Dictionary:

Puerto Rico

  (pwĕr'tə rē'kō, pôrt'ə, pōrt'ə, pwĕr'tō)

A self-governing island commonwealth of the United States in the Caribbean Sea east of Hispaniola. Inhabited by Tainos when it was discovered by Columbus in 1493, it was colonized by the Spanish in the 16th century and ceded to the United States in 1898 after the Spanish-American War. Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, although residents of the island do not vote in U.S. presidential elections. Commonwealth status was proclaimed in 1952 and has been upheld by various plebiscites since the 1960s. San Juan is the capital and the largest city. Population: 3,940,000.

Self-governing island commonwealth of the West Indies, in the northeastern Caribbean Sea; it is associated with the U.S. Area: 3,515 sq mi (9,104 sq km). Population (2005 est.): 3,912,000. Capital: San Juan. Most of the population is of Spanish descent, with significant minorities of people of African and mixed (African-European) descent. Languages: Spanish, English (both official). Religion: Christianity (predominantly Roman Catholic; also Protestant). Currency: U.S. dollar. The island of Puerto Rico may be divided into three geographic regions: the mountainous interior, the northern plateau, and the coastal plains. It has a developing free-market economy, of which manufacturing, financial services, and trade (mostly with the U.S.) are the main components. Tourism is also an important source of income. Puerto Rico's chief of state is the U.S. president, and its head of government is the commonwealth governor. The island was inhabited by Arawak Indians when it was settled by the Spanish in the early 16th century. It remained largely undeveloped economically until the late 18th century. After 1830 it gradually developed a plantation economy based on the export crops of sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco. The independence movement began in the late 19th century, and Spain ceded the island to the U.S. in 1898 after the Spanish-American War. In 1917 Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship, and in 1952 the island became a commonwealth with autonomy in internal affairs. Voters reaffirmed the island's commonwealth status in plebiscites in 1967, 1993, and (tacitly) 1998, but Puerto Rican statehood remained a political issue into the 21st century.

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Puerto Rico is the easternmost and smallest of the Greater Antilles. Located between the Atlantic Ocean to the north and the Caribbean Basin to the south, the island is a crucial access point to hemispheric waters and coasts, representing a valuable acquisition for European powers and the United States. Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his second voyage in 1493. The island and its indigenous people, the Taínos, were colonized by Spain, which in 1508 appointed Juan Ponce de León its first colonial governor. In 1897, after almost four centuries of colonial administration, Spain approved an Autonomic Charter for the island that entailed local self-government, elected legislators, and voting rights in the Spanish parliament. But its implementation was soon thwarted by war between Spain and the United States. The Treaty of Paris (1898) that ended the Spanish-American War placed Puerto Rico under U.S. colonial authority.

Previous Relations

The relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States did not begin with this war. By the eighteenth century, the Spanish and British colonies had long engaged in contraband trade. At the time a major producer of sugar and molasses, Puerto Rico exchanged these commodities for basic food staples produced by Anglo American colonists. Ongoing expansionism concerning the Spanish-speaking Caribbean paralleled these economic relations, becoming official policy by Jefferson's presidency in 1801. The initially clandestine economic exchanges were officially authorized in 1815 when Spain sanctioned commerce between its colonies and other nations. A declining colonial power, Spain no longer had the means to extract primary resources from its few remaining colonies—Cuba and Puerto Rico being the most productive among them—and benefited from their participation in international trade. The authorization of commercial ties facilitated U.S. intervention and claims of vested interests on the two islands. By the 1830s, Puerto Rico's (and Cuba's) relations with the United States were so extensive that Cuban and Puerto Rican merchants established a Sociedad Benéfica Cubana y Puertorriqueña (Cuban and Puerto Rican Benevolent Society) in New York City.

