Puerto Ricans
Puerto Ricans
In a republic established by colonizing European settlers and shaped by succeeding waves of immigrants, the Puerto Rican experience is exceptional. Other than the indigenous peoples of North America and the African Americans whose ancestors were brought to the United States as slaves, most U.S. residents are descended from immigrants of many nations, or else are among the current arrivals in a centuries-old progression. The people of Puerto Rico, however, have the distinction of being declared U.S. citizens by a single act of Congress in 1917 after the United States seized possession of Puerto Rico in 1898–1899 following four centuries of Spanish colonial rule.
The identity issues that have arisen from these circumstances are unique, leaving Puerto Ricans as a large ethnic minority among U.S. citizens but without a “hyphenated” identity. Even those born Stateside call themselves Puerto Ricans, not “Puerto Rican–Americans,” and their identification with the island is quite strong. Many scholars, among them Ramon Grosfoguel and Angelo Falcón, have noted the extent to which multiple-generation Stateside Puerto Ricans retain a sense of belonging to the Puerto Rican imagined community even if they have never visited the island.
So many Puerto Ricans have migrated from the island in the last century that today the diaspora in the fifty U.S. states (estimated by the 2003 census at 3,855,608) matches the population of the island nation itself (3,808,610 people in the 2000 census), raising the prospect of a future in which the Puerto Rican majority is “Diasporican.” The political and economic dependency between the United States and Puerto Rico, and U.S. governmental policies with intended and unintended consequences to Puerto Ricans, are critical to understanding the ethnoracial experience of Puerto Ricans Stateside as “people of color,” regardless of skin color (Urciuoli 1996). How complicated these issues become in the racially charged and conflicted context of U.S. society is reflected in data showing that fewer Puerto Ricans (46%) in the U.S. diaspora identified themselves in the 2000 census as “white” compared to 80 percent of island residents.
“Puerto Ricans’ racialization is evident through their imposed racial categorization,” sociologist Vidal-Ortiz wrote in 2004 (p. 188). As the United States worked to Americanize Puerto Rico—for example. with a five-decade-long failed attempt to impose English language education in island schools—and as more island residents traveled Stateside, Puerto Ricans experienced the American racial dichotomy of black and white, as well as divisions based on proficiency in English and Spanish and economic conflicts based on social class under capitalism. The colonial history of the island still matters to the process of racial formation today.
HISTORY
Taínos, the inhabitants of Puerto Rico at the time of the first Spanish expeditions after 1500, left no written records and died out almost entirely as the result of the brutal Spanish conquest. Survivors were assimilated into the populations of the Spanish colonists: Creoles, Mestizos, African slaves, and Mulattoes who supplanted the Taínos, and from whom modern Puerto Ricans are descended. The Taínos called the island Borikén, meaning “land of the valiant warrior” (later transposed to Borinquén). Today Puerto Ricans self-refer as “Boricuas,” one of many ways in which a link to the island’s indigenous population is kept alive.
European writings from the time of the Spanish conquest described two different indigenous peoples of Puerto Rico, the Taínos—considered “gentle”—and the “warlike” Caribs. There is debate about the degree to which these distinctions were imagined by the Europeans. Modern scholars added confusion through the ambiguous categorization of Taínos as Arawak, based on a linguistic link to South America. The Taíno language is not Arawak but belongs to that family of languages and is sometimes called “Island Arawak.” In recent decades the term Taíno has come into popular use as part of a revival in Caribbean indigenous self-identification. Some scholars argue that by focusing on the Amerindian past, Puerto Ricans may be obscuring or downplaying the connections to their African heritage and hence to blackness.
Puerto Rico, including the inhabited islands of Vieques and Culebra and the uninhabited islands of Culebrita, Palomino, and Mona, was colonized by Spain in the sixteenth century. Sovereignty was transferred from one colonial power to another in 1899 with the ratification that year of the Treaty of Paris, ending the Spanish-Cuban-American War. A militarily defeated Spain ceded the Philippines and Guam and dominion over Cuba and the Puerto Rican islands to the United States. Washington passed the Jones Act in 1917, granting U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans and all persons subsequently born on the island. Under the island’s first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, the Puerto Rican electorate in 1952 ratified Puerto Rico’s status with the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
STATUS OF PUERTO RICO
Although they are U.S. citizens with the right to travel freely and reside in the fifty states, the island’s residents are denied representation in the federal government. While island residents are ineligible to vote for president, they elect a governor. They pay no federal income tax, but they do pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. The island remains subject to the sovereignty of Congress under the Territorial Clause of the U.S. Constitution, leaving open the question of whether its status is properly described as an independent territory or a colony: Congress has all plenary power over Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rican citizenship in the United States is considered second class by many, politically as well as culturally. Some argue that second-class citizenship is evident as Puerto Ricans have long served in the U.S. military— islanders have been subject to conscription in the United States but cannot vote for the commander in chief. Citizens who live Stateside but then move to Puerto Rico cannot exercise the right to vote in federal elections on an absentee ballot in their last state of residence. That same citizen moving to Iran would be able to cast an absentee ballot at the U.S. embassy in Iran. Finally, because the terms of relationship between the island and Washington could change at any time on the authority of Congress, Puerto Rico’s ability to govern its own affairs is seriously limited and, according to many, demonstrates policy that maintains the island and its residents as separate and unequal.
