July 20 marked the 10-month anniversary of the day Hurricane Maria roared into Puerto Rico—leaving death, destruction and devastation in its wake. In spite of the ongoing disaster, mainland media coverage (such as it is) has done very little to educate the not-Puerto Rican majority, and has fostered and strengthened misconceptions about Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans.
July 25 marked the 120th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico:
Since that time the relationship between the U.S. government and Puerto Rico has shifted (see timeline), granting U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917, and the right to elect their own governor in 1947. The U.S. government however continues to hold the upper hand of colonial rulership.
Over time, the population has shifted, with the number of Puerto Ricans on the mainland exceeding the island population.
In 1950, about a quarter of a million Puerto Rican natives lived "stateside", or in one of the U.S.States. In March 2012 that figure had risen to about 1.5 million. That is, slightly less than a third of the 5 million Puerto Ricans living stateside were born on the island
One of the first misconceptions mainland Americans have held (and many still do) is the citizenship question. Anti-immigrant rhetoric in the U.S. and the increasing vitriol hurled at Latinos by Donald Trump has spilled over onto Puerto Ricans, exemplified by the well-reported “t-shirt” incident.
Discrimination against Puerto Ricans is not new, and has persisted since the first waves of migration to New York City. 1994 saw the police murder of Anthony Baez, and the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program targeted young blacks and Puerto Ricans.
Despite the fact that current news stories stress that Puerto Ricans are American citizens, that citizenship hasn’t prevented the ongoing tragedy, nor has it sparked national outrage and mass protests. One of the measures taken by many to correct the mistaken idea that Puerto Ricans are not citizens was critiqued in this article in Dissent.
In order to garner support for aid and assistance, bloggers, writers and journalists have been pushed to stress the “Americanness” of Puerto Ricans.
Philosopher Nelson Maldonado Torres was among those to object to the “American” appeal by pointing out that Puerto Ricans should “receive help because they are people, not because they are [American] citizens”; citizenship status alone has never guaranteed rights for racialized people, who are not seen as fully human to begin with. Eduardo Bhatia, former president of the Senate of Puerto Rico, argued that while it was legally accurate to say that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, calling them Americans was another matter. From this perspective, “our fellow Americans” erases Puerto Rican national identity and their long history of struggles against U.S. colonialism. Yet under the current circumstances, the most revealing limitation of the attempt to rhetorically make Americans out of Puerto Ricans is its failure to end the suffering on the ground—highlighting that Puerto Rico’s colonial subjection is thoroughly systemic. Usual responses to disasters in the United States, such as expanding the food stamp program for families in need, were not followed because unlike in the fifty states, there is a cap to the amount of funds the island can receive, even in times of emergency. For still disputed reasons, the mutual aid typically provided by states when catastrophe hits also did not kick in. States like New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts were quick to send personnel, equipment, and other assistance to Texas and Florida after Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria but not to Puerto Rico. To further clarify the island’s low status, four weeks after the hurricane, no less than sixty-nine House Republicans voted against additional aid for Puerto Rico, and the approved package was ultimately offered in the form of loans, although state agencies were granted direct relief in the same bills.
In other words, the appeal of “our fellow Americans,” particularly in the absence of political mobilization, is no match against a racist, colonial logic designed to keep resources away from “minorities” deemed to be undeserving. Trump underlined this when he defended his administration’s negligent response by invoking old stereotypes of Puerto Ricans as lazy, responsible for their own financial woes, and unreasonable in their expectations of the U.S. government. In contrast to his September 1 speech on Texas after Harvey, when he stated, “We will support you today, tomorrow and the day after. . . . We help our fellow Americans every single time,” Trump’s October 12 tweet to Puerto Ricans claimed that: “We can’t keep FEMA, the Military & First Responders . . . in P.R. Forever.” Not surprisingly, this assertion is inconsistent with FEMA’s record; the agency sometimes stays engaged in disaster areas for more than a decade after a storm. In fiscal year 2017 alone, FEMA was slated to provide $440 million in relief to Gulf Coast states for damages resulting from 2005 hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, and $1.4 billion to New York and New Jersey for Sandy.
Yes, Puerto Ricans have U.S. citizenship. However, they are first and foremost Puerto Ricans. I have never met a Puerto Rican who said,“Hi, I’m American.” My husband, who was born in New York and self-identifies racially as black, is also Puerto Rican.
It’s no accident that Rosie Perez named her documentary Yo soy Boricua, pa'que tu lo sepas! (That translates to “I am Puerto Rican, just so you know it!”)
