This paper makes two contributions. First, we examine the macroeconomic implications of Puerto Rico’s Fiscal Plan that was certified in March 2017 for fiscal years 2017-18 to 2026-27. Second, we perform a Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA) that incorporates the expected macroeconomic dynamics implied by the Fiscal Plan in order to compute Puerto Rico’s debt restructuring needs. We detect a number of flawed assumptions in the Fiscal Plan that lead to an underestimation of its contractionary effects on the island’s economic activity. We conduct a sensitivity analysis of the expected macroeconomic dynamics implied by the plan that allows us to construct more realistic scenarios of Puerto Rico’s debt restructuring needs. We show that the island’s current debt position is unsustainable, and compute the necessary debt relief to restore sustainability under different sets of assumptions. The paper offers general insights for performing a macro-consistent DSA.
During the years in which Jack Agueros conducted research for his bilingual anthology of Julia de Burgos' poetry, he kept a list of what he called Burgos' As his research proceeded, the list of poems that he recovered quickly grew. In three years, he found fifty poems in scattered periodicals and other archival sources that had not been included in previous collections of Burgos' poetic oeuvre (Agueros 1997, xxxvii). Although his anthology was subtitled Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos, in his introduction Agueros underlined the incompleteness of his quest to compile all of Burgos' poetry. As much as he celebrated his newfound poetic trove, he also evoked the poems that refused to appear and that would perhaps remain forever lost: of Julia de Burgos and her missing poems, he wrote, never end. Thus there will always be 'lost poems' for Quixotic writers to pursue (1997, xxxvii).While they did not yield more poems, the celebrations in 2014 of the centennial of Julia de Burgos's birth elicited an outpouring of works by and about the seminal Puerto Rican poet. Exhibits, colloquia, workshops, poetry readings, and scholarly talks in honor of Burgos dotted the calendars of cultural institutes in Puerto Rico and on the U.S. mainland. The bibliography about Julia de Burgos was significantly enlarged with the publication of more than half a dozen new books of biography and criticism.1 The centenary festivities also fomented the publication of some of Burgos's previously unavailable or hard-to-fmd writings: we now have a bilingual edition of Julia de Burgos' personal diary, which she wrote in April 1948 during her institutionalization at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City (Burgos 2015). We also have available for the first time in print the extensive correspondence of Julia de Burgos to her sister Consuelo, which spans a period of fourteen years (Burgos 2014a). And in Jack Agueros' papers, recently acquired and catalogued by Columbia University, we can access the copious files, notes and primary materials (including Julia de Burgos' FBI file) that Agueros gathered in preparation for his bilingual anthology.2 Newly available texts and materials are not limited to archival materials and critical writings. In Puerto Rico, a new Julia de Burgos anthology with one hundred poems was released (Burgos 2014b), while, in Cuba, Casa de las Americas published a new edition of Burgos' poetry titled Obra poetica completa (Burgos 2013).This wealth of new sources and scholarship would seem to bring us closer to a more complete understanding of Julia de Burgos and her oeuvre. Yet the wishful notion of completeness is precisely the idea Agueros questioned when he invoked the myth of Julia de Burgos and her missing poems. It is also an idea contested by some recent Burgos scholars, who criticize the possibility of reconstructing a coherent and complete Julia, and who resist a single methodology or approach (whether feminist, nationalist, internationalist, etc.) with which to frame her biography and poetry. These non-essentializing views are particularly audible in the Fall 2014 special issue this journal dedicated to Julia de Burgos in commemoration of her centenary. The issue opened with an introductory essay, suggestively titled Untendered Eyes, by the issue's guest editor, Lena Burgos-Lafuente, which stresses the untranslatable-that is, the unfixable-many ojos/yoes of Julia de Burgos (2014, 6).3 The editor's elegant reflection on a poet whose corpus cannot be pinned down is characteristic of the overall thrust of the special issue, which is remarkable for its analysis of the profusion of Julias marshaled in her poetry.The two hitherto lost poems I present here, La novia del campo and Pequeno viaje a tu alma, contribute to this proliferation of Julias, whose biographical and poetic aggregations can never be complete. Escaping the attention of previous anthologists, the poems were published in a Spanishlanguage Christmas annual titled Aurora de Navidad, which was printed in New York towards the end of 1953? …
