Puerto Rico’s Status and Citizenship

Why the Americans of Puerto Rico Want and Deserve Citizenship Equality

Here at La Chuleta Congelá’, we believe that there is but a one-way street for Puerto Rican self-determination and citizenship equality: a statehood-versus-independence plebiscite.

The Enemies of Equality in Puerto Rico must choose what it is they want as a perpetually sovereign form of government with full citizenship for the American citizens of Puerto Rico. No more can the unequal status quo be offered—enhanced or otherwise. Call it colonial or territorial; it is not equal.

The Puerto Rican people have made it clear that this is about citizenship—more specifically American citizenship. Overwhelmingly, 97 percent of Puerto Ricans consider American citizenship uncompromisable in any final status solution. The political status issue of Puerto Rico is a multiple-choice-, not an essay question.

Puerto Rico’s 65th Infantry Regiment in Korea. During this particular battle against a Chinese Division, they bravely conducted what would become the last documented bayonet charge in the history of the United States Army.

The essay question is the citizenship question, which Puerto Ricans have been filling out in blood for over a century in the name of American values. “Every good citizen makes his country’s honor his own,” said Andrew Jackson, “and cherishes it not only as precious but as sacred. He is willing to risk his life in its defence and is conscious that he gains protection while he gives it.”

There should be no doubt as to the sacrifice the Puerto Rican people have endured in the name of the United States of America, and, yes, the territories, and their American citizenship. The United States invaded in 1898; in 1899, the “Porto Rico Regiment” was formed. The 65^th Infantry Regiment (The Borinqueneers) went on to fight valiantly and honorably from World War I and World War II to Korea and Vietnam. Puerto Ricans stood side-by-side with the U.S. throughout the Cold War with no conflict, no rebellion, no Communism, just adherence to the Borinqueneer motto Honor et Fidelitas.

Moreover, the Puerto Rican devotion for America, for Puerto Rico, has led them into every modern conflict including the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War. Puerto Ricans have fought with other Americans from all states for over a century, concurrently enjoying but the morsel of second-class citizenship.

Those who propose Puerto Rico is not good enough to join the union of American states as equal partners in the democratic endeavor our founders began, refuse to see the overwhelmingly positive evidence because it frustrates their notion of what America or Puerto Rico is supposed to be and look like, but they ignore reality and deprive themselves of the very spirit on which this great experiment of self-government was founded. Those principles are spelled out in our founding documents. The U.S. Constitution (our highest legal authority) and our Declaration of Independence (our highest moral authority) give us our soul and conscience.

“We the People of the United States,” begins our soul as written in the Constitution, “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Such is the structure of our soul’s constitution; this is who Americans set out to be. The constructs of American citizenship are but the precious residue of the sweat, blood, tears, and treasury spent over the years by a great people whose conscience encapsulates that highest of American values: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

While the America of the Founding Fathers did exhibit a lack of moral fortitude when it came to the true equality of American citizenship, no one can deny that their own vision of “a more perfect union” was meant as a guiding light for future generations of Americans who could—and would—correct past wrongs. “The best principles of our republic secure to all its citizens a perfect equality of rights,” believed Thomas Jefferson and it is in this spirit that all Americans should answer Puerto Rico’s plight.

American citizenship is not about language, or ethnicity, or economics, or even local culture (none of them found anywhere in the founding documents) though these elements of culture have peripherally affected Americans’ perception of their citizenship throughout our history. American citizenship is defined by the overarching popular principles on which this country was actually founded: collective Union, -Justice, -Tranquility, -Defense, -Welfare, and -Liberty. Necessarily, the blessings of American government are sustained by the mantra that ALL are equal in their allotment.

“And for the support of this Declaration,” stated the Founders as they closed their democratic proclamation, “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

The four million American citizens of Puerto Rico have been deprived of their natural rights to self-determination. The nature of said rights is undisputable, and their insistence to end their 500 years of subservient government is but a Puerto Rican expression of the American values they have consecrated. To trick the Americans of Puerto Rico with political obstruction and to put before them “options” that amount to enhanced colonialism is to trick our founders and our founding principles and to cheat future generations out of the achievements of a more perfect union.

