I’m Not The Only One

Last Sunday was the birthday of Jose Celso Barbosa. While he is relatively unknown to most Americans, he died a hero in his native Puerto Rico. Founder of the Puerto Rican Republican Party and the movement to make Puerto Rico a state, July 27th is a legal holiday on the island.

This particular Jose Celso Barbosa Day was more politically heated than usual, as the pro-statehood Republican Party rallied for their gubernatorial candidate in Barbosa’s name.

Jose Celso Barbosa (1857-1921) accomplished a number of firsts for Puerto Ricans. He was the first mixed race person to attend Puerto Rico’s Jesuit Seminary and in 1880 graduated from Michigan University to become the first Puerto Rican to have a medical degree and the first Puerto Rican to have a degree from an American University.

After the U.S. defeated Spain in 1898 and seized Puerto Rico, Barbosa was one of the first advocates for statehood even when the U.S. barely knew what to do with their new war prize. He founded the Puerto Rican Republican Part, solidifying his legacy as the father of the Statehood for Puerto Rico Movement. He also began Puerto Rico’s first bilingual newspaper, perhaps a testament to his eagerness to have his island join the United States as an equal and shed its centuries-long history as a subservient Spanish colony.

While I would love to see an independent Puerto Rican nation, I do favor statehood as a second choice. Anything is better than remaining a colony. I believe the best solution for Puerto Ricans is for Washington to force them to choose only between independence or statehood.

I’ve heard many stories of abuse from Washington on Puerto Rico residents as well as on the island itself which only makes the United States appear more like a big bully than a benevolent land of the free. Abuse from the federal government that would never be allowed to take place in any U.S. state and would become an international incident if the feds inflicted such abuse upon people of another nation.

I’ve heard the stories of economic exploitation, the Naval base in Vieques and the civilian casualties rendered as a result of military exercises. My sister currently works for an INS subcontractor as a guard in a detention center in Puerto Rico.

This is no GITMO, though; it’s just for illegal aliens who attempted to float their way onto technically American soil. No Mexicans here, though. In Puerto Rico the most frequent illegal aliens caught sneaking onto shore are either Dominican, Haitian or Chinese.

Anyway, my sister has complained that her employer (the INS subcontractor) owes her pay for 28 hours of work from the previous month and that only bonafide INS employees receive federal benefits. According to federal law, any contractor hired by a federal agency has to provide its employees with salaries and benefits close, if not equal, to those a federal employee would receive. The loophole, of course is if a contractor hires a subcontractor, and that subcontractor is offering benefits and wages that would only be seen in the private sector. Looks like Washington is taking a cue from the sweatshop industry.

If this was an INS detention center in California or New York, it would be absolutely illegal. But because Puerto Rico resides in a hazy status between sovereign nation and U.S. state, federal laws seem to be applied at the discretion of the various federal agencies with offices based on the island.

According to a 1996 report by the House Committee on Natural Resources, Puerto Rico’s current status does not meet the criteria for any of the options for full self-government. It added that PR is still an unincorporated territory of the U.S. under the territorial clause, that the establishment of local self-government with the consent of the people can be unilaterally revoked by the U.S. Congress, and that U.S. Congress can also withdraw the U.S. citizenship of natural-born residents of Puerto Rico at any time, for a “legitimate Federal purpose”.

What’s more, because the Constitution does not mention its application towards U.S. colonies, the Constitution is therefore not fully applicable to natural-born residents of colonial territories such as Puerto Rico. This is what allows federal agencies to pick and choose what civil rights to extend or deny to Puerto Rico residents, including the right for Congressional representation.

That’s a lot of disenfranchisement for four million people, especially when you consider that Puerto Rico residents have fought, either through the draft or voluntarily, in every war in which the U.S. has been involved since 1898. Interestingly enough, some Puerto Ricans, tired of 400 years of Spanish rule, actually fought on the U.S. side during the Spanish-American War and helped troops locate the Spaniards’ strategic military outposts.

This legal inconsistency is a direct result of Puerto Rico trying to have it both ways. And when you try to have it both ways in life, you usually end up with nothing at all. Of course, the federal government has benefited greatly from this indecision. Whenever Puerto Rico is allowed to have a non-binding vote regarding the future political status of their home, it is always a dead heat between statehood and colony, with independence only favored upon by a small minority.

Obviously Puerto Ricans are not interested in being their own country. So perhaps next time the feds hold a non-binding vote they should opt for statehood, the next best resolution.

It’s what Jose would’ve wanted.

Click here and here for more information on the hazy political relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Language, History, Latin America, Race & Ethnicity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.