Alejandro Granadillo/AP Photo
People protest against the LUMA Energy company in front of the Puerto Rico Capitol in San Juan, July 20, 2022.
On July 20, the House Committee on Natural Resources passed the Puerto Rico Status Act (H.R. 8393). Should the measure win passage in the House and Senate and get the president’s signature, Puerto Ricans will decide their country’s political future. Will Puerto Rico join the Union as the 51st state, or gain its independence, or become a sovereign state that is still freely associated with the United States? The committee vote should have been a momentous occasion in Puerto Rico since it marks the beginning of a possible end to 124 years of U.S. colonial rule.
But it was overshadowed by another event.
On July 27, a little over a week after the committee voted, the international reggaeton phenomenon Bad Bunny held an exuberant three-day concert at the sold-out El Choli (a popular name for the Coliseo José Miguel Agrelot). The concert was an island-wide celebration that was live-streamed to town plazas throughout Puerto Rico.
These two disparate events encapsulate the current state of affairs in Puerto Rico. On one hand, a powerful congressional committee instructs Puerto Ricans on how the archipelago will be decolonized. On the other, at the Choli Puerto Ricans exuberantly celebrated their national pride. They expressed a widening belief among Puerto Ricans that the terms of colonial emancipation will be set by its people, and not by the political class. The celebration was not an isolated event divorced from the people’s quotidian struggles. The specter of government incompetence, colonialism, corporate greed, displacement, and forced migration formed part of the backdrop of the memorable concert. Bad Bunny censured the government in an impromptu recitation of its many failings. For many, the concert provided a catharsis that conveyed the intensity of emotions that drive a mix of advocacy, self-help, and resistance movements on the island.
Where will Puerto Rico’s future be decided? Will it be in Congress or the streets?
More recent Bad Bunny concerts in New York and Miami were also unrestrained celebrations of puertorriqueñidad that connected the 5.6 million Puerto Ricans in the diaspora with the 3.2 million on the archipelago. Bad Bunny captures the vibrancy and resilience of a culturally confident people who have resisted 124 years of Americanization under colonial rule, racism, and marginalization in the United States. Where will Puerto Rico’s future be decided? Will it be in Congress or the streets? More and more Puerto Ricans are convinced that it will be en las calles de Borinquen.
Political developments in the last five years may render ineffectual Congress’s approach to resolving the archipelago’s vexing territorial status. For decades, Puerto Rico’s status has been a bipartisan congressional concern. This is no longer the case. Congress is ideologically and racially polarized. Republicans are purveyors of the explicitly racist “great replacement” theory, which former President Trump and his ilk propagated to exploit the racial fears of a shrinking white electorate.
Tucker Carlson, the unofficial ideologue of the Republican right, denounces the Democrats as “openly and very aggressively anti-white.” In an infamous 2017 interview with Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, Carlson made his antipathy to Puerto Rico very clear. He called Puerto Rico “totally corrupt and dysfunctional,” and insultingly asked the disbelieving governor, “Why would it be good for America to absorb a Third World country into the United States?” Tucker and the millions who agree with him are convinced that the Democrats are using immigration policy to erode the political power of the white population.
These politics clearly erode the prospects for statehood. The state of Puerto Rico would send two senators and up to four representatives to Washington, as many as Nevada and more than 15 other states. Republicans will never permit Puerto Ricans to have such power. And Democrats need Republican votes to pass any status legislation on Capitol Hill, particularly since a number of progressive Democrats prefer a more inclusive self-determination process among Puerto Ricans to congressional legislation such as H.R. 8393.
After numerous inconclusive plebiscites, dozens of congressional hearings, and many status-related bills that died in committee, Puerto Ricans are skeptical that Congress will act in the foreseeable future. Moreover, the political situation in Puerto Rico is not conducive for yet another plebiscite. When Hurricane Maria struck in 2017, it not only devastated Puerto Rico and killed thousands, but it also altered the political landscape and accelerated the pace of anti-government activities. Support for the government plummeted when it famously failed to manage the post-hurricane recovery. The Trump administration’s ineffectual response to the humanitarian crisis reinforced a widening popular belief that Puerto Rico was insignificant to Washington. This sense of abandonment was compounded by Trump’s frequent demeaning tweets about Puerto Ricans and their country. Events post–Hurricane Maria heightened public distrust in all government institutions.
