The U.S. Invasion of Puerto Rico

Abstract

It is fitting that LAP publish an article on Puerto Rico this year. Just over 100 years ago, on July 25,1898, U.S. troops invaded and soon captured the Spanish colony. The Peace of Paris (December 1898) formally awarded Puerto Rico to the United States. No Puerto Rican (or Cuban, or Filipino, or Guamese, and so on) sat at the negotiating table, nor was any consulted, and this boded ill for the future. The following article briefly traces the history of Puerto Rican anticolonial resistance, revealing a long tradition of nationalist and anti-imperialist struggle. Space limitations, however, mean that important topics get shelved. This article does not examine, for example, the massive emigration to the United States starting in the 1920s and 1930s. Traditional historiography explains this exodus in purely economic terms (the spread of large landholdings, the Depression, etc.), but many came because colonial authorities drove them out. Others felt that they could better resist in exile. Still others, like Jesús Colón, the Marxist and American Labor party activist, became politicized in the United States. Nor does the article mention the 15 prisoners of war and political prisoners now serving long sentences in U.S. jails. These men and women (some held in solitary confinement) were punished for defending their homeland against an illegally constituted government. The solidarity movement to free these patriots constitutes an integral part of the tradition of resistance that González-Cruz so amply documents. —Hobart A. Spalding Jr.