Por y Para Mi Gente: Puerto Rico-US Relations (Meditation 3)

Note

This is my third 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, and the second meditation here.

The Aftermath of the Treaty of Paris (1898): The Foraker Act (1900)

The Treaty of Paris (1898) provided the US with a Caribbean jewel Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had labored for—Puerto Rico. In May of 1898, Roosevelt had asked Senator Lodge to ensure that the administration did not “make peace [with Spain] until we get Porto Rico.” Senator Lodge assured Roosevelt that “Porto Rico is not forgotten and we mean to have it. Unless I am utterly . . . mistaken, the administration is now fully committed to the large policy that we both desire.” With the Treaty complete, these racist imperial expansionists had what they wanted: Puerto Rico, mi isla y mi gente, was under US jurisdiction.

But as we saw in the last post, the Treaty of Paris left most of the questions about how to take up the “White Man’s Burden” of relating to Puerto Rico to Congress. Indeed, the Treaty didn’t even promise mi gente US citizenship. Consequently, Congress had to enact legislation to establish patterns of governance and regulation of mi gente y nuestra isla.

Here we must recall Du Bois’s dictum: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” The Treaty of Paris had already determined the rights and privileges of the White Spaniards inhabiting Puerto Rico; it left the task of governing and regulating the majority non-White population to Congress. Do you see the white supremacy in these policies? Do you see the color-line?

Of course, the problem of the color-line persisted as Congress and President McKinley considered what to do with these non-White latin@s under their jurisdiction. The initial answer they provided was the Foraker Act (1900). Arnold Leibowtiz describes the act thus:

President McKinley’s Puerto Rican policy, which was incorporated in the Foraker Act of 1900, established a civil government in which the key roles would be given to Americans appointed by the President. There would be a Governor appointed by the President, an 11-man Executive Council (with a majority being Statesiders), 35 elected Puerto Ricans in the House of Delegates (whose laws were subject to Congressional veto), and an elected Resident Commissioner who spoke for Puerto Rico in the U.S. House of Representatives but had no vote there.

As Leibowtiz describes, the Foraker Act imposed a form of governance and taxation—without real representation: The lone spokesperson for Puerto Rico in Congress, who only had access to the House of Representatives, could not vote. Of course, white normativity and white supremacist paternalism suffused the rest of the governmental structure. The President picked Puerto Rico’s Governor; the Executive Council primarily consisted of white males from the mainland; and Congress could veto any legislation Puerto Rico’s House of Delegates passed. Thus, the Foraker Act established racist patterns of exploitation and oppression at the start of the twentieth century. Again: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”