In the summer of 2019, the simmering collective indignation against the conspicuously uncaring political class erupted into the largest public protests in Puerto Rico’s history. Hundreds of thousands of protesters forced the resignation of the despised governor and his corrupt cohort. They did not call for independence or statehood. Instead, they clamored for government accountability and competence, and in the process renounced the politics of status change.
But the political class weathered the outpouring of public revulsion and went about business as usual. Corruption is institutionalized in the PNP and PPD, Puerto Rico’s two largest political parties; that goes a long way to explaining their waning political power and influence. On August 4, former PNP Gov. Wanda Vázquez, who left office in 2021, along with a retired FBI official and a Venezuelan banker, was arrested by the FBI on a host of corruption charges. The PPD has a lamentable record of corruption as well. The noted journalist Benjamín Torres Gotay commented that people are “exhausted by the frequency and intensity” of government corruption cases. Voting for the PPD and PNP has declined “because of corruption and the collapse of government institutions.” The political class is mired in a legitimacy crisis, and it’s not likely Congress will act on territorial status unless a viable leadership emerges.
Commonwealth (in Spanish known as the Estado Libre Asociado, or ELA) was not an option included in H.R. 8393 because it is an unconstitutional territorial option. Congress established ELA Puerto Rico in 1952 in order to refute the Soviet Union’s claims that the United States was a colonial power. After signing the law that created the Commonwealth, President Truman announced that “full authority and responsibility for local self-government will be vested in the people of Puerto Rico.” But this claim was a distortion, because despite the law Puerto Rico remained an unincorporated territorial possession of the United States subject to Congress’s plenary powers. Congress did not relinquish its colonial hold over Puerto Rico. H.R. 8393 is significant because it intends to end colonialism in Puerto Rico.
ELA’s fate was politically sealed in the 2012 plebiscite, when 54.3 percent of the electorate voted against living under the Commonwealth, then the “present form of territorial status.” Indeed, the Puerto Rican Independence Party cautioned the House committee that “it is not in dispute that the very clear majority has repudiated and repudiates the continuation of the colonial and territorial regime.”
The PPD, the architect of the Commonwealth, faces extinction. Since the late 1970s, the PPD and PNP have been the power brokers on status-related legislation. But during the last two decades, they have struggled to find relevance in a changing political environment. Both parties have suffered successive electoral reversals, and both are unable to generate appreciable support among young voters. One commentator underscored this point, noting that “the impressive participation in Benito’s [Bad Bunny’s] activities, the enormous human energy displayed, contrasts with the emptiness, stiffness, and absence of people” in three “official celebrations promoted by the two parties of government.”
In a contentious H.R. 8393 markup session, just 25 of the 47-member committee voted in favor of the bill. Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González, who chairs the Puerto Rican Republican Party, was the only Republican to vote for the bill. Her Republican colleagues proposed over a dozen poison-pill amendments to subvert the bill. Tom McClintock (R-CA) introduced a controversial amendment to require that official functions of the state of Puerto Rico be conducted in English, and that “English will be the language of instruction in public schools.” McClintock was opposed to statehood “without assuring that they can be fully assimilated.”
But the Republicans were not alone in their campaign to subvert the bill. PPD officials also worked with Republicans. According to González, PPD Senate President José Luis Dalmau and PPD House Speaker Tatito Hernández lobbied the Republicans to introduce the amendments. Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) said that the intense lobbying against the bill “was not about process … but instead about maintaining the island’s current colonial status,” which benefits the political elites, “who prefer commonwealth.” In a blistering critique, Manuel Natal, president of the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana, a political party that first appeared in the 2020 elections, said that the PPD’s “only allies in Congress are the racist and xenophobic Republicans who represent” all that the party once fought against.
But some Democrats in the committee and Puerto Rican diaspora organizations also opposed H.R. 8393 for very different reasons. Representative Jesús “Chuy” García (D-IL) stated that “Puerto Rico’s relationship with the U.S. is rooted in a history of racism, exploitation, and repression.” He voted no because the Puerto Rican community was not given “an opportunity to contribute their perspectives into the debate.” Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) also voted no “because the residents of her district, ‘particularly the Puerto Ricans,’ wanted her to reject the measure.” Puerto Rican diaspora organizations insisted on public hearings to address problems with the bill. The Puerto Rican Cultural Center called H.R. 8393 “a statehood bill masquerading as a self-determination bill.” LatinoJustice, Power4PuertoRico, and seven other organizations wrote that they would not support the “legislation in its current form” because it ignored “our community’s drumbeat for transparency and fairness.” Power4Puerto Rico pointed out that H.R. 8393 “denies Puerto Ricans clear details on critical issues” and called for “Spanish accessible public hearings.” The social justice and decolonization advocacy organizations Boricuas Unidos en la Diáspora and CASA denounced the “artificially created” H.R. 8393.
