Pico, Rafael Papers

Member, Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, 1946-1951

The papers of Rafael Pico are composed of correspondence from his time as President of the Puerto Rico Planning Board, as well as letters related to his nomination as Commissioner of Education of Puerto Rico. Many of the papers concern his later appointment by President Truman as a member of the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission.

Size: 2.5 linear inches (about 75 pages).
Access: Open.
Copyright: The donor gave to the U.S. government their copyrights in this material and in any other material received by the U.S. government and maintained in a depository administered by the National Archives and Records Administration. Documents created by U.S. government officials in the course of their official duties are in the public domain. Copyright interest in other documents presumably belongs to the creators of those documents, or their heirs.
Processed by: Haley Petersen (2019) as part of the Truman Library Internship Program.
Supervising Archivists: Randy Sowell and David Clark.

The papers of Rafael Pico are composed of correspondence from his time as President of the Puerto Rico Planning Board, as well as letters related to his nomination as Commissioner of Education of Puerto Rico. Many of the papers concern his later appointment by President Truman as a member of the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission. The collection is arranged in a single Subject File.

The collection contains correspondence in both English and Spanish. There is also a transcript of Pico’s nomination hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Territories and Insular Affairs in 1945. Several letters discuss his position on the teaching of English in Puerto Rico, and his eventual decision to withdraw his nomination to be Commissioner of Education of Puerto Rico.

Other than one 1971 newspaper article, all of the materials in the collection date from 1942 to 1951. The materials in the collection were originally open for research as part of the Miscellaneous Historical Documents Collection (MHDC 266).

More information about Puerto Rico can be found at the Truman Library in the papers of Harry S. Truman (Official File 400), Stephen J. Spingarn, and William and Sophie Brophy.