The Declaration of Independence speaks to what it means to be an American, but it also speaks of what Americans must do to rid themselves of bad governance:

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

The “Commonwealth” system of government in Puerto Rico is an evil government that Puerto Ricans were tricked into back in 1952, but one they are no longer disposed to suffer. And while none of their tools for deposing this government will be in the arsenal of war, the tools that Puerto Ricans have at their disposal will prove much more morally assertive. As Mark Twain believed, “Citizenship is what makes a republic; monarchies can get along without it.”

It is time Puerto Ricans make a decision on a permanent, sovereign status option. They can choose to construct their own version of citizenship, or they can continue to expand the long course charted thus far, but what they cannot do is keep a majority of their American brothers and sisters bound to a colonial model of governance that only yields ambivalence and uncertainty from cradle to grave.

The overwhelmingly vast majority of Americans in Puerto Rico want a permanent, non-territorial status solution that protects their century-old effort in the name of American citizenship.

Puerto Ricans have earned that much.

United States Plus One

How an Independent Mind Can Cut through the Fog of Puerto Rico’s Status Politics

La Chuleta recently received notice that there was some guy out there trying to do an independent project on the status issue of Puerto Rico. Apparently, he noticed that the recently passed H.R. 2499, which could result in Puerto Rican independence or statehood, did not garner the attention of the American people as much as the possible admission of a new state should. The “guy” is Craig Edwards of SolidPrinciples.com, and he set out to find out what is really going on with the status issue, and what he found was nowhere near what he had believed.

With some of the most prominent voices  (and some of the loudest) of the status issue at his disposal, Craig Edwards moves to answer some key question about Puerto Rico’s path to self-determination: 1) Have Puerto Ricans ever voted “against” statehood? 2) If not statehood or independence, then, what? 3) What happened in the 1993 and 1998 plebiscites? 4) Why was H.R. 2499 different from previous plebiscites? 5) Will Puerto Rico be Democratic or Republican? 6) What about bilingualism?

Craig Edwards’ final product does not reflect a pro-statehood or a pro-independence ideology (although there are no Independentistas in the audio); instead, what the audio reveals is an intricate lie that has survived for half a century. With Luis Dávila-Colón, one of Puerto Rico’s foremost political analysts (and a trusted voice everywhere in Puerto Rico) as the fulcrum of the status argument, calumny on Puerto Rico and what it is trying to achieve through self-determination does not stand for long.

Of course there are sides, but that does not subtract from the learning experience of the documentary. Instead, the listeners gets to make their own opinions as to what is really going on in Puerto Rico and why the territory does not seem to find “consensus” on the status question.The sides include pro-statehood supporters (i.e. Gov. Fortuño (R-PR); Res. Comm. Pierluisi (D-PR); former mayor of San Juan and fierce advocate of equality, Hernán Padilla; Kenneth McClintock, PR Sec. of State), the Enemies of Equality (i.e. PR Rep. Hector Ferrer, PPD President & House Minority Leader; US Rep. Luis Guitiérrez (D-IL); Don Soifer, Lexington Foundation; Brian Darling “Bombastic Know-Nothing“; Phylis Schlafly, Eagle Foundation), and the interviewer, the expert and the analyst (i.e. Craig Edwards, Jeffery Farrow, Luis Davila-Colon, respectively).

As noted before, there are no independence supporters on the panel, but given that this is NOT a forum for the airing out of comparisons between statehood and independence, the quality of the information gained has not been diminished one bit. Although to have been able to hear some of the Independentistas‘ rhetoric on the “Commonwealth” status would have been delightful, their absence did not translate into missed opportunities for raising very essential questions about the current status. And that mantle of chastising the Enemies of Equality at every turn fell on the pro-statehooders, and we at La Chuleta must confess that we were quite pleased with the way in which the PPD lie was, once again, cogently exposed.

The opposition, though, did not come only from the Enemies of Equality in the territory; there were two other overarching “arguments” being leveled against Puerto Rico self-determination. The first had to do with the implications of Puerto Rico’s bilingualism and the second with political composition of a state of Puerto Rico. There, the documentary makes it clear that in Puerto Rico’s status issue 90 percent of the opposition is premature or misguided, with the other 10 percent being merit-based opposition and legitimate concerns.

We hope this audio documentary provides the readers of La Chuleta Congelá’ a valuable glimpse into the very sinister actions of the PPD and the condition (political and otherwise) of the unequal American citizens of Puerto Rico.

