Setting them straight: Social services, youth, sexuality, and modernization in postwar (WWII) Puerto Rico

This project examines the concerns expressed by those involved in social services with regard to family and juvenile interventions within the broader framework of modernization from the 1950s to the ′60s in Puerto Rico. The desire to produce a new, democratic society and the fear that decomposing, traditionally gendered family roles and hierarchies would lead to social crisis became a persistent theme in mid-century social work on the island. Along the same lines, there seemed to be a sort of amplified heterosexist hysteria, where any deviance from the accepted norms were not only classified as pathological but often as homosexual, therefore equating homosexuality with any sort of sexual deviance.