Living in an unincorporated territory means seeing the effects of modern-day colonialism on a daily basis, whether directly or indirectly. There isn’t a more resonating time or place for this than a Puerto Rican election year.
While in most U.S. presidential campaigns (or those of most sovereign nations) you can count on a focus on topics such as health, foreign policy, and economic growth to be at the forefront of public debate, the topics naturally differ in spaces that preserve the image of colonialism in the 21st century such as Puerto Rico, my home. Despite Puerto Ricans being U.S. citizens, misinformation and simply lack of knowledge (or interest) on the topic of the island and its status relating to the United States runs rampant. The Bi-Co isn’t exempt from it, and Haverford’s Puerto Rican Student Alliance has decided to do something about it. The PRSA will hold a teach-in for the Bi-Co community on November 3, as an initiative to bring awareness to the island’s political history and the election occurring on the same day as the U.S. presidential election.
“It’s important for us to host this event because one too many people have asked me why I cannot vote for the president of the United States”, says junior Haverford student Lyali Pereda-Figueroa, co-head of the PRSA and resident on the island. “It seems like the United States is always central to Puerto Rican politics, but people in the United States don’t even know we are their colony. I just think it is important to create awareness about what Puerto Rico’s colonial state is and how much US politics affects us, even when we have no type of legislative voice in these decisions.”
For the first time in its history, the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) presents a legitimate threat to the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP) and the pro-Commonwealth Popular Democratic Party (PPD) in the gubernatorial race with the candidacy of Juan Dalmau. This is due to a historic alliance between the PIP and the anti-colonial party Citizens’ Victory Movement (MVC) that seeks to show that the 70-year-long duopoly riddled with corruption between the PNP and PPD is not advancing our way of life in any way, and instead provide an opportunity to vote for the needed radical change in leadership. This alliance has ignited a multi-generational movement in which more and more people are recognizing that, for decades, the same two parties have completely bankrupted the island and are at the root of too many of the problems that affect Puerto Ricans every day.
Countless school infrastructures still have not been repaired years after being ravaged by natural disasters, the University of Puerto Rico is constantly defunded every year, and we face a local sourcing crisis—Puerto Rico imports around 85% of its food and, according to a Vox study, the U.S.-imposed Jones Act of 1920 makes shipping prices, and consequently product prices, incredibly higher than they would be anywhere else, including some states. Daily power outages occur across the whole island due to the gross incompetence of LUMA Energy, the private power company tasked with distributing power in Puerto Rico, and American billionaires are being lured into the island through unregulated tax exemption laws, buying up the shores for their massive beach-front complexes that restrict public access to beaches and ruin ecosystems. These are just some of the most pressing issues on the island under the current PNP administration that The Alliance brings to light, yet, instead of countering this movement with actual proposals and policies that directly address them, PNP candidate Jenniffer González has opted to instill fear instead and spread misinformation about what P.R.’s relationship with the U.S. would look like if Dalmau won the election.
For the past 3 months, González has exhausted the baseless rhetoric that Puerto Rico will immediately become a communist nation under Dalmau’s governance, mentioning Cuba, Venezuela, and Hugo Chávez at any given chance as cautionary tales for daring to aspire towards a future free from the serial corruption of her party. She uses fearmongering and takes advantage of the lower class by claiming that a PIP government would stop federal aid like food assistance and Pell Grants from being distributed in P.R. and that the only way to stop this is by voting pro-statehood, another baseless claim that Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez recently disproved. As Resident Commissioner in Washington for 8 years, González knows just as well as Congresswoman Velázquez that what she’s spewing is false, but past prominent voting patterns have demonstrated that most Puerto Ricans fear what life outside of a U.S. context would be like and cast their votes accordingly, even if the island’s currently experiencing some of the worst struggles in its history within that colonial context.
“I think it is very sad that so many people have been taught to think that the United States is our only salvation,” states Pereda. “At the moment, status should not be our priority… We have so many other issues. We should be voting for people who want to create a better future for our island and not just vote for people who claim to represent whatever status we want for Puerto Rico. It is very frustrating that many people cannot see the candidates for their individual assets, but instead focus only on their political affiliations. Still, I have hope that this year, things are changing.”
Puerto Rico is in dire need of a change this year, maybe more than ever before. Neither its people, its schools, nor its shores can sustain another 4 years of PNP-PPD leadership, where history has proven that it’s guaranteed that personal and outside interests will override the needs of the people. This election is too important for it to continue to be framed as a matter of advancing a specific party’s agenda relating to the U.S. It’s not until we decentralize our relationship with the United States when dealing with critical local issues and begin a collective process of decolonization that we’ll ever be within reach of the dignified future Puerto Ricans deserve, starting by resisting insulting scare tactics and getting out to vote in favor of change.
