By comparison, Mexicans, the nation’s largest Hispanic origin group, constituted 36.6 million, or 62%, of the U.S. Some Puerto Ricans fear the cultural implications of statehood, particularly losing a sense of national identity and Spanish as the official language. “I get the sense that when Puerto Ricans leave the island, they’re even more nationalistic than when they’re on the island,” Cabán said. “If they’re more nationalistic, that means it’s harder for me to believe they really are into statehood.” About 3.1 million people live on the island, and more than 5.6 million Puerto Ricans live on the mainland, according to 2017 data from the Pew Research Center.
The party of the current Governor, the New Progressive Party, advocates for the island to become a state. Rep. Don Young latindate.org/central-american-women/puerto-rican-women/ (R-AK) said in 1994, “The people were presented a mythical commonwealth option which proposed significant changes to the current relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States.” Read more statements on the subject.
A raft of legislation and court rulings in the early twentieth century forged a unique relationship between Washington and its Caribbean territory. After two years of direct U.S. military rule, the 1900 Foraker Act reestablished a civilian government and specified Puerto Rico’s territory status. While it had an elected legislature, the U.S. president appointed the island’s governor and other major officials. The Foraker Act also granted Puerto Ricans a nonvoting representative in Congress, but not citizenship. Ambiguity over the island’s status was fueled by Supreme Court cases that declared it an unincorporated territory with no clear path to statehood. Those laws which directed or authorized direct interference with matters of local government by the Federal Government have been repealed. With respect to no other territory has the Congress adopted an act in the nature of a compact authorizing the organization of a constitutional government by the people of the territory.
Some argue that cutting debt without requiring deeper structural reforms means problems are likely to repeat. Others worry that maintaining pension obligations—which amount to $2.3 billion yearly—will prove unsustainable. Advocacy groups such as the Center for Popular Democracy say the deal will result in more economic austerity, including cuts to health care and education. They echo many critics who oppose the PROMESA process on the grounds that it undermines the territory’s already weak self-rule.
- Vito Marcantonio of New York, whose district included Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Harlem, favored complete independence for the island rather than commonwealth status.
- While it had an elected legislature, the U.S. president appointed the island’s governor and other major officials.
- “The fundamental opposition is based upon this notion of Puerto Ricans being other than.”
- President Franklin Roosevelt created the Puerto Rican Reconstruction Administration as part of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935.
- It’s classified as an “unincorporated territory,” meaning the island is controlled by the U.S. government but is separate from the mainland.
Returning to Puerto Rico, he founded the Republican Party pledged to promote statehood, prosperity and civil liberties. His daughter, Pilar Barbosa de Rosario (1898–1997), the first woman to teach at the University of Puerto Rico, received master’s and doctorate degrees from Clark University. Celso Barbosa’s contemporary, Felix Córdova Dávila(1878–1938), https://blog.amozeshportal.ir/2023/01/23/statistics-on-violence-against-api-women-asian-pacific-institute-on-gender-based-violence-website/ provides another example.
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The island’s average household income is about one-third of the U.S. average, and its poverty rate is more than twice that of the poorest state, Mississippi. Meanwhile, the territory’s unemployment rate has stayed at almost twice the national average for the past decade, at times reaching double digits. However, it fell to about 8 percent in 2021 and has continued to drop. Puerto Rico’s economy boomed in the postwar period, with per capita income jumping by more than 500 percent between 1950 and 1971.
Congress to make the island a full state, and its independence movement remains on the electoral margins. Others propose that Congress change territory-specific policies that disadvantage Puerto Rico. The Jones Act, passed in 1920, requires goods traveling by sea between the mainland and Puerto Rico to be transported only by U.S.-built, -owned, and -operated vessels, which drives up prices on the island. Repealing it could create more than thirteen thousand jobs and inject $1.5 billion into the economy, a 2019 study found. Meanwhile, some experts say that tax changes, including partially resurrecting Section 936, could revive Puerto Rico’s once-thriving pharmaceutical sector, stimulate the territory’s economy, and reduce U.S. dependence on international drug suppliers.
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That September, the Trump administration announced almost $13 billion in new aid to repair Puerto Rico’s hurricane-ravaged electrical grid and schools. Beyond a change in political status, Washington could do more to ease Puerto Rico’s crisis, observers say. Some have called for federal policymakers to implement an economic stimulus program, which the territorial government cannot do because of federally imposed spending restrictions. The Obama-era Affordable Care Act provided Puerto Rico with billions of dollars in additional spending, but the ACA aid expired in 2019. Supporters of free association envision an independent, sovereign Puerto Rico still closely linked to the United States. The federal government has similar relationships with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau, whose residents receive U.S. aid, military protection, and immigration benefits, but not citizenship. Puerto Rico has a long history of pro-independence movements, dating back to uprisings against Spanish and American colonial rule.
Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Perspectives
Throughout the nineteenth century, white settlers pushed westward, displacing and exterminating native populations to extend U.S. sovereignty across the North American continent. But “Manifest Destiny”—the idea that https://www.cood.fr/federation-of-cuban-women-cuban-political-organization/ the United States was destined to expand—was not limited to the continent. White Americans also dreamt of expanding their country’s territorial holdings into the Caribbean and beyond. William Seward, for example, is remembered for purchasing Alaska in 1867, but he tried to arrange the U.S. annexation of Nicaragua and the Danish West Indies (which would eventually become the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1917) that very same year. Since 2000, the Puerto Rican-origin U.S. population has increased 65%, growing from 3.4 million to 5.6 million over the period. At the same time, the population of those born in Puerto Rico and living in the 50 states and D.C.
Democratic Reps. Nydia Velazquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a bill in August calling for a status convention where delegates, elected by Puerto Ricans, develop an option for the island’s status with the intent that it be voted on. The bill by the New York congresswomen — which has no Republican co-sponsors — hints at the Democratic divide on the statehood issue. In that election, there were also candidates who advocated statehood for Puerto Rico and independence for Puerto Rico; they were roundly defeated.