V. Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican Communities: Citizenship Without Equal Power

Puerto Rico belongs in this story because it shows how the United States could expand civil rights at home while preserving colonial power over millions of its own citizens. During the same years that the nation presented itself as a defender of democracy and equality, it continued to govern Puerto Rico through a territorial system that denied equal political power. Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens, but citizenship did not give them full democracy.

On the island, Puerto Ricans lived under federal authority without voting representation in Congress and without the right to vote for President while residing there. On the mainland, Puerto Rican communities faced poverty, language discrimination, school exclusion, housing neglect, police hostility, and racialization as outsiders. Puerto Rico shows that racial hierarchy did not operate only through segregation or formal race labels. It also operated through empire, territorial status, language, labor, migration, and citizenship without equal power.

This was not the same as anti-Black racism, which remained the central organizing feature of American racial hierarchy. But it was part of the same national system. Anti-Black racism created the deepest and most durable structure of exclusion. Other groups were placed within that structure in different ways. Puerto Ricans were treated as citizens when the United States wanted jurisdiction, labor, military service, and national control. They were treated as lesser members when they demanded equal power.

Puerto Rico had been under U.S. control since 1898, when the United States acquired the island after the Spanish-American War. In 1917, Congress granted U.S. citizenship to people born in Puerto Rico. But that citizenship was limited by territorial status. Puerto Rico was treated as belonging to the United States without being fully part of it.

The Insular Cases, a series of Supreme Court decisions from the early twentieth century, allowed the federal government to govern some territories without extending all constitutional protections in the same way they applied in the states. Those cases rested on a racial and colonial assumption: that some people under U.S. rule were not ready for full constitutional equality. The doctrine gave legal cover to empire. It told the nation that the United States could possess territory without accepting full democratic responsibility for the people who lived there.

By 1952, Puerto Rico had adopted its own constitution and became known as the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. That change gave Puerto Rico greater local self-government, but it did not end federal control. Congress still held ultimate authority. Puerto Rico still lacked voting power in Congress. Puerto Ricans on the island still could not vote for President. The language of “commonwealth” softened the colonial relationship, but it did not erase it. The legal structure gave Puerto Ricans national belonging, but not democratic control.

The status question did not disappear during the civil rights era. In 1967, Puerto Rico held a status plebiscite. Voters chose to maintain commonwealth status over statehood or independence. But even that vote occurred within a system where Congress controlled the available legal choices. Puerto Ricans could express a preference, but they could not unilaterally change the island’s relationship to the United States. That is the heart of colonial power. The governed may speak, but the governing power decides what that speech means.

This was not only a constitutional issue. It shaped daily life. Puerto Rico’s economy had been transformed by Operation Bootstrap, a mid-twentieth-century development program that shifted the island away from agriculture and toward manufacturing. Operation Bootstrap promised modernization, but modernization came on terms set by outside capital and federal power. Puerto Rico was developed, but not freed.

The program attracted investment and expanded some industrial employment. But it also deepened dependency on U.S. corporations, federal tax policy, and decisions made outside the island. Many rural workers lost their place in the old agricultural economy. Many families left Puerto Rico for the mainland, not simply because they wanted to migrate, but because law and economic policy narrowed their choices. Migration was not just a private family decision. It was tied to colonial economics.

The island and the mainland were not separate stories. Federal policy helped shape conditions in Puerto Rico, and those conditions helped shape migration to mainland cities already organized by race, poverty, and white political power.

By the 1960s and 1970s, large Puerto Rican communities had developed in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Hartford, Boston, and other cities. These communities entered cities already shaped by anti-Black racism. White flight, segregated schools, job discrimination, landlord neglect, police violence, and urban disinvestment had already created sharp racial lines. Puerto Ricans often lived near Black communities and shared many of the same material conditions: overcrowded housing, underfunded schools, low-wage work, and hostile policing.

For families, those conditions were not abstract. They meant crowded apartments, schools that did not expect their children to succeed, welfare offices that treated them with suspicion, hospitals that failed to listen, and police who treated young Puerto Rican men as threats before they had done anything at all. These were the daily signs of racial hierarchy. The law did not have to announce that Puerto Ricans were inferior. The structure already delivered that message.

Puerto Ricans were also treated in distinct ways. They were U.S. citizens, yet often treated as foreign. They were racialized through language, accent, poverty, skin color, and national origin. Spanish became a marker of inferiority in schools, workplaces, welfare offices, hospitals, and courts. Puerto Rican children were often placed in English-only classrooms where they could not fully participate. Adults were often expected to navigate government systems in English, whether or not the government made meaningful language access available.

That is why language rights became a civil rights issue. Equality could not mean giving everyone the same English-only form and pretending the system was fair. If a child could not understand the classroom, that child was not receiving an equal education. If a voter could not understand the ballot, that voter was not receiving equal access to democracy. If a patient could not understand a doctor, that patient was not receiving equal medical care.

Puerto Rican families and advocates fought these exclusions. In New York, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, founded in 1972, became an important legal institution for challenging discrimination against Puerto Rican and other Latino communities. The ASPIRA litigation over bilingual education was especially important. In the 1970s, Puerto Rican students and families challenged New York City’s failure to provide meaningful education to children who were not proficient in English. Their struggle helped establish that language exclusion could violate civil rights law.

The issue was not whether Puerto Rican children should learn English. Of course they needed English to function in the United States. The issue was whether schools could sacrifice their education while they were learning it. English-only education often treated Spanish-speaking children as if their language were a defect. Bilingual education challenged that assumption. It insisted that children should not have to lose a language, lose a year, or lose themselves in order to receive an education.

