The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  I spent my first few nights in Old San Juan, a one-square-mile peninsula jutting into the ocean. The rest of San Juan, a regional capital of four hundred thousand people (two million in the metropolitan area), is sprawling and modern, with ever-clogged freeways, a small subway system, and vast stands of high-rises: banking headquarters, luxury hotels, workaday apartments, decrepit public housing. But Old San Juan is all hilly cobblestone streets and wedged-together houses and storefronts in a rainbow of edibly vivid colors (so European!). In the mornings, I ate guava-filled pastries and brioche-like Mallorca buns* in genteel plazas, with fountains and landscaped grounds and old men reading the newspaper. My evening itinerary was a drink—my hotel was next to a bar called Douglas, which I was duty-bound to patronize—and an hour or so wandering the streets, peeking past curlicuing iron gates into houses, and strolling past bars and cafés spilling outside, with tables taking over parking spots, snug between SUVs (so American!). At all hours, well-fed cats loped along the curbs, Old San Juan’s unofficial mascots and catchers-of-rats. I’d promised Maren more text messages—now that I was back in what Verizon considered to be the United States—and San Juan offered plenty of fodder.

  Old San Juan was something of a world apart from the rest of the island—tidy, safe, literally walled-off—but even here the anxieties were evident at every turn. The restaurants at nighttime were beckoning and beguiling but mostly empty and lonely, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks in the tropics. The street smelled, somehow, of caramel corn and turmeric, with an ever-present hint of cigarette from the police officers standing watch on seemingly every corner.

  The nervous energy built as Old San Juan prepared for the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián, the island’s biggest street festival. Painters touched up trim and deliverymen in sunglasses delivered pallets of Heineken and a drink called Gasolina (“Party in a Pouch” read the boxes). Workers built stages in seemingly every plaza, dwarfing the statues of Very Important Men. For days, the anticipation was growing.

  FROM MY first gray-matter-pulsing night in the USVI, I’d been propelled along—across months of travel and a year of research and rumination—by the hope and assumption that a Grand Unified Theory of the United States’ Insular Possessions was within reach. My head was overstuffed with information, yet I felt irredeemably clueless, forever tumbling down the rabbit hole, discovering new offshoots to explore, new tidbits and perspectives I’d somehow never seen before.

  Now I was tumbling once again. For starters, I had to recalibrate my conceptions of territory size and scale. Puerto Rico has ten times more people than all the other territories combined, and the island itself, an almost-rectangle of 110 miles by 40 miles, also dwarfs its insular compatriots (and is also larger than Delaware or Rhode Island). It’s big enough that there are tangible, stereotyped regional differences: San Juan, on the north side of the island, is the bustling capital; Ponce, to the south, is the haughty second city; the central mountains are the home of the jibaros; the eastern islands of Vieques and Culebra are former military bases with small, laid-back towns. Puerto Rico was simply larger and—amazingly—even more complicated than the other territories.

  But even as I was ever-adjusting my understanding of the territories, it was increasingly clear that there were many shared traits. These included, for starters: polyglot cultures proud of being distinct from the states; close-knit, insular communities; a history of colonialism followed by parallel improvements and declines in the American era; messy (and often just plain corrupt) local politics; heavy reliance on tourism and a general lack of stable investment and economic diversification outside this fickle industry (the USVI’s economy was long based on tourism plus Hovensa; American Samoa was pretty much just tuna; Guam was tourism plus military; the CNMI was tourism plus the garment industry); and perpetual frustration with the ever-shifting nature of the local and federal laws and the relationship to the USA.

  And on the issue of political status, even in the territories where this hadn’t been a major topic of discussion, when it did come up, there was common ground on the primary talking points:

  The Change-Averse, who support the status quo, say: It’s not perfect, but we’re better off partly with the United States and partly on our own. We have more economic opportunity than our regional neighbors and more cultural independence than the states. We just need to do a better job within the current setup.

