Maret’s Accelerated U.S. History classes this year prepared for the November elections by staging constitutional conventions. During these simulations, many questions arose surrounding the status of Puerto Rico, which is currently a territory of the United States. Acting as legislators, the students debated whether to grant Puerto Rico statehood or, alternatively, to give Puerto Ricans the right to vote on independence. During the debates, students were able to come up with practical solutions to enable Puerto Ricans to access greater rights and autonomy. The students’ ability to brainstorm solutions raises the question of why Congress has failed to implement any of them. The answer is simple: statehood – which a clear majority of Puerto Ricans support – would presumably give the Democratic Party more political power, which is a major concern for the Republican-controlled Congress.
According to the Miami Herald, in 1952, the U.S. Congress made Puerto Rico a commonwealth, a “designation” that “created decades of confusion about how much independence and sovereignty the island really had.” Since that time, Puerto Ricans have debated whether they should seek statehood status. Most recently, 57% of Puerto Rican voters who participated in a November 2024 non-binding referendum registered approval for statehood. An October 2024 article in The Progressive reports that a recent survey conducted by Puerto Rico’s main newspaper showed that support for paths other than statehood has also grown, with 25 percent of Puerto Ricans favoring “free association with the United States,” “a form of sovereignty established by the U.S. Congress” that would enable Puerto Ricans to “have full legal and political independence but enjoy certain federal rights and benefits through a series of negotiated compacts” and 19 percent in favor of full independence.
To understand the current debate over statehood among Puerto Ricans, one must understand the context of their current territorial status and how it came to be. According to the Miami Herald, Christopher Columbus turned the island into a Spanish colony during his voyages to the Caribbean, which the United States later staked a claim on while attempting to seize Cuba, Spain’s rebelling colony. This militaristic, political, and imperialistic campaign is now known as the Spanish-American War. Historians offer many different reasons why the colony was not put onto a path of statehood like Hawaii or free association (independence with American financial assistance) like Palau. To put it simply, likely a mix of racism and neglect landed the territory in its current predicament.
Puerto Rican-focused historian Jorell Meléndez-Badillo explained that the United States saw Puerto Ricans as “too barbarous [and] too African” for self-determination. However, unlike Hawaii, this territory was not the American government’s main imperialistic interest at the time. In favor of pursuing relations with Cuba, the U.S. disregarded Puerto Rico. Moreover, Christina Ponsa-Kraus, a legal history professor at Columbia University, found that the U.S. was unwilling to spend time, energy, or money on Puerto Rico, resulting in Puerto Rico being left as an unincorporated territory. Today, Puerto Ricans have American citizenship, pay taxes, and serve in the U.S. military, yet are still denied representation in the federal government.
With the hypocrisy of the U.S. denying American citizens constitutional rights, Puerto Ricans stood divided between the fight for independence and statehood. Earlier in the territory’s history, a majority of Puerto Ricans wanted independence. Lately, however, Puerto Rican public opinion shifted to support statehood, as a reaction to the independence movement’s association with the extremist Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR) members. This party popularized Puerto Rican independence with free association from the 1920s to the 1950s and often came to blows with the American government. In fact, as the Oxford Research Encyclopedia stated, the U.S. government collectively feared the PNPR so much that a U.S.-appointed Puerto Rican governor ordered the police to fire into a Nationalist Party’s peaceful march, rendering almost two hundred injured and nineteen dead in 1937. That same year, the United States began to imprison PNPR leaders and continued to do so for six years. Under tight restrictions, the party’s popularity dipped in the 1950s, prompting PNPR militants to move to extreme, violent measures in order to bring attention to the harmful effects of American colonialism. PNPR militants attempted to assassinate U.S. President Harry Truman but ultimately failed, resulting in the death of one of the militants.
As a result of the thwarted assassination attempt, the PNPR’s support rapidly declined. According to the New York Times, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continued to surveil members of the party and the current Puerto Rican Nationalist party, Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP), until 1965. It is safe to assume that the current United States government will not let Puerto Ricans gain independence, even if, as The Progressive claims, Puerto Rican support for self-determination has started to increase in recent years.
The other side of this political conundrum is statehood, which is as unpopular with the current U.S. government as independence was with the 20th-century U.S. government. But, in a full circle moment, statehood is now popular among an emerging majority of Puerto Ricans.
Although Puerto Rico, like all U.S. foreign territories, cannot vote in the presidential election, they do hold a straw poll to determine which candidate the territory would support. Perhaps due to recent comments at a Trump rally, in which a comedian referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” it is not a surprise that the island’s straw poll election overwhelmingly favored the U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris.
This same Democratic Party support, of course, will deter the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress from granting statehood to Puerto Rico. If granted statehood, the island’s electoral votes and representatives in the U.S. Congress may tip the scales towards the Democratic Party. Therefore, it is unlikely the Republican-led U.S. Congress will pass an Enabling Act to allow the island to vote on their political status. Puerto Rico will likely remain in limbo for some time to come, with their constitutional rights sacrificed for the Republican Party’s political gains.