Latino Americans

by Ray Suarez

  JUST A FEW years after historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 lament over reaching the end of a wide-open continent and the closing of the American frontier, the United States was adding territory far beyond its shores, through war. The conflict with Spain was quick, relatively inexpensive in lives and money, and brought under the American flag millions of nonwhite and mixed-race citizens from the Antillean islands of the Caribbean to Guam and the Philippines clear across the other side of the planet. Perhaps there is a better word to describe the inhabitants of these new U.S.-occupied territories than “citizens.” More on that later.

  With the liberty of the Cubans being the stated reason for going to war with Spain in the first place, the question was widely asked in Havana and Washington, “What happens now?” It was unclear from the very moment the American defeat of the Spanish army in Cuba was complete, and remained so as the Spanish legislature approved the terms for ending the war, and the queen regent of Spain Maria Christina signed the treaty on behalf of her son, still a boy, King Alfonso XIII.

  Congress had forbidden the annexation of Cuba by the United States, but had not specified a hands-off policy toward other territories. Both the Philippines and Puerto Rico had been home to active, and occasionally armed, anticolonial movements in the second half of the nineteenth century. Emilio Aguinaldo led the resistance to Spanish rule in the Philippines, and was proclaimed president of the First Philippine Republic in 1899, only to see the Americans take control of the island nation.

  Aguinaldo maintained in the years that followed that U.S. diplomatic and military officials had urged him to return to the Philippines from exile to aid in the war against Spain and the transition to civilian control. Popular relief at seeing the Spanish leave was replaced by dismay at seeing the Americans stay. The Philippine guerrilla army once fighting Spain turned its fire on American forces in a bloody civil war with enormous Philippine casualties.

  As the United States got a firmer grip on the Philippines and Puerto Rico, in the face of disappointment and armed resistance the puzzle pieces began to fall into place on Cuba. How do you control a place while providing a promised independence to a long-colonized people? Part of the answer came with the Platt Amendment, legal language drafted in Washington and attached to the new Cuban constitution. The amendment created an unusual kind of freedom for Cuba: an independence under terms directed by the United States. It read in part, “That the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the Treaty of Paris on the United States, now to be assumed and undertaken by the government of Cuba.”

  The Platt Amendment told the Cubans, if they had any doubt, that Uncle Sam was looking over their shoulder, and if the government of the day in Washington saw things it did not like, the United States could—would—impose its will. The young government of Cuba would not be free to make its own mistakes.

  In what came to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the new president, Theodore Roosevelt, who’d served as the colonel of a volunteer regiment in Cuba and was catapulted to the vice presidency by the war, left no doubt about a future role for America: “It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare.

  “Chronic wrongdoing or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force it, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”

  • • •

  PUERTO RICO HAD been home to a resistance movement against colonial rule since the early 1860s. The first revolt came in September 1869, with the Grito de Lares, the Cry of Lares, an attempted armed insurrection crushed by Spanish forces in a matter of weeks.

  As in Cuba, the leaders of the resistance to colonial rule also opposed slavery. Again as with Cuba, the Spanish authorities, tied down by fiscal problems at home and multiple revolutions across the Americas, had been leaning heavily on colonial cash to restock the treasury in Madrid, raising taxes and extracting cash. This led to growing unrest, especially among members of a European-descended intellectual elite with links in North America and Europe. Many of the leaders of the Puerto Rican independence movement, men like Ramón Emeterio Betances and Eugenio María de Hostos, were spared execution after the failed military uprising and, like Martí, would spend the years that followed in exile. Others like Mathias Brugman and Francisco Ramirez Medina, the president of the abortive Republic of Puerto Rico, did not survive the aftermath of the brief combat.

  When you look at the leadership you see a microcosm of a cosmopolitan nineteenth-century Antillean elite. Teachers, physicians, small businessmen, they were the sons of parents born across the Caribbean world. Most were born in Puerto Rico, some in other Spanish possessions. They were fired up by the political and social revolutions rocking the rest of the Spanish-speaking world (even by events in Spain, which had just become a republic for the first time), and wanted the same for their adopted or native home.

  The circumstances of their births and parentage also represented what was happening in the wider Caribbean world. In 1815 King Ferdinand VII of Spain issued the Royal Decree of Graces, opening his possessions to increased immigration from Europe. From this distance, nearly two hundred years, it is hard for us to grasp just what a shock wave the Haitian Revolution sent through the Caribbean, the young United States, and the colonial powers of Europe. The Spanish king, like other rulers of plantation colonies with large slave populations, wondered whether lurking in the slave cabins and fields there might be another Toussaint L’Ouverture, another Jean-Jacques Dessalines, men who created the first black republic in the New World.

  Slave masters from Missouri to Rio de Janeiro slept just a little bit less securely after Haiti’s spasm of horrifying violence on both sides sent France packing. Ferdinand VII’s proclamation was designed to create more profitable colonies, but at the same time “whiten” the populations of places like Cuba and Puerto Rico. The Decree of Graces said European Catholics willing to pledge loyalty to the Spanish Crown could easily move to Puerto Rico and Cuba and receive free land, and hold slaves.

