Representing development: new perspectives about the new deal in Puerto Rico 1933-36

This article suggests an alternative approach to the traditional perspectives in which the New Deal, specifically the Puerto Rican Emergency Relief Administration (PRERA), has been represented by Puerto Rico and United States historiography. The PRERA, far from being a short-term policy of emergency help, a strategy of imperial domination, or an initiative of the Roosevelt administration to provide temporary relief to a needy territorial possession on the verge of economic disaster, constituted a carefully crafted project of development that embodied a technology of domination over the colonial subjects, allowing the United States to establish new principles of colonial governmentality in Puerto Rico during the 1930s.