This book rethinks the social processes that violently refashioned Puerto Rican society in the first half of the twentieth century. Santiago-Valles explores how the new regime's socio-economic, political, and signification systems socially constructed the laboring poor of this Caribbean island as "wayward" subjects. Critically drawing on recent theorizations of post-structuralism, feminism, critical criminology, subaltern studies, and post-coloniality he examines the mechanisms through which colonized subjects become recognized, contained, and represented as subordinate.

He analyzes the structures of social control in Latin America by focusing on the evolving definitions of deviance, social unrest, and economic development. At issue are the cultural practices that necessarily accompanied and aided U. S. colonialist enterprises in Puerto Rico during a shift in the world capitalist market and in geopolitical hegemony with the Caribbean.