Puerto Ricans are American citizens but Puerto Rico itself is not strictly speaking
a part of the United States. Instead it's a US Commonwealth meaning that they have an organized
government (an elected governor, a legislature, government departments and so on) but aren’t
actually incorporated into the US proper. So, they don't have a vote in Washington DC,
though they do send one representative who has no voting power, and Puerto Ricans living in Puerto
Rico can’t cast a vote for President, though Puerto Ricans who move to the mainland, can.
So how did Puerto Rico acquire such a complicated relationship with the US? Well,
long before the US was founded the island that would eventually be named Puerto Rico
was inhabited by a people called the Taíno, but in 1493 a little-known Italian sailor
named Christopher Columbus sighted the island on his second voyage and claimed
it for Spain. In 1509 the Spanish made Juan Ponce de Leon, who had served under Columbus,
the first governor of Puerto Rico, beginning nearly four hundred years of Spanish rule over
the island. The native Taíno were turned into labourers for the Spanish through the Encomienda
system where entire subsections of native society were put under the command of Conquistadors. Over
the next few decades the vast majority of Puerto Rico’s native population were wiped out as a
consequence of their enslavement and, much more devastatingly, European diseases. In their place,
the Spanish brought in thousands of African slaves to power Puerto Rico’s plantation-based economy.
In 1873 the Spanish abolished slavery on the island, but they also lost most
of their colonial empire to revolutions a few decades earlier and were left only with Puerto
Rico and Cuba as American colonies. Speaking of… for the previous hundred years or so the United
States had been manifest destiny-ing itself across most of North America,
hampered only briefly by a small internal conflict, but they quickly
realized that they had run out of space on the mainland to claim. So what to do? Well,
grab lots of islands of course! And the dying Spanish Empire presented an excellent target.
On February 15th, 1898, the USS Maine docked in Havana, Cuba, exploded. Possibly in an accident,
possibly because of sabotage, but either way the disaster caused enough outrage
in the US to force President McKinley into declaring war on Spain. The ten-week long
conflict saw America’s naval power prove itself to be considerably stronger than
Spain’s and the last remnants of the Spanish Empire: Puerto Rico and Cuba
in the Americas and the Philippines and Guam in the Pacific were handed over to the US.
Puerto Rico was occupied by the US military for about two years until on April 12th
1900 when McKinley signed the Foraker act which gave Puerto Rico its elected
House of Representatives and a judicial system, but not US citizenship. Instead,
the law referred to the island’s inhabitants as quote: “Citizens of Porto Rico.” The governor
of Puerto Rico would be appointed by the US President. In 1917 the Jones-Shafroth act
amended the Foraker act. It gave Puerto Ricans American citizenship, a Senate,
and their representative in the US congress: Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner. At this
point though there were still plenty of Puerto Ricans calling for complete independence from
the US. But despite that in 1952, Puerto Rico went the other way and built stronger ties to America,
taking on its modern form as a commonwealth and gaining the right to elect its own governor.
So then why is Puerto Rico and America’s modern relationship so complicated? Mostly
because of the complicated history between the two entities but partly because of
fierce debate as to the island’s future among Puerto Ricans themselves. The two most recent
referenda on statehood were held in 2012 and 2017, both of which returned majorities for
*statehood*. But in 2012 over ⅓ of all ballots cast were blank and in 2017, despite 97% of
votes cast being in favour of *statehood*, only 23% of the population voted at all.
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learning more about US history find out why New York City isn’t the American capital,
or why Russia sold Alaska to the US, in the videos to the left. And as always,
I’ve been James and thank you for watching Look Back History.