I’ve been attempting to cover all things Puerto Rican and related to Puerto Rico in stories here on Daily Kos since last year. Daily, I post a “Puerto Rico Twitter round-up” of news stories in Abbreviated Pundit Roundup (APR). One of the things that concerns me is that in comments to each story multiple respondents say “Puerto Rico needs to be a state” or conversely, “Puerto Rico needs to be independent and/or become part of Cuba, or Canada, or Venezuela …”
These comments are almost all from non-Puerto Ricans. The magic solution to everything is either statehood or independence, which does little to deal with what is going on on the island now — and for the foreseeable future, nor does it address what is happening right here to evacuees.
The other set of irksome comments is that all those Puerto Ricans who have fled to the mainland will somehow magically enhance the blue wave—especially in Florida.
Let me digress for a minute. I am not Puerto Rican. Yes, I’m married to one, have cousins who are, and I have lived and worked in the Puerto Rican community for decades both as an activist and as an anthropologist. Yes, I have opinions too, many which have shifted over time, but the last thing in the world I’m going to be presumptuous enough to do is to tell Puerto Ricans what they should or should not be doing in their politics.
Puerto Ricans have strong and contentious ideas about their political affiliations and the status issue. In many neighborhoods on the island people paint the trim on their houses the color of the political party they belong to—red for Populares, (Popular Democratic Party), blue for Penepes (New Progressive Party), and green for Independentistas (Puerto Rican Independence Party) .
Outsiders to the issue can opine all they want, but ultimately Puerto Ricans are going to decide for themselves what their relationship will be to the United States and conversely, some time in the future, the U.S. government will do the same. Meanwhile, the most important issue is survival. I have even seen Puerto Ricans who live on the island get prickly about the opinions being expressed by those who live on the mainland, feeling that those outsiders won’t have to live with whatever happens. Only residents were eligible to vote in the series of status referendums and plebiscites.
Frances Robles covered the last vote in 2017 for the New York Times.
SAN JUAN, P.R. — With schools shuttered, pensions at risk and the island under the authority of an oversight board in New York City, half a million Puerto Ricans voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to become America’s 51st state, in a flawed election most voters sat out.
With nearly all of the precincts reporting, 97 percent of the ballots cast were in favor of statehood, a landslide critics said indicated that only statehood supporters had turned out to the polls. Opposition parties who prefer independence or remaining a territory boycotted the special election, which they considered rigged in favor of statehood.
On an island where voter participation often hovers around 80 percent, just 23 percent of registered voters cast ballots. Voting stations accustomed to long lines were virtually empty on Sunday.
Some common misconceptions:
1. Puerto Ricans are a “race.”
Puertonicaness is a national identity that is not bounded by geography and while it is centered in roots on the island of Puerto Rico or Boriken (hence many Puerto Ricans refer to themselves as Boricuas or Borinqueños), it is a diaspora which includes the mainland U.S. with 5 million persons who identify as Puerto Rican—larger than the number of those who reside on the island.
The ancestry of those who are gathered under this identifier is diverse, with DNA differences between and among men and women, with women carrying more of the Taino MtDNA. Puerto Ricans are a mix of Indigenous Taino, European (not just from Spain), and sub-Saharan African ancestry. Many Puerto Ricans self-identify as white, others simply “Puerto Rican,” and others as Afro-Boricua. You can see the phenotypical admixtures in families.
Hence simply lumping Puerto Ricans into the “people of color” category (which many people have done during this ongoing crisis) and pointing a finger at Trump’s racism obfuscates how Puerto Ricans see themselves and obscures divisions within Puerto Rican society that has a racial hierarchy meshed into a socio-cultural hierarchy.
Yes, Puerto Ricans, especially those with more visible darker melanin and kinky hair textures, are victims of racial discrimination here in the U.S. and on the island. One of the interesting side effects of Maria, was the inability of many Puerto Rican women to straighten their hair, who wound up having to “go natural.” And though the elite class on the island is “white,” that does not mean that all of the poor are “black” or “mixed-indio.”
2. Puerto Ricans are a monolith
Puerto Rico has a class hierarchy and if you take a look at political and social elites on the island (the governors and legislators, as well as business leaders), you will find that most of them are “de clase alta” (upper class). Perceptions of the class positions of Puerto Ricans here on the mainland as primarily working-class are influenced by the fact that the migrations out were of people who were mostly the working poor, just as those evacuees here today in hotels on FEMA vouchers are those who did not have the financial wherewithal to repair damage to homes on the island, or have well-heeled relatives to stay with. The first waves to settle in New York, for example, included many Puerto Ricans of both the jibaro (peasant) or lower working-class, and many were darker-complexioned or visibly “mixed”.
