Why did Puerto Rico become part of the US? And why is it not a state? Experts explain

The year is 1898. The United States had 45 states. William McKinley was president. Candy corn, ice cream scoops and semi-trucks had just been invented. Up north, Canada was still a British colony. Down south, Spain’s once-extensive empire across the Americas was slipping out of its control.

And life on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico was about to change forever.

On Oct. 18 of that year, the U.S. took control of Puerto Rico and raised the American flag on the island — a decision with echoing consequences still felt 125 years later.

“What happened in 1898 still impacts the everyday realities of Puerto Ricans,” Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a professor of Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latin American history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told McClatchy News. “Puerto Rico is still a colonial possession of the United States.”

To understand the significance of this anniversary, experts explain why the U.S. took control of Puerto Rico in the first place, why the island hasn’t become a state and what might be next for Puerto Ricans.

Why did the U.S. take control of Puerto Rico?

“The U.S. for a long time had wanted to assert its sort of predominance in the Americas and remove European powers formally,” Christina Ponsa-Kraus, a professor of legal history at Columbia University, told McClatchy News. In the 1890s, these European powers included Britain, still in control of a self-governing Canada, and Spain, whose empire in South America had largely collapsed.

“At the time, there was this notion that if the United States was not able to get into the empire business, it would be handicapped,” Jose Javier Colón-Morera, a professor of political science at the University of Puerto Rico, told McClatchy News.

The U.S. government identified Cuba as a “natural appendage” and main target for expansion, Jorge Duany, a professor of anthropology at Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute, told McClatchy News. To a lesser extent, Puerto Rico was also identified as a strategic location in the Caribbean, he said.

“Cubans had been fighting since 1868 intermittently until 1898 for their independence,” Meléndez-Badillo said. “By 1898 or late 1897, Cubans understood that they were going to win the war for independence against Spain, and it’s in that context that the United States intervened.”

This intervention became known as the War of 1898, or the Spanish-American War. Spain lost and, in a treaty with the U.S., gave up control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, Duany and Meléndez-Badillo said.

“It was really Cuba that the U.S. had always been interested in,” Ponsa-Kraus said.

“Puerto Rico,” according to Meléndez-Badillo, “was an afterthought … It’s something that they got out of the war, but in reality it was not something that they were actively looking for.”

Why isn’t Puerto Rico a state?

Puerto Rico is an unincorporated U.S. territory with a population of about 3.2 million people. It is officially known both as the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and as the Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, which translates to Free Associated State of Puerto Rico.

The island’s non-state status has long been mired in confusion and debate.

Although they are U.S. citizens, residents of Puerto Rico — whether born there or moved there — cannot vote in presidential elections beyond primaries and do not have representation in Congress beyond one non-voting member. Life on the island includes a yearslong economic crisis with high levels of poverty and unemployment, leading many to move to the mainland.

As of 2021, about 5.8 million people of Puerto Rican descent, or roughly two-thirds of all Puerto Ricans, live on the U.S. mainland.

“For a lot of people, they feel that to live in Puerto Rico, it’s an act of survival,” Meléndez-Badillo said.

Still, Puerto Rico is, according to Colón, “by far the most important territory of the United States.”

Puerto Rico has not become a state because of a combination of decisions taken — or not taken — by the mainland and the island.

On the mainland, the U.S. government in 1898 did not feel much “political pressure” to put Puerto Rico on a path to statehood or independence, Ponsa-Kraus said. It “just wasn’t at the center of the conversation.”

Rather, the U.S. government “thought that Puerto Ricans were not fit for self government,” Meléndez-Badillo said. They were “seen as too barbarous, too African (and) too lazy … as lesser-than,” he said.

“That early 20th century racism has not gone away,” Meléndez-Badillo said. ”Those ideas about Puerto Ricans unfit for self government still operate today.”

The same Supreme Court that supported the “separate but equal” racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson also ruled on cases about Puerto Rico that are still in effect, Ponsa-Kraus and Meléndez-Badillo explained.

Over several cases, the Supreme Court ruled that Puerto Rico was “foreign to the U.S. in a domestic sense,” that it “belonged to but was not a part of” the U.S. and created the category of unincorporated territory to describe the island, according to experts.

Congress, which is the ultimate authority over U.S. territories, showed similar hesitation to enabling Puerto Rican statehood.

Congress made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens in 1917, about 19 years after taking control of the island. Later, when the island passed its 1952 constitution, Congress decided to make Puerto Rico a commonwealth.

This designation broke from the pattern Congress had established in approving the constitutions of the 50 states, Ponsa-Kraus explained.

“The United States has always been resistant to admit Puerto Rico into statehood,” she said, “and that has an enormous impact on how people feel about asking for it.”

The designation of Puerto Rico as a commonwealth created decades of confusion about how much independence and sovereignty the island really had.

Some clarity came in the form of the Federal Oversight and Management Board. This board was appointed by Congress in 2016 and given “quite serious control over Puerto Rico’s government,” Ponsa-Kraus said, including the power to set budgets and veto laws.

Today, Congress’ reluctance to admit Puerto Rico into statehood involves economic concerns about the cost of such a decision and political concerns about the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats, Duany and Meléndez-Badillo said.

If Puerto Rico became a state, it would have a larger population than about 22 current states. Consequently, Puerto Rico would add two new senators to the U.S. Senate and require a reconfiguration of the U.S. House of Representatives to give it the adequate number of representatives, Meléndez-Badillo said.

Although Puerto Rico has its own political parties, its politicians have traditionally been Democrats. Consequently, Meléndez-Badillo and Duany noted that the Republican Party is unlikely to support admitting a new state with a long Democratic history.

The House, for example, voted in favor of a bill in December 2022 that would have given Puerto Ricans a binding public vote on whether to pursue statehood, with 216 Democrats and 16 Republicans voting in favor. All 191 votes against came from Republicans. The Senate never voted on the bill.

On the island, Puerto Ricans have long been divided over whether they want statehood or the ambiguous status quo, Duany and Ponsa-Kraus said. Six nonbinding votes on the topic, known as plebiscites, have taken place between 1967 and 2020 with varying structures, choices and voter turnout rates. None demonstrated that a clear majority of voters supported statehood.

In the most recent 2020 plebiscite, about 52% of voters supported statehood, but the turnout rate was about 55%.

Many Puerto Ricans are afraid they would lose their culture, language and identity if they became a state, experts said.

Colón described this as “strong cultural nationalism,” adding that, “Puerto Ricans remain very, very proud of their own identity.”

What could happen next for Puerto Rico?

“What often gets neglected or obscured or erased is the agency of Puerto Ricans,” Meléndez-Badillo said. “Puerto Ricans are enacting and imagining other futures, freedom futures, in the present, as we speak. Puerto Ricans have agency.”

Puerto Rican voters are increasingly moving toward supporting statehood and away from supporting the current commonwealth status quo, according to experts.

Recently, some Puerto Ricans have proposed another alternative: free association, Duany said. Under this type of arrangement, Puerto Rico would become an independent nation but maintain a unique, agreed-upon relationship with the U.S., he said. The U.S. has a free association arrangement with several Pacific islands it once controlled, including Palau and Micronesia.

Still, any change to Puerto Rico’s status would require Congressional approval and a Congressionally sponsored plebiscite with legally binding options and outcomes, Duany and Colón said.

“Now that we’re commemorating the 125 years of the war,” Duany said, “I think it’s essential that ordinary U.S. citizens understand the kind of complex and turbulent relationship that Puerto Rico has with the U.S. and then the need to move forward.”

According to Colón, “I think there’s an opportunity for the United States to get it right with Puerto Rico.”

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