Puerto Ricans are repetitively placed into a unique diaspora by the government. Only the alternative’s radical rupture of racial binaries solves.

“To them [the United States government], we are Black, an inferior race. Even if we are white or blond, we are inferior.” This assertion—which suggests that whiteness in Puerto Rico is always qualified in relation to the empire— was voiced by one of the more than one thousand Puerto Ricans who responded to a 2016 survey that asked them to state their racial identity. The survey was originally designed to recruit participants for a qualitative study led by Yarimar Bonilla on the political impact of the Puerto Rican debt crisis. Race was not the focus of the study, but in the final demographic section of the survey, Bonilla (in collaboration with Godreau) decided to experiment with posing the question of racial identity in an open-ended format rather than asking participants to select from a predetermined set of racial categories. This decision was partly based on previous critiques about the inappropriate imposition of US federal racial categories onto the Puerto Rican con- text (Berkowitz 2001). For example, in the US Census of 2000, 81 percent of Puerto Rican residents identified as racially “white.” According to critics, such misleading results evidenced, among other things, the incompatibility between US racial categories and local notions of racial mixture and whiteness (Duany 2005; Godreau, Lloréns, and Vargas-Ramos 2010; Lloréns, García-Quijano, and Godreau 2017; Vargas-Ramos 2005). Responding to this criticism, the research team used an open-ended question format, prompting respondents for their racial identity. We presumed that this would lead respondents to use culturally specific racial categories, yielding a more nuanced and complex portrait of racial identification.

After analyzing all responses to our open-ended ques- tion, we noticed a sharp decrease in the number of partici- pants who identified as white: 20 percent chose this option, as opposed to 81 percent on the 2000 US Census. As for local categories of racial mixture, such as trigueño, jabao, col- orao, or indio (see Appendix for definitions), only 10 percent of respondents employed them, even though the use of such color terms has been well documented in everyday conver- sations in which people draw distinctions based on pheno- type (Duany 2005; Godreau 2008; Gravlee 2005). Instead of using local racial terms to distinguish themselves from other Puerto Ricans, the overwhelming majority of respon- dents (69 percent) gravitated toward US federal categories of race and ethnicity, such as white, Black, Latino/Hispanic, or Puerto Rican.

At first glance, these results might seem attributable to the cultural impact of migration or to the growing sup- port for statehood among Puerto Ricans. After all, people who spend considerable time in the United States or who favor Puerto Rico becoming a state might be more willing to identify with US federal racial categories and to use the United States, rather than Puerto Rico, as their point of ref- erence. Yet, although 46 percent of respondents reported having lived outside Puerto Rico for periods of three years or more, and although 49 percent of those interviewed favored statehood, neither migratory experience nor political ori- entation was statistically correlated with respondents’ use of federal race categories. Understanding why required further interrogation.

An additional set of important findings was yielded by the open-ended question format (often shunned by demog- raphers and pollsters because it poses considerable chal- lenges to quantitative analysis). For example, among those who identified as white, many tended to align themselves with what we call “qualified whiteness,” using terms like “white Latino” or “white among Puerto Ricans,” indicating an awareness of an “unmarked” normative whiteness against which Puerto Rican whiteness was measured. These kinds of responses would go undocumented in a survey that solely used close-ended questions.

In addition, using an open-ended format allowed us to witness firsthand the apprehension with which Puerto Ri- cans confronted the question of race. Since the survey was administered by researchers trained to track both verbal and nonverbal responses, we were able to document how, when confronted with the open question of race, many responded with confusion, silence, stuttering, and even outright resis- tance to the question, and 16 percent of respondents ei- ther refused or were unable to answer the question as it was asked.

Our survey, which was initially designed as a recruit- ment tool (not as its own source of anthropological data), also pushed us to think more creatively about how to an- alyze the quantitative results of our experiment with the open question of race. Anthropologists have traditionally shied away from using survey data, but some argue that these methods will become more common in an era of “lockdown anthropology” (Long 2020). More than a mere substitute for practicing ethnography in contexts in which doing so is deemed impractical, survey methods can be critically adapted to the kind of questions anthropologists ask, which differ in both nature, form, and purpose from those of pollsters and quantitative scientists. They also require us to learn how to think and write in a “numerate way” when addressing such questions (Dressler and Oths 2014, 512). Aggregate data can be particularly useful for finding unexpected patterns and relations that we might not have otherwise inquired about or organically observed and to detect shifts that might go otherwise unremarked by our interlocutors (Handwerker and Borgatti 1998, 530).

Our survey data led us to discover several surprising trends and nuances in Puerto Rican racial identification. By running statistical analysis, we were able to ask whether the patterns we observed could be correlated with other so- cial variables, such as gender, class, education level, political party affiliation, migratory history, or geographic location. The analysis and write-up process was challenging and re- quired a great amount of retraining and assistance, but it ul- timately led us to new theorizations of Puerto Rico’s racial state.

