Colonial subjects and their “fellow Americans”: Decolonization, statehood, and settler futures

• In Event: Solidarity Against Settler Displacement in Puerto Rico

Abstract

In recent years, the fissures of Puerto Rico’s unincorporated territorial status have become mainstream topics in U.S. media outlets, yet this discussion has mostly been framed as an issue of rights, equality, and democracy, and have left colonialism largely unquestioned. The response of many well-intentioned Americans in the United States has been to call for the fair and just treatment of their “fellow Americans” who are consistently treated as “second-class citizens.” In this paper, I argue that this rhetoric frames Puerto Rico’s colonial issues as a matter of civil rights, solvable within the confines of empire. This quest for changes within existing colonial arrangements may potentially bring about important and immediate material benefits, but it also serves to strengthen and legitimize colonialism by suggesting that territorial incorporation and/or statehood are legitimate decolonizing options. I explore how the rhetoric of rights, equality and democracy and the discourse of second-class citizenship in Puerto Rico are misleading because they fail to account for how decolonization wants more than just political rights, equality, and democracy.

Biographical Information

Rafael is the founder and director of Memoria (De)colonial, a non-profit organization that critically examines the legacies of colonialism in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean through public and digital humanities initiatives. Dr. Capó holds an MA in History and completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Curriculum Studies, where he teaches courses on education and decolonization. His dissertation critically explored the historiographical development of the narratives of racial democracy, mestizaje, and slavery in Puerto Rican intellectual history. It concludes by discussing how Caribbean forms of historical consciousness can potentially interrupt Eurocentric conceptions of heritage and entangle the relationship between Indigeneity and Blackness. In 2022, Rafael was selected as a decolonization fellow for CENTRO’s/Princeton’s inaugural Bridging the Divides study group program, which convened scholars, journalists, artists, and other intellectuals to critically examine and reimagine decolonization in Puerto Rico. Rafael was also the 2023-2024 digital humanities fellow at the University of Puerto Rico’s UPR Caribe Digital program, and currently teaches public history at its campus in Cayey. He previously worked as a public-school Social Studies teacher for 8 years in his hometown of Santurce and completed an M.A. in History in 2016. His research interests include Caribbean philosophy, (de)coloniality / (de)colonization, monuments, curriculum, public history, race and heritage, historical narratives, and Puerto Rican studies.

Author

• Rafael V Capó García, The University of Puerto Rico