Common Wealth

Common Wealth

In 1944, Heifers for Relief, as Heifer International was then called, sent its first shipment of livestock to the village of Castaner, Puerto Rico. We wondered what life was like on the island in those days, and found our answer in the images of two photographers.

The husband and wife team of Edwin and Louise Rosskam headed for Puerto Rico in 1938. The island was, and still is, a commonwealth, neither nation nor state, a holdover from the age of American imperialism. The Rosskams spent several months photographing daily life on the island—men, women and children working, playing, worshipping, celebrating and mourning. Several years later, the couple returned to the island to continue their photo exploration and eventually settled on the island, where they lived for a number of years and reared their children. Their Puerto Rico photographs, taken between 1938 and 1944, became part of the Farm Security Administration’s archive. The FSA was charged with documenting American society during the Great Depression and much of World War II, and gave us such iconic photographs as “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange. A few years after these photographs were taken, the first shipment of dairy cows from the organization that would become Heifer International arrived on the island. The cows were originally slated to go to Spain, where Dan West had first envisioned a new kind of hunger relief. While volunteering during the Spanish civil war, West had an epiphany. “These people don’t need a cup,” said West, referring to the powdered milk he rationed out. “They need a cow.” But due to the outbreak of World War II, the cows were rerouted to Castaner, Puerto Rico.

Sugarcane and tobacco were two of the largest cash crops in Puerto Rico. Sugar, as well as coffee, were plentiful and cheap. But milk was inaccessible to many of Puerto Rico’s poor. Therefore, many children were given “black milk,” a mixture of coffee, sugar and water.

“Jibaro” refers to the mountain peasants from Puerto Rico’s interior. It was these poor farmers and laborers that Heifers for Relief set out to help with its first shipment of cows.

The entire FSA archive, with more than 160,000 black-and-white and 1,600 color photographs, is available online as part of the Library of Congress American Memory project:
http://www.memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml