I was 16 the first time I traveled on my own from San Juan, Puerto Rico. After the almost ritualistic goodbyes from my very Puerto Rican household, I left to attend a conference for “young scholars” in Washington, DC, on historic Capitol Hill. This was my first unadulterated exposure to young Americans in all their “diversity,” and I was propelled into the unique experience as one of three Latinx kids in this space — and the only one who had flown in directly from the Caribbean. It was also my first interaction with the raw, gritty effects of colonialism firsthand.
“Do you have malls in Puerto Rico, or do you order things online?”
“How do you get to school? By canoe?”
“Which part of Mexico was Puerto Rico again?”
At age 16, I was bothered by typical teen woes such as a high school crush or an upcoming biology exam, but I was also very aware of the hold the United States government had on the archipelago of Puerto Rico. And it was during that time in DC when, 16 and confused, I discovered how little grasp most Americans had — and still have — on the conditions that drive and uphold the United States of America as a global superpower.
I’m not attempting to imply that I had a conceptual understanding of heavy terms such as “imperialism” and “systemic racism” at such a young age. I did have some familiarity with the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which brought an end to the Spanish-American War and formalized the United States’ control over former Spanish colonies such as the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. But I lacked a conceptual understanding of policies like the Foraker Act, which established a nominal civilian government in PR; the Supreme Court’s Insular Cases, which found that the U.S. Constitution does not apply to the territories; and the Jones Act, which formally granted Puerto Ricans a version of U.S. citizenship. We are taught so little about the forces that shaped the land we proudly call home, and given so little say in what our future will look like.
As the dialogue about Puerto Rico’s status comes and goes in mainstream U.S. media, Puerto Ricans face further invisibility in discussions that impact our immediate reality. Many Democrats propose statehood as the “only” alternative to resolution of a century-long occupation, demonstrating once again that decisions about how we will be governed are out of the hands of regular Puerto Ricans. The collective confusion about our present comes from a failure to reckon with our past, which leaves many Americans struggling to locate us on a map, or even recognize that we are “citizens.”
Puerto Rico’s geographic location in the Caribbean was key to U.S. expansion throughout the Americas. Under the banner of Manifest Destiny, U.S. battalions went up against Puerto Rican and Spanish soldiers fighting to maintain control of an archipelago that was one of two remaining Spanish colonies in the Americas. Signed away with Guam as loot of war through the Treaty of Paris, Puerto Rico was immediately seized by an American military regime that undid the economic and social structures that were barely beginning to take form as a national criollo identity. But how much of this can you find in a standard U.S. history textbook?
In 1899, discussions about how to “Americanize” the archipelago were in full swing, part of the efforts of the U.S. War Department’s Bureau of Insular Affairs, modeled after the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The immediate abandonment of the local currency, the elimination of the Spanish language in Puerto Rican schools, and the reduction of the multicrop agricultural economy to a single crop were just the beginning of the century-long, still ongoing, occupation of Puerto Rico.
At age 18, nearly two years after my first time on my own in the United States, I got the opportunity to attend Syracuse University in upstate New York. After even more elaborate goodbyes, I departed for the promise of a one-of-a-kind educational experience. It was going to be my privilege to learn more about history, public policy, and international relations at a top institution, exchanging ideas and teachings from renowned professionals. Instead, my arrival at Syracuse was the beginning of an extended period of reflection: an attempt to define a personal identity, and the inability to personally express the story of myself and my people.
“Your English is very good!” was the comment I was most consistently greeted with when I introduced myself to my peers, as if more than a century of colonialism would leave Puerto Ricans lacking the skill set to grasp the intricacies of the English language. But what are the effects of colonialism if not to modify our understanding of realities and possibilities?
It is nearly impossible to fully or even adequately explain how colonialism impacts those who survive colonization. It's almost as difficult for the noncolonized to grasp how colonization is not a one-time disruption, but an ever-renewing commitment by those who consciously or unconsciously benefit from the imposition. Colonization and the relations it creates are cyclical, relying exclusively on the uneven distribution of power due to race, gender, faiths, and ideologies. It also relies on ignorance, willful or instructed, to ensure that the questions asked don’t go far enough to threaten the discourse of those who get to shape history.
