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The Puerto Rican Diaspora to the United States

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The Puerto Rican Diaspora to the United States THE PUERTO RICAN DIASPORA TO THE UNITED STATES: A POSTCOLONIAL MIGRATION?1 Jorge Duany In 1953, the General Assembly of the United Nations removed Puerto Rico from its list of ‘non- self-governing territories’. Officially, the Island was no longer considered a ‘colony’ of the United States. Since then, the US government has repeatedly claimed that the Puerto Rican people have exercised their right to self-determination, that they adopted their own Constitution, that they have attained self-government and that they are freely associated with the United States (Mekdad, 2002). The leaders of Puerto Rico’s Popular Democratic Party (PDP), who favour the current political status, insist that in 1952 the Island entered into a ‘bilateral compact’ with the United States. That year, 81.9 per cent of the Island’s electorate approved the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Estado Libre Asociado, in Spanish, or ‘Associated Free State’). From this perspective, Puerto Rico may be deemed a ‘postcolonial’ state that has received the consent of the majority of the governed. This state is characterised by free elections, a competitive party system, respect for human rights and legal protection of civic liberties, as well as extensive welfare and social programmes. However, the exact nature of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States has been intensely disputed since the creation of the Commonwealth. Both independence supporters and proponents of the Island’s incorporation as the fifty-first state of the American union have denounced the continuing ‘colonial’ relations between Puerto Rico and the United States. The Island remains under the ‘plenary power’ of the US Congress, and residents of Puerto Rico do not enjoy all the constitutional rights and privileges of US citizenship. In particular, the Island’s residents cannot vote for the President and Vice-President of the United States or for their own congressional delegates, yet they depend greatly upon the actions of these elected officials. From this standpoint, the Island is an ‘incomplete democracy’ with ‘partial 1 citizenship’, subordinated to an external political entity that does not represent its own inhabitants. (For more details on Puerto Rico’s enduring ‘colonial dilemma’, see Duany & Pantojas-García, 2005; Ramos & Rivera, 2001; Rivera Ramos, 2001). Puerto Ricans in the United States have been dubbed ‘colonial immigrants’ because they are US citizens who can travel freely between the Island and the mainland but are not fully covered by the American Constitution on the Island (Grosfoguel, 2003; Rodríguez, 1989). As Ramón Grosfoguel (2004) has argued, Puerto Ricans share much with other ‘colonial subjects’, such as the residents of other Caribbean dependent territories who have relocated in large numbers to their metropoles. For instance, the parallels between Puerto Ricans in the United States and Antilleans in France and the Netherlands are striking, including their subordinate position within metropolitan societies, largely as a consequence of colonial racism, despite conditions of legal equality (see also de Jong, 2005; Giraud, 2002; Milia-Marie-Luce, 2002, 2007; Oostindie & Klinkers, 2004). For other analysts, Puerto Rico resembles a ‘postcolonial colony’ because it combines elements of classical colonial rule with political autonomy, relative prosperity and a strong national culture (Duany, 2002; Flores, 2000, 2008). In any case, Puerto Rico occupies a marginal space within the US academy and particularly within postcolonial debates, partly because it is not formally recognised as a colony. Recent studies of Puerto Ricans have revisited their colonial history, national identity and transnational migration from various standpoints, including postcolonial, transnational, postmodern, queer and cultural studies (see Duany, 2002; Grosfoguel, 2003; Martínez-San Miguel, 2003; Negrón-Muntaner, 2004; Pabón, 2002; Pérez, 2004; Ramos-Zayas, 2003). Most scholars in the social sciences and the humanities no longer question whether Puerto Rico is a 2 colony of the United States. They often discuss, sometimes angrily, the precise form of US colonialism on the Island, the extent to which it has acquired certain ‘postcolonial’ traits such as linguistic and cultural autonomy, and the possibility of waging an effective decolonization process. The issue of national identity in Puerto Rico is still contested as intensely as ever. What is different about current scholarly discussions is that many intellectuals, especially those who align themselves with postmodernism, are highly critical of nationalist discourses. Other debates focus on the appropriate approach to population movements between the Island and