 

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Listen to The United States Plus One: The Prospects of Puerto Rico as the 51st State (by Craig Edwards @ SolidPrinciples.com).

 

 

Puerto Rico’s Linguistic Culture Is An American Tradition

Why Opponents of Equality Will Not Succeed in Derailing Puerto Rican Self-Determination

 

Puerto Rico as a state would have a Tenth Amendment right to keep English AND Spanish as both of its official languages. Any notion to  the contrary is a change of the statehood rules in mid-game.

If you, as so many Americans do, support English as the official language of the United States of America then get  in line in your particular state and lobby to have that state recognize the lingua franca as its official language–as 30 other states have done. That’s what federalism is all about, but to pretend that Puerto Rico is the Quebec of the United States after 112-years of active participation in the American armed forces, or that its prospects of bilingualism as a state would undermine the very foundation of American culture with roughly two-thirds of this country being former foreign lands, or that only with an English-only Puerto Rico can American culture be safe from the vandals of multiculturalism even as every government body and private industry across the land moves toward bilingualism is an obsence affront to the very principles and culture for which these so-called defenders of American culture are fighting for.

There is a variety of national organizations that promote the concept of English as the official language of the United States, which is an exercise of their consitutional rights under the First Amendment. Further, as American organizations and individual citizens, they also have a stake in Puerto Rico’s status–but that is where the two topics’ connection ends!

Those same organizations do not have a constitutional right to undermine the full capacity of the people of Puerto Rico to run their state as they so wish, and that would be their Tenth Amendment right. Puerto Rico’s unique culture is not some  homogenous, static “thing” that can be controlled (and that much can be said about the broader American culture); in fact, those who champion one or the other, in Puerto Rico or the mainland, live under an illusion of the highest magnitude.

To pretend that American culture has not permeated every nook and cranny of Puerto Rico’s own local customs carries the same harsh penalties of ignorance that would be leveled upon anybody in the mainland who tried to deny those same permeating qualities of culture that have created our unique American style.

To be sure, those organizations that promote official English claim to be protecting American values and the overall linguistic culture by opposing a bilingual state like Puerto Rico (or Hawaii or New Mexico), but they are more than happy to have a bilingual colony. That, to them, presents no problem of conscience. No blemish on the American fabric of freedom, just the spoils of war and the bad luck of Puerto Rico for having been claimed by the Spanish Empire rather than the English 500 years ago.

Let us remember that it was not Puerto Rico who invaded the U.S. in 1898. As history tells it, it was the American flag that came to Puerto Rico after over 400 years of Spanish language dominance and the Americans knew it. And if we follow the invading American general’s (Gen. Nelson A. Miles) remarks, it sounded like the Americans were in Puerto Rico to stay:

“We have not come to make war upon the people of a country that for centuries has been oppressed, but . . . to bring you protection . . . to promote your prosperity, and to bestow upon you the immunities and blessings of the liberal institutions of our Government.”

In addition, America’s private industry–which nobody can deny wields extraordinary power in defining our American culture–trips over itself to throw money at Hispanics in the United States. They are willing to print every advertisement slogan in both English and Spanish, and whatever other languages the bottom line requires. But we do not see Official English organizations picketting private businesses. In that instance, then, the stains on their American culture and its “distortions” are the price of doing business, right? Somehow, though, citizenship equality, equal enfranchisement for all Americans, and equal opportunity for the people of Puerto Rico like the peoples North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, California, Vermont, Utah, and all the other states, each unique, have is not as important to these organizations.

The acceptance of new states into our Union has depended not on cultural proselytizing but on cultural assimilation. Assimilation, though, does not mean the absorption of a small- into a large culture; it is, rather, an amalgamation of both, with the largest, of course, defining the relationship. Indeed Puerto Rico’s qualifications for statehood–when held before the record of history–look as good as all of its 37 predecessors. That same record tells us that there are three basic, tradition-based requirements: population size, republican form of government, and a territorial majority for statehood. Period!

Any attempt to throw the non-germane issue of language should be viewed as simply more attempts to derail the status question and keep four million American citizens unequal–democratically and economically.

