In that position, he traveled in Central and South America, aiding agricultural programs in Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia and Dominican Republic.

After serving as a university administrator and head of a major agency, he returned to his academic work in the fields of land use and agriculture in 1940 and later.

His great-grandfather, Juan Bautista Chardón, a Catholic native of Champagne, France, immigrated to Puerto Rico from Louisiana in 1816, encouraged by the Royal Decree of Graces issued by the Spanish Crown, which was trying to attract new settlers to the island.

[3] He resigned from his position as Commissioner of Agriculture and Labor in 1931, when he was named by Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the US-appointed governor, as Chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico.

Don Pedro Albizu Campos, president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, believed that Chardón was being used by the US for its own interests at the university.

[8] The following day, 24 October, a student assembly at the university declared Albizu Campos Persona non grata (person not welcomed).

Concerned about the potential for violence, Chardón requested the governor to provide armed police officers at the university because of the tensions.

[8] In 1935, Chardón was appointed by Blanton Winship, the island governor, as head of the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA).

Luis Muñoz Marín, a senator in the Puerto Rican legislature and member of the Liberal Party of Puerto Rico, had encouraged formation of the agency; it was also modeled on some of the New Deal programs of the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, developed by his administration to put people to work during the Great Depression.

After returning to Puerto Rico in 1940, he held positions as director of the Land Authority (1940), and the Tropical Agricultural Institute in Mayagüez (1942).

[11] Chardón was in the process of publishing the fourth and fifth volumes of Los Naturalistas en América Latina when he died on 7 March 1965, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.