Voting rights followed a similar pattern. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was built primarily around the Black freedom struggle in the South. That was necessary. Anti-Black disfranchisement had been one of the most violent and durable pillars of American racial hierarchy. But by 1975, Congress recognized that language minorities also faced barriers to political participation. The Voting Rights Act amendments required language assistance in certain jurisdictions for voters from covered language minority groups, including Spanish-speaking citizens.

This was not special treatment. It was a recognition that formal rights are hollow when the state designs the process in a way that excludes people. A ballot a citizen cannot read is not a real invitation to democracy. Language access made visible a basic truth: racial hierarchy does not always announce itself through racial labels. Sometimes it works through forms, offices, ballots, schools, and bureaucratic rules.

Puerto Rican women also faced racial hierarchy in deeply personal ways. Reproductive control became one of the most painful parts of Puerto Rico’s twentieth-century history. Sterilization was widespread on the island, especially among poor women. This history requires care. Some women chose sterilization. Others were pressured, misinformed, or denied real alternatives. But choice cannot be understood apart from poverty, colonial power, medical authority, and the limited options available to poor women.

Law and policy did not need to physically force every woman in order to produce a coercive system. When poor women are told that their fertility is a social problem, when public health systems promote sterilization more easily than they support family well-being, and when women lack full information and real alternatives, bodily autonomy is compromised. Puerto Rican women were not simply making private medical decisions in a neutral world. They were making decisions inside a colonial and racial order that treated their reproduction as something to manage.

This connects Puerto Rican women to a larger pattern in American racial history. Black women, Native American women, Mexican American women, and poor women also experienced reproductive abuse, coercive sterilization, and medical neglect. The details differed, but the logic was connected. Racial hierarchy did not stop at the schoolhouse door or the voting booth. It entered hospitals, welfare offices, prisons, and clinics. It reached into decisions about family, motherhood, fertility, and the body.

Puerto Rican activism during this period must be part of the story. Puerto Rican communities did not simply suffer these conditions. They organized against them. The Young Lords, first in Chicago and then in New York, became one of the most visible Puerto Rican liberation organizations of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Influenced by the Black Panther Party and broader anti-colonial movements, the Young Lords challenged police brutality, poor housing, inadequate sanitation, hospital neglect, lead poisoning, and U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico.

Their politics were direct because the conditions were direct. Garbage piled up in Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Children lived with lead poisoning. Hospitals neglected poor patients. Police treated young Puerto Ricans as threats. Schools failed Spanish-speaking children and then blamed the children for failing. The Young Lords understood these conditions as political choices, not accidents. Their message was that government neglect was a form of racial power.

Their work also showed the connection between Puerto Rican liberation and Black freedom. Puerto Rican activists often built coalitions with Black activists, especially around policing, housing, schools, health care, and poverty. But coalition did not mean sameness. Anti-Black racism remained the central pillar of American racial hierarchy. Puerto Ricans entered a society already organized around Black subordination and white advantage. Their treatment was shaped by that structure, but it also reflected colonialism, language discrimination, migration, and national-origin bias.

Afro-Puerto Ricans stood at the intersection of these forces. They experienced the racialization directed at Puerto Ricans as a group and the anti-Blackness directed at Black people more broadly. Their experience reminds us that Puerto Rican identity is not racially uniform. Puerto Ricans include people of African, Indigenous Taíno, European, and mixed ancestry. U.S. racial categories often flattened that complexity. But the hierarchy still worked. The closer one was read as Black, the more directly anti-Black racism shaped one’s treatment.

By the late 1970s, federal law continued to reinforce Puerto Rico’s unequal status. Residents of Puerto Rico were excluded from some federal benefit programs or treated less favorably than residents of the states. In 1978, the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion of Puerto Rico residents from Supplemental Security Income. By 1980, the Supreme Court made the contradiction plain. In Harris v. Rosario, the Court allowed Congress to reimburse Puerto Rico at a lower rate under a federal welfare program than it reimbursed states. The Court reasoned that Congress had broad power under the Territorial Clause and needed only a rational basis for treating Puerto Rico differently.

That decision is an important endpoint for this period. In the same era when civil rights law promised equality, the Supreme Court reaffirmed Congress’s power to treat Puerto Rico unequally. The law did not say Puerto Ricans were not citizens. It said their citizenship did not require equal treatment. That is why Puerto Rico belongs in a history of racial hierarchy through law. It shows how inequality could survive inside citizenship itself.

Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican communities reveal the limits of the civil rights revolution. The period from 1965 to 1980 brought real gains: stronger voting rights, bilingual education claims, legal advocacy, community organizing, and new forms of Puerto Rican political power. But those gains did not dismantle the deeper structure. Puerto Rico remained subject to federal authority without equal federal representation. Mainland Puerto Ricans remained vulnerable to racialized poverty, language exclusion, housing inequality, and police abuse. Puerto Rican women continued to bear the weight of reproductive control and medical neglect.

The broader lesson is clear. Racial hierarchy did not depend on one legal device. It could operate through segregation, as it did against Black Americans. It could operate through tribal dispossession and attacks on sovereignty, as it did against Native nations. It could operate through immigration exclusion and foreignness, as it did against Asian and Latino communities. And it could operate through colonial citizenship, as it did in Puerto Rico.

Puerto Ricans were inside the United States but not equal within it. That was not a failure of citizenship alone. It was a design of law. The United States could condemn discrimination while preserving empire. It could celebrate citizenship while denying equal power. It could speak the language of democracy while governing millions of citizens as if democracy were optional.