Caribbean Matters: Yes, Puerto Rico is a U.S. colony

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Watching responses to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the case of United States v. Vaello Madero, where the only dissent came from Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, was painful. While legal scholars wrote a raft of opinion pieces on why or why not the decision was or wasn’t correct, all I could think of was the 1899 illustration from Puck, posted above, which I used to show my students back when I was still teaching a college course on the Caribbean. 

The Library of Congress description of the graphic describes the scene:

“Print shows Uncle Sam as a teacher, standing behind a desk in front of his new students who are labeled “Cuba, Porto [i.e. Puerto] Rico, Hawaii, [and] Philippines”; they do not look happy to be there. At the rear of the classroom are students holding books labeled “California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, [and] Alaska”. At the far left, an African American boy cleans the windows, and in the background, a Native boy sits by himself, reading an upside-down book labeled “ABC”, and a Chinese boy stands just outside the door. A book on Uncle Sam’s desk is titled “U.S. First Lessons in Self-Government.”

The racism encapsulated in the illustration is patently obvious. While Uncle Sam is portrayed as adult white father and teacher, colonized people are depicted as squirming and uncomfortable children, with racial stereotypes including menial labor, pigtails, bare feet, and feathers thrown in for good measure. 

Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.

I don’t remember ever being taught about the Insular Cases in school. I learned about them when studying Puerto Rican history outside of the classroom, as an activist for Puerto Rican independence. I wonder if readers here had the same schoolroom experience I did.

Back in 2017, Doug Mack wrote this story for Slate which describes the Insular Cases’ history.

How a series of racist Supreme Court decisions cemented the island’s second-class status.

The devastation wrought by Hurricanes Irma and Maria has reawakened many Americans to the existence of Puerto Rico as well as the archaic laws and domineering bureaucracies that continue to burden the island. News outlets have scrambled to explain the Jones Act, the 1920 law that restricts shipping between U.S. ports, the PROMESA board that Congress set up last year to oversee Puerto Rico’s finances, and the fact that territory residents can’t vote for president.

But beneath these data points lurks something deeper and more problematic, yet rarely discussed: the Insular Cases, a series of Supreme Court decisions from the early 20th century. When we talk about the differences between states and territories—and when we ask why the United States even has territories in 2017—we’re really talking about the legacy of the Insular Cases. The recent controversies are, in fact, the latest iteration of a conversation about American empire that goes back more than a century.

The earliest Insular Cases were decided by the same Supreme Court that allowed “separate but equal” segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. That case was overturned, but the Insular Cases, which are built on the same racist worldview, still stand today. Legal scholars disagree about how many Insular Cases there are—some say six; others include more than two dozen—but the general view is that they begin with Downes v. Bidwell in 1901. Up to then, the U.S. government considered territories to have the complete protection of the Constitution and a clear, straightforward path to statehood. This was true for all of the territories that existed on the North American continent at the time—Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and Alaska. But as the new century dawned, the federal government’s definition of what it meant to be a territory was shifting rapidly, as manifest destiny morphed into empire-building. President William McKinley and other leaders of the day aimed to bolster U.S. global stature by following the template of European powers: controlling the oceans by controlling islands, holding them not as equals but as colonies, as possessions.

Social justice activist Debbie Pérez conducted the following hour-long interview with attorney, activist, and co-host of the Radio Independencia podcast Andrés González Berdecía last year. This interview was conducted in English; much of the information and discussions around Puerto Rico, from a Puerto Rican perspective, are in Spanish. This essentially limits the information to only Spanish speakers, but many Puerto Ricans in the diaspora don’t speak the language, much like a vast majority of mainland citizens.

Berdecía explains the history of not only the Insular Cases, but the Jones Act, which granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship. He also points out that some of the best constitutional lawyers both here and in Puerto Rico haven’t studied or been taught about the Insular Cases in depth. 

When I was teaching, most of my students didn’t think of the U.S. as a colonial power; our “colonies” are dubbed “territories,” further obfuscating the political reality. Yet most of us here in the U.S. who have been watching the the disastrous Caribbean tours of the British royals—like this one covered here last month—have no problem describing the nations visited as “former British colonies.”

Now if only Americans could only get used to using “colony”—and understanding what that means—when we talk about our government’s relationship to Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam, not to mention the rarely mentioned Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa.

Erica Gonzalez, director of Power 4 Puerto Rico, which bills itself as “a national coalition of the Puerto Rican Diaspora and allies working full-time and year-round for federal policies and legislation that will support Puerto Rico’s just recovery, economic growth and self-sufficiency,” has no problem using the “C” word.

It’s often assumed that all Puerto Ricans are clamoring for U.S. statehood. That’s simply not true; as Gonzalez notes below, that’s a “colonizer mindset.”

Puerto Rico and its citizens should get to choose for themselves what happens next—known as self-determination. Activist Maricarmen Gutiérrez of CASA wrote about it just this week in a Daily Kos Community story. 

Even though slavery was abolished in the 19th century in the United States, it is dismaying to know that here in the 21st century, an entire country – my country – can be a possession of another country. That we can’t decide our destiny. No matter how many local governments you choose, your sovereignty is kidnapped.

To our surprise, there is a bill in Congress, HR2070, to decolonize Puerto Rico. This bill binds Congress in that process. It is not a perfect bill, but it has achieved the approval of important sectors in Puerto Rico, including all the existing political parties. The United States Congress denies that Puerto Rico is a colony. The existence of such a project – a new law to be passed which would allow Puerto Ricans to control their own political destiny – exposes this lie. This bill gives us hope, but we’ve seen sparks of hope fail to catch fire before.

If you are wondering what you can do to support the movement for self-determination for Puerto Rico, consider sending emails to Congress.

The Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act (introduced in both the House and the Senate) has diverse support.

Join me in the comments section below for more on Puerto Rico and for the weekly Caribbean Twitter Roundup.