User Reviews

All empires need at least one laboratory. That is what Puerto Rico has been to the United States since mid-1898. Any doubts you might have of this are completely eliminated in this very painful, searing documentary. The reason I have marked this review as a spoiler review is that I feel like I must mention that, while this documentary seems to be only about the benevolently-coerced sterilization of thousands of Puerto Rican women, "for their own good", it is about much, much more. This year alone, our newspapers have been using their front pages to lament how Puerto Rico is undergoing a massive population drop every month. This 1982 documentary not only mentions that, at that time, this had already been going on for decades (let me write that word one more time: d-e-c-a-d-e-s, plural), but casually mentions that this migration was not only encouraged by our "government", but also had yearly minimums of people leaving as goals. Have any doubts as to whether 'Operation Bootstrap' was a sham? You will no longer have them after watching this film. Think that becoming a state would be the most wonderful thing that could happen to Puerto Rico? Stay away from this documentary as if your life depended on it. In closing, with its final images, you might never think of the phrase 'Made in P.R.' the same way again.