In what follows we make sense of these findings by ana- lyzing the shifting role of Puerto Rico’s nonsovereign racial state apparatus. We begin from the anthropological insight that “the state” is not an ontological reality but a bundle of relationships, practices, and processes (Abrams 1988; Aretx- aga 2003; Trouillot 2001). The state is thus perceivable only through its “effects,” which include the production of racial, ethnic, and national identities. As Ruth Gilmore and Craig Gilmore (2008, 144) argue, the production of racial cate- gories is a key function of statecraft. “Racist ideological and material practices,” they write, “are infrastructure that needs to be updated, upgraded, and modernized periodically: this is what is meant by racialization.” This production of racial identities, which we describe as the project of “racecraft,” is thus one way that the state produces and reproduces both its subjects and itself.

We thus use “racecraft” to refer to the processes, bureau- cracies, policies, and ideologies that support racialized state practices in modern nation-states. Racecraft can be funded by public or para-governmental private entities that partake, with the support of state agencies and governmental enti- ties, in constructing and portraying the nation as a bounded collectivity with specific racial characteristics. Its identity ef- fects are part and parcel of how race becomes institutional- ized via the nation-state, but also of the subjectivities state- sanctioned practices legitimize and make culturally legible for people, since the state is both a political and cultural form (Loveman 2014).

Taking seriously the notion that the production of racial subjectivities is a critical function of the state (Goldberg 2002; Omi and Winant 2014), and that the production of “race” is inextricably tied to imperial projects, we begin by examining the particularities of Puerto Rico as a nonsovereign racial state, one whose capacity for race-making has always been compromised by its lack of sovereignty, but never more so than in the context of its current economic and political crisis.

Puerto Rico’s compounding and intersecting crises— which thread colonial governance with austerity politics and disaster capitalism—have weakened the local state’s ability to reproduce its usual racial “scripts” (Godreau 2015). The political and economic crisis of the last decade, combined with the ongoing “aftershocks” of recent disasters (Bonilla and LeBrón 2019), has transformed local understandings of how Puerto Rico fits within the larger racio-imperial forma- tion of the United States (Bonilla 2020). As a result, the is- land’s current political and economic bankruptcy is evident not only in financial indicators and the loss of political au- tonomy but also in the weakening of the local state’s racial project, as evidenced by our survey findings.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE PUERTO RICAN RACIAL STATE

Initially a colony of Spain, Puerto Rico came under US ju- risdiction in 1898 during the Spanish–American War. Its ac- quisition occurred as the United States sought to assert itself as an imperial power on the world stage by acquiring terri- tories as disparate as the Philippines, Guam, and American Samoa. This expansionist project posed complex legal, eco- nomic, and social challenges as the United States was forced to reckon with the political realities of incorporating colonial subjects who were deemed racially and culturally inferior (Rivera-Ramos 2001). To justify the exclusion of territorial residents from the constitutional protections of a purport- edly democratic nation, the US Supreme Court established the legal category of “unincorporated territories”—which could be acquired without the intent of full incorporation into the nation and held indefinitely in a de facto colonial sta- tus (Burnett et al. 2001; Sparrow 2006). Political imagery of the time reveals how the acquired territories were depicted as racially inferior and as foreign to the domestic body of the United States (see Figure 1).

Transformations ushered in by World War II in the 1940s—such as the need to maintain domestic peace and gain access to cheap labor—combined with local and inter- national pressures to change the overtly colonial relation- ship between Puerto Rico and the United States. This led to the drafting of a constitution in 1952, ratifying the is- land’s political status as a US commonwealth. The new status became known as the Estado Libre Asociado (Free Associ- ated State, or ELA)—a euphemistic and contradictory term that obfuscates Puerto Rico’s status as an enduring colo- nial state (Torres-Ríos 2018). Under the ELA arrangement, Puerto Ricans can elect their own governor and other lo- cal public officials, but they cannot vote for US president or practice self-determination to challenge their subordinate political status. Currency, defense, external relations, com- munications, the postal service, social security, and interstate commerce remained under the jurisdiction of the US federal government.

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The newly founded ELA enjoyed considerable support from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, which imple- mented health, education, labor, and land reforms in Puerto Rico through an interventionist and well-funded state policy. A key feature of the ELA project was the notion that Puerto Rico could manage and exercise autonomy over its internal affairs despite its lack of formal sovereignty. Another key idea was that Puerto Rico had a distinct cultural patrimony and an autochthonous “Puerto Rican identity,” which veiled Puerto Rico’s colonial subjugation to the United States (Álvarez- Curbelo 1993, 16; Dávila 1997; Kennerley 2003).

