Puerto Rico Had a 500-Acre Limit. One Company Owned 12,188.
The film of this episode premieres November 17, 2026 on YouTube. The documents, the transcript and the sources are below now.
In 1900, two years after the United States took Puerto Rico, Congress ruled that no corporation engaged in agriculture on the island could own more than five hundred acres. It attached no penalty.
Transcript
Five hundred acres
R001 Burning a field of sugar cane, vicinity of Guanica. This destroys the leaves and makes it easier to cut the cane
Jack Delano · Guánica, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Five hundred acres. That was the legal limit on a sugar company in Puerto Rico, and it had been ignored for forty years.
R003 Harvesting sugar cane in a burned field, vicinity of Guanica, Puerto Rico. Burning the sugar cane gets rid of the dense leaves and makes cutting the unharmed stalks easier
Jack Delano · Guánica, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
They burned the leaves off first. Then the men walked into the ash and cut the stalks by hand.
R026 Sugar cane workers, vicinity of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
This is cane country outside the capital — the ground the government was about to start buying back.
Congress wrote it down in 1900. Every corporation authorised to engage in agriculture, it said, was restricted to not more than five hundred acres of land.
R008 Sugar cane land, Yabucoa Valley? Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Two years after the United States took the island, that was the ceiling. Five hundred acres is about three quarters of a square mile. Here is one valley.
Nothing behind it
R006 Crane at a "central" gathering place for sugar cane crop, vicinity of San Sebastian, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · San Sebastián, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A small farmer could not grind his own cane. It went to a mill, and the mill sent a crane out to the road to lift it.
R007 Crane at a "central" sugar cane gathering place, San Sebastian vicinity, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · San Sebastián, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The crane belonged to the company. So, usually, did the land under it.
The limit was real; the penalty was not. Congress, a Supreme Court justice would write, affixed no direct consequences to disobedience of its land policy for Puerto Rico.
The island's justice department kept a list of who was over. Seventeen holdings.
Add the column up and it comes to about a hundred and sixty thousand acres. The ceiling for each of them was five hundred.
The company
In 1937 the island's attorney general sued one of them. Not the biggest holder. By acreage, the fifth.
Its own articles of incorporation restricted it to five hundred acres. The complaint said it was working twelve thousand, one hundred and eighty-eight.
R009 Southwestern Puerto Rico in the vicinity of Guanica?
Jack Delano · Guánica, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
That is the south-western corner of the island, and most of what you can see there belonged to somebody in excess of the law.
March 1940
The company conceded the acreage and argued the law had no teeth. On the twenty-fifth of March, 1940, the Supreme Court disagreed, in a phrase that has outlived the case.
R005 Sugar cane land, vicinity of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A brutum fulmen is a thunderbolt that hits nothing. The Court refused to believe Congress had written one.
Three days later
Three days after it lost, the company dissolved itself and handed everything to a partnership made up of its own shareholders.
R064 Small farms in the southwest, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 or Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The limit bound corporations. A partnership was not a corporation. The land did not move — only the name on it did.
April 1941
In April 1941 the island's legislature passed a Land Law, and built an agency to buy the excess back.
R019 Small farms in the hills, vicinity of Corozal, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Corozal, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
The agency's own chronology of the problem begins in 1541. What it wanted instead was this — small holdings, on hillsides, in the middle of the island.
December 1941
R011 Puerto Rico, Dec. 1941, San Juan
Jack Delano · San Juan, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
In December 1941, in the month the United States entered the war, the Farm Security Administration sent a photographer down to see what was there.
R012 Puerto Rico, San Juan
Jack Delano · San Juan, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
He brought colour film, and he started in the capital, up on the roofs.
R013 Apartment houses near the cathedral in old part of the city, San Juan
Jack Delano · San Juan, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Apartment houses near the cathedral, in the old part of the city.
R014 Street in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · San Juan, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
A street in the old city. Soft drink signs, a blue car, and a girl in a striped dress.
R015 Malaria poster in small hotel, Puerto Rico ... San Juan
Jack Delano · San Juan, Puerto Rico · 1941 or 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
A hotel room, a chair, and a public health poster about malaria.
R016 A town in Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Then inland, where the towns are built down the sides of hills.
