Por y Para Mi Gente: Puerto Rico-US Relations (Meditation 2)
Note
This is my second meditation on the documents of barbarism that solidified Puerto Rico’s standing as a US colony from 1898 to present (As Jóse Trías Monge writes, Puerto is the “oldest colony” in the world). You may find the first meditation here.
More Background
Puerto Rico and its inhabits came under US jurisdiction when Spain and the US completed the Treaty of Paris (1898). This Treaty is part of a nineteenth-century barbarous textual tradition that championed and perpetuated the establishment of White, Anglo-Saxon supremacy across much of the globe. I’ll consider two authors from this tradition, before turning to the Treaty itself.
Author One: Thomas Jefferson Farnham
Thomas Jefferson Farnham was an explorer who advocated and financed the spread of Anglo-Saxon white supremacy across what is now the contiguous United States during the early nineteenth century. Like many White males engaged in settler colonialism on behalf of the US, Farnham understood his position in terms of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny—the view that the expansion of the US throughout much of the American continents was justified and inevitable. And like many of his racist companions, Farnham linked the moral justification and inevitability of Anglo-Saxon expansion to that race’s purity. Natural Law, Farnham argued, ensured the vitality of the supposedly unadulterated members of the Caucasian race—here seen as coextensive with Anglo-Saxons—while also cursing groups born from race-mixing. Hence, Farnham writes the following while defending Anglo-Saxon expansion into California:
No one acquainted with the indolent, mixed race of California, will ever believe that they will populate, much less, for any length of time, govern the country. The law of Nature which curses the mulatto here with a constitution less robust than that of either race from which he sprang, lays a similar penalty upon the mingling of the Indian and white races in California and Mexico. They must fade away.
For Farnham, Mexicans are racial mongrels that Nature penalizes with deficient natures and inevitable demise—“they must fade away.” In contrast, Farnham writes, the undefiled branches of the Caucasian race must persist and dominate the continent.
The mixing of different branches of the Caucasian family in the States will continue to produce a race of men, who will enlarge from period to period the field of their industry and civil domination, until not only the Northern States of Mexico, but the Californias also, will open their glebe to the pressure of its unconquered arm. The old Saxon blood must stride the continent, must command all its northern shores, must here press the grape and the olive, here eat the orange and the fig, and in their own unaided might, erect the altar of civil and religious freedom on the plains of the Californias.
White supremacy suffused the vision and practice of Manifest destiny Farnham and others advocated, financed, and died for.
Author Two: Rudyard Kipling
Across the Atlantic Ocean, Rudyard Kipling supported the US imperial expansion as the glorious spread of the White race around the globe. And in February 1899, Kipling wrote “The White Man’s Burden,” a poem praising and defending the US victory in the Spanish-US War (1898). More specifically, he linked it to the history and “burden” of empire that characterized Britain and other European nations.
Kipling’s poem caught Theodore Roosevelt’s attention—the same Theodore Roosevelt who wrote Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in May 1898 urging him to ensure that the US did not “make peace [with Spain] until we get Porto Rico.” A fan of the poem, Roosevelt copied and mailed it to Senator Lodge, writing that the piece as a “rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.”
Here’s Kipling’s poem.
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.
Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
Like Farnham, Kipling championed racist White expansionism as a justifiable way of establishing the pure White race over mixed-race squalor—just as Nature intended. No wonder Roosevelt, who feared White racial suicide via race-mixing, liked the poem’s primary themes.
The Treaty of Paris (1898)
Farnham wrote before the Spanish-US War. Kipling penned “The White Man’s Burden” when the war was over. Yet the Treaty of Paris that ended this war echoes the racist expansionist views both men championed. Consider the following passages from the Treaty.
Article I:
Spain relinquishes all claim of sovereignty and title to Cuba….
Article II:
Spain cedes to the United States the island of Porto Rico and other islands now under Spanish sovereignty in the West Indies, and the island of Guam in the Marianas or Ladrones.