OPERATION BOOTSTRAP
Operation Bootstrap began in 1948 under the colonial government as an attempt to improve the fortunes of Puerto Rico, thereby improving the fortunes of the United States. In effect, the program industrialized Puerto Rico
and changed the economy from an agricultural base to one reliant on manufacturing and tourism. Whereas sugar corporations dominated the island in the 1940s, today electronics and pharmaceutical companies are drawn there because of the favorable tax laws. Despite the wealth of those industries, the unemployment rate in Puerto Rico stands at about 10 percent.
While Operation Bootstrap encouraged the outmigration of men and the factory employment of the island’s women, Puerto Rican elites and U.S. backers behind the transformation also actively sought to reduce the island’s population growth. During this period, but having begun in the 1930s, increasing numbers of Puerto Rican women were sterilized. By the 1960s approximately 35 percent of Puerto Rican women had had “la operación,” the highest rate of sterilization in the world. Puerto Rican women were also used as a test population for the development of the birth control pill.
The Great Migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States in the 1940s and 1950s was prompted by the changing labor picture and urbanization on the island brought about by Operation Bootstrap. Tens of thousands of migrants from Puerto Rico went Stateside just before United States industry shifted from manufacturing to office work, which required technical and professional skills that left these workers, without high levels of education, at a particular disadvantage.
THE NEW YORK CITY DIASPORA
Among U.S. Latinos, Puerto Ricans remain the most residentially segregated, which evidences housing discrimination. People living in segregation face low-performing schools, low-wage jobs, reduced physical and mental health—in short, the exhausting impacts of living in poverty. While Puerto Ricans can be found in increasing density in large and small cities around the country, including Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, and Hartford, New York City has long been and remains a hub for those migrating from the island.
According to the 2000 census, New York City is still home to the highest concentration of Stateside Puerto Ricans. They were most active in building cultural, educational, and political institutions in New York from 1945 to 1970, when the majority of Stateside Puerto Ricans lived in the city. Even with steady decline since then, 23 percent of Diasporicans live in the city’s five boroughs. The term Nuyorican became widely used when Miguel Algarín coed-ited an anthology of poetry in 1973 with Miguel Piñero titled Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings. When asked about his coinage, he explained that the term was used in the San Juan airport as an insult against him and Piñero because they spoke fluent English; they appropriated the word to remove its sting. He would go on to found the still-flourishing Nuyorican Poets Café in the Lower East Side (Loisaida) of Manhattan.
A rich cultural tradition of art—including literature, poetry and music, particularly salsa—was born in Nueva York. By 1964, Puerto Ricans were 9 percent of the city’s population. Their art was sometimes born of the pain of exclusion, racism, and hostility faced Stateside. It can be difficult to document or measure discrimination, but looking at the history of education of Puerto Ricans Stateside provides concrete evidence of that manifestation of racism.
When Puerto Rican children began attending New York public schools in the 1900s, the environment placed no value on their ethnic heritage and held low expectations for their academic performance. As detailed by Rodríguez-Morazzani, the New York City Chamber of Commerce issued a report in 1935: Study on Reactions of Puerto Rican Children in New York City to Psychological Tests. Based on the results of an English-language exam administered to Puerto Rican children whose mother tongue was Spanish, they scored quite poorly. Concluding that Puerto Rican children were “retarded in school according to age,” the report claimed that “the majority of Puerto Rican children here are so low in intelligence that they require education of a simplified, manual sort, preferably industrial, for they cannot adjust in a school system emphasizing the three R’s” (Rodríguez-Morazzani 1997, p. 61). The committee also determined that Puerto Ricans would tend to become delinquents and criminals.
Having conceptualized the presence of Puerto Rican children as a problem, both reflecting and setting the tone for the school system’s interaction with these students for decades to come, another study undertaken by the Board of Education was released in 1958. Whereas previous studies had no participation from the Puerto Rican community, “The Puerto Rican Study, 1953–1957” did include some Puerto Rican staff and consultants. The release of the study overlapped with the growing organization of Puerto Rican groups pushing for school reform, including the Puerto Rican Forum, Aspira, and United Bronx Parents, as well as the beginning of the “great school wars” of the late 1960s. Eventually a consent decree was won for bilingual education in city public schools, but the negative impact of early experience, combined with minimal funding and discrimination against Spanish-English education, would impact generations of Puerto Ricans.