R017 A town in Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
His caption for that one runs to five words. A town in Puerto Rico.
R018 Vicinity of Corozal, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Corozal, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941? · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Above the towns, the small farms.
R020 On the coast of Puerto Rico?
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941? · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
And on the coast, a row of palms and a bandstand.
The men in the cane
R004 Sugar cane land, vicinity of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
But he had been sent for the cane, and the cutting had already started.
R021 Sugar cane worker and his woman, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A sugar cane worker and his woman. That is the entire caption, and it is more than most of them get.
R022 Man in a sugar-cane field during harvest, vicinity of Rio Piedras? Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 or Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A man in a sugar cane field during harvest.
R023 Man in a sugar cane field during harvest, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A man in a sugar cane field during harvest.
R024 Sugar cane worker in the rich field, vicinity of Guanica, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Guánica, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
This one he called the rich field.
R025 FSA borrower? in a sugar-cane field, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 or Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The cane grows well over head height. Every stalk of it came down by hand.
The noon hour
R027 Sugar cane workers resting at the noon hour, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
At noon they stopped.
R028 Sugar cane workers resting, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Sugar cane workers resting. December, on a fence, in the shade of the crop.
R029 Rice and papaya in the lunch of a sugar worker on a plantation, vicinity of Guanica, Puerto Rico?
Jack Delano · Guánica, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Lunch was rice and papaya, off a tin plate, in the field.
R030 Son of one of the FSA farmers on the Rio Piedras project who brought lunch to his father, working in the sugar cane field, vicinity of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
This boy carried his father's lunch out to him. His father was one of the farmers on the government's project.
The cooperative
R031 Farm Security Administration borrowers harvesting sugar cane cooperatively on a farm, vicinity of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Because there was already a project. Before the Land Law, the Farm Security Administration had put families on cane land outside the capital and told them to work it together.
R032 Farm Security Administration farmers working in a sugar cane field, vicinity of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. This is part of an FSA cooperative
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Farm Security Administration borrowers, harvesting sugar cane cooperatively on a farm.
R033 Farm Security Administration borrowers harvesting sugar cane cooperatively on a farm, vicinity of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
They had borrowed the money to buy in. The word in every one of these captions is borrower.
R035 FSA borrower and participant in the sugar cane cooperative, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A borrower and participant in the sugar cane cooperative.
R037 FSA borrower who is a member of a sugar cooperative, vicinity of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A borrower who is a member of a sugar cooperative.
R038 FSA borrower who is a member of a sugar cooperative, vicinity of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A borrower who is a member of a sugar cooperative.
R002 FSA borrower who is a member of a sugar cooperative, vicinity of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Río Piedras, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The same six words, over and over, under men the photographer did not name.
The houses
R039 FSA borrower? in her garden, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 or Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The women in this file are captioned by their gardens.
R040 FSA - Tenant Purchase borrower? in her garden, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 or Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A tenant purchase borrower, in her garden. Tenant purchase meant the government lent you the price of the farm you were already working.
R041 FSA - Tenant Purchase borrowers? by their house, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 or Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Borrowers, by their house. The roof is loaded with squash.
R042 FSA - Tenant Purchase borrowers? in front of their house, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 or Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The same two people, one step to the side, in front of the same wall.
R046 FSA - Tenant Purchase borrowers? in their garden, by their house, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 or Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Borrowers in their garden, by their house.
R043 Child of an FSA - R.R. borrower? in front of their house, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 or Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A child of a rural rehabilitation borrower, in front of their house.
R044 Children of FSA-RR borrower? on their farm, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 or Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Children of a borrower, on their farm.
R045 Children in a company housing settlement, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · San Juan, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
And children who were not on anybody's farm. Company housing, and a door made of corrugated iron.
The tomato association
R047 FSA borrower and member of Yauco tomato cooperative, planting tomatoes on his farm in the hills, vicinity of Yauco, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Yauco, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
In the west the agency tried the same arrangement on a crop that was not sugar.
R048 FSA borrower and member of Yauco tomato cooperative, planting tomatoes on his farm in the hills, vicinity of Yauco, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Yauco, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A borrower and member of the tomato cooperative, planting tomatoes on his farm in the hills.
