Unpacking Political Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationhood in a Federal Political System

Abstract

What distinguishes race, ethnicity, and nationhood as categories of political identity? How can we explore the commonalities and dissimilarities between these three categories of political identity? Most of the existing scholarship has looked at one or another of these forms of identity in isolation. I compare these three forms of identity by examining one case of peoplehood within the federal political system that we call the United States. Puerto Ricans are an ideal case study because they are a group that can exhibit racial, ethnic, or national political identities, depending on where they find themselves in the United States. Puerto Ricans on the island have a primary political identity that reflects their sense of nationhood. This is characteristic of sub-state national societies in multinational democracies. Puerto Ricans in the continental United States are racialized and ethnicized by the mainstream, majority culture. Their primary political identities become racial or ethnic, although this takes place through a process of contestation, negotiation, and relativization.

Notes

1 Nat’l Bank v. County of Yankton, 101 U.S. 129, 133 (1880).

2 Balzac v. Porto Rico, 258 U.S. 298, 312-13 (1922).

3 See Boumediene v. Bush, 128 S. Ct. at 2255 (2008) (‘century old doctrine [of the Insular Cases] informs our analysis in the present matter.’)

4 Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, Pub. L. No. 114-187, §§ 101-09, 201, 130 Stat. 549, 553-65 (2016).

5 In Laitin's terms, one might say they have a strong commitment to an ‘identity project,’ on the basis of the categories that exemplify them as individuals and tie them to a social group (Laitin, 1998, p. 11).

6 In Romance languages, the word ‘militant’ is used to describe the party members who are most committed to their party, are willing to attend party Congresses and Assemblies, and take a very active role influencing the orientation and trajectory of their party, without being part of the top leadership. In English, the alternatives are using the term ‘activist’ or using the term ‘militant.’ I have opted for the latter.

7 Sovereignty-Association is a variant of Independence.

8 The term estadounidense (or equivalent) is used in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Latin America, but USA English has no equivalent term. ‘Americans’ literally refers to those who are residents of all of the Americas, but we will use it here as shorthand to refer to those who consider themselves holders of the U.S. national identity.

9 A similar phenomenom occurs in the literary world: literature in Puerto Rico has been primarily preoccupied with questions of national identity, whereas Puerto Rican literature on the continent is part of an ethnic and racial minority canon, enriching the contributions made by African American and Chicano authors (Duany & Matos, 2002, p. 31).

10 Jorge Duany, ‘The Orlando Ricans: Overlapping Identity Discourses among Middle-Class Puerto Rican Immigrants,’ UPR-RP Department of Sociology and Anthropology (2009), subsequently published in Duany (2011).

11 In this sense, national identities are uncertainty reduction devices that help to foster a sense of solidarity (Hale, 2008).