  Both island colonies saw increased immigration in the first decades after Ferdinand’s decree. However, later in the century, as instability stalked Europe, people poured in from France, Ireland, Germany, Corsica, and Italy. Slaves, people of mixed races, and free blacks made up a smaller share of the overall populations. Nearly half a million settlers came to Puerto Rico alone, “whitening” the population, paradoxically feeding both the allegiance and the resistance to Spanish rule.

  By the 1850s, Spain had lost all its New World colonies except for Cuba and Puerto Rico. That might have strengthened her resolve to hold on. Negotiations with the Spanish Crown by delegations from Puerto Rico were fruitless, both in the efforts to end slavery and the demands to win a measure of autonomy for the island. Puerto Rico had not produced the riches of Cuba, nor fired the imaginations of imperial powers in quite the same way. Puerto Rico is about thirty-five miles from north to south, and some hundred miles from east to west, and at the time, the island’s population was small, its infrastructure undercapitalized, and its economy providing little more than subsistence for the majority of its people.

  Ramón Betances organized his independence movement from New York and the Dominican Republic, and served as a delegate to the Cuban revolutionary junta, and secretary of the Dominican League. During a long sojourn in New York, Betances applied for U.S. citizenship in the superior court of New
York, in anticipation of the military revolt in Puerto Rico. The doctor wanted to protect himself from possible retaliation by the government of Spain, and believed U.S. citizenship would insulate him.

  In these years the leaders of the Puerto Rican independence movement moved constantly among the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Haiti, the United States, and Europe. The intellectual networks forged by these journeys lasted for decades. Orator, essayist, and motivator Ramón Betances was not stopped or slowed by the defeat of the Lares uprising. In 1869, Betances returned to New York to take up his work with the Central Republican Board of Cuba and Puerto Rico. The organization’s aim was to encourage military action against Spain on both islands. Many of the anticolonial leaders hoped to one day join Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic into an Antillean confederacy.

  As we have seen, the war in Cuba continued, and gathered steam. In Puerto Rico, however, the efforts to win self-rule from Spain continued on the diplomatic track, with leading citizens agitating for concessions, and organizing Puerto Ricans in the young diaspora to maintain the pressure.

  In the propaganda in the U.S. media, in debates on Capitol Hill and at the White House, Puerto Rico was not a lower priority than Cuba. It rarely came up at all. During the run-up to war there were no conversations about the relationship between the United States and a postcolonial Puerto Rico. Editorial cartoons prominently featured a representation of Cuba, a little brown man in the raggedy white clothing of a peasant. When Puerto Rico featured in these drawings at all, it appeared as an even smaller, often younger little brown fellow, in similar rags, topped by a pava, the straw hat of the farm worker.

  It was only after the real prizes in the Spanish imperial crown, Cuba and the Philippines, were seized and secured in 1898 that the military turned its attention, and its fire, on Puerto Rico. First came a naval bombardment of San Juan, on the island’s northern coast, then a July 25 land invasion by General Nelson Miles and eight thousand men at Guánica, on the southern coast.

  Just a few weeks later, on August 9, the last major Spanish force on the island was defeated at Coamo, in the south central part of Puerto Rico. By then there were almost no Spaniards left to defeat. That same day, Spain formally accepted the terms for ending the war offered by President McKinley.

  Little more than a month later, when the queen regent signed the protocol, the evacuation of Puerto Rico by Spain began, ending four hundred years of Spanish administration. Again, by far the most attention in Washington and the newly occupied island territories was paid to Cuba and the Philippines, and there was little evidence the new colonial power thought about what would happen next to Puerto Rico other than the fact that unlike Cuba, which was merely occupied and understood to be on its way to some form of self-government, Puerto Rico was to be occupied and possessed by the United States. It was still unclear what this was going to mean to the people of Puerto Rico, who at this time numbered nearly a million.

  Puerto Rico began its American journey under military occupation, with its name officially changed in U.S. documents to “Porto Rico” (a usage that was changed to “Puerto Rico” in 1932), and its currency changed from pesos puertorriqueños to an unusual hybrid, Puerto Rican dollars.

  The day the queen regent signed the final documents bringing an end to hostilities with Spain, and giving up all claims to a long list of long-held possessions, who were Puerto Ricans? Were they citizens of the Spanish Empire? Were they citizens of the United States? Were they citizens of Puerto Rico, an island just captured by a country that had not yet welcomed them in as citizens?

  The Foraker Act, the popular name for the Organic Act of 1900, was the first step, but hardly a definitive one in declaring what Puerto Ricans were. It is significant that the act spent a lot more space defining the fate of pineapples and sugarcane, and the rate of exchange of Puerto Rican pesos and U.S. dollars, than it spent on the fate of the people of the island.

