“Tricky Rick” Santorum (aspects of his personality do remind me of Nixon, although his formal political positions are comparatively worse) is at it again. The press reports that he told a group of Puerto Rican people that for Puerto Rico to gain statehood it would have to adopt English as its “main language.”
Now let me say that virtually all of the Puerto Ricans that I know are not supporters of statehood. On the Island, it is largely the conservative elements connected to the Republican party who support statehood, while those who identify with the liberal wing of the Democratic party support the present Commonwealth status and many on the Puerto Rican left support at least in principle Puerto Rican Independence,
Santorum’s comments show his studied ignorance about Puerto Rico. They are a cross between the old “Manifest Destiny, and the anti-Latino” English only “rightwing agitation in the Southwest, with a bit of Monty Python thrown in
First, Spanish settlers established the Spanish language in Puerto Rico generations before English settlers established the English language in North America. Also, Puerto Ricans, who were a Spanish colony, didn’t ask to become an American colony after the Spanish-American War—no more than did Cubans, who were in rebellion against Spanish colonialism but were forced to accept U.S. control of the Cuban economy and indirect rule(backed up by the Marines) at the point of a bayonet.
Puerto Rico was under U.S. military control until World War I led the Wilson administration to liberalize U.S. control at a time that it feared that the Germans were trying to get Mexico on their side by promising them return of the territories conquered by a pro slavery U.S. administraton in the Mexican-American War, under the old Manifest Destiny.
Military rule especially in Puerto Rico was brutal and openly racist. Puerto Ricans who migrated to the U.S. we’re and to the best of my knowledge are not considered “white” regardless of their color and were and are subject to the manifold abuses of racism.
I know this from vivid personal experiences. I grew up in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in the South Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s and witnessed these abuses from the police, non Puerto Rican landlords some storekeepers, and others whom one might call “ordinary racists.”
Santorum likes to point to his immigrant family with pride—ignoring the fact that his anti-Fascist grandfather returned to Italy and along with many others of his relatives were Communist activists. Puerto Ricans, on the other hand, to paraphrase Malcolm X, didn’t land in the U.S. The U.S. in the form of the army and marines, landed in Puerto Rico.
While the U.S. was nowhere near as brutal in Puerto Rico as, let us say, Mussolini’s fascist regime was in its savage colonial conquest(using bombs and poison gas) and brief control over Ethiopia, Puerto Rico remained a U.S. colony unti reforms began in the New Deal era—when the colonial Governor, leading left New Dealer Rex Tugwell, allied himself to former Puerto Rican socialist Luis Munoz Marin, to enact economic developmental and political reforms that led eventually to the present commonwealth status.
Unfortunately, the development was largely cut short by changes in U.S. policies after WWII, leading to a much larger migration of rural Puerto Ricans for whom jobs in Puerto Rican cities never materialized to the U.S. mainland, to New York, Philadelphia, and other major cities where they were both ghettoized and concentrated in the lower echelons of service work.
Santorum’s statements show his studied ignorance and add insult to injury to the Puerto Rican people. The business groups whom he and his party slavishly support have long gone down to Puerto Rico to avoid mainland U.S. tax laws and have super-exploited Puerto Ricans, secure in the knowledge that their political status would permit the Puerto Rican working poor to acquire food stamps and other U.S. benefits which they would not need if they were paid living wages.
Santorum’s comments on Puerto Rico remind me a bit of the Italian-American policeman in San Francisco before WWI who told a native American aka Indian street speaker to “go back where she came from,” only in this case, Spanish speaking Puerto Ricans have no way to return to 16th Century Spain. Actually, Santorum, if one takes his rhetoric seriously, might be more at home in feudal religious 16th century Spain where the Inquisition sought to terrorize and eradicate the kinds of ideas and people he regularly attacks today.
Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the U.S. have nothing to gain from Santorum or any Republican administration. Cooperative cultural pluralism in social and human relations and a U.S. government which enforces civil rights legislation and regulates capital and removes the “special conditions” that enable it to exploit the island is what both Puerto Ricans and all working class Americans need .
