‘It’s in my blood, in my food and in my soul’: current understandings of Puerto Ricanness within the Puerto Rican nation

ABSTRACT

Although the United Nations no longer classifies Puerto Rico as a colony, Puerto Rico poses theoretical and empirical challenges to inquiries about national identity within (post-)colonial situations. Gazing through a sociohistorical lens, the present study explores how beliefs about legitimate membership criteria relate to self-identified Puerto Ricans’ understanding of their and in-group others’ national identity. By contextualizing current perceptions of national identity as linked to an emergent Puerto Rican nationalism throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth-century, this paper relates individual-level conceptions of membership criteria to institutional and discursive interventions, thereby contributing to studies of national identity in colonially (un)settled times.

KEYWORDS:

• Beliefs
• culture
• membership criteria
• national identity
• Puerto Rico

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, J. E. R., upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 This study was granted an exemption by the author’s IRB-granting institution; review type: non-committee.

2 The ‘hybrid’ racial category trigueño is widely and commonly used on the island to indicate that someone’s skin color is not as dark as ‘black’ or not a light as ‘white’; the category ‘people of color’ or de color can, depending on the social context, be understood as a euphemism to categorize people as Black in Puerto Rico. However, the fact that all nine participants who identified using this category were residing in the U.S. might suggest an adherence to ‘people of color’ as a way to index ‘non-white’. For a fuller discussion of these terms in Puerto Rico see Godreau (2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jorge E. Ramos

Jorge E. Ramos is a Ph.D. student in Spanish Linguistics at Georgetown University. His research interests include language attitudes and beliefs, (national) identity and social perception.