Ironically, if the Spanish period was largely focused on repopulating an emptied island, for most of the twentieth century the United States’ modernizing project was concerned with what the state saw as a problem of “overpopulation.”[3] From the start, political figures such as Charles Herbert Allen, Puerto Rico’s first appointed civilian governor, declared that the root cause of the island’s poverty was “plenty of laborers and poor people” and few “men with capital” (Camacho Souza 1984, 159; Cabán 2018). American academics actively supported and rationalized these ideas and introduced most of the terms that still frame the discussion today, if in reverse: “Puerto Rico presented a classic example of the densely settled, underdeveloped tropical area,” wrote Harvard-trained sociologist Kingsley Davis (1951, 626). “Rural and poor, without resources but with a large and fast-growing population, it had all the earmarks of the hopelessness we still ascribe to such areas” (1951, 625).