The Nation in the Diaspora:
The Multiple Repercussions of Puerto Rican Emigration
Jorge Duany1
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Puerto Rico
PO Box 23345
San Juan, PR 00931–3345
Email address: jduany@coqui.net
1
Pride in being Boricua [Puerto Rican] has
nothing to do with geography … We are just as
Puerto Rican as a Puerto Rican born on the
Island. Being Boricua is a state of mind and a
state of heart and a state of soul. And as far as
I’m concerned, that’s the only kind of state it’s
ever going to be.
– María Teresa ‘Mariposa’ Fernández, author of
the poem ‘Ode to the Diasporican’2
In the year 2006, the US Census Bureau (2008) estimated that a larger proportion of
people of Puerto Rican origin lived in the US mainland (50.4 per cent) than on the Island
(49.6 per cent). No other country in the Caribbean – or in Latin America – has such a large
share of its population residing abroad. Compared with the main Caribbean countries, Puerto
Rico exceeds by far the figures on immigrants and their descendants in the United States,
both in absolute and relative terms (see Figure 1). One of the basic causes of this massive
diaspora3 is the freedom of movement between the Island and the US mainland, as a result of
the extension of statutory US citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917. Thus, it is instructive to
compare Puerto Ricans and other ‘colonial subjects’, such as the residents of other Caribbean
islands who have moved in large numbers to their former or current metropoles. For instance,
the similarities between the experiences of Puerto Ricans in the United States and Antilleans
in France are striking, including their subordinate incorporation into the host societies, mostly
as a consequence of colonial racism, even under conditions of legal equality (see Daniel,
2000; Giraud, 2002; Grosfoguel, 2003, 2004; Milia-Marie-Luce, 2002). Nonetheless, the
magnitude and persistence of the Puerto Rican diaspora have few contemporary parallels and
2
historical precedents, with the exception of Ireland during the second half of the nineteenth
century.4
[Insert Figure 1 near here]
What are the long-term implications of the large-scale relocation of Puerto Ricans
outside their original territory? This demographic fact has not yet been examined
systematically in Puerto Rico. Few scholars have detailed the multiple repercussions of the
circulation of people, money, material goods and cultural practices between the Island and
the US mainland. Until now, most essays on the topic have been published in English and
outside the Island. In recent debates about the national question in Puerto Rico, scant
attention is still paid to the diaspora (see Bernabe, 2003; Carrión, 1996; Coss, 1996; Daniel,
1999; Pabón, 2002). In this chapter, I propose that the massive displacements of the Puerto
Rican population over the last six decades have undermined the ideological premises of
traditional discourses of the nation, based on the equation among territory, birthplace,
residence, citizenship, language and identity. Employing statistical data and recent research
results, I will show that Puerto Rico has become a transnational nation,5 that is, a community
split between two locations, two languages and two cultures, beyond the physical and
symbolic borders of political sovereignty. This widespread scattering of people subverts the
definition of the nation as a community imagined by its members as a fixed place, tied to a
single territory or language, characterized by a ‘profound horizontal comradeship’, without
internal fissures (Anderson, 1991).
3
Geographic Dispersal
A basic problem in studying the Puerto Rican diaspora is the absence of reliable
records on the number of people who move back and forth between the Island and the US
mainland. In turn, this situation is due to Puerto Rico’s peculiar condition as an
‘unincorporated territory’ of the United States after the Spanish-Cuban-American War of
1898; since 1904, US immigration authorities have not considered Puerto Ricans as ‘aliens’.
Nevertheless, official statistics on passenger movement provide a crude estimate of net
migration between Puerto Rico and the United States since the beginning of the twentieth
century. Compiled by Puerto Rico’s Planning Board and Government Development Bank,
these figures show that emigration became massive during the 1940s, expanded during the
1950s, decreased considerably during the 1970s, and regained strength during the 1980s (see
Figure 2).