Ideological ties also emerged as nationalist struggles escalated in Puerto Rico. By the eighteenth century, Puerto Ricans were asserting a unique Creole identity that distanced them from their Spanish colonizers, who were increasingly designated hombres de la otra banda (men [sic] from the other side). Resistance against Spain during the nineteenth century, either through claims for autonomy and independence or for equality and incorporation as an overseas province of Spain, brought Puerto Rican political activists, exiled as subversives, to the United States. They settled mostly in New York City, where they established an organizational base from which to work against Spanish rule, often acting jointly with Cuban exiles who were struggling equally for sovereignty. Puerto Rican exiles developed local political and communal associations and pioneered in the northeastern United States the historic and sociocultural bases for Latinismo—the assertion of a Latino identity based on shared linguistic, historical, and cultural resources—that spread throughout the nation in the later twentieth century. They also founded the first of many Puerto Rican communities on the mainland.

The Spanish-American War was thus the culmination of long-standing political, ideological, and economic ties, as well as the instantiation of U.S. interests in the Caribbean. Although the war was ostensibly triggered by concerns over the struggle for Cuban independence, the Puerto Rican campaign figured from the outset as a major military target and political goal. Controlling the Caribbean was consonant with national interests and the ideological orientations embodied in such historic principles as the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny.

Although an armistice had already been proposed, the United States invaded Puerto Rico on 25 July 1898, landing in the small southwestern town of Guánica. The American military forces made their way to Ponce, the island's second-largest city, through a series of skirmishes with Spanish militia. They marched on to Coamo, in the southeast, to engage in the most serious fighting of the Puerto Rican campaign, with casualties amounting to six dead and thirty to forty wounded Spanish soldiers, and six wounded Americans. The U.S. forces soon gained control of the island, aided by relatively small Spanish garrisons and an enthusiastic populace anticipating the speedy acknowledgment of Puerto Rican sovereignty by the United States. Puerto Ricans assumed that this invader would be different from Spain and expected that it would uphold anticolonial and democratic principles.

Establishing the Colony

The immediate outcome of the takeover, though, was military rule. Significantly, the drafters of the Treaty of Paris had not provided for Puerto Rico's incorporation into the nation through citizenship and implementation of the Constitution. Enactment of the Foraker Act of 1900 reaffirmed the island's territorial status and consequently its colonial relationship with the United States. Unlike Spain's Autonomic Charter, it did not give Puerto Rico voting rights in Congress. Neither did it confer U.S. citizenship on Puerto Ricans, whom Spain had recognized as Spanish citizens. It gave the president full powers of appointment over the offices of the governor, the local Supreme Court, and key executive branches—education, treasury, and justice. Unlike other "territorial" peoples—Mexicans after the 1848 Mexican-American War and Hawaiians upon their 1898 annexation and the 1900 grant of U.S. citizenship—Puerto Ricans would enjoy neither incorporation as citizens nor the automatic extension of the benefits of constitutional protections because Puerto Rico was not considered an "incorporated" territory. This fostered the continuation of the local separatist movements that emerged during the island's struggles against Spain. As under the previous colonial regime, Puerto Ricans were divided about whether to advocate outright independence or incorporation through statehood in parity with other states of the union. The period saw the continuation of political parties organized around these forms of political relationship to the United States, or "status formulas," as they have been called ever since.

Congress continued to respond to the situation with mixed signals and equivocal measures. In 1917, rather than terminate or redefine the colonial relationship, the Jones Act conferred U.S. citizenship on Puerto Ricans yet confirmed their continuing status as an "unincorporated" territory. The U.S. Supreme Court also determined as much in a series of cases decided between 1901 and 1922, collectively known as the Insular Cases, in which the debate centered on whether or not the U.S. Constitution automatically applied of its own force (ex proprio vigore) and "followed the flag" into any territorial expansion. Since Puerto Ricans began clamoring for a solution to their status from the moment that they were forcibly involved in the 1898 war, unilateral congressional actions and decisions were increasingly viewed as oppressive, cynical, and undemocratic. The unsolicited grant of citizenship authorized by the Jones Act was regarded as a convenient imposition that anticipated the nation's entry into World War I and its need for soldiers; citizenship subjected island youth to military draft by a federal U.S. government that Puerto Ricans had no right to elect or to participate in.

