Reference
- PUERTO RICANSThe inhabitants of the US Caribbean dependency of Puerto Rico. Settled by the SPANISH in 1508, Puerto Rico remained a backwater until the 1830s, when immigrants from newly independent LATIN AMERICAN states established a plantation economy. This entailed importing a limited number of African slaves, whose impact on the largely European culture was likewise limited. By the end of the 19th century an increasingly brutal colonial regime was facing growing resistance, and in 1897 Puerto Ricans won a degree of autonomy, which was terminated with US occupation in 1898. Thereafter their relationship with the USA was unusual. Puerto Ricans resented attempts to Americanize them, but accepted the advantages of their position. In 1917, for example, they became US citizens of an AMERICAN commonwealth. This meant they had limited self- government, could not vote in federal elections and paid no federal taxes. Incomes remained low, and in many fields, not least welfare, their standards were lower than in the USA but higher than in most of Latin America.
- Muñoz-Rivera Day July 17Luis Muñoz-Rivera was born on this day in 1859 in Barranquitas, Puerto Rico. A statesman, journalist, and patriot who devoted his life to the cause of Puerto Rican independence, Muñoz-Rivera was instrumental in obtaining Puerto Rico's charter of home rule from Spain in 1897 and served as secretary of state and later president of the first autonomist cabinet. However, when the United States put an end to his country's short-lived experiment with home rule, Muñoz-Rivera resigned. He eventually went to live in the U.S., where he continued to advocate Puerto Rican independence by publishing a magazine to acquaint North Americans with the plight of his homeland. He died in 1910 just before the passage of the Jones Bill, which gave Puerto Rico a large measure of self-government.
Muñoz-Rivera's birthday is a public holiday in Puerto Rico. His hometown of Barranquitas holds a three-day crafts fair every July that is timed to coincide with the birthday anniversary celebration. The fair tries to keep traditional skills and crafts alive by passing them on to the young.
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Here's Why Puerto Rico Is Part of the U.S. — Sort Of | History
- Here's Why Puerto Rico Is Part of the U.S. — Sort Of | HistoryLearn about Puerto Rico's complex history, starting with its Spanish rule to becoming a U.S. territory. See how its eventual commonwealth status, the 2006 recession, and 2017's Hurricane Maria have caused political and economic upheaval.
Perspectives
Puerto Rico's Revolt for Independence
This book interprets Puerto Rico's first and most significant attempt to end its colonial dependence on Spain. Looking at the imperial policies and conditions within Puerto Rico that led to the 1868 rebellion known as El Grito de Lares, the author compares the colonization of Puerto Rico with that of Spanish America and explores why the island's independence movement began decades after Spain's other colonies of the region had revolted. Through the extensive use of previously unresearched archival materials of the rebel movement, she corrects many errors found in earlier accounts of the revolt, and offers new interpretations of the movement's impact on Spanish-Puerto Rican relations.
Puerto Rico, a political and cultural history
The people of Puerto Rico today are caught in a centuries-old dilemma of identity. In this non-partisan text, Arturo Morales Carrión discusses the island's social, institutional, and cultural evolution and provides a historical perspective on all political positions. Attention to problems related to the Puerto Rican search for identity makes this a book of special interest to Americans and Puerto Ricans alike. "Understanding the island," says the author, "involves transcending the confines of American nationalism in an effort at empathy and insight. Only through mutual understanding and respect will the United States and Puerto Rico face with hope and creativity the many baffling and thorny issues of the present."
Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American expansion, and the Constitution
In this groundbreaking study of American imperialism, leading legal scholars address the problem of the U.S. territories. Foreign in a Domestic Sense will redefine the boundaries of constitutional scholarship. More than four million U.S. citizens currently live in five "unincorporated" U.S. territories. The inhabitants of these vestiges of an American empire are denied full representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Focusing on Puerto Rico, the largest and most populous of the territories, Foreign in a Domestic Sense sheds much-needed light on the United States' unfinished colonial experiment and its legacy of racially rooted imperialism, while insisting on the centrality of these "marginal" regions in any serious treatment of American constitutional history. For one hundred years, Puerto Ricans have struggled to define their place in a nation that neither wants them nor wants to let them go. They are caught in a debate too politicized to yield meaningful answers. Meanwhile, doubts concerning the constitutionality of keeping colonies have languished on the margins of mainstream scholarship, overlooked by scholars outside the island and ignored by the nation at large. This book does more than simply fill a glaring omission in the study of race, cultural identity, and the Constitution; it also makes a crucial contribution to the study of American federalism, serves as a foundation for substantive debate on Puerto Rico's status, and meets an urgent need for dialogue on territorial status between the mainlandd and the territories. Contributors. José Julián Álvarez González, Roberto Aponte Toro, Christina Duffy Burnett, José A. Cabranes, Sanford Levinson, Burke Marshall, Gerald L. Neuman, Angel R. Oquendo, Juan Perea, Efrén Rivera Ramos, Rogers M. Smith, E. Robert Statham Jr., Brook Thomas, Richard Thornburgh, Juan R. Torruella, José Trías Monge, Mark Tushnet, Mark Weiner
The Last Colony: Puerto Rico's Unique Relationship With The United States
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In 1898, the United States invaded and colonized Puerto Rico as part of the Spanish American War. For 114 years the people of Puerto Rico have maintained a polarizing debate on the STATUS ISSUE that has been front and center of the political discourse on the Island. Puerto Ricans (American citizens since 1917) constantly dispute between the options of Statehood, Independence and Commonwealth.
Articles
- "Bloody Legislations," "Entombment," and Race Making in the Spanish Atlantic: Differentiated Spaces of General(ized) Confinement in Spain and Puerto Rico, 1750-1840A study shows how Spain's own bloody legislation expedited the enforced transformation of peasants and artisans into vagabonds and paupers, and the extirpation, enslavement and entombment of subaltern populations in the Caribbean. A comparison between race-making confinement structures in Spain and Puerto Rico during the most aggressive period of colonial commerce illustrate the extent to which the decline of formal slavery and the expansion of penal reforms in the Iberian metropole had as their counterpart an increase in chattel slavery and generalized confinement in the Spanish Antilles.
- Collecting the Puerto Rican Colony: Spanish‐American War Material Encounters between Officer‐Wives and Puerto RicansWithin a current moment characterized by widespread diaspora and debate about national identities, the American commonwealth of Puerto Rico stands at an economically perilous, politically liminal classificatory intersection as both American and a “cultural other.” This article presents an on‐the‐ground, collection‐oriented intervention for documenting and interpreting the origins of the island's complex colonial relationship with the United States. Tacking between objects, texts, and photographs, the historical context of the Spanish‐American War is explored through the case study of the Puerto Rican Ethnological Collection at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). The NMNH's assemblage reveals previously unrecognized intercultural exchanges between officer‐wife collectors (collectors who were the wives of military officers stationed in Puerto Rico) and local makers. The perspectives of these two differentially disenfranchised, yet agential, groups, which formed part of the ideological formation of Puerto Rico within a nationalist museum imaginary, simultaneously reconstruct and complicate Puerto Rican narratives.