  The Nationalists, who support independence, say: We have a separate cultural heritage, which is threatened by Americanization. We should fight colonialism and become our own country. The economics might be tricky, but we’ll make it work; we’ll attract investors from the whole world, not just the few people in the USA who are paying attention.

  Then you have the statehood supporters, who take two different approaches to reaching the same conclusion:

  The Melting-Pot Optimists say: The United States, for all its flaws, has brought a lot of good things here; we’re proudly Americanized, and the United States is a diverse place, with plenty of room for us to keep aspects of our culture if we become a state. It’s not too late for the nation to live up to its ideals of pluralism and equal opportunity for all, and to give us a stronger political voice without imposing cultural domination.

  And the Jaded Realists say: Like it or not, we’re dependent on the USA, and that won’t change at all if we’re our own nation—we’ll just lose what little voice we have because we’re no longer part of the USA. We might as well stick with them. Besides, there’s no stopping cultural change at this point; globalization is the new Americanization.

  Underpinning each of these views is a general feeling of being in a limbo state and trying to find a way out. More often than not, the outlook was not especially optimistic, because uncertainty—political, economic, cultural, and otherwise—was so long-standing, with no real signs of abating. Though each territory has followed its own path, they share a fraught, bumpy common ground, and a sense that it’s getting bumpier all time. In the territories, the trajectory of history trends not toward justice or coherence but toward confusion and chaos.

  ONE AFTERNOON, I walked to the eastern edge of Old San Juan. Wedged in the hundred yards or so between the thick stone wall and the crashing Atlantic was La Perla, a famously rough and ramshackle neighborhood that my Lonely Planet guidebook cautioned even the most intrepid travelers to avoid. I followed the wall to the tip of the peninsula, and suddenly I was in front of a broad green space, at least a quarter mile long, that stretched to one of the most recognizable symbols of Spanish colonialism and the American Imperial Moment: Castillo San Felipe del Morro (commonly called simply El Morro), a sort of early colonialism Death Star, with walls 140 feet tall and up to 25 feet thick.

  For nearly three hundred years, starting in the mid-1500s, Spain dominated the Caribbean, thanks in part to El Morro; its even larger sibling, Castillo San Cristóbal (a short walk away); and (Old) San Juan. Christopher Columbus came to what’s now Puerto Rico in 1493, and Ponce de León founded the first European settlement, called Caparra, in 1508. Jesus took me to the Caparra’s ruins, which stand discreetly along a stretch of urban highway, near a pool supply store and a veterinary clinic. Out front, a sign said that the structures were built to “protect the settlers from Indian attacks,” though in truth it was the Taínos who were in danger.

  The Taínos called their island Borinquen (or Borikén) and called themselves boricua, terms still in common use; the commonwealth’s anthem is called “La Borinqueña.”† There were more than ten thousand Taínos when Ponce de León arrived; within ten years, a third of them died of smallpox. Many of the rest were enslaved to build cities and mine gold and silver. In the 1530s, officials in Spain asked the governor how many Taínos still lived on the island. The answer was none.

  The Spanish brought in thousands of new slaves, from Africa, who constructed much of what you see in Old San Juan today and worked in the sugarcane fields that, as in the USVI, made this an economically important colony, envied by
other Caribbean colonizers. The English bombarded El Morro in 1595, 1598, and 1725, in an attempt to take the city and the island, and the Dutch tried in 1625. (The English actually took the fort that second time, but left after six weeks because so many men got dysentery.) By the early 1800s, the Spanish Empire was facing an even bigger test, as independence movements swept through its South American holdings, and in 1868 the fervor spread to Cuba and Puerto Rico. On September 23, more than six hundred Puerto Ricans marched into the mountain town of Lares and decreed the island an independent republic. The next day, the Spanish military quashed the rebellion. Brief and unsuccessful though it was, El Grito de Lares (“The Cry of Lares”) looms large in Puerto Rican pride as the day when the island became not merely an outpost but something unto itself, a culture tied to this specific land rather than to a far-off ruler.