[Insert Figure 2 near here]
According to these statistics, the contemporary diaspora has equalled and perhaps
surpassed the ‘Great Migration’ between 1945 and 1965. Almost 8 per cent of the Island’s
inhabitants relocated to the US mainland during the 1990s. Between the years 2000 and 2006,
more Puerto Ricans (some 331,000) emigrated than in the previous decade. Approximately
two million people have moved from the Island to the US mainland since the mid-twentieth
century. The proportions of this exodus are even more staggering when one recalls that
Puerto Rico’s population has not yet reached four million at the beginning of the twenty-first
century.
4
Census data confirm the spectacular growth of the diaspora after World War II (see
Figure 3). The number of stateside Puerto Ricans was relatively small until about 1940, when
it began to expand quickly. Since 1960, the population of Puerto Rican origin abroad has
increased less rapidly, but at a more accelerated pace than on the Island. By the year 2006,
according to census estimates, the number of Puerto Ricans in the US mainland had
overcome those on the Island. (For recent demographic portraits of the US Puerto Rican
population, see Acosta-Belén and Santiago, 2006; Falcón, 2004a; Meléndez, 2007).
[Insert Figure 3 near here]
Until the mid-twentieth century, the Puerto Rican exodus was primarily directed
toward New York City and other metropolitan areas in the Northeast and Midwest of the
United States, especially Chicago and Philadelphia. Since the 1960s, the migrants have amply
spread out (see Table 1). In 2006, slightly more than one-fourth of US Puerto Ricans lived in
the state of New York, compared to nearly three-fourths in 1960. During the 1990s, New
York was the only state that lost part of its Puerto Rican population (about 3.3 per cent). At
the same time, Florida substituted New Jersey as the second largest settlement of Puerto
Ricans abroad. The ‘Flori-Rican’ population grew from a little more than 2 per cent of all
stateside Puerto Ricans in 1960 to more than 17 per cent in 2006. Puerto Ricans have also
congregated in north-eastern states such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and
Connecticut. In 2006, more than 600,000 Puerto Ricans lived in states which did not have the
ten largest concentrations of immigrants from the Island. Altogether, census data document
the dispersal of Puerto Ricans outside their original niche in New York during the last four
decades. (For more details on the changing settlement patterns of Puerto Ricans in the United
States, see Vargas-Ramos, 2006; for excellent studies of various diasporic Puerto Rican
5
communities, see Whalen and Vázquez-Hernández, 2005; for the case of Florida, see Duany,
2006.)
[Insert Table 1 near here]
During the second half of the 1990s, Orange and Osceola counties in Florida became
the primary destinations for Puerto Ricans, replacing the Bronx and other counties in New
York, Pennsylvania and Illinois (see Table 2). Moreover, Florida has five of the top ten
places (including Hillsborough, Miami-Dade and Broward) where recent migrants from the
Island congregated. Census data also confirm the constant coming and going of people – the
vaivén – between Puerto Rico and the United States, which I have analyzed in more depth
elsewhere (Duany, 2002). Many more Puerto Ricans are moving away from the Bronx and
other traditional destinations (such as New York and Kings counties in New York City, and
Cook county in Illinois, not shown in the table) than from most places in Florida.
[Insert Table 2 near here]
A final demographic aspect I would like to underline is the swift expansion of the
Island’s ‘Nuyorican’ population – as return migrants and their US-born descendants are
commonly dubbed in Puerto Rico.6 As Figure 4 reveals, the immigration of persons of Puerto
Rican ancestry in Puerto Rico was statistically insignificant until 1950. Thereafter, the
number of Island residents originating in the United States – mostly children and
grandchildren of Puerto Ricans who had emigrated before – increased substantially. The
presence of more than 200,000 Puerto Ricans born abroad – with all of its political, cultural,
linguistic and even pedagogic consequences – has gone practically unnoticed in recent
6
research on Puerto Rico.7 (For some relevant studies, published in the United States, see
Aranda, 2006; Lorenzo-Hernández, 1999; Pérez, 2004; Reyes, 2000; Vargas-Ramos, 2000.)
