Parroquia San Fernando Rey - Toa Alta - 2014 00020

Puerto Rico Historic Building & Drawing Society > Colección Pueblos > Toa Alta (PRHBDS) > Parroquia San Fernando Rey - Toa Alta

Toa Alta

2014

The urban planning of the municipal plaza of Toa Alta is a visual representation of the economic stagnation of Puerto Rico after the Fordist stage of Operation Bootstrap. On the left side of the image, you can see the campuses of the American Educational College, which is a short-course school established in 1981. This coincides with the approval of Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code in 1976, which was a measure by the US government to bring pharmaceutical industries to the island without paying federal taxes to the metropolis. The use of Puerto Rico as a tax haven increased economic dependence on the United States and at the same time reconfigured local employment to be inclined towards cheap, professionalized labor. This came with an aggressive process of post-Fordist individualization that brought with it neoliberal economic policies on the island to reduce local government. Puerto Rico's neocolonial turn was toward indebtedness of the island at the expense of tax evasion by large foreign manufacturing industries that left after the repeal of section 936, leaving thousands of Puerto Ricans unemployed. The deindustrialization on the island caused by the United States left a shattered national economy without diversification and the lack of economic development in the urban center of Toa Alta is notable.

English Rights. (hyperlink)

Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín

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