  As ripples of unrest continued, El Morro came to symbolize not so much security from invaders but the Spaniards’ heavy hand. It was a dungeon for dissidents.

  As you walk around El Morro today, it’s hard to figure out what’s dungeon and what’s everyday quarters—it’s all dark, dank, a little bit spooky. The tunnels and stairways keep going down and down and down. Near the bottom, I found myself in a cavernous room. The air was cool and silent but for a buzzing floodlight. My eyes traced the curve of the mottled stone wall, all greens and whites and browns, and stopped on a menacing protrusion midway up one side, a rusty hunk of metal that looked like a petrified railroad tie. It was part of a shell from the last bombardment of the fort, on May 2, 1898, by the United States, during the Spanish-American War.

  The shelling that hit El Morro, at the beginning of the Puerto Rican campaign, didn’t result in a full takeover of the city, but it did allow the Americans to set up a blockade, cutting off San Juan’s harbor. (By the way, don’t go looking for San Juan Hill here. As the website of the San Juan National Historic Site—which includes El Morro—dryly notes, on the Frequently Asked Questions page, “The famous hill which Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders charged up . . . is in eastern Cuba, 500 miles away.”) In Cuba and the Philippines, fighting was in full swing, steadily ticking up through May and June 1898. On June 10, the United States Navy, along with Cuban independence fighters, captured the Cuban harbor of Guantánamo Bay. It was a critical gain, positioning the Americans for the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, on July 3, when they all but wiped out Spain’s Caribbean fleet.

  On July 25, 1898, American troops from Guantánamo landed at Guánica, on the south side of Puerto Rico. “The Spaniards were completely taken by surprise,” the New York Times reported, before describing the bucolic meadows-and-mountains scenery and adding, with a vacationer’s breeziness, “Guánica is the most delightful spot yet occupied by our forces.”

  The Americans were largely welcomed by Puerto Ricans, and for a brief period after the war, it seemed as though their island was on the fast track to become a full-fledged part of the United States. The island’s Organic Act—the Foraker Act—established the local government and courts in 1900, seemingly the start of a path toward statehood. It followed the same general principles and guideposts as Organic Acts of prior territories but, Christina Ponsa explained to me, in earlier instances there was “this sort of pro forma language in the Organic Act that says, Congress hereby extends the Constitution and laws of the United States. And the Organic Acts for Puerto Rico and Philippines left that out.” The one prior instance of this omission had happened two years earlier, with the annexation of Hawaii, but Congress had quickly extended the Constitution to those islands, as a virtually automatic act—which is to say, Congress incorporated Hawaii before the term existed. Ponsa added: “Once the Supreme Court invents all this business [of incorporation]” with Downes v. Bidwell in 1901, “Congress never does this again.”

  During the American invasion in 1898, Carl Sandburg (then an American soldier, later an acclaimed poet) reported, “On roads and streets as we marched were barefooted men and women smiling and calling us ‘Puerto Rico Americano.’” The Insular Cases, however, quickly undermined this feeling of common ground, not least by confirming that Puerto Rico had taken a step backward, rights-wise. Near the end of its colonial run, Spain had sought to temper Puerto Rico’s independence movement by granting island residents Spanish citizenship and representation in the Spanish Parliament, and most Puerto Ricans expected equivalent rights under American rule. Yet it would take nearly two more decades, until the 1917 Jones Act, for Puerto Ricans to finally gain American citizenship—just in time for eighteen thousand territory residents to be drafted into World War I—along with the right to elect their own (nonvoting) congressperson, known here as the resident commissioner.

  It was a slow process, but bit by tiny bit, Puerto Ricans seemed to be making headway in becoming more equal Americans.

  PARTS OF Puerto Rico reminded me of Tumon on Guam, in the sense that they felt not just American but extra-American—but in Puerto Rico it wasn’t a matter of tourists’ taste but locals’.