[Insert Figure 4 near here]
The Economic Impacts of Emigration
The main economic effect of the diaspora was to temporarily slow down the growth
of Puerto Rico’s labour force after World War II. During the 1940s and 1950s, the local
government sponsored emigration as a ‘safety valve’ to alleviate demographic and economic
pressures on the Island. Improving wages, employment and living standards was tied to one
of the pillars of the Estado Libre Asociado [the Island’s Commonwealth status under the
United States], US citizenship, and one of its fundamental consequences, the free movement
of labour between the Island and the US mainland. According to the economist Stanley
Friedlander (1965, 93), had it not been for the outmigration of some 325,000 workers during
the 1950s, Puerto Rico would have faced an unemployment rate of 22.4 per cent in 1960,
almost double the figure (13.2 per cent) recorded that year. Thus, exporting surplus labour
became an integral part of the economic development strategy known as Manos a la Obra or
‘Operation Bootstrap’. Ironically, the sociologist Frank Bonilla (1994) suggested that the
state-led program of industrialization could have been named Manos que Sobran [‘Idle
Hands’], given the massive dislocation of agricultural workers. As government planners
predicted during the 1940s, emigration from rural to urban centres, and from the Island to the
US mainland, became a survival strategy for hundreds of thousands of people.
The diaspora’s continuing economic significance can be partially measured through
the migrants’ monetary transfers to their relatives on the Island. The volume of remittances is
7
probably much larger than can be inferred from official statistics, since many transfers are
conducted in cash and are not reported to the local government. (A large part is money orders
sent through the US postal service.) In any case, Puerto Rico’s balance of payments shows
the steady expansion of private remittances over the last four decades, especially during the
1990s. Although much smaller than in neighbouring countries such as the Dominican
Republic, remittances to Puerto Rico increased nearly nine times between 1970 and 2006,
from 57 million to 490 million US dollars (Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico, 1980–1998,
2007). According to these figures, the Island currently occupies the sixteenth position in the
reception of remittances in Latin America and the Caribbean, after Costa Rica (InterAmerican Development Bank, 2007).
Together with unilateral transfers from the US government, remittances are a basic
source of economic support for low-income households on the Island. For example, private
transfers represented about half of the net income generated by the tourist industry in 1997
(Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico, 1998). However, the impact of remittances on the
Island’s economy has not yet been gauged precisely. It is important to track the flow of
remittances to and from Puerto Rico, given the scarcity of information, analysis and public
policy measures. Even estimates of monetary transfers vary greatly from one source to
another. On the one hand, political scientist Angelo Falcón (2004a) has speculated that
stateside Puerto Ricans might send 1 billion US dollars per year to the Island, based on an
unpublished survey of immigrants in the United States. On the other hand, the more
conservative figures provided by Puerto Rico’s Planning Board, cited above, pale before the
federal transfers of 8.8 billion US dollars in 2006 (Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico,
2007).
Government disbursements, especially for nutritional assistance, housing subsidies
and educational grants, play in Puerto Rico the safety net role played by remittances in other
8
countries. Besides, most Puerto Ricans are covered by public programs such as Medicare and
unemployment and disability insurance, and many have earned benefits such as Social
Security and veterans’ pensions. The latter benefits have displaced welfare programs as the
primary form of state subsidy for the Island’s lower classes (Duany and Pantojas-García,
2005; Pantojas-García, 2007). The availability of federal funds helps explain the low level of
remittances to Puerto Rico, compared with other Caribbean and Latin American countries.
(For more details on economic remittances, see Duany, 2007; for a broader discussion of
sociocultural remittances – the ideas, values, styles, practices and identities that circulate
between the United States and Puerto Rico –, see Flores, forthcoming.)
Two understudied aspects of the economic impact of emigration are the creation of
businesses abroad and the migrants’ participation in the Island’s tourist industry. On the one
hand, the recent proliferation of Puerto Rican-owned businesses is noteworthy in Florida,
particularly in Miami, Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale and Tampa (Duany, 2006). This economic
expansion has attracted numerous Island-based companies, especially in finance, insurance,
communications, education, trade and other services, such as food preparation and sales.