  After setting out the duties and tariffs now collectible on agricultural commodities and manufactured goods heading from Puerto Rico to ports in the mainland United States, Article 7 stated, “That all inhabitants continuing to reside therein who were Spanish subjects on the eleventh day of April, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine, and then resided in Porto Rico, and their children born subsequent thereto, shall be deemed and held to be citizens of Porto Rico, and as such entitled to the protection of the United States, except such as shall have elected to preserve their allegiance to the Crown of Spain on or before the eleventh day of April . . . and they, together with such citizens of the United States as may reside in Porto Rico, shall constitute a body politic under the name of The People of Porto Rico, with governmental powers as hereinafter conferred, and with power to sue and be sued as such.”

  That phrase “governmental powers, as hereinafter conferred” left the hard stuff, the political rights of Puerto Ricans, for later. It was the U.S. response to a people who had finally achieved a measure of self-government under a declining Spanish Empire, and now had new political masters. “Hereinafter” was going to be years in length, and it did not take very long for the internal contradictions in America’s new imperial project to emerge.

  There were legislators in Washington who argued in the closing days of the war and thereafter that America’s new Caribbean territory should be treated like Arizona, New Mexico, and Alaska, integrally part of the United States, its citizens fully and unquestionably citizens of the country, and its products treated like products from anywhere else in the country.

  For other Americans, Puerto Ricans were a people in need of education, in need of the kind of training for liberty that the United States could provide, and the Spanish colonial masters had not, in four centuries. In response to a report on the Senate debate on the future of Puerto Rico, the New York Times printed a letter from one S. S. Harvey, who wrote from Ponce, “Let us educate these people, and teach them what government of the people means. They do not know, and never will, unless the people of the United States teach them.” Harvey insisted that if the preinvasion Puerto Rican elite were left in charge, the island would be “Spanish in all but name a hundred years from now.” After dismissing the island’s educated elite as unsuited for and uninterested in U.S. democracy, he “praised” the common people as “light-hearted, simple-minded, harmless, indolent, docile people, and while they gamble and are fond of wine, women, music, and dancing, they are honest and sober.”

  • • •

  ENTER ISABEL GONZÁLEZ and Samuel Downes.

  Downes was a New York merchant. When he imported oranges from San Juan, he was charged $659.35 in duties. Downes sued the collector of tariffs in the Port of New York, pointing out that a similar amount of oranges brought into New York from Florida would have no duty collected, as guaranteed from the earliest days of the United States by the U.S. Constitution. In a narrow decision, the Supreme Court found that the people of America’s new island possessions were not covered by constitutional guarantees in many cases, unless an act of Congress made those territories “an integral part” of the United States.

  Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent was a strong rebuke to the idea that there were places and peoples who were inside U.S. jurisdiction but outside the protection of the Constitution: “This nation is under the control of a written constitution, the supreme law of the land and the only source of the powers which our government, or any branch or officer of it, may exert at any time or at any place.” Since all of Congress’s authority came from the Constitution, Harlan wrote, it could not exert authority outside of that same Constitution. “Monarchical and despotic governments, unrestrained by written constitutions, may do with newly acquired territories what this government may not do consistently with our fundamental law. To say otherwise is to concede that Congress may, by action taken outside of the Constitution, engraft upon our republican institutions a colonial system such as exists under monarchical governments.” Harlan dismissed the idea
that the United States could take possession of Puerto Rico, or, as it appeared in federal documents, Porto Rico, imposing a currency, requiring the Puerto Rican government to report all its spending to the U.S. executive branch, subjecting Puerto Rico to U.S. tax laws, and holding the island outside the umbrella of the Constitution.

  Isabel González was a young woman who headed to the United States to begin a life with her fiancé, who worked in Staten Island, New York. Just twenty years old, she left San Juan on the SS Philadelphia. While the ship was en route, the immigration commissioner for the U.S. Treasury Department issued a new regulation changing the status of travelers like González to that of foreigners, aliens. Under this regulation, González was no longer to be treated like a legal resident of North Carolina, let’s say, deciding to relocate to New York. She was now to be treated like a new arrival from a foreign country, with discretion given to immigration authorities over whether the immigrant would be a desirable presence in the United States.

  Instead of simply walking ashore in the United States, González and other Puerto Ricans on the Philadelphia were transferred to Ellis Island for processing. U.S. immigration law specifically excluded from entry into the country “all idiots, insane persons, paupers, or persons likely to become a public charge.” In the case of González, pregnant with her fiancé’s child, plenty of attention was paid to the likelihood that she might one day rely on public sources for support, that she would become “a public charge.”

  González had contacts and family waiting ashore, not least her fiancé, and they were willing to attest to a network of support for her, and the child, if she was allowed to come into the country. Her first stop on a long legal journey into the United States was a special board of inquiry convened to take testimony on her fitness to enter as an alien national. The commissioner of immigration at Ellis Island, William Williams, had made it policy to pay special attention to unmarried, pregnant women who carried less than ten dollars.