R049 FSA borrower and member of Yauco tomato cooperative, planting tomatoes on his farm in the hills, vicinity of Yauco, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Yauco, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Planting them by hand, in rows, on a slope, in January.
R050 Sorting and packing tomatoes at the Yauco Cooperative Tomato Growers Association, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Yauco, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Sorting and packing at the growers' association.
R051 Tomato crates at the Yauco cooperative tomato growers' association, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Yauco, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The crates say what it was. A brand, the words Puerto Rico tomatoes, and the name of the cooperative and its town — printed on the end of the box, where you can read it.
R052 Tomatoes at the Yauco Cooperative Growers' Association, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Yauco, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Baskets of them, graded and stacked, and not one of them is cane.
What the law bought
R053 Federal housing project on the outskirts of the town of Yauco, Puerto Rico. About an acre of land for gardens is provided with each house
Jack Delano · Yauco, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The other half of the programme was houses, with about an acre of land for a garden at each one.
R054 Federal housing project on the outskirts of the town of Yauco, Puerto Rico. About an acre of land for gardens is provided with each house
Jack Delano · Yauco, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A federal housing project on the outskirts of a town in the west, under a sky about to break.
R055 A land and utility municipal housing project, Ponce, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Ponce, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
On the south coast the city had built its own version — a municipal land and utility project, laid out in a grid.
R057 A land and utility municipal housing project, Ponce, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Ponce, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
New roofs, new streets, and hills behind them that nobody was going to build on.
R058 A land and utility municipal housing project, Ponce, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Ponce, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
From above you can count the houses. That is why it was photographed.
The crop that was not sugar
R060 Tobacco string in the tobacco barn? vicinity of Barranquitas? Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Barranquitas, Puerto Rico · Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
In the mountains he found the other crop, the one the five hundred acre limit was never really about.
R062 Tobacco country, vicinity of Barranquitas, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Barranquitas, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Tobacco country at first light, and one pale rectangle down in the fold of the hill.
R063 Cultivating tobacco at the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration experimental area, vicinity of Cayey, Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Cayey, Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
And an experimental plot run by the federal reconstruction agency, where somebody was working out what else those hills would carry.
March 1942
On the sixteenth of March, 1942 — weeks after the last of these photographs — the Supreme Court took the case back and upheld a receiver over the whole estate.
R065 Sugar cane land, Yabucoa Valley? Puerto Rico
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The island had already elected to sell the land at auction. Forty-two years after Congress wrote the number down, somebody finally had the power to enforce it.
R066 Puerto Rico?
Jack Delano · Puerto Rico · Dec. 1941 or Jan. 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The last frame in the set has no place on it at all. The Library's caption is two words and a question mark. Puerto Rico, question mark. If you know that hillside, the comment box is open.
Sources
- 66 frames by Jack Delano, December 1941 – January 1942, Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Color Photographs (LC-DIG-fsac-*): https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsac/
- Period Kodachrome, not colorization — no model touched these frames and no altered-content disclosure applies.
- Masters pulled at ~3,000 px from the Wikimedia Commons mirror of the same negatives.
- Joint Resolution of May 1, 1900, § 3, 31 Stat. 715, 716 — "…not to exceed five hundred acres of land": https://archive.org/details/us_stat_31
- The limit was carried into the Organic Act of March 2, 1917, § 39, 39 Stat. 951, 964 (48 U.S.C. § 752).
- Puerto Rico v. Rubert Hermanos, Inc., 309 U.S. 543 (1940), decided March 25, 1940 (Frankfurter, J.): https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep309543/
- Puerto Rico v. Rubert Hermanos, Inc., 315 U.S. 637 (1942), decided March 16, 1942 (Byrnes, J.): https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep315637/
- Enforcement machinery: Acts No. 33 (July 22, 1935) and No. 47 (August 7, 1935), Laws of Puerto Rico, Special Session 1935, both set out in full at 309 U.S. 543.
- Act No. 26, approved April 12, 1941 — the Land Law of Puerto Rico, creating the Land Authority.
- Raúl Gándara, "Land and Liberty" (Puerto Rico Land Authority, 1943), Chart No. 1 p. 29 and Appendix A p. 31: https://archive.org/details/landlibertybrief00gand