The tensions between Puerto Rico and the United States throughout the twentieth century were not only experienced at the level of government, legislation, and case law. They also reached everyday domains, issuing from how Puerto Ricans were being regarded. The United States saw itself as exercising a benign "modernizing" function upon a society that it considered backward, underdeveloped, and bereft of any civilizing trait as the product of Spanish oppression. Puerto Ricans were racialized as the product of centuries of intermarriage between Europeans, indigenous people, the African slaves that were imported for its plantation economy, and Asian laborers. Puerto Ricans saw U.S. efforts at "modernization" as eroding their culture, curtailing their autonomy, and negating their uniqueness; they were also conscious that they were being regarded and defined through the prejudicial terms of U.S. racial hierarchies.

Spain had initially neglected the island after the colonial power realized that Puerto Rico's wealth did not lie in gold and silver. For 300 years, Puerto Rico survived as a strategically located military outpost for Spain, supporting itself through contraband and piracy, trading cattle, hides, sugar, tobacco, and foodstuffs directly with other nations.

In the eighteenth century, though, the Spanish monarch initiated a series of reforms inspired by enlightened despotism. Puerto Rico's system of land tenure was reformed through the establishment of private ownership. The 1815 sanctioning of commerce with other nations fostered development, immigration, urbanization, and population growth. These changes also facilitated the emergence of a strong sense of cultural nationalism among Puerto Ricans that was compounded by increased political consciousness. Because Spain was subject to periods of liberal reform, Puerto Ricans were exposed to the experience of civil liberties, constitutional principles, and representative government. Unlike the backward and politically unsophisticated colony that the United States assumed it to be, Puerto Rico was a complex society with a persistent sense of uniqueness, definite culture, and an intricate historical experience.

The colonial situation was aggravated by capitalist practices. The U.S. government facilitated the island's economic exploitation by absentee mainland corporations, abetted by local landowning and merchant elites. The implantation of monopolistic agribusiness in the form of the single-crop cultivation of sugarcane eroded economic diversity and autonomy, impoverishing the local economy. The United States also instituted the exportation of Puerto Rican workers as cheap, unskilled migrant labor. Depicting the island as overpopulated and as lacking prime material resources, the U.S. government encouraged migration, with the consequent expansion of Puerto Rican communities throughout the United States.

Widespread Americanization efforts targeted other significant sociocultural domains. These included, among others, the imposition of English-only education in the implementation of an educational system modeled on that of the United States, the appointment of pro–United States local elites to government positions, the incorporation of Anglo-Saxon common-law principles and practices into the island's Continental legal system, massive importation of U.S. consumer goods, and the devaluation of the local peso with the introduction of U.S. currency, a measure that bankrupted many middle-class families.

The dependency that ensued fostered the resurgence of strong political resistance. In the late 1920s, the Nationalist Party was founded under the leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos, a Harvard-trained attorney. The 1930s brought much turbulence to Puerto Rico, exemplified by the 1935 murder of five Nationalists during a university strike; two party members countered by assassinating the chief of police and were beaten and killed while in police custody. In 1937, Albizu Campos was successfully tried for sedition by federal prosecutors and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment in a federal facility. A Nationalist demonstration in Ponce, organized to protest both the persecution of Nationalist leaders and colonial measures of Americanization, ended with the massacre of participants and bystanders when police fired into the assembled crowd. The Ponce Massacre remains a significant Puerto Rican historical and ideological landmark.