FUTURE STATUS
Ongoing and fierce political debate over the status of Puerto Rico vis-à-vis the United States frames the development of Puerto Rican identity on the island and State-side. Several options on a continuum of sovereignty are advanced: independence, free association, commonwealth, and statehood. Independence would mean full self-governance for Puerto Rico and international recognition as a sovereign state. Free association would involve a treaty between two nations assumed to be independently sovereign. Statehood means integration with the United States, including seats in the House and Senate as well as liability for federal taxes. Many argue that the status-quo option for the commonwealth in its current form would maintain colonial status for Puerto Rico, although the United States considers Puerto Rico an unincorporated territory, not a colony.
In 1998, a nonbinding referendum was held asking residents of Puerto Rico which option they wanted for the island. A fifth answer, “None of the above,” received a slim majority of votes (50.3%), followed by statehood (46.5%). The referendum excluded an option that had won a plurality of votes in a 1993 plebiscite: enhanced commonwealth status (48%), which would shift power away from Congress to Puerto Rico.
Although the island’s lack of sovereignty encourages the devaluation of its people and land, and although the people’s lack of self-determination fosters an institutionalized racism, there has been no lack of resistance. In April 1999, a civilian U.S. Navy security guard living on Vieques, David Sanes Rodríguez, was killed, and four others were injured, when Marine jets on a training mission for the Kosovo war missed their target and fired two 500-pound bombs at the communications tower where he was working. The event brought together the three Puerto Rican political parties, religious organizations, politicians, and citizens–on the island and Stateside–in what to some represented an unprecedented unity call for the withdrawal of the navy from Vieques. Terms included a return of the two-thirds of the island the United States had purchased in 1941 as a weapons proving ground and a significant cleanup of damage done to the environment by military exercises. With repeated protests and civil disobedience, and after hundreds of people were arrested at a protest camp on Vieques, Viequenses eventually voted in a nonbinding referendum to remove the navy from their island. In May 2003, the navy withdrew, although Congress has yet to provide funds for a cleanup.
More recently, U.S. politicians have been prompted to support change by congressmen of Puerto Rican ancestry. In April 2007, two House members from New York introduced bills to demand that Congress act in deciding permanently on Puerto Rico’s political future. One bill, the Puerto Rico Democracy Act of 2007, with ninety-six cosponsors, calls for a federally sanctioned self-determination process, but the bill is criticized as being pro-statehood. Another bill, the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act, with thirtyfour cosponsors, by contrast, would recognize the right of Puerto Ricans to call a constitutional convention through which they would exercise their right to selfdetermination. These recent bills will likely raise calls for a resolution to Puerto Rico’s political status by 2009.
Despite concentrated poverty, Stateside Puerto Ricans are increasingly diverse economically, with a small, growing middle class. While still experiencing prejudice and discrimination, Puerto Ricans stand poised for a new era of self-determination. Cultural nationalism remains strong, for there is a consistent circular migration of people between the fifty states and the island (known as vaíven, or “coming and going”). The possible imminent resolution of the island’s status is likely to redefine the future form of this coming and going and the relations between Puerto Ricans Stateside and those on the island.
SEE ALSO Blackness in Latin America; Central Americans; Immigration to the United States; Latin American Racial Transformations; Latinos.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acosta-Belén, Edna, and Carlos E. Santiago. 2006. Puerto Ricans in the United States: A Contemporary Portrait. Boulder, CO:Lynne Rienner.
Duany, Jorge. 2002. The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Falcón, Angelo. 2004. Atlas of Stateside Puerto Ricans. Washington, DC: Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration.
Grosfoguel, Ramon. 2003. Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Louis de Malave, Florita Z. 1999. “Sterilization of Puerto Rican Women: A Selected, Partially Annotated Bibliography. Wisconsin Bibliographies in Women’s Studies. http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/bibliogs/puerwom.htm.
Rodríguez Domíguez, Victor M. 2005. The Racialization of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans: 1890s–1930s.Centro journal 17 (1): 70–105.
Rodríguez-Morazzani, Roberto P. 1997. “Puerto Ricans and Educational Reform in the U.S.: A Preliminary Exploration.” Centro journal 9 (1): 58–73.
Urciuoli, Bonnie. 1996. Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race and Class. Boulder, CO:Westview Press.
Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador. 2004. “On Being a White Person of Color: Using Autoethnography to Understand Puerto Ricans Racialization.” Qualitative Sociology 27 (2): 179–203.
Michelle Ronda