Article III:
Spain cedes to the United States the archipelago known as the Philippine Islands…
The United States will pay Spain the sum of twenty million dollars ($20,000,000) within three months after the exchange of the ratifications of the present treat….
Article IX:
Spanish subjects, natives of the Peninsula, residing in the territory over which Spain by the present treaty relinquishes or cedes her sovereignty, may remain in such territory or may remove therefrom, retraining in either event all their rights of property, including the right to sell or dispose of such property or of its proceeds; and they shall also have the right to carry on their industry, commerce and professions, being subject in respect thereof to such laws as are applicable to other foreigners. In case they remain in the territory they may preserve their allegiance to the Crown of Spain by making, before a court of record, within a year from the date of the exchange of ratifications of this treaty, a declaration of their decision to preserve such allegiance; in default of which declaration they shall be held to have renounced it and to have adopted the nationality of the territory in which they may reside.
The civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the United States shall be determined by the Congress.
Articles I-III describe the lands the US acquired in its racist, expansionist war against Spain. That racism subtly surfaces in Article IX.
Begin at the end of Article IX. The text never promises citizenship or statehood to the “native inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the United State.” Instead, it leaves that matter to Congress. This is a legal first for the US. As José Cabranes writes:
For the first time in [US] history, in a treaty acquiring territory for the United States, there was no promise of citizenship…[nor any] promise, actual or implied, of statehood. The United States thereby acquired not “territories” by possessions or “dependencies” and became, in that sense, an “imperial” power.
We may further appreciate Cabranes’ claim if we contrast Article IX from the Treaty of Paris (1898) with Article IX from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ceded much of Mexico to the US. In the latter Treaty we read:
The Mexicans who, in the territories aforesaid, shall not preserve the character of citizens of the Mexican Republic, conformably with what is stipulated in the preceding article, shall be incorporated into the Union of the United States and be admitted, at the proper time (to be judged by the Congress of the United States) to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States according to the principles of the Constitution; and in the mean time (sic.) shall be maintained and protected in the fee enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction.
The difference in promises and privileges extended to the peoples considered in the two treaties is stark.
The absence of a promise of US citizenship in the Treaty of Paris becomes more stark when we recall that, at this point in US history, people could only become US citizens if they were deemed (a) white, (b) former African slaves who’d lived in the antebellum US, (c) or the descendants of the latter slaves. Whereas the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo rendered Mexicans White by legal fiat—How else could they be US citizens!—the Treaty of Paris did not offer this law-based racial identity to the human spoils of its war with Spain. The US wanted to be more careful about who it deemed and made White. As The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), The Dawes Act (1887), and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) had shown, Anglo-Saxon purity required the policing of racial bloodlines and privileges.
Speaking of privileges, notice the disparate treatment between those deemed “Spanish” and those deemed “natives.” The Treaty of Paris dedicates 157 words to elucidating the range of privileges those “Spanish subjects, natives of the [Iberian] Peninsula” receive; it dedicates 25 words to clarifying “the civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the United States.” Indeed, only the supposedly White Spanish could maintain their Spanish citizenship; those deemed non-White—the vast majority of the population—were left citizenship-less. We should expect such treatment by those folks like Farnham, Kipling, and Roosevelt would have seen as racial mongrels.
Transition
The Treaty of Paris left Congress with a racist race-conscious question: What to do with Puerto Rico’s non-Spaniards—its non-Whites? Of course, versions of this question applied to all the supposedly non-White human spoil of the US’s expansionist war with Spain. I conclude this meditation with someone who helped me appreciate this point. Rubin Francis Weston writes:
Those who advocated overseas expansion faced this dilemma: What kind of relationship would the new peoples have to the body politic? Was it to be the relationship of the Reconstruction period, an attempt at political equality for dissimilar races, or was it to be the Southern “counterrevolutionary” point of view which denied the basic American constitutional rights to people of color? The actions of the federal government during the imperial period and the relegation of the Negro to a status of second-class citizenship indicated that the Southern point of view would prevail. The racism which caused the relegation of the Negro to a status of inferiority was to be applied to the overseas possessions of the United States.