While the Department of War solidified the U.S. empire in the Pacific and the Caribbean, most people in the United States remained unaware of the dealings — and conflicts — in Puerto Rico. Over a million Puerto Ricans were controlled by the U.S. military regime until 1900, when the Foraker Act was enacted. In the aftermath of the catastrophic 1899 hurricane, the Foraker Act created a “Puerto Rican citizenship” for the millions of residents of our archipelago, and replicated a supervised quasi-republican government in the islands with U.S.-appointed Puerto Rican public officials. This protectorate relationship remained in place for decades.
In 1901, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the first of dozens of cases involving the territories, which became known as the Insular Cases. In short, to spare you the judicial review, this first case developed when a merchant claimed the federal government had no right to collect import tariffs on products shipped from Puerto Rico. Because Puerto Rico was considered property of but not part of the United States, the main question was whether or not the Constitution “followed the flag” and applied equally to all U.S. territories. The short answer? “Puerto Rico is inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought,” read the official opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court. Deemed “savage” and “lawless,” Puerto Rico and other unincorporated territories were not fully protected by the U.S. Constitution and laws. Only a few, poorly defined “fundamental” rights were granted for us as inhabitants, including, ironically, the guarantee of liberty and private property.
Legal conclusions such as this one laid the foundations for policies that continue to uphold colonial structures, such as the Jones Act, which formally allowed Puerto Rico to establish its own system of government and granted Puerto Ricans second-class U.S. citizenship. Much of the Jones Act is still enforced today. Almost all of the Insular Cases still stand, with the Supreme Court declining to weigh in on their constitutionality as recently as June of last year.
There is no simple history of Puerto Rico’s colonization. Our histories as Puerto Rican peoples, collective and individual, are the consequences of oppressions so deep that they’ve become part of our own identity and fabric. Not much has changed for Puerto Rico and other colonies such as the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam a whopping 120 years after the U.S. assumed control of them.
Despite Puerto Rico's history of colonization and the extraction of its natural resources and billions of dollars, it rarely made headlines until Hurricane María ravaged our islands and cost us the lives of almost 5,000 friends, family members, and loved ones. People became uncomfortably familiar with Puerto Rico and the discussion of its status. Their use of our islands as a tropical getaway and tax haven was threatened by a natural disaster that quickly became a political one, thanks to local and federal officials alike. People learned about institutions such as the Financial Oversight and Management Board, created by Congress in 2016 to navigate Puerto Rico’s debt crisis, and granted its seven members the ability to manage, craft, and veto key decisions relating to the well-being of over 3.5 million individuals in the Caribbean. While people likely read about Puerto Ricans relocating to Florida and New York after the hurricane, they may be less familiar with the ever-worsening gentrification of the entire archipelago. A pair of recently-passed laws, Acts 20 and 22, grant astonishing tax benefits to wealthy individuals who buy out property in cash and displace Puerto Ricans.
Now at 28 years old, I am painfully aware of the life we are meant to live as Puerto Ricans. Puerto Rico’s colonization is not just part of our past; it forms the shackles that currently bind us to live in an in-between reality. We are a Latin American country potentially doomed to never understand ourselves through our own eyes and autonomy. Colonization means seeing your support network displaced across far-flung distances; it’s living the looming threat of who will be the next one to flee their home; it is fear of the consequences of the climate crisis, knowing that we’ll see little accountability from the country that forbids Puerto Rico to leverage relationships with our local and intercontinental communities. It is understanding that the history of Puerto Rico, much like the history of the United States, is left to be written by a privileged few who never wanted to understand the realities of imperialism in the first place. The greatest sleight of hand imperialism offers is how it disguises itself in plain sight.
As we defend our existence and identity to those who benefit from our erasure, we also challenge the renewing vow of colonialism that displaces us. We have been gaslit into naming ourselves the ones responsible for our own demise, placing the blame on Puerto Ricans’ “inability” to govern ourselves, rather than evaluating the road the United States has paved with the lives of those who came before us. As we move together to build new systems and redefine power, it is urgent to relinquish the hold of colonialism and to dream of growth beyond the United States.
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