  Jesus was eager, in his stoic way, to show me his hometown of Caguas, the Creole City, a mixture of the territory’s Taíno, African, and European roots. And so, one morning, he picked me up and we got on the freeway heading south. We whizzed past the Hiram Bithorn baseball stadium and a cockfighting arena, and trucks parked on the shoulder selling bananas, and the Plaza de las Americas, a three-hundred-store shopping mall with a Cheesecake Factory and the first Macy’s outside the continental states.

  As we entered Caguas, he said with delight, “We have six Walgreens!” and I later learned that, in fact, Puerto Rico has the highest concentration of Walgreens in the United States, and the highest concentration of Walmarts in the world.

  Jesus grew up in a poor section of San Juan—he showed me a photo of houses connected by a haphazard plank boardwalk above the swampy ground—in a neighborhood that was later leveled to make room for a freeway interchange. Now, having retired from the NYPD in 1995, he lived in a gated subdivision called Mansiones de Bairoa, where, he said, houses sell for $250,000 to $300,000. His house, where we joined his wife for lunch, was even tidier than most model homes I’ve toured, the tile floor spotless, the yard immaculately buzz-cut.

  All of this is essentially what Puerto Rican and American leaders had in mind in their postwar development plans, as highways and malls and industrialization and tourist infrastructure came in, and agriculture went out.

  It had been a rough few decades. After the American takeover, Puerto Rico’s coffee, tobacco, and, especially, sugar industries had flourished, thanks in large part to free trade with the states, but the prosperity was selective. In 1899, a hurricane wiped out almost the entire coffee crop, forcing many farmers to sell their land to banks; they and other famers were hit two years later by a substantial property-tax increase. By 1930, absentee owners—corporations—controlled more than one-third of the island’s land in use. Everyday Puerto Ricans felt left out. In the middle of this epochal transition, in 1912, a Puerto Rican delegation traveled to the White House to discuss their concerns with President Taft; during their post-dinner conversation, the president fell asleep and started snoring.

  But in 1948, the American and Puerto Rican governments developed a new initiative to modernize and jump-start the local economy: Operation Bootstrap, which focused on increasing manufacturing and tourism. The results were immediate: by 1952, Puerto Rico had 150 new industrial plants in production, and some 100,000 tourists. In 1958, Puerto Rican Governor Luis Muñoz Marín was featured on the cover of Time magazine, under a headline “Democracy’s Laboratory in Latin America.”

  But again the success was selective. Between 1950 and 1960, factory jobs rose from fifty-five thousand to eighty-one thousand, but in the same period, as César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe write in their book Puerto Rico in the American Century, sugarcane-industry employment dropped nearly in half, from eighty-seven thousand to forty-five thousand, and needlepointing, a once-thriving in-home industry, fell from fifty-one thousand
workers to ten thousand. All told, “The ‘golden age’ of Operation Bootstrap was actually characterized by a shrinking economy in terms of employment.”

  On the other hand, agriculture and needlepoint almost certainly would have declined even without Operation Bootstrap, in parallel with the trend elsewhere. “Progress” is always in the eyes of the beholder, as I’d been reminded constantly on this Territories Tour.

  In Caguas, Jesus pointed out a Sam’s Club, a Costco, and two malls. Where slaves once worked the sugarcane fields, there was now a Macaroni Grill and a Caribbean Cinema. We passed a university, which provided Jesus the opportunity to boast of Puerto Rico’s many institutions of higher education. (I later looked up the numbers and the territory has seventy-four accredited four-year colleges and universities. In comparison, Iowa, which has a similar population, has forty-seven such schools. Jesus was right to be proud.) Then Jesus took me on a whirlwind tour of the town’s cultural highlights: a performing arts center; a tiny but genuinely impressive history museum; and a sprawling botanical garden, with separate sections showcasing plants from the town’s Taíno, African, and European heritage. (The garden was closed for the day, but Jesus insisted I needed to see it and, much to my chagrin, badgered the local tourism officials into opening it up for the Important Writer from the States. The officials also gifted me with a blaze-orange, Caguas-branded insulated lunch bag and a beige Caguas-branded hat. What the Pacific territories had taken away, again and again, the Creole City had returned.)