The Puerto Rico Land Authority: Agrarian Reform Records (1941-1970s)

The Puerto Rico Land Authority (Autoridad de Tierras), established in 1941, was the agency charged with enforcing the 500-acre law and redistributing land from American sugar corporations to Puerto Rican farmers — a belated attempt to undo 40 years of illegal land concentration.

Establishment

The Land Authority was created under Governor Rexford Tugwell (the last appointed mainland governor) and championed by Luis Muñoz Marín and the Popular Democratic Party. Its mandate:
- Enforce the 500-acre limit on corporate landholdings (already federal law since 1900)
- Acquire excess land from corporations
- Redistribute land to small farmers through 'proportional profit farms' (fincas de beneficio proporcional)
- Create aggregates (land cooperatives)
- Build rural housing and infrastructure

What the Records Show

Scale of Violation: Land Authority records confirmed the massive scale of corporate land violations:
- Four major sugar corporations held over 170,000 acres collectively
- Individual corporations held 10,000-15,000+ acres — exceeding the 500-acre limit by factors of 20-30
- The violations had been documented for decades with no federal enforcement

Redistribution: The Land Authority acquired approximately 100,000 acres through purchase and enforcement:
- Created over 50 proportional profit farms
- Distributed individual farm plots (parcelas) to thousands of families
- Built rural communities with housing, schools, and infrastructure
- Managed aggregate farms that employed landless workers

Limitations:
- The best sugar lands remained in large-scale production (now government-managed rather than privately held)
- Small parcela plots were often too small for economic viability
- The shift from sugar to manufacturing (Operation Bootstrap) soon made agricultural reform less relevant
- Many former agricultural workers moved to urban areas or migrated to the mainland
- The Land Authority gradually declined in importance as Puerto Rico's economy industrialized

Significance

The Land Authority records document both the scale of colonial land theft and the limitations of reform within a colonial framework. The 500-acre law was violated for 40 years; when finally enforced, it was too late — the agricultural economy was already being replaced by industrial policy (Operation Bootstrap). The land reform that might have created a class of Puerto Rican small farmers was implemented just as colonialism shifted from agricultural extraction to industrial extraction.