Puerto Rico has an odd relationship with the United States government
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
Last night’s thirteen-minute Super Bowl half-time show featuring Bad Bunny had more watchers than any other halftime show in history: an estimated 135 million watched live, while millions more have streamed it since. Rapper, singer, and record producer Bad Bunny, whose given name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is from Puerto Rico, and rocketed to prominence with the release of his first hit single on January 25, 2016. On February 1, 2026, just a week before the halftime show, Bad Bunny made history by being the first artist to win Album of the Year at the Grammys for an album recorded in Spanish.
Right-wing critics complained about the NFL’s invitation for Bad Bunny to do the halftime show, saying he was “not an American artist.”
In fact, people born in Puerto Rico are American citizens. But Puerto Rico has an odd relationship with the United States government, a relationship born of the combination of late-nineteenth-century economics and U.S. racism.
In the 1880s, large companies in various industries gobbled up their competitors to create giant “trusts” that monopolized their sector of the economy. The most powerful trust in the United States was the Sugar Trust, officially known as the American Sugar Refining Company, which by 1895 controlled about 95% of the U.S. sugar market. Thanks to pressure from the Sugar Trust, in 1890, Congress passed the McKinley Tariff, which ended sugar tariffs and tried to increase domestic production by offering a bounty on domestic sugar.
This privileged domestic producers, and in 1893, sugar growers in Hawaii staged a coup to overthrow the Hawaiian queen and asked Congress to admit the islands as an American state. President Benjamin Harrison, a friend and confidant of tariff namesake William McKinley, cheerfully backed annexation, but before the treaty could be approved, an 1894 law reinstated the duties on sugar and ended the bounties. Voters elected President Grover Cleveland later that year, and with Hawaiians furiously protesting against the machinations of an American business ring, Cleveland insisted on an investigation, and Hawaiian statehood stalled.
When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, the Senate still did not have enough votes to admit Hawaii, so Congress annexed it by a joint resolution and McKinley, now president, signed the measure. As the popular magazine Harper’s Weekly put it in a cartoon with a little boy dressed in the symbols of the American flag eating candy, America was swallowing “sugar plums.”
The acquisition of the territory of Hawaii had begun the question of annexing islands. Then the 1899 Treaty of Paris that ended the war transferred from the control of Spain to the control of the United States the islands of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, as well as a number of smaller islands including Guam, all of which either were sugar producers or had the potential to become sugar producers.
Since the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, adopted under the Articles of Confederation that made up the basis of the nation’s law before the Constitution, the U.S. had rejected colonies and had instead established a system for incorporating new territories into the country on terms of equality to older states. But in the era of Jim Crow, annexing the newly acquired islands under the terms established a century before presented a political problem for lawmakers. Although sugar growers wanted the islands to be domestic land for purposes of tariffs, most Americans did not want to include the Black and Brown inhabitants of those lands in the United States on terms of equality to white people.
Congress’s 1898 resolution of war against Spain in Cuba had contained the Teller Amendment, which required the U.S. government to support Cuban political independence once the war was over and Spanish troops gone, providing a quick answer to American political annexation of Cuba (although it left room for economic domination). But there was no such amendment for the rest of the islands the U.S. acquired in 1899.
A fiercely pro-business Supreme Court provided a solution for Puerto Rico in what became known as the Insular Cases. In May 1901, in Downes v. Bidwell, the court concluded of the newly acquired island that although “in an international sense [Puerto Rico] was not a foreign country, since it was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the United States, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense, because the island had not been incorporated into the United States.” This new concept of “unincorporated territories” that were “foreign…in a domestic sense” allowed the U.S. government to legislate over the new lands without having to treat them like other parts of the Union, while also preventing the inclusion of their people in the U.S. body politic.
Two months after the court’s decision, on July 25, McKinley issued a proclamation removing tariff duties for products from Puerto Rico, and the sugar industry boomed.
But what did this system mean for the people in Puerto Rico? In 1902, a pregnant twenty- year-old Puerto Rican woman named Isabel González arrived in New York City to join her fiancé, but the immigration commissioner turned her away on the grounds that she was an “alien” who would require public support. González sued.
When her case reached the Supreme Court, it concluded in the 1904 Gonzalez v. Williams case that González was not an alien, and indeed that she should not have been denied entry to the United States. The justices went on to create a new category of personhood for the island’s inhabitants. They were not aliens, but they were not citizens either. Instead, they were “noncitizen nationals.” As such, they had some constitutional protections but not all. They could travel to the American mainland without being considered immigrants, but they had no voting rights in the U.S.
U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans was established in the 1917 Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act, also known as the Jones-Shafroth Act.
Today, Puerto Rico is a self-governing commonwealth of about 3.2 million people. Puerto Ricans do not pay federal taxes or vote in presidential elections, although a resident commissioner serves in Congress and can sit on committees and debate, but not vote on legislation. Puerto Ricans do pay U.S. Social Security taxes and receive certain federal benefits.
Last night, Bad Bunny highlighted Puerto Rican history, beginning with the workers at the heart of colonial sugar production and moving through to those same cane workers hanging from electric poles in an evocation of the recent blackouts in the country’s inadequate electric grid, poorly addressed by the U.S. government after Hurricane Maria wiped out the system in 2017. He carried the flag of the island from before the U.S. takeover—an independence flag banned from 1948 to 1957— its light blue triangle picked up in various fabrics throughout the performance.
He ended by shouting “God Bless America” in English, echoing the United States mantra in an answer to right-wing critics. And then he rejected the idea animating the current U.S. administration’s deportation of Black and Brown people with the claim they are not Americans and their culture will undermine American culture.
After saying “God Bless America, Bad Bunny listed in Spanish: “Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, Antilles, United States—not Estados Unidos—Canada, and Puerto Rico.”
posted by Ricky at 15:53
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