IntroductionThe Puerto Rican experience in farm labor challenges our understanding of U.S. citizenship and its relation to immigration policies regarding guestwork. A recent case illustrates the complexity of Puerto Ricans' role in farm labor in the mainland U.S. On January 5, 2015, Charlene Rachor, regional director of the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor, announced charges against Cassaday Farms in southern New Jersey for unlawfully rejecting 13 qualified Puerto Rican workers who had applied for seasonal employment. Cassaday Farms had shown preferential treatment to guestworkers in violation of the regulations of the H-2A visa program.1 Farms hiring workers through the H2A program are required to recruit U.S. workers first and offer the same wages and working conditions to U.S. workers as to H-2A workers. The farm had allegedly provided wages and working conditions less favorable to the Puerto Rican workers than guestworkers without maintaining all required records. The owners agreed to pay $57,870 in civil penalties and $117,130 in back wages in order to settle the charges (Forand 2015). The Cassaday Farm case is one of many that demonstrate how employers' legal ability to deport a large segment of farmworkers (guestworkers and undocumented workers) has rendered another segment (Puerto Ricans and other U.S. citizens) less desirable for agricultural work.Nowadays, Puerto Rican farmworkers are imperfect migrants for the majority of agricultural employers. Guestworkers and undocumented workers have become, what Cindy Hahamovitch (2003) calls perfect immigrants for an agrarian labor regime characterized by a low-wage, deportable, seasonal, mobile, and easily replaceable labor force. Being less desirable for agriculture does not imply that Puerto Rican workers are in a worse position than guestworkers or that being a guestworker is a privileged position. Rather, this article emphasizes the long history of ironies and contradictions in the ways that farmers and government officials have acted in regard to farm labor.Puerto Rican migration to U.S. farms has grown and shrunk as a result of immigration policies and guestworker programs (see Figure 1). In 1948, Puerto Rican workers began to migrate to the Northeast through contracts sponsored by the Puerto Rico Farm Labor Program under the Migration Division of the Puerto Rico Department of Labor. The Puerto Rico Farm Labor Program was in charge of recruiting, arranging contracts for, and transporting workers from Puerto Rico to the mainland United States (Lapp 1990). By promoting migration and assisting workers, the government sought to eliminate unemployment on the islands while feeding the postwar labor demands of U.S. employers. The U.S. colonial status offered an important tool to the government of Puerto Rico to shape the migratory flows and the formation of Puerto Rican communities (Garcia-Colon 2008). Colonial officials forced federal agencies and elected officials to pay attention to migrant farmworkers. The end of the Bracero Program and restrictions on H-2 workers increased the use of Puerto Rican farmworkers throughout the United States. Puerto Rican farmworkers in the mainland United States constituted more than 60,000 workers per year at the peak of their migration during the late 1960s and early 1970s (Morales 1986). They migrated because of their desire to earn a living with better pay and stability. During the mid-1970s, apple growers were successful in stopping the preference for Puerto Rican workers over H-2 workers. In 1975, this situation contributed enormously to the decrease of Puerto Rican migrant contract farmworkers (see Figure 1). Still, despite discrimination and shrinking numbers, contemporary Puerto Ricans continue their quest for earning a living by working in U.S. agriculture (Garc?a-Col?n and Mel?ndez 2013).Studies of Puerto Rican farmworkers in the United States have focused on racial discrimination and social problems encountered by migrants, unionization and organizing, the failures of contract labor, emigration as a development strategy, the role of gender ideologies and domesticity, and their migration as form of transnationalism (Bonilla Santiago 1986; Duany 2011; Findlay 2014; Nieves Falc? …