The Nationalist Party represented the most militant promoter of independence among Puerto Rico's political parties. Other political parties were organized by prostatehood advocates and those moderate pro-independence advocates who did not join the Nationalists. The lack of resolution to the colonial situation, its very complexity, and the perceptions of exploitation at the hands of the U.S. government, representing a nation that ostensibly stood for fundamental democratic principles, generated complex and fluid party politics. Shifting alliances emerged during these decades, bringing together pro-independence and pro-statehood advocates in such bipartisan party formations as La Alianza (Alliance Party) that emerged in the late 1920s and subsisted through the 1930s.

The Commonwealth

In 1938, Luis Muñoz Marín founded the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), which eventually proved to be the most significant political development for Puerto Rico in the twentieth century. The son of Luis Muñoz Rivera, a prestigious journalist, politician, and advocate for autonomy under both Spain and the United States, Muñoz Marín initially espoused independence and a socialist agenda of reform. He was incredibly successful in achieving control over the island's government by the mid-1940s and initiating local socioeconomic reforms. But he met congressional resistance when he attempted to gain any kind of resolution of Puerto Rico's colonial status.

Muñoz Marín devised the third "status formula"—the commonwealth—after World War II. Known in Spanish as Estado Libre Asociado (Free Associated State), it entailed the grant of greater control over local matters to Puerto Ricans. Its most evident change was to allow Puerto Ricans to elect their governor and to appoint local officials. It also provided for the enactment of a local constitution, but one subject to congressional approval. The colonial residues of commonwealth status were dramatically obvious when Congress rejected several dispositions of the Puerto Rican Bill of Rights that mandated universal education and health services because these rights were deemed too radical, even "communist," for the conservative postwar period. Finally, commonwealth status meant that island-based Puerto Ricans still could not vote in U.S. federal elections; they were and continue to be represented in Congress by a resident commissioner who can speak on their behalf but cannot vote. The situation has often been justified by appealing to the circumstance that island Puerto Ricans are not subject to federal taxes.

In 1952, Puerto Ricans went to the polls to approve their new constitution and commonwealth status. The change was consonant with both local claims for autonomy and the postwar situation, as the United States had become the leading world power and the Cold War had begun. The concession of commonwealth status persuaded the United Nations to drop Puerto Rico from its list of colonies, precluding both official UN support for its decolonization and the United States's status as a colonial power with regard to Puerto Rico. The short-lived Nationalist insurrection of 1950 was only the most dramatic resurgence of resistance at the time. Led by an aging Albizu Campos, Nationalists managed to take over some of the island's towns and attack both the governor's palace in San Juan and Blair House in Washington, D.C., in a failed attempt to assassinate President Harry S. Truman. The uprising had been anticipated by local legislation that curtailed freedom of speech in proscribing the use of media for advocating for independence; when it floundered, Nationalist and other pro-independence leaders were rounded up and incarcerated.

The commonwealth complemented limited local autonomy with industrialization programs to boost the island's economy, as embodied in Operation Bootstrap, the government's master developmental plan. Tax incentives and cheap but skilled labor brought many U.S. industries to the island, fostering a shift from an agriculture-based economy to one dependent on outside industrial investments. Consonant infrastructural changes included urbanization and suburbanization; improved public education, vocational training, and higher education to create a middle class and an educated and skilled labor force; the establishment of public medical services that reduced mortality and raised life expectancy; and the development of an island-wide network of modern highways and expressways.

By the late 1960s, Puerto Rico had achieved the highest standard of living in Latin America and had become a model for developing and newly decolonized nations. But it had also experienced steep social costs such as environmental pollution, social dislocation, wealth inequalities, consumerism, and more subtle forms of economic and political dependence. The end of tax incentives began to erode the economy, and U.S. economic cycles became even more intensely felt. As their ten-year tax exemption ended, U.S. industrialists fled to cheaper labor markets; ironically, labor legislation and educational campaigns had produced a protected, well-trained, educated, and thus expensive Puerto Rican labor force that was not competitive with unskilled labor in other nations. The rise of transnational business reduced the thrust of industrialization, since restrictive U.S. laws and policies concerning shipping, manufacturing, and tariffs, as well as U.S. dominated banking and finance, limited Puerto Rico's ability to develop its own markets and attract more advantageous international business.

