This rift has also allowed the U.S. to commit over a century’s worth of state violence in Puerto Rico without much historical outrage or pushback from stateside citizens.
The calls for the United States to care for the citizens on the island are therefore inherently ineffective, because they ask an imperialist government to treat folks separated by race, ethnicity, class, Latinidad and a “very big ocean” as no different than it would treat the average white American ― when at no point in U.S. history has this country treated Puerto Ricans as fully human, let alone as fully American.
The citizenship that white Americans enjoy, one with a specific set of privileges and freedoms, has never been fully extended to people of color on the mainland. How could it ever reach the shores of Borinquen?
The citizenship that Puerto Ricans have been forced to accept has always been second class, at best. American citizenship has historically been used as a tool of colonial exploitation on the island, not liberation.
The U.S. government imposed citizenship upon Puerto Rico as a shiny new gift to itself; underneath the wrapping was unfettered access to millions of bodies that the U.S. would use to fuel its military industrial complex for generations to come.
One month after citizenship was passed on the island in March 1917, the U.S. entered World War I. Approximately 20,000 Puerto Ricans served for a country they couldn’t even vote in.
And, maybe more importantly, the gift of citizenship also included a permanent caste of working-class citizens for U.S. corporations to exploit for cheap labor as a means of upholding the capitalist social structure.
If we are to use simple reminders in a conversation as complex as this, let’s remind ourselves that the government’s abhorrent response to Hurricane Maria isn’t its first deliberate act of violence against the Americans in Puerto Rico.