Former Colonial Governor Hernandez-Colon’s ‘Quicksand’ Argument

The Spaniard’s Puffery in Support of a Constitutional Convention on Status

 

Former Governor Rafael Hernández-Colón’s last two columns on CaribbeanBusinessPR.com (see Part I; see Part II) show that the Spaniard has shifted his focus beyond H.R. 2499 because it is obvious that the colonial status party, the PPD Commonwealthers, have succeeded once again in derailing the process towards self-determination by attacking the possibility of statehood and refusing to define what their sovereign solution for Puerto Rico is.

Hernández-Colón’s two-part column begins by highlighting two questions on a CaribbeanBusiness-Gaither poll:

1. How important is it to resolve Puerto Rico’s territorial status?

2. What is Puerto Rico’s principal problem?

On the first question, the poll shows that 70 percent say it is important or very important to resolve the status issue. The governor also points to the 60 percent who think it is “urgent,” while simultaneously saying these figures have not changed in the past five years. Further, on the second question, the poll shows that less than 1 in 10 persons believe the status issue is “a principal problem,” bested by homicides, healthcare, and the economy. Now, there are natural questions that arise in view of these paradoxically tantalizing poll answers, and the former governor has his.

Hernández-Colón uses these ostensibly opposed answers to validate his belief that Puerto Ricans do not wake up in the morning “fearing or feeling oppression from the chains of colonialism as the ideological status junkies would have us believe.”

His conclusion is that “Puerto Ricans are not upset at the functionality of the (territorial) Commonwealth” but at the “ongoing conflict between varied aspirations of the Puerto Rican people as to the ultimate political destiny of the island,” which the governor qualifies as a “governing problem.” (All emphasis added)

The one thing the former governor has right is that Puerto Rico’s current territorial status is NOT the pinnacle of Puerto Rican sovereignty he and his party have sold to Puerto Ricans for almost 60 years.  It is the very “functionality” (or lack thereof) of the territorial structure known as the “Commonwealth” that the people of Puerto Rico do feel everyday of their lives and the consequences of such an uncertain, impotent mechanism.

As for the “ongoing conflict between varied aspirations,” let us not kid ourselves, governor, we all know that in Puerto Rico the real “fight” for status is between those who believe Puerto Rico should be sovereign through statehood and those of you who believe the current territorial, unequal “Commonwealth” status is just fine. Only less than 5 percent of Puerto Ricans want sovereignty for Puerto Rico through independence, but at least they have a real, constitutional option out there for the Puerto Rican people and they can vote for it if they so wish.

But Hernández-Colón and the PPD do not care about ending the current territorial status–they want to “enhance” it. Lipstick for that pig, anybody?

The “lipstick” in this case is a Constitutional Convention on Status. The foundation for his argument is that “status resolution devolves through a fatal political quicksand that requires more than a one-shot deal plebiscite expression to bring the matter to fruition” because (as he shockingly admits) “the losing parties will mount an all-out campaign–to them a matter of political life or death–to defeat the will of the people.”

This last comment on “losing parties” is not some sort of premonition or academic conclusion, as the governor attempts to portray it, but, instead, it is a page out of the PPD’s dirty playbook. The latest occasion for its deployment being the assault on Res. Comm. Pedro Pierluisi’s H.R. 2499, which sought to end the current unequal and subservient status of Puerto Rico. And it worked! It worked so well that it “defeated the will of the people” before they had a chance to express it. Brilliant! (see Foxx Amendment)

So, to recapitulate the governor’s stand, 1) direct democratic plebiscites are the wrong way to go; 2) losing parties will defeat the will of the people; 3) there is nothing wrong with unequal democratic and civil rights; and 4) we should enhance the very structure that supports the unequal status, even though this idea does not have the support of a majority of Puerto Ricans. Mix well, look up, look down, clap once, propose a Constitutional Convention on Status and Presto!

Rafael Hernández-Colón erroneously concludes that because past plebiscites have not worked to produce a clear choice from the Puerto Rican electorate it is time to move beyond the direct will of the people and on to a yet-to-be-described big “C” convention. Hernández-Colón has already told us that past and future plebiscites will not work because those who stand to lose will do anything to subvert the will of the people. When it comes to past plebiscites–the same plebiscites the enemies of equality claim are repudiations of statehood–what the former governor fails to mention is that all have been riddled with innocuous obstacles placed there by the party that stands to lose the most: Mr. Hernández-Colón’s PPD.

“In status politics,” Rafael Hernández-Colón believes, “anything goes.”

And he means it!