3. Puerto Rico’s relationship to the U.S. is like Hawaii’s
No. It isn’t. Yes, they are both islands. However, Hawaii only has a tiny group of native Hawaiians. The primary language spoken there is English. Only 20 percent of Puerto Ricans are fluent in English and the national identity, including flag, anthem, language, and Olympic teams, are not something many people want to lose.
4. Puerto Ricans are Democrats and they will help the blue wave
Not exactly. Granted, a majority of Puerto Ricans in New York and some other states with large PR communities are Democrats and vote for Democrats. They were part of an earlier wave that wound up in unions and also developed strong ties to the African-American community. What most people don’t recognize is that many Puerto Ricans are Republicans from the elites and upper-middle class, and those who served in the military. Republicans dominate the Statehood Party on the island. Even though Gov. Ricardo Rossello identifies as a Democrat, most of his policies are conservative. The elected non-voting representative to Congress, Jenniffer González Colón, is a Republican. Statehooders on the island voted for Marco Rubio in the primary. Populares voted for Hillary.
4. Statehood will fix Puerto Rico
Not so fast. In order to make that kind of statement you need to understand that Puerto Ricans don’t all hold that perspective.
Let me first say that I agree with this tweet.
Getting into the complicated issue of status, which will take years to resolve, is jumping the shark. Issuing pronouncements on status will embroil you in hot water, as the NAACP found out recently.
There was immediate outraged pushback from those groups who don’t support statehood, or who simply felt that the NAACPs role is to listen and not make pronouncements.
What made the situation even worse is Gov. Rossello spoke with soaring rhetoric about slavery and racism, and appealing to civil rights.
Unfortunately, “Ricky” is a white Puerto Rican elite who does not have a good track record in protecting rights—something I doubt his listeners had a clue about. There was pushback on that as well. He also got parts of the black history of Puerto Rico wrong.
David Begnaud then got involved and, after interviewing NAACP officials, uncovered that there were two resolutions—and the statehood one had been endorsed last year.
Here’s the original NAACP statehood resolution from 2017.
I wish the NAACP had taken a more nuanced approach and not taken a position at all other than to call for Puerto Ricans’ right to determine their own destiny, and that the island needs immediate support from the U.S. government.
Hopefully, they will learn from this experience.
Do some studying up. You are not going to find agreement across the board. Heck, folks on the island do not agree with each other. However, it is a good idea to explore the history and perspectives that have brought us to where we are today regarding Puerto Rico.
This site, though not up-to-date on the various votes and vote boycotts on the island, does lay out some of the options.
POLITICAL STATUS OPTIONS FOR PUERTO RICO
Option 1: Current Commonwealth
- Puerto Ricans are American citizens who serve in the military and may reside in the United States.
- Puerto Rico has a constitution that provides for self-government in most local matters and includes the right to elect a governor and two-house legislature.
- Puerto Ricans are exempt from the federal income tax, but pay into Social Security.
- Federal grants (more than $10 billion annually) finance a large portion of Puerto Rico's government.
- Puerto Rico is a territorial possession under the authority of Congress.
- The United Nations still debates whether Puerto Rico is a colony.
Option 2: "Enhanced" Commonwealth
- Includes all items listed in Option 1
- Provides the right to vote for U.S. president and elect a voting representative to Congress (would probably require amending the U.S. Constitution).
- Adds a bill of rights to the Constitution of Puerto Rico.
- Allows membership in trade and other world organizations.
- These enhancements would all have to be approved by Congress, which would continue holding ultimate power over Puerto Rico as a territorial possession.
Option 3: Statehood
- Puerto Rico would have equal status with the other 50 states and would no longer be under congressional authority.
- Two senators and about seven congressional representatives would represent Puerto Rico in Congress.
- Federal financial benefits would increase, but Puerto Ricans would pay federal income taxes.
- Some businesses would lose tax breaks.
- Congress would probably require English as the primary language of government and the public schools as a condition of statehood.
Option 4: Independence
- Puerto Rico would become a sovereign nation with its own political system, language, culture, and membership in the United Nations.
- The United States would no longer be obligated to provide financial support, but would lose all military bases unless Puerto Rico agreed to lease them.
- Some or all Puerto Ricans would likely lose U.S. citizenship and the right to reside in the United States.
- Puerto Rico would be a poor nation, depending on foreign aid from other nations.
I could write more but will stop here. I’m sure you are on information overload.
After all that weighty material, I thought I’d close with some humor. This comic skit fits the bill: