A damaged Puerto Rican national flag spray painted with the words "Together as One" hangs from the facade of a business, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2017. The relief effort from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico has so far been concentrated largely in San Juan, and many outside the capital say they've received little or no help. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

After Hurricane Maria

The History of Puerto Rico and the United States

09.07.18

In August of 2018, officials in Puerto Rico reported that over 3,000 people died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. One year after the disaster, Brian, Ed and Nathan take a look at the historical relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. Are Puerto Ricans really Americans in the eyes of the federal government?

Puerto Rico; U.S. territories

Open Episode Transcript as PDF

Segments

Jose Julio Henna & the Invasion of Puerto Rico

In 1898, America was on the verge of war with Spain, and Puerto Rican exiles in New York City offered their support to the federal government. One such man was Jose Julio Henna, who believed the United States was waging war to liberate the Puerto Rican people from the Spanish. He was mistaken.

Music:

Vector Melody by Podington Bear

Denouement by Podington Bear

Elipse by Podington Bear

Jose Julio Henna; Puerto Rico; colonialism

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and the Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Male: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Brian Balogh: Welcome to BackStory, the American history podcast. I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Ed Ayers: It’s been one year since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, causing the worst electrical blackout in U.S. history and leaving more than 3,000 people dead.

Brian Balogh: Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but many Americans feel that the government’s response to the disaster was not only slow, it was negligent. It made many people ask, are Puerto Ricans really citizens in the eyes of the federal government.

Nathan Connolly: To answer that question, let’s return to the moment when Puerto Rico became part of the United States. Puerto Rico had been a Spanish colony since the 16th century. By 1898 the island had taken a big step towards self-government with the establishment of a democratically-elected legislature, but many Puerto Ricans, including political exiles in the United States, wanted to see the island free.

Male: The United States can save us, making us independent, and the majority of the people will determine in the future whether or not to ask annexation to the American Union.

Ed Ayers: Jose Julio Henna advocated for independence for Puerto Rico until he was banished from the island when he was 18 years old. In New York City, Henna studied medicine at Columbia University, and became an influential leader in a community of Puerto Rican exiles.

Ed Ayers: In 1898 the United States was gearing up for war with Spain and had its eye on Spanish territories in the Caribbean. Henna, now 45, wanted to make sure that American troops landed on Puerto Rican shores.

Male: At the naval station, the Port of San Juan to the north and Bahia Honda to the south of the island will surpass all others in the Antilles. The island is geographically positioned before the canals of Panama and Nicaragua, and in the path from Europe to South America.

Ed Ayers: Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, and even President McKinley all liked the sound of this very much, and they were happy to accept the assistance of Henna and other Puerto Rican exiles in New York, who provided the U.S. government with maps and military intelligence down to the number of Spanish soldiers in each village. Many volunteered to go along with the army to act as civil commissioners in captured towns.

Nathan Connolly: In preparation for the invasion, Henna and Eugenio Maria de Hostos wrote a manifesto which they believed would be distributed among the Puerto Rican people. It’s not clear that it ever was.

Male: Puerto Rico, from this day in which the American squadrons have landed on your beaches, you cease to be a Spanish colony, land of injustices, and you emerge as a state or nation under the shadow of the greatest and most powerful, the freest and happiest of federations that history has known. You will not be the booty of conquest, but there will be left to your own free initiative, the organization of yourselves under your own form of government.

Nathan Connolly: On the day the United States invaded Puerto Rico, Jose Julio Henna was not there as planned. Legend has it that he was in bed with pneumonia. On July 25th, 1898, the United States landed at the Port of Guanica. Many of the island believed the army was there to liberate them from the Spanish. Mayors thanked god for the invasion and offered their loyalty to the United States, proclaimed, “Via Puerto Rico Americana.”

Nathan Connolly: Townspeople showered them with cigars, fruit, and flowers, and the peasants helped the U.S. military by raiding, looting, and burning plantations where they had been oppressed for generations.

Male: In the prosecution of the war against the kingdom of Spain, by the people of the United States, in the cause of liberty, justice, and humanity, its military forces have come to occupy the island of Puerto Rico.

Ed Ayers: General Nelson Miles, who led the U.S. invasion, gave this declaration to the Puerto Rican people.

Male: They come bearing the banner of freedom.

Ed Ayers: The very next day, the United States invalidated the democratically elected local government and established martial law. General Miles declared the U.S. military supreme and that the private rights and properties of the inhabitants would be respected as soon as they had demonstrated their obedience. Puerto Rico became domain of the U.S. Department of War.

Male: The flag of the United States of America floats over the soil of Puerto Rico, but it does not make American even the children who are born under its shade.

Brian Balogh: Jose Julio Henna, that ardent believer that the U.S. would liberate Puerto Rico, came to realize that life under the United States was even more restrictive and brutal than life under the Spanish.

Male: If the war which the United States of America waged against Spain for purely humanitarian purposes freed Puerto Rico, as it is said, the Puerto Rican people do not know as yet of what that freedom consists. They are treated as inferior, dependent people, needing to be educated and Christianized and civilized. The voice of Puerto Rico was not heard. The island and its people were conveyed from one sovereign to another as a farm and its cattle are conveyed from one master to another.

What is Puerto Rico?

A 2016 poll found that most Americans were confused about Puerto Rico’s constitutional status, and many were unclear on whether Puerto Ricans were even American Citizens. Sam Erman, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Southern California explains.

Music:

Pravda, Strongheart by Paul Mitchell Beebe

Puerto Rico; U.S. territories; citizenship

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh: Today in our show we’ll look at the history of Puerto Rico and the United States. We’ll talk about how a typo led to the island being misnamed for decades, how Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate President Truman in 1950, and we’ll discover if Puerto Rico is a nation or a territory on the international sports field.

Nathan Connolly: First, to talk us through the precise constitutional status of the island, I talked to Sam Erman, associate professor of law at the University of Southern California. He told me that the political storm which followed Hurricane Maria had an eerie parallel to the year Puerto Rico first became a U.S. territory.

Sam Erman: It’s striking that the year the United States annexed Puerto Rico, the island was hit by a massive hurricane, and afterwards U.S. officials talked about how the people were going to starve as a result. There was a need for immediate aid. One of the things they talked about was how there was a need to create markets so that Puerto Ricans would be able to sell their goods and create the kind of industry on the island that would allow them to pull through the crisis and eventually to become a self-sustaining and even potentially wealthy island. That did not happen. For the next decade there was a general failure to alleviate the grinding poverty in Puerto Rico.

Sam Erman: What we’re seeing now is another hurricane has hit, and hurricanes have immediate bad effects, but then the recoveries are much more political problems than they are natural disasters. Puerto Rico has been unable to get the kind of federal aid and attention it needs because it has a political status that doesn’t give it a megaphone in Washington. In an odd way, the hurricane as unmasking what is a colonial status that’s getting in the way of lots of things is an old story for Puerto Rico that’s been made new again.

Nathan Connolly: What is clear is that for most Americans, Puerto Rico’s constitutional status is unclear. A May 2016 YouGov poll found that Americans are confused about whether the people who live there are even American citizens. For the record, Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, carry a U.S. passport, have free entry to the 50 U.S. states, and they can vote in those states if they establish residency. Erman says that Puerto Rico’s status stems from the moment in history it became part of the U.S.

Sam Erman: Unlike most things in history where we talk about gradual changes over time and trends, when it comes to the question of what status you get as a U.S. territory, it matters almost down to the month when you got into the union. When the United States began, the first territories were organized under the Northwest Ordinance. It expressly looked ahead to those territories becoming states. That was the expectation and the practice for every territory added to the union after that. After the Civil War and during Reconstruction, the expectation remained. Any place that was annexed would eventually become a state.

Sam Erman: When Hawaii was annexed in 1898, that remained the expectation. When Puerto Rico was going to be annexed, into late 1898, that also remained the expectation. Then when the decision was made to annex the Philippines, there was a period of rapid constitutional innovation. The key takeaway from it was the invention of a new kind of territory, the unincorporated territory, that would not necessarily become a state.

Sam Erman: When the annexation actually went through in early 1899, that group of territories, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, were all put into this other box and were not put on the road to statehood. Every territory acquired since then has also been put in that unincorporated territory box, and none of them have become states. Anywhere acquired before 1899 was an incorporated territory that is now a state, and everything else is an unincorporated territory that remains not a state.

Nathan Connolly: What happened in 1898 to make this such a lively debate?

Sam Erman: The United States went to war with Spain. First they annexed Hawaii in order to win the war. Then after they defeated Spain, the United States annexed Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. What happened essentially was that people panicked when the Philippines were about to be annexed. Lots of Americans were worried about the Philippines, largely for racism reasons. They thought Filipinos would be bad citizens. They wanted to come up with a way to keep Filipinos out of U.S. citizenship and the Philippines from becoming a U.S. state.

Nathan Connolly: This question of citizenship then migrated directly to the Puerto Rico case.

Sam Erman: That’s right. There were about two months were the United States said it was gonna annex Puerto Rico but hadn’t decided on the Philippines. During those two months, everybody speaks as though Puerto Ricans are about to be U.S. citizens and as though Puerto Rico will be a state. Once it’s decided to annex the Philippines, U.S. officials start saying, “Let’s withhold citizenship from Puerto Ricans.”

Nathan Connolly: With the hurricane in 2017, you had a number of surveys go out to assess Americans’ sense of Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican status. According to some of those surveys, the majority of Americans had no idea that Puerto Ricans were actually American citizens. Why has there been so much confusion over the last 100 years on this?

Sam Erman: I think there are several reasons. Puerto Rico is small and doesn’t have a ton of people, and so it doesn’t always get thought of very much. One reason is just inattention. Another reason is that people speak a different language in Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans are understood to be a distinct ethnic group, differentiated from non-Hispanic whites. Just as we speak of second-class citizenship within the United States, people who are citizens, but in some ways are held at a distance from fully belonging, Puerto Rican citizenship is second-class, and because it’s associated with a place that’s not fully integrated, that can take the form not merely of [impuding 00:14:45] inferiority to Puerto Ricans, but of thinking of them as being more alien.

Nathan Connolly: You have in the Puerto Rican case too where the majority of Puerto Ricans actually live on mainland U.S. territory.

Sam Erman: That’s right. Most people of Puerto Rican descent have used their citizenship to leave the island. They can vote on the mainland as citizens. This creates this interesting situation of layered influence. If you’re a Puerto Rican who lives on the mainland, you can vote for a representative in Congress and you can lobby that representative, and you might lobby that representative about what you or your community needs on the mainland, but also about what the island needs.

Sam Erman: I remember talking to an assistant to the resident commissioner, which is what they call the person they send to Congress to speak for Puerto Rico, even though that person can’t vote. This person basically told me, when Puerto Ricans have problems, they don’t necessarily go to the resident commissioner. Often, the way they’re able to get traction with Congress is to go through the representatives of districts that have a high number of constituents of Puerto Rican descent. That’s been a long strategy. When Puerto Rico is treated particularly badly, then that strategy tends to become more activated. There’s a lot of movement-

Nathan Connolly: Wow.

Sam Erman: … back when the island of Vieques was under navy control and people were worried about environmental damage there. You would see representatives from New York taking this up as a cause. When you treat Puerto Rico badly, you also tend to drive people off the island, and to the extent those people register to vote and do vote, you then can create additional pressure, because these are folks who have very recent memories of the island, and so its fate is gonna be particularly important to them.

Nathan Connolly: When you see the humanitarian crisis in the wake of Hurricane Maria with so many millions without, with so many multitudes without electricity, does that raise new constitutional questions? Will we see this now in terms of Puerto Rico status?

Sam Erman: I think we will. The Supreme Court and the political branches in the United States have long taken an approach towards Puerto Rico of, “Let’s not look too closely at what’s going on.” It’s all working more or less. They have something like democratic governance there. People are something like content with what’s going on, and so let’s not shake things up. With the debt crisis, and especially the hurricane, that sense of letting sleeping dogs lie doesn’t seem nearly as compelling anymore.

Sam Erman: I think you are gonna start seeing people thinking creatively about what to do about status, and because it’s such a constitutional question, this will include litigation. There are several ways this could go. One thing you could do is you could attack the governor of Puerto Rico who is elected and say that’s an officer of the United States who has to be appointed by the president. The point of such an attack might be to reveal that Puerto Rico is still a colony, or you could imagine self-interested actors who are doing it for more narrow concerns, but then having a big collateral impact.

Sam Erman: You could also imagine litigation trying to show that the constitution actually allows some status other than state and territory within the United States, and suggesting that Puerto Rico in fact has sovereignty of some sort, so is sort of like an internal nation. That would be a big constitutional innovation, but of course unincorporated territory was a big innovation that was brought about to meet a crisis. The court is capable of innovating when it feels like it has no other choice.

Nathan Connolly: Sam Erman is an associate professor of law at the University of Southern California.

Spell Check

When the U.S. signed the treaty with the Spanish to acquire Puerto Rico in 1898, the Americans overlooked one major detail: how to accurately spell the territory’s name. Scholar Amílcar Barreto details why the island was called “Porto Rico” for more than a quarter of a century and the contentious debate to change it back to its original spelling.

Music:

Seashore by Podington Bear

Puerto Rico; Spanish (language); place names

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Brian Balogh: As we’ve heard, Puerto Rico has been a United States territory since 1898, but it hasn’t always been called Puerto Rico, at least not by folks who didn’t speak Spanish.

Ed Ayers: Really? What else would you call it?

Brian Balogh: Take a look at a map from the early 20th century, Ed, and you’ll see the island is named Porto Rico, as in P-O-R-T-O. In Spanish, puerto means port, but in porto, that doesn’t mean anything at all. That didn’t stop Congress from officially recognizing the island as Porto Rico for decades. It wasn’t until 1932, more than a quarter of a century later, when they finally fixed the spelling to what we use today.

Nathan Connolly: That’s the year they invented spellcheck.

Brian Balogh: You’re jumping the gun a little bit on that, Nathan, but that mistake all came down to a typo. I spoke with Professor Amilcar Barreto about the mistake that changed the island’s name from Puerto to Porto and the surprisingly divisive debate about changing it back. He’s researched the name change and says it started after the war with the Spanish.

Amilcar Barreto: The United States ends up taking over Spain’s overseas colonies, Guam and the Philippines in the Pacific, Puerto Rico and Cuba in the Atlantic. They negotiate the peace treaty in Paris. Clearly they were gonna work on two drafts of the treaty, one in Spanish, one in English. They never bothered to painstakingly proofread the two versions to see if they completely matched. The English language version misspelled Puerto Rico as Porto Rico, and of course the version in Spanish spelled it quite correctly. After all, Spain had been in charge of the island for 400 years, they knew how to spell the island.

Brian Balogh: They got that right, huh? I know that there was a debate about spelling it and pronouncing it correctly throughout the beginning of the 20th century. Could you give me a sense of the arguments on both sides?

Amilcar Barreto: Once Puerto Ricans discovered that, oops, there was a mistake, because they began seeing the name of their island appearing in federal documents, what have you, as Porto Rico, they began a process of asking Congress, “Can you please change our name back?” Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory still to this day has no formal representation in the U.S. Congress except for a non-voting delegate, who’s referred to as the island’s resident commissioner. The resident commissioners throughout the first 30 years of the 20th century kept asking Congress, “Will you please consider changing our name back?”

Male: Mr. Chairman, first of all I must say that I feel very proud and greatly honored on this first occasion in which I am to be heard by this high body. I represent a small country, but a country which is a community of one and a half million American citizens. Puerto Rico is the name we have given to our fair land. Puerto Rico is the word associated with the tombs of our parents and the cradles of our sons. Puerto Rico is the word we have consecrated as representative of our patriotic sentiments. I am here because we have faith in the justice of the American people and because we believe in American institutions. We know that this Congress is not willing to impose itself upon the patriotic feelings of the people of Puerto Rico, and we know that we are going to have the restitution that we are asking for in this bill, which is of immense significance to the high feelings and patriotic sentiments of one and a half million American citizens on the island of Puerto Rico.

Amilcar Barreto: It was such a low priority that Congress, to be blunt, kept blowing off Puerto Rico, until finally in 1930 the Puerto Rican legislature passed a unanimous resolution asking Congress and President Hoover, “Will you please change our name back?” That’s what got the ball rolling in Congress, a process from 1930 to ’32, culminating in the name change.

Brian Balogh: What were the arguments against changing the name? Why antagonize all of those Puerto Ricans?

Amilcar Barreto: The arguments were absolutely precious. First, there were some who didn’t want to change the name, who insisted that porto was a perfectly legitimate word next to Spanish. Some of them, by the way, insisted that porto was the correct English version of the island’s name. Others insisted that porto, P-O-R-T-O, was a Spanish name, which clearly it was not, ignoring, by the way, other members of Congress who knew Spanish and were telling them, “No, this is not correct.” They also chose to ignore Puerto Rico’s legislature. After all, they should know how their island is spelled. Some questioned the cost, “Is this gonna cost too much money?”

Brian Balogh: Wait wait wait wait. Hold up. Hold on. Hold the presses, quite literally. These were the days where, yes, they might’ve had to reprint something. Are you telling me people argued we can’t change the name because the printing cost will be too high?

Amilcar Barreto: That is correct.

Brian Balogh: Come on.

Amilcar Barreto: This appears in the Congressional record. I kid you not. The arguments become even more ridiculous. The ultimate trump card is children, “Oh, we’ve spent so much time and effort teaching them Porto Rico, it would be an undue burden to force them to learn Puerto Rico.”

Brian Balogh: Spill the beans, who’s the ringleader against changing the name back to Puerto Rico?

Amilcar Barreto: A couple of names come up in the Congressional records as staunch opponents of the name change. A particularly feisty one was Representative William Henry Stafford, a Republican from the state of Wisconsin. He was particularly vehement in his dismissal of Puerto Rican sentimentality, “English is fine,” which means Porto, which he thought was English. There was no problem attaching it to Puerto. He brought up on several occasions the people over there of Spanish descent and how what they want is not American. In fact, talk about a grammatical error, Representative Stafford kept referring to Porto as the proper Anglican, quote unquote, version of the name. The last time I checked, Anglican referred to a church, not to a language, but oh well.

Male: Mr. Chairman, I take the time in opposition to this bill, because I believe it would be a mistake to change a name that all the children, all the people for years back have known under that name the island adjoining that of Cuba. Now it is a mistake for us to try to engraft a Spanish name upon an Anglican name. Porto is Anglican for “this island,” and it has been accepted as such. It would not only cost thousands, but hundreds of thousands of dollars to make this change. Why would we in this particular change a name just because the legislature of Porto Rico wishes to have a Spanish rather than an American name? We have it established in the minds of the people of this country as Porto Rico as the name of the island, and when the bill is read, I intend to move to strike out the enacting clause, because I do not think this Congress should be occupied with these insignificant matters.

Brian Balogh: Professor Barreto, you are a professional of cultures, societies, global studies. It sounds to me like there’s more than a typo going on here. Will you tell us what’s going on behind this? We’ve been laughing at it. It’s a rather farcical story on the surface.

Amilcar Barreto: Behind all this is the story of Americanization. Americanization was a formal policy implemented in Puerto Rico between 1898, really 1899, and about the late 1940s, but the most intensive period was those first three decades of the 20th century. From the perspective of the federal government, the dream was to have everyone culturally switch over and become English-dominant, hence justifying something in the name of the English language was perfectly reasonable from their perspective.

Brian Balogh: You call this overall attitude, I think the phrase you use in your scholarship is malign neglect. Could you explain that?

Amilcar Barreto: Yes. It’s a form of neglect. Federal government for the most part doesn’t care what’s going on, not realizing that it’s hands off when it rules the island, it is the sovereign, has all sorts of negative consequences. We see a very good example of it today with the consequences of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the realization that, hmm, a lot more people died than we thought right after the event. Malign neglect.

Brian Balogh: I think that your explication of the history of Puerto Rico to Porto Rico back to Puerto Rico is very illuminating and sheds light on the larger relationship, but some would say, “Oh come on, this is just historical political correctness. Who cares?”

Amilcar Barreto: It’s interesting how a fundamental aspect of those debates is repeated in contemporary debates about Puerto Rico. Those who advocated restoring the island’s name brought up on several occasion, “These people are our citizens, to be clear.” 1898, Puerto Ricans lose their Spanish citizenship, but Puerto Rican Islanders would not acquire U.S. citizenship until 1917. De facto we were stateless for 19 years. Officially we were so-called citizens of Porto Rico. What does that mean to be a citizen of a territory? The notion of citizenship and that bestowing worthiness upon a people repeats itself in contemporary debates about Puerto Rico’s status vis a vis the federal government. That part of that debate from the 1930s endures in different forms. Oftentimes today it’ll take on more nuances, such as not only do Puerto Ricans have citizenship, but since World War I they have fought in every major American conflict. It’s a nuance on the same theme of worthiness and citizenship.

Brian Balogh: It’s more than a typo. It’s more than misspelling.

Amilcar Barreto: It’s an attitude.

Brian Balogh: You know that the current American president is somewhat infamous for misspellings in his tweets. Are you worried that he might return Puerto Rico to Porto Rico?

Amilcar Barreto: That would take an act of Congress, and I suspect that Congress has higher priorities than name changing.

Brian Balogh: Amilcar Barreto is a professor of culture, societies, and global studies at Northeastern University.

No More Annexation: Assassination!

Producer Nina Earnest recounts the extremes to which Puerto Rican national Pedro Albizu Campos and his followers fought for independence.

Music:

Cm by Podington Bear

Black is the Color by Podington Bear

Theme in G by Podington Bear

Gymnopedie 2 by Podington Bear

Puerto Rico; decolonization; rebellion

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: In the late 1940s, Puerto Rico was at a crossroads. For almost 50 years, it had been a colony of the United States, but with colonial subjects in Asia and Africa throwing off their European rulers, many Puerto Ricans were looking forward to a new status for their island as well. Some wanted statehood, others more autonomy. Some demanded outright independence.

Brian Balogh: Throughout the 1930s, the radical wing of the Independence faction, known as the Nationalist Party, violently clashed with the colonial regime in Puerto Rico. In 1936, that party’s leader, a man named Pedro Albizu Campos was imprisoned by American authorities for sedition. Our next story picks up 10 years later when Albizu Campos was released, and his followers saw one last chance to shape Puerto Rico’s future through a devastating act of political violence. Here is producer Nina Earnest with that story.

Nina Earnest: When Pedro Albizu Campos was released from prison in 1947, he picked up right where he had left off, giving fiery speeches in support of independence.

Pedro A. Campos: [foreign language 00:33:57].

Nina Earnest: Puerto Rico had changed in his 10-year absence. When he first rose to prominence in the ’20s and ’30s, support for independence was at an all-time high. Now many political leaders were turning toward a new model, one that meant more autonomy for Puerto Rico with continued oversight by the United States. It was a path favored by a savvy politician named Luis Munoz Marin, who recognized that Puerto Rico’s contributions to the Allied war effort had given it leverage to negotiating more favorable status with the U.S. He was at that very moment on the verge of becoming the island’s first democratically elected governor. In the summer of 1950, the U.S. Congress did pass a law allowing Puerto Ricans to vote on a new constitution, one that would eventually cement the new commonwealth status.

Harry F.-R.: There’s no way Puerto Rico [inaudible 00:34:54] ratifying the constitution that is going to be presented to Congress.

Nina Earnest: This is Harry Franqui-Rivera, a historian at Hunter College New York. He says Albizu Campos regarded the constitution as another form of colonialism, but also realized that the political winds had turned against him.

Harry F.-R.: He realized that he wasn’t a relevant figure anymore politically, so he had to, if he wanted to determine the future of Puerto Rico, which is something that he wanted, he wanted to determine the future of Puerto Rico, he had to do something drastic.

Nina Earnest: His desperation was fueled by a repressive gag law that had gone into effect months after he had returned from prison. Many scholars believe it was created to keep the nationalists in line. It prohibited writing, discussing, even singing about an independent Puerto Rico or from displaying a Puerto Rican flag. Albizu Campos decided that the only way to win Puerto Rico’s independence was to fight for it. He and the nationalists planned to revolt. Nelson Denis is the author of a forthcoming book about this rebellion.

Nelson Denis: What they planned to do was to have an island-wide set of actions where they assaulted the police precincts, to hopefully get some weapons, which they didn’t have many of, and then they would retreat to the central town of Utuado, which was nestled in a ring of mountains pretty much in the center of Puerto Rico. They were hoping to hold out for about two weeks.

Nina Earnest: Now the hope here wasn’t to win a military victory. The nationalists were a small force and they knew it.

Nelson Denis: It’s important to emphasize that Albizu Campos and the nationalists knew that militarily it was ridiculous to attempt to confront the United States, the most powerful country in the world. What they needed to do, and they needed to do it with some urgency, was to get world attention, and specifically the UN Decolonization Committee to focus on what they considered the colonial situation in Puerto Rico.

Nina Earnest: In this era of decolonization, the newly formed United Nations had a special committee to help that process along. The nationalists wanted their help. On October 30th, 1950, nationalists assaulted police precincts in seven towns. They stormed Governor Munoz Marin’s mansions, La Fortaleza, in San Juan. In one town, Jayuya, nationalists even managed to lift the Puerto Rican flag in defiance of the gag law and declared for the free republic of Puerto Rico. The countermeasures were swift. President Harry Truman declared martial law. Munoz Marin called in the U.S.-trained Puerto Rican National Guard. Most striking of all, those National Guardsmen bombed the towns of Jayuya and Utuado. It was the only time, says Nelson Denis, that the U.S. military carried out a bombing campaign against its own citizens.

Nelson Denis: That’s how the United States dealt with it very quickly, 5,000 National Guardsmen, bombing of two towns, and a clampdown on any media attention to it. President Truman tried to dismiss everything, the revolution that happened in 1950, as quote unquote, an incident between Puerto Ricans, but that didn’t seem all that credible when two of those Puerto Ricans showed up in Blair House and tried to assassinate him.

Male: Outside Blair House, the President’s temporary Washington home, extreme fanatics of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party try to force their way in, guns blazing, to assassinate the President of the United States. When the three-minute shooting is over, assassin Griselio Torresola lies dead on the Blair House lawn, and White House policeman Leslie Coffelt is dying a few feet away.