During the 1940s and 1950s, ELA-supporting intellec- tuals and ideologues such as the anthropologist Ricardo Ale- gría (1978) officially conceptualized the racial substance out of which this autochthonous national identity was to be con- structed as a harmonious mixture of Spaniards, Taíno Indi- ans, and Africans. When implemented through the state, this conception, which resembled discourses of mestizaje devel- oped in Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba, marginalized Blackness and exalted Hispanic ancestry as a positive influence. At the same time, local ideologues often silenced or disregarded the problem of racism, casting it as a “foreign” US issue and representing Puerto Ricans as mere spectators of the United States’ “color problem” (e.g., Barbosa 1937; Blanco 1942).

During Puerto Rico’s political transformations in the 1950s, the task of developing the island’s discourse of racial nationalism fell on the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (ICP), a local government institution. Founded in 1955, the ICP provided an integrated vision of the foundational racial triad for Puerto Rico. More than “living ancestors” repre- senting different “ethnic groups” (Segal 1994), “Spanish,” “Taino Indian,” and “African” were developed by the ICP and other ELA government institutions as distant heritages that blended the biological and cultural makeup of all Puerto Ricans.

Over time, the ICP’s narrative about the three racial roots and their corresponding cultural contributions and harmonious blending was disseminated through cultural programs, festivals, museums, and school curricula, gaining island-wide acceptance (Godreau 2015). In this framework, “race” and “culture” became relevant primarily as part of a national origin story that pre-dated US intervention. Puerto Rico’s national culture was represented as racially harmo- nious, made up of subjects who could lay claim to all three racial heritages but who were also assumed to have whitened over time through mixture.

This ideology of a whitened mixture went hand in hand with the government’s denial of racism and “racial identity” as a matter of public policy worth documenting or addressing. As a result, the ELA government shunned the federal census procedure of eliciting information on race and developed its own local census apparatus that excluded the race question. Hence, from 1960 to 2000, Puerto Ricans were not hailed into this compulsory bureaucratic ritual of racial identification. During this period, the local state apparatus did not formalize “race” into “bureaucratic identi- ties.” Although the idea that Puerto Ricans were a mixture of three races was promoted in educational materials, local media, and tourism ads, this idea was not applied to a state-sanctioned classification theme. Local terms for de- noting degrees of darkness or lightness along the continuum of mixture (such as trigueño, jabao, colorao, prieto, mulato, mezcla, café con leche; see Appendix) prevailed in the arena of interpersonal interactions but were not part of state practices of identification (Duany 2005; Godreau 2008; Gravlee 2005).

When race was formalized as a bureaucratic identity, it was usually within contexts such as military inscription, fed- eral work, or financial aid applications. Only in these mo- ments would federal categories of race trump the ELA’s lo- cal discourse of racial irrelevance, as locals were recruited into adopting the federal government’s racial categories.

This began to change in 2000, when the local government—under a pro-statehood administration— requested that the federal government institute the same procedures, questions, and categories used in the continen- tal US Census in Puerto Rico. Far from being a move to document racial inequality, the request was made by the Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) in support of its efforts to make Puerto Rico the fifty-first state of the union. Since its inception in 1967, the pro-statehood PNP has challenged the ELA for failing to guarantee the equal treatment of Puerto Ricans as US citizens. In line with that ideology, government officials requested that, for administrative purposes, Puerto Rico be treated as a state by the federal government, using the same census questionnaire as the fifty states. The rationale was that this would pave the way for Puerto Rico’s eventual admission to the union, achieving what Godreau and others have described as “statistical statehood” (Godreau, Lloréns, and Vargas-Ramos 2010).

The year 2000 thus marked the first time in fifty years that Puerto Ricans were asked about their race on the census. The change, which was not complemented with educational materials or information about its rationale, was met with a great deal of apprehension and mistrust because it clashed with previous color-blind state policies. In fact, two studies commissioned by the US Census Bureau found that only 53 percent of households returned their census questionnaire by mail and that the race question was an important factor in nonresponse (Berkowitz 2001, 16).

In 2000, an election landslide gave control of the local state apparatus to the opposing political party, the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), which supports the ELA status. With that victory, the PPD administration had the oppor- tunity to reverse its predecessor’s decision to use federal census procedures, but it did not. We suspect that this was because the local state could no longer afford its own census project, due to the developing fiscal crisis.

This inability to finance an independent census fits within the larger dismantling of the ELA state’s cultural arm, which had enjoyed abundant financing during the 1940s–1960s to shape the racial representation of its citi- zens as a color-blind, non-Black, racially mixed population, distinct from that of the United States. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, that was no longer the case. The cultural and educational programming previously sponsored by the ELA was far from sustainable, as seen in drastic bud- get cuts to agencies such as the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, the headquarters for which is now slated to be- come a hotel (Meléndez García 2019); the public television network WIPR, which is up for privatization (Hernández Mercado 2020); and the public school system, battered by the closure of more than four hundred schools, which is roughly a third of the schools Puerto Rico had before 2016 (Brusi 2020). With the declaration of the debt crisis in 2016, this debilitated cultural apparatus began to collapse, along with local roadways, the electric grid, and other forms of infrastructure, thus making undeniable Puerto Rico’s colonial status and subordinate racial position (Ficek 2018; Lloréns and Stanchich 2019).