the US mainland. For example, some outside observers insist that, technically speaking, the Puerto Rican exodus should be considered an internal, not international, migration, while others, including myself, refer to such a massive dispersal of people as transnational or diasporic. Much of this controversy centers on the significance of geographic, cultural, linguistic and even racial borders between the Island and the US mainland. Puerto Rico is one of the overseas territories acquired by the United States since the end of the nineteenth century, including Hawaii (1898–1959), Cuba (1898–1902), the Philippines (1898–1946), Guam (1898), the Northern Mariana Islands (1898), American Samoa (1899), the Panama Canal Zone (1903–1979) and the US Virgin Islands (1917). The expansion of the continental United States into what has been called ‘the imperial archipelago’ in the Caribbean and the Pacific (Thompson, 2002) quickly displaced the inhabitants of one territory to another during the first decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most relevant case for comparison with Puerto Rico is the Philippines; both territories were ceded by Spain to the United States after the War of 1898 and both have staged large-scale population flows to the US mainland. The first migrations of Filipino workers were directed towards Hawaii and other US territories in the 3 Pacific. At the time, Filipinos were considered ‘nationals’ but not citizens of the United States, a spurious legal status that allowed them to move freely to the United States until 1934. That year, Congress established an immigration quota from the Philippines and the number of Filipino immigrants decreased sharply (Asis, 2006). In 1946, the Philippines became independent from the United States. After the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished restrictions by national origin, Filipino migration increased greatly. Today, Filipinos are the second largest foreign-born group (with more than 1.7 million people) in the United States, after Mexicans. Puerto Rico is the leading source of migration from the overseas possessions of the United States. Table 1 provides recent estimates of the population originating in the major territories annexed by the United States (though both Cuba and the Philippines are independent republics and Hawaii is a state of the union). The figures show that Puerto Rican immigrants and their descendants surpass by far all the other groups, including Filipinos, Cubans, Guamanians, Hawaiians, Samoans and US Virgin Islanders in the United States. Except for American Samoa, Puerto Rico also has the highest share of its population residing abroad. Moreover, Puerto Ricans have migrated en masse to the US mainland for more than six decades, the most sustained movement among all the territories acquired by the United States over the last century or so. Hence, focusing on the peculiarities of the Puerto Rican case seems well justified. [Insert table 1 near here] 4 BRIEF HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Puerto Rico was one of Spain’s two remaining colonies in the Americas until 1898 (the other was Cuba), when it became an overseas possession of the United States as a result of the Spanish-Cuban-American War. On 25 July 1898, US troops invaded the Island and have retained a strong presence there ever since. In 1901, the US Supreme Court paradoxically defined Puerto Rico as ‘foreign to the United States in a domestic sense’ because the Island was neither a state of the union nor a sovereign republic. The Court also ruled that Puerto Rico was an ‘unincorporated territory’ of the United States and that Congress would determine which parts of the American Constitution would ‘follow the flag’ (Burnett & Marshall, 2001). In 1904, the Court declared that Puerto Ricans were not ‘aliens’ in the United States for immigration purposes (Erman, 2008). In 1917, Congress granted statutory US citizenship to all Puerto Ricans, but the Island remained an ‘unincorporated territory’. In the 1930s, the federal government extended the New Deal through the Puerto Rican Emergency Relief Administration (PRERA) and the Puerto Rican Reconstruction Administration (PRRA). In 1947, President Harry S. Truman appointed the first Puerto Rican-born governor, Jesús T. Piñero. That same year, the Puerto Rican legislature approved the Industrial Incentives Act, which lured US investments through tax exemptions for manufacturing enterprises. Thus was launched ‘Operation Bootstrap’ (Manos a la Obra, in Spanish), the government’s much-touted programme of ‘industrialisation by invitation’. In 1948, Luis Muñoz Marín became the Island’s first elected governor, a post to which he was re-elected three times. In 1952, Puerto Rico became a US Commonwealth with limited self- 5 government in local matters, such as taxation, education, health, housing,
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