Will Puerto Rico Become the 51st State?

TERRITORY. COLONY. COMMONWEALTH. “An island surrounded by water, big water.” Boriquén.

In 2017, when Hurricane María hit and Puerto Ricans were left without power for months, people around the world Googled: “What is Puerto Rico?”

A strip of land 100 miles long and 35 miles wide in the Caribbean Sea. Home to nearly 3.2 million people, “proud people,” as my abuela says. It is an island of people in la brega, an expression without a translation that encapsulates “a state of mind,” Alana Casanova-Burgess explains in La Brega, a WYNC podcast series. It’s the feeling of always being in the struggle, the hustle. “It shows us something about our ‘Puerto Ricanness,’ our history, our present,” she says. “And maybe where we’re headed.”

This year, Steven Spielberg will release his screen revival of the hit musical West Side Story. It’s been 60 years since Rita Moreno as Anita sang, “I like to be in America” from a staged New York City rooftop (muddying the waters as to whether Puerto Rico was “America”). As a new Anita emerges, Congress will debate the Puerto Rico Statehood Admission Act, introduced in March. If the act is approved, then a vote will be held in Puerto Rico on whether to become a state.

Upon “winning” Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain in 1898, the U.S. saw Puerto Rico as an outlet for goods and a strategic naval location. In the 1901 case Downes v. Bidwell, which followed on the heels of Plessy v. Ferguson, the court decided that Puerto Rico should not become a state, but rather live as an “unincorporated territory” of the U.S. “Separate, but also not equal. Sort of,” writes Ed Morales in Fantasy Island.

In 1952, Puerto Rico got another name: estado libre asociado (“a free associated state”). A commonwealth, of sorts. It was a status originating from the island’s first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín. “In order to massage the continued colonial interests of the U.S. in Puerto Rico and present a sovereign future to his residents, Marín came up with this label that sounded like decolonization,” Casanova-Burgess says. It was neither statehood, nor independence. It was a promised third way: access to U.S. riches and preservation of self-governance. But neither came true.

In 2014, Puerto Rico entered a debt crisis. Two years later, Congress appointed a U.S.-based financial oversight board that slashed funds from health care and education to repay mainland creditors. According to the U.S. Census, 43 percent of those residing on the island live below the poverty line. The median income between 2015 and 2019 was $20,539.

Today, there are more Puerto Ricans living on the mainland than there are on the island itself, most of my family among them. Puerto Rico lost a ninth of its population in the last decade, the largest drop of any state or territory counted in the U.S. census. We, the descendants of the diaspora, have become like the island herself: belonging to, but no longer part of. Our presence on the mainland doesn’t answer the question of what should happen to the land of our ancestors. Nor what it will mean for us, as a people, should Puerto Rico become a state. Will the U.S.-induced debt be forgiven? Will the public health and school systems be rebuilt? Will reparations be paid for past harm? Will we finally acknowledge the truth of the “failed colonial experiment” the U.S. government retains control of today?

“It hurts to say [Puerto Rico] is a colony because we know that colonies are violent and do not prosper,” said Ishbel Cora Rodríguez, a student at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. “But it is our reality ... it is the only reality I have ever known.”

When I asked Rodríguez what she hopes for the island, she envisioned an “anti-colonial, just, anti-racist, and feminist Puerto Rico.” She imagines a Puerto Rico with free and accessible health services, food sovereignty, gender justice, affordable housing, public transportation, and environmental protections. Most of all, she dreams of a Puerto Rico that is free. “We are the ones who little by little have seen the place where we were born being taken away from us,” she said. “It is we who must decide how to recover what has always been ours.”

Nearly two years ago, on a trip to Puerto Rico, my father and I stood in the dark listening to the chorale of the coquí. There were once millions upon millions of these small frogs across the island. Today many of their species are endangered, threatened by environmental disregard and deforestation. Yet those left continue to sing.