PUERTO RICO’S BANKRUPT RACIAL STATE

The survey discussed here took place from the summer to the fall of 2016, a tumultuous time in which Puerto Rico’s debt crisis was heavily debated in the public sphere. In Oc- tober of that year, then-governor Alejandro Padilla declared that the island was in a financial “death spiral” and that its debts were unpayable (Williams 2016). Having the legal sta- tus of neither a state nor an independent nation, Puerto Rico could neither refinance nor default on its debt. The US Congress barred Puerto Rico from declaring bankruptcy or receiving any kind of financial bailout. Instead, Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Eco- nomic Stability Act (PROMESA), which established an unelected seven-member Fiscal Oversight Management Board to oversee local finances and negotiate directly with creditors.

PROMESA cemented the idea that Puerto Rico had entered into a new era of governance characterized by a more overt colonial relationship with the United States (Goldstein 2016), no longer veiled by the mask of the com- monwealth status and its promise of offering locals the “best of both worlds.” These developments coincided with two US Supreme Court rulings in which the US government itself argued that Puerto Rico wasn’t really sovereign after all (Stern 2016).

This realization marked a shift in the public sphere in which Puerto Rico was suddenly referred to explicitly as a colony. In a previous era, Puerto Rico’s colonial status was asserted only in leftist independence circles, but during the 2016 televised gubernatorial debates, all the candidates were asked how they would resolve Puerto Rico’s colonial status rather than whether they thought decolonization was still nec- essary. Notably, 68 percent of those who participated in our survey said they considered Puerto Rico a colony. As evi- dence of that colonial condition, many pointed directly to media coverage of the debt crisis and to the imposition of PROMESA and the fiscal board.

As Puerto Rico’s colonial and bankrupt status came sharply into view, many began to proclaim that the ELA was officially “dead” (Primera Hora 2016). Demonstrators held performative funerals in which they carried the ELA in an empty coffin, and artists began depicting the national flag in black and white instead of the usual red, white, and blue (see Figures 2 and 3).

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During the survey period, Puerto Rico’s colonial re- lationship with the United States also became increasingly visible in popular media and public discourse. For example, in a popular cartoon by local artist De La Nada (2017; see Figures 4 and 5), Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States was visually likened to that of a master and a slave. In the cartoon, Puerto Rico is represented as a dark-skinned slave chained to a wooden post with a sign reading “Colony.” He is whipped by a light-skinned master. The slave asks to be granted the same rights as the other fifty states. The Amer- ican master warns him that this will not necessarily result in freedom or the right to decide for himself, since he would then be subject to the desires of fifty other “equal states.” The Puerto Rican figure responds that he is sure he will have much in common with the other states. Then the video pans out to a representation of the slave as the sole brown figure within a community of fifty other white masters.

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In representing Puerto Rico’s racialized place in the US political fabric, this cartoon challenges the previous model of racial mixture and color-blindness promoted by the ELA. It makes evident that Puerto Ricans are not mere “specta- tors” of the US color problem, and that they are not located outside the US empire’s racial formation.

Moreover, this post-PROMESA imagery restages a pre- vious era of imperial representation in which the US colonial relationship was depicted as one of patronizing contact with nonwhites. Representations of the United States as a white figure charged with disciplining unruly Black children were common during the early nineteenth century, often drawing from the symbolic repertoires of minstrelsy. This “pick- aninny aesthetic” was commonly used to depict US policy toward the Caribbean and Latin America in the wake of the Spanish–American War in 1898 (see Figure 6). It repeatedly cast colonial subjects as dark-skinned children in need of an avuncular authority so as to justify US intervention, military occupation, and even outright acquisition (Pérez 2008).

This trope persists. In interviews conducted as part of the larger research project discussed here, Bonilla repeatedly found narratives of the island’s debt crisis that made use of family metaphors, describing Puerto Rico as a misbehaving child and the United States as a disciplining paternal figure. Some participants compared the United States to a parent who gave their child a credit card that had been maxed out and then had to be cut up into pieces. Others described Puerto Rico as a teenager who had crashed their parent’s car, with the United States representing the parent who had to take the keys away.

Such infantilizing and imperial representations of Puerto Ricans were also embedded in responses to our sur- vey’s open question on race. These representations index a shift away from the ELA racial regime in which Puerto Ri- cans were told that they could lay claim to autonomous for- mulations of mixture and whiteness, outside of the US racial framework. The following survey findings illustrate the iden- tity effects of these shifts.