As Puerto Rican contract workers emigrated to various countries and American states between 1900 and 1924, they set into motion a continuum of emigration and permutations that persist to the present. Justified by the premise of overpopulation, emigration was promoted as a temporary but valuable measure. Puerto Rican men and women were openly encouraged to leave their homeland, not only for Hawaii but to set the rails in Ecuador, harvest henequen in Yucatan, work in agriculture in Colombia, as industrial workers in St. Louis, Missouri, and pick cotton and fruit in Arizona and New Mexico. Viewed from another perspective, the ten women from “good families” contracted to work in the American Manufacturing Company in Brooklyn, New York, in 1920, the earliest documented couple to arrive in Meriden for work in a Connecticut ball bearing factory in 1925, and the 20 or 30 families recruited to live and work for the Arizona Cotton Growers’ Association in 1926 set the stage for a procession of migrants that would intensify with the coming years.
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