“You have to remind them, Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and its residents are U.S. citizens,” Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told USA Today after Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that it would end hurricane relief aid for the island.
Not long after FEMA’s late January announcement (one it later retracted), lawmakers from both sides of the aisle took the agency to task for its latest disregard for the hurricane victims. At the time, more than 1 million Puerto Ricans didn’t have access to electricity. Today, there are municipalities where 70 percent of people are still without power.
Activists and politicians noted that FEMA’s retreat was especially gross because it was a federal agency attempting to abandon the American citizens that it was responsible for. Since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico last September, many influential people have also used their platforms to remind President Donald Trump and other lawmakers that the current humanitarian crisis on the island is particularly dire because the people suffering are in fact Americans.
It was as if abandoning our fellow citizens is apparently something we suddenly don’t do in this country.
The consistent emphasis on Puerto Ricans’ U.S. citizenship does have its purpose. Less than half of mainland Americans realize that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. This might be one of the reasons why there isn’t a collective national outcry strong enough to propel Trump and his administration to act. FEMA’s attempt to abandon the island and Trump’s failure to address the crisis during his State of the Union address suggest that these reminders have been largely ignored stateside.
It’s time we do away with our dangerous assumptions of what Trump doesn’t know and accept that the government’s current negligence in Puerto Rico is not the result of inexperienced, uninformed leadership. It is rather a deliberate political act of violence from a racist, imperialist government that is fueled by capitalist greed and white supremacy.
The lack of an uproar in the states about this violent act (or inaction) can also be attributed to the lack of kinship the majority of mainland Americans feel towards Puerto Ricans, which is no accident.
The United States has spent well over 120 years otherizing and dehumanizing Puerto Ricans to ensure this division exists since it invaded the island in 1898. The U.S. government has purposefully positioned Puerto Rico within the American imagination to always be seen as a foreign land inhabited and run by an inferior race of people, thus freeing itself from all legal and moral obligations to the island.