Puerto Rico remains economically dependent and reliant on manufacturing and services. The Puerto Rican government, a major employer, has fostered petrochemical and high-technology industries that capitalize on Puerto Rico's educated labor force. Pharmaceuticals, chemicals, electronics, medical equipment, and machinery are leading products. Tourism is the most important service industry.

Politically, the advent of the commonwealth has failed to end ongoing debates over Puerto Rico and its neocolonial condition. Muñoz Marín became Puerto Rico's first elected governor in 1948 and was reelected for four consecutive terms until he retired from the governorship in 1964. The PPD lost the 1968 elections, when a prostatehood party, the New Progressive Party (PNP) won government control. The PNP had emerged in 1967, succeeding the old pro-statehood party, the Republican Party of Puerto Rico; along with the PPD, it remains one of the two strongest of the island's political parties. The leading independence party, the Puerto Rican Pro-Independence Party (PIP), was founded in 1948, when a PPD faction split off, disappointed at Muñoz Marín's failure to support independence and his "treason" in proposing, developing, and advocating for commonwealth status. Other short-lived political parties have waxed and waned under the commonwealth.

Since 1968, government control has alternated between the PPD and the PNP, indexing the ongoing struggle over the island's situation. Puerto Ricans are steadfast participants in the election process, practically the island's total adult population. The commonwealth's limitations and the lack of resolution in the island's relationship with the United States have increasingly led voters to overlook status preferences to support politicians on the strength of their immediate agendas rather than on the basis of status positions. The PIP's election returns peaked in 1952 when it was second only to the PPD, but it has since decreased to less than 5 percent of the vote. Nevertheless, the party and other independence advocates play important opposition roles in local politics. Concerns over the economy and quality-of-life issues have predominated over colonialism in elections, yet cultural nationalism, the fact of congressional control, and the ambiguities of the U.S.–Puerto Rico relationship have kept the colonialism issue from being fully disregarded.

On the occasions when Puerto Ricans have been consulted in plebiscite and referenda, they have to varying degrees supported commonwealth status. Yet incidents such as the widespread resistance, particularly in the 1990s, to the U.S. Navy's use of Vieques, one of Puerto Rico's outlying island extensions, for military maneuvers that include the use of live munitions, have brought to the fore the residual tensions between the two nations.

Bibliography

Berman Santana, Déborah. Kicking Off the Bootstraps: Environment, Development, and Community Power in Puerto Rico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996.

Burnett, Christina Duffy, and Burke Marshall, eds. Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.

Cabán, Pedro A. Constructing a Colonial People: Puerto Rico and the United States, 1898–1932. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999.

Carr, Raymond. Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment. New York: New York University Press, 1984.

González, José Luis. Puerto Rico: The Four-Storeyed Country and Other Essays. Translated by Gerald Guinness. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1993.

Lauria, Antonio. "'Respeto,' 'Relajo,' and Interpersonal Relations in Puerto Rico." Anthropological Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1964): 53–67.

López, Adalberto, and James Petras, eds. Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans: Studies in History and Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1974.

Maldonado-Denis, Manuel. The Emigration Dialectic: Puerto Rico and the USA. Translated by Roberto Simón Crespi. New York: International, 1980.

Rivera Ramos, Efrén. The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001.

Steward, Julian H., et al. The People of Puerto Rico: A Study in Social Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956.

Trías Monge, José. Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.

Island in the Caribbean Sea, southeast of Miami, Florida. Its capital and largest city is San Juan.

• Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States. Citizens of Puerto Rico are also American citizens but do not vote in federal elections and do not pay federal taxes on their local earnings.

The international dialing code for Puerto Rico is:   787

Local Time: Aug 20, 2:45 PM

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