(Lo que sigue es el Capítulo VII del borrador de un libro que estoy escribiendo, cuyo título preliminarmente es «Puerto Rico: Cultura y parálisis»). Lo que más llama la atención del presente régimen colonial es su longevidad. Durante ya más de 120 años de presencia estadounidense, una constante ha sido…

La historia de Puerto Rico es una de transformaciones y repeticiones. En nuestra manera de enfrentar la realidad de la hegemonía estadounidense, ha prevalecido la invariabilidad, el estancamiento, la repetición de estratagemas que han probado ser inútiles. …

Puerto Rico es una colonia de Estados Unidos desde 1898. Casi desde que tengo memoria soy consciente del «debate sobre el status» de Puerto Rico –que trata sobre cuál debe ser nuestra relación política con el mencionado poder metropolitano. Rara vez son visibles otros debates que se dan en la…

Victory is fleeting. Losing is forever. –Billy Jean King It was Friday, December 4, 2015, close to three in the afternoon. I had just had a pleasant lunch in the Río Piedras section of San Juan. Just back at the office, my mobile phone rang. It was José, the colleague…

What is human dignity? What is the meaning of asserting that a particular action is an affront to human dignity? Notions of human dignity are at the core of ethical maxims, such as the golden rule, and the principle that humans are not to be treated as mere means, but…

Like Nazis in Germany, White supremacists throughout U.S. history have based their claim of superiority on an essentialist and racialized worldview. That is, they have pretended to define the “essence” of the nation and its people through the idea of “race.” Such vision features the notion that humans are distinctly…

On March 18, 2021, two bills aimed at ending Puerto Rico’s colonial status were introduced in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The bills, S. 865 and H.R. 2070 (the “Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act”), purportedly seek to allow Puerto Ricans the exercise of their “natural right to self-determination,” through…

On August 25, 2020, representatives Nydia Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced H.R. 8113 (https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hr8113/BILLS-116hr8113ih.pdf), a bill aimed at arriving at a solution to Puerto Rico’s current colonial status. That is the first congressional bill ever to propose the mechanism of a status convention. At the moment of publication, that bill…

In August of 2019, the law journal of the InterAmerican University of Puerto Rico Law School published an article I penned, titled Racism, Culture, Law, and the Juridical Rhetoric Sanctioning Inequality and Colonial Rule. [1] The sources consulted for the article provide a fairly thorough picture of American political, cultural…