial, and post-tropical city attractive for U.S. industrial capital. A city planned for capital and not humans came about. In this paper, I engage with Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric and radical humanist work to help us rethink the history of urban planning in Puerto Rico and the United States. Drawing on Fanon, I maintain that urban planning must, above all else, “institute a general framework for de-alienating encounters”. Against this Fanonian principle, I evaluate the PRPB’s imperial design of San Juan during its first two decades of existence. Based on archival research, the paper documents the PRPB’s slum clearance program from 1945 to 1955, a vast urban and carceral operation that displaced and re-placed thousands of Black families in the name of capital. In effect, the program, tested first in San Juan and later emulated across the U.S., ran counter to Fanon’s planning principle, instituting instead the framework for urban alienation by designing a white supremacist city by and for imperial capital. With this intervention I wish to accomplish two goals: (1) center Puerto Rico in the cartographies of Black Geographies; and (2) engage with Fanon to help us theorize dehumanizing and racist planning and design in settler colonial and postcolonial cities.
Author: Joaquin Villanueva
Date: 11/5/21
Location: Indiana University

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