Surprisingly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) removed her name from the bill before it was filed by Grijalva. H.R. 8393 is a compromise measure that combined elements of a pro-statehood bill co-sponsored by Puerto Rico Republican González and a self-determination bill co-sponsored by Ocasio-Cortez earlier this year. But H.R. 8393 does not include a status convention, a key provision in Ocasio-Cortez’s defunct bill. Under her bill, Puerto Ricans would elect delegates to a status convention that “must provide self-determination options for a referendum.” Her “bill was informed by groups on the Island and is endorsed by over 80 progressive organizations.” In contrast, H.R. 8393 confines voters to choose among ill-defined status options. It’s unlikely that Congress will act on the measure since House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer reported that “outside interests” have stalled action on the bill.
The idea that the colony belongs to the people is undoubtedly revolutionary.
In Puerto Rico, the spirited Bad Bunny concert was a joyous fiesta infused with national pride and an inspiring embrace of diversity. Claridad, formally the official publication of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, called the concert a “celebration of resistance and determination.” Bad Bunny captured this sentiment when he cried out that “the country belongs to us, the county belongs to us. We are the ones who have to take control.” Much of Puerto Rico agrees with Bad Bunny that “You have to break the belief that gringos are gods.”
Bad Bunny has regularly derided the colonial government and its political class. His frustration erupted at the concert: “We have all the obstacles above us. We have a government on top of us, messing up our lives daily. The worst electrical system, I tell you.” He denounced the foreign-owned utility company LUMA and excoriated unpopular Gov. Pierluisi for contracting out the utility. Pierluisi got the message. On August 18, he, too, criticized LUMA, which until that time he had strenuously defended against growing public outrage. Unexpectedly, the besieged governor demanded that LUMA “significantly improve the service you are offering our people.”
The U.S. government promoted Puerto Rico during the Cold War as the Shining Star of the Caribbean. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, Puerto Rico’s strategic value to the American empire quickly faded, and within a decade the United States shuttered all its key military installations on the island. For decades, multinational corporations operated in Puerto Rico, lured by its cheap labor and federal tax policies (Section 936) that guaranteed enormous profits. But the federal government terminated Section 936 in 2005, resulting in a major contraction of Puerto Rico’s manufacturing sector and increased unemployment.
Puerto Rico is burdened with debt. Its finances are controlled by a U.S.-imposed fiscal management board, while nearly 50 percent of its population is in poverty and on the cusp of a humanitarian crisis centered on the collapsing health system. Given these conditions, statehood is more improbable now than it even was in 1901 when the Supreme Court decided that Puerto Ricans were an “alien race” and unworthy of membership in the union.
Bad Bunny is not a revolutionary and doesn’t claim to be. Yet the idea that the colony belongs to the people is undoubtedly revolutionary. What does it mean for Puerto Ricans to claim ownership of the colony and aspire for transformational change? If Puerto Ricans do depose the political class that has worked hand in glove with the colonizer to exploit the archipelago, what comes next? Is it conceivable that Congress will incorporate Puerto Rico as a territory but delay the granting of statehood for generations, as it did for New Mexico and Arizona?
Ocasio-Cortez hinted at a likely scenario when she commented, “Independent of any short-term political prospects, we need to figure this out … so that when the political window opens, whether that’s between now and September, or whether it’s another time in the future, we will have this ready to move.”
The political window has been ajar for a few years now. In the years since Hurricane Maria, the political landscape has been recast. The decline of the PDP and PNP is persistent and likely irreversible. Civil society is organized, politically assertive, and regularly challenges government actions on the streets and beaches. The Puerto Rican Independence Party and the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana have emerged as viable political opposition forces. They are working on developing “a new correlation of political forces” to elect a governor in 2024 to gain Puerto Rico’s decolonization.
H.R. 8393 may well be the first step in a process leading to independence. It’s simply a matter of time.