Nina Earnest: The assassination attempt took place on November 1st. By the following day, Puerto Rican forces had the revolt under control. In the end, 28 people had been killed, most of them Nationalists. Between 1,000 and 2,000 Puerto Ricans were arrested, including Pedro Albizu Campos. Once again, the revolutionary went back to prison. He would spend yet another decade of his life there. A few months after the revolt, 76% of Puerto Ricans voted in favor of drafting a new constitution that would grant them some autonomy under the commonwealth status. Since Puerto Rico was soon to be ostensibly in Puerto Rican hands, the United Nations would no longer consider the island a colony that demanded its attention.

Nelson Denis: At that point it was like game, set match. It’s like, “Hey, the game’s over. Everybody take your bottles and go home. There’s nothing more to say.”

Nina Earnest: Despite his failure in 1950, Pedro Albizu Campos has not been forgotten. To the contrary, he is still widely revered. Nelson Denis is among many, especially in the Puerto Rican diaspora, who admire him for standing up to the U.S. when the odds were stacked against him.

Nelson Denis: Even though he didn’t win that military battle, he won, in my view, the moral victory, the moral battle of showing the world what is right and what should be.

Nina Earnest: Harry Franqui-Rivera is less laudatory. He sees Albizu Campos as something of a conservative, cultish figure whose followers had a nostalgic vision of a Puerto Rican nation that hearkened back to a time before U.S. rule.

Harry F.-R.: They were completely defeated and discredited philosophically. Munoz Marin is offering a peaceful path towards modernity, to create a new Puerto Rico, a new Puerto Rican. What the Nationalists are offering is going back in the past.

Nina Earnest: As for the legacy of the 1950 revolt, Franqui-Rivera says the territorial government’s swift response to it showed Congress that Puerto Ricans could govern themselves, and it demonstrated to Puerto Rican voters that Munoz Marin was an effective leader. Perhaps Albizu Campos did help shape the future of Puerto Rico, just not in the way he would have liked.

Brian Balogh: Producer Nina Earnest. Helping her tell that story was Harry Franqui-Rivera from the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, and Nelson Denis. He’s the author of War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony.

Independence Through Sport?

Puerto Rico may be a territory of the United States, but on the international sports field they are anything but. Brian sits down with historian Antonio Sotomayor to talk about how sports sovereignty allows Puerto Rico to compete under its own flag, while also continuing the colonial relationship with the U.S.

Music:

Nature Kid by Podington Bear

Lope and Shimmer by Podington Bear

Olympic Games; Puerto Rico; basketball

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Brian Balogh: Now I want to turn your attention to the 2004 Summer Olympics held in Athens, Greece. The U.S. Men’s Basketball Team had just steamrolled through the competition in the qualifying rounds, and they were stacked with talent.

Nathan Connolly: Just like our BackStory team, baby.

Brian Balogh: Exactly like that, Nathan. The Dream Team, as it was called, boasted a star-studded roster of NBA players. They were far and away the favorites to win gold at the Olympics. They were well on their way. That is until they faced the might of plucky Puerto Rico.

Male: South Florida Sun Sentinel, August 18th, 2004. Puerto Rico stunned the United States 92 to 73 in the opening game of the Olympic Men’s Basketball Tournament. The loss was a huge blow to whatever basketball ego Uncle Sam has left. People knew the world was catching up to the United States. Now one of its own territories has zoomed past.

Antonio S.: We organized a party at the graduate apartments.

Brian Balogh: This is scholar and librarian Antonio Sotomayor.

Antonio S.: Everybody brought food from their countries, and we were playing, and then the games started. A lot of attention of course. The Mexicans were rooting with us for Puerto Rico. We were there, and all of a sudden, basket and basket and steal and they were missing and we were making the shots and we were up by 20-something points at the end of the half.

Brian Balogh: Oh my goodness.

Antonio S.: It was crazy. There was a lot of jumping, screaming. There was hugging. There was some crying, pulling hairs. It was just a unbelievable scene. At the end of the game we were extremely tired, exhausted of the energy, but exhilarated at the same time.

Ed Ayers: Wow, that’s inspiring stuff. It almost makes me want to lace up my old basketball shoes and get back out on the court.

Brian Balogh: That’s a lot of laces, Ed, because as I recall, you were still wearing high-tops. At any rate-

Ed Ayers: That’s true.

Brian Balogh: … I wouldn’t advise it. These were highly trained athletes representing their countries on the world stage.

Nathan Connolly: Now wait a minute, I just want to get this straight. Now Puerto Rico, a territory of the U.S, could compete against the United States?

