Statehood

Puerto Rico’s Uncertain Future

- Christine Graf

The overwhelming majority of Puerto Ricans who voted on a controversial referendum in June, 2017 voted in favor of statehood. But that vote alone won’t change the island’s status. Puerto Rico will vote again in October, and ultimately it is up to the U.S. congress to pass a statute that would make Puerto Rico the 51st state. The island has a long history of making its voice heard.

Two armed Puerto Rican nationalists— supporters of Puerto Rico’s independence movement—attempted to assassinate President Harry Truman in 1950. Four years later, nationalists shot and wounded five members of the United States Congress at the House of Representatives.

The events that triggered these acts of violence began in the 1930s, when members of the independence movement began to call for the United States to grant Puerto Rico sovereignty. After members of the movement staged a peaceful island-wide agricultural strike in 1935, the U.S. government began surveilling, harassing, and imprisoning the movement’s leaders. More than 1.5 million pages of documents reveal that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted a program that they now admit caused “tremendous destruction to many people.”

After Puerto Rico’s 1948 “Gag Law” made it illegal for people to display the Puerto Rican flag, sing patriotic songs, or speak, write, or publicly support independence in any way, members of the movement felt as if all legal avenues for obtaining independence had been closed to them.