Puerto Rico Under the United States

Juan Ponce de León, the Spanish conqueror of Puerto Rico, went on to land in Florida in 1513. Centuries later, island leaders such as Luis Muñoz Rivera and Tulio Larrínaga were fighting for Puerto Rico’s sovereignty while it still belonged to Spain. In 1898 the United States went to war with Spain, which had been fighting Cuban revolutionaries for three years, and in the Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898, Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States.

Victory over Spain left the United States with island colonies and no settled plan for governing them. Many Americans wanted the strategic and commercial advantages of overseas territory; anti-imperialists warned that ruling peoples without their consent betrayed the nation’s founding ideals. Over the following decades Congress would debate more than a hundred bills dealing with citizenship for the island.

At first the island was ruled by the U.S. military and a presidentially appointed governor. The Foraker Act of 1900 ended military rule and provided a “temporary civil government for Porto Rico,” as Congress then spelled it, but it did not make Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens. Muñoz Rivera and others kept pressing Congress. President Theodore Roosevelt endorsed citizenship during a visit to the island in 1906, and as resident commissioner in Washington, Muñoz Rivera told Congress in 1916: “Give us now the field of experiment which we ask of you.” He died that November, a few months before Congress acted.

On March 2, 1917, the Jones-Shafroth Act became law. It collectively naturalized the people of Puerto Rico as U.S. citizens and created a new government: an elected two-house legislature with a 19-member Senate and a 39-member House, a governor and executive council appointed by the president, a Supreme Court and a U.S. District Court, a non-voting resident commissioner in Congress, and protections for individual civil rights. Two months later Congress passed the Selective Service Act, and some 20,000 Puerto Rican men were drafted to serve in World War I.

Citizenship did not bring full self-rule: the governor and other top officials were still appointed in Washington. Over the following decades Congress kept adjusting the islanders’ status — according to scholars of the Puerto Rico Citizenship Archives Project, it enacted at least ten laws conferring different kinds of nationality and citizenship, and since 1940 people born in Puerto Rico have been U.S. citizens by birth.

In 1952 Puerto Rico became a commonwealth (Estado Libre Asociado) with its own constitution and more autonomy, though the citizenship rights granted in 1917 did not change. Many Americans still do not understand the island’s status: in a 2017 poll only 54 percent of mainland residents knew that people born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens. Academics and politicians continue to argue over whether Puerto Ricans’ citizenship leaves them with a second-class, territorial status.