Testimony before the Puerto Rico Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights on the role that race and ethnicity play in the treatment of the people of Puerto Rico by the federal government

Authors

Yomaira Figueroa, Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Center for Puerto Rican Studies

Document Type

Report

Publication Date

5-2025

Abstract

The Insular Cases, whether the narrow or more expansive canon, have structured the political relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States for more than a century. The genesis of this “third-way” of understanding and structuring the territorial relationship with the United States rested on the very ethnocentric and indeed racist ideology pervasive at the time in U.S. ruling circles, whereby there was a hierarchy of dominance and control that placed White Anglo Saxon Protestant men at the top and subordinated all other ethnic and racial groups in a gradation of subservience and exclusion.