Brian Balogh: I don’t blame you for being confused, Nathan, but you’re correct. It’s all down to this thing called sports sovereignty. It dates back to 1948 when Puerto Rico was first invited to participate in the Olympics by the International Olympic Committee. The invitation was part of a larger effort to express anticolonial sentiment and expand the Olympic movement. Puerto Rico has competed internationally as an independent nation ever since, but before 1948, that wasn’t yet the case.

Antonio S.: Early on in the 1930s when they started participating in the Central American Caribbean games, the delegation was composed of Spanish Caribbean peoples, with a history of a plantation society, with a history of the Spanish empire economy, mainly Catholic society. They brought those things to these events, but they did it back in the 1930s holding the U.S. flag, not the Puerto Rican flag. Technically the delegation was a United States delegation at the Central American Caribbean Games, where the U.S. officially doesn’t play, because they’re not in the Caribbean, but they did have that possession, that territory, and they send it to these games as a way to be present. Puerto Rico’s first incursion into the Olympic movement was not necessarily out of a intrinsic motivation, like, “We need to participate. We have to get there.” No, there are multiple instances where Puerto Ricans themselves didn’t want to participate and wanted to participate with the U.s.

Brian Balogh: You know that the Olympic stage is a very big one. Are there any examples of Puerto Ricans using that stage to enhance political agendas.

Antonio S.: The best example is the 1966 Central American and Caribbean Games held in San Juan. At that time, 1966, you had in Puerto Rico around, the sources vary, 18,000, 20,000, 26,000 Cuban exiles living in Puerto Rico, very tied close to the political leadership and who were putting pressure to the organizers of the games to not invite the Cubans, because of course for them Cubans were war dictators. Castro was a dictator. It was a dictatorship.

Antonio S.: You bring let’s say 200 Cuban athletes, which back then were claimed to be an export of the Cuban Revolution and the athletic soldiers of the revolution. The Puerto Rican leadership, the political leadership, didn’t ask for the visas for the Cuban government. They said, “We are not going to invite the Cuban delegation to these games. Now the problem is that according to the IOC’s rules, you have to invite every delegation in the region for these games, for these regional games. Otherwise you are in risk of losing the right to host those games, because then you’re not following the principles of Olympism. Everybody should get together and celebrate these things.

Antonio S.: It was a very tense few months where the Cubans were attacking both the Puerto Rican government and the U.S. government of mixing politics and sport. Everybody was calling everybody for mixing politics and sport. What happened then at the end is that the U.S. says, “Okay, we’re gonna issue the visas,” because Puerto Rico is part of the U.S., and if we don’t allow those visas, then the IOC can then say, “No, you are going against the Olympics rules, U.S, so you are not allowed to host anymore Olympic Games.” Right there, even though Puerto Rico had Olympic sovereignty and supposedly an autonomous government, the U.S. imposed the permission and the visas to the Cubans to go to the island.

Brian Balogh: It sounds like their one hand is shaped as a fist and the other is a handshake. It sounds like one step forward, two steps back, in terms of real independence.

Antonio S.: It’s [inaudible 00:49:56]. It’s not a delegation that is trying to seek independence through sport. It’s not a delegation that is saying, “Hey, we are here, we want independence.” It’s a delegation that is saying, “We are here, we exist as a nation, we are proud of being Puerto Ricans, and we do it being U.S. citizens, by being U.S. citizens and by having all the benefits of being within the U.S. political system.”

Brian Balogh: When you step back and look at that strategy, Antonio, would you say that’s been successful?

Antonio S.: It depends on what you consider success. In terms of reproducing the structures of consent to a subordinated political relation or colonialism, it is successful. Puerto Rico’s Olympic delegation allows for the reproduction, allows for the fueling, the nurturing of a national identity. By doing so as U.S. citizens, by doing so without the need of having an independent republic, you allow for that escape valve of that nationalistic sentiment and then continue with the political relation, whatever it is. It’s been successful in those regards. I say it is successful in helping to maintain a colonial relation.

Brian Balogh: Antonio Sotomayor is the author of The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico.

Ed Ayers: That’s gonna do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org or send an email to BackStory@Virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connolly: Special thanks to our voice actors this week, James Scales, Juan [Malanati 00:52:41], Ed Julio [Ana 00:52:42], and Carl Iglesias as Puerto Rican commissioner Jose Lorenzo Pesquera.

Ed Ayers: Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Male: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew [Windham 00:53:30] for Virginia Humanities.