Many of these businesses maintain multiple economic ties with Puerto Rico, including
sources of capital, markets and even labour. On the other hand, little is known about the
contribution of stateside residents of Puerto Rican origin to the Island’s tourist market. But
they probably represent an important clientele for transportation, communications, lodging,
eating and retail establishments in Puerto Rico.
Diasporic Politics
The formula of the Estado Libre Asociado, launched in 1952, did not eliminate Puerto
Rico’s colonial subordination vis-à-vis the United States, although it did provide greater
9
autonomy for the local government. For example, foreign immigration in Puerto Rico is
currently under the jurisdiction of the US Department of Homeland Security, as in any other
state of the union. Unlike a state, however, Island residents have no voting representatives in
Congress and cannot vote for the President of the United States. In this regard, Puerto Ricans
are similar to other colonial migrants in their metropolitan countries (Grosfoguel, 2003). As
colonial subjects, Puerto Ricans share the metropole’s citizenship, but lack power in decisive
spheres of the federal government. But, once they move to the US mainland, Puerto Ricans
acquire all the legal rights and obligations of US citizens. Consequently, the Puerto Rican
diaspora, through its legislative representatives and other elected officials, could substantially
influence the relations between Puerto Rico and the United States.
Notwithstanding its lack of sovereignty, Puerto Rico’s government acted as a
‘transnational’ intermediary for its migrant citizens for most of the twentieth century
(Meléndez, 1997). Thus, the Island’s government established several agencies in the United
States with different names: the Bureau of Employment and Identification (1930–1948), the
Office of Information for Puerto Rico (1945–1949), the Migration Division of the
Department of Labour (1948–1989) and the Department of Puerto Rican Community Affairs
in the United States (1989–1993) (Duany, 2002).8 Among other initiatives, these agencies
supervised an extensive program for contract farm workers; promoted employment
opportunities for Puerto Ricans in the United States; lobbied for the rights of migrant
workers; negotiated cheaper airfares between the Island and the US mainland; mounted voter
registration campaigns; and helped organize the Puerto Rican community in New York,
Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere (Lapp, 1990; Stinson-Fernández, 1996). In summary,
the Commonwealth government instituted a transnational migration policy after World War
II.
10
Despite (or perhaps because of) their colonial condition, Puerto Rican migrants have
preserved various types of political links with their country of origin. For decades, the
Island’s political parties have had a formal presence in the United States. The proCommonwealth Popular Democratic Party, which controlled the Island’s government
between 1940 and 1968, used the Migration Division as a sort of informal consular office in
several cities with large numbers of Puerto Rican immigrants (Duany, 2002; Lapp, 1990).
When the pro-statehood New Progressive Party gained power in 1969 and again in 1977 and
1985, it sought to restructure the agency to further the Island’s annexation into the United
States. In 1993, the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration supplanted the Department of
Puerto Rican Community Affairs in the United States. Nowadays, this agency has greatly
reduced its budget and influence over the diaspora. For their part, several left-wing groups
have been active in the United States, including the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican Socialist
Party, the Armed Forces for National Liberation, and the Puerto Rican Popular Army, better
known as Los Macheteros [literally, ‘The Cane Cutters’] (Torres and Velásquez, 1998).
Puerto Ricans in the United States have attained a relatively high level of political
representation, although they remain underrepresented in proportion to their numbers (Cruz,
1998, 2000). In 1999, there were 95 elected officials of Puerto Rican ancestry in the
municipal, state and federal spheres of the US government (National Puerto Rican Coalition,
1999). By 2004, the figure had increased to 150 (Puerto Rico Herald, 2004). Currently, the
US House of Representatives has three Puerto Rican members (Luis Gutiérrez, José Serrano
and Nydia Velázquez), in addition to the Island’s nonvoting Resident Commissioner (Luis
Fortuño). New York City now has 23 elected officials of Puerto Rican origin, including the
Bronx Borough President, several city council members, senators and state assembly
members (Falcón, 2004b). (For more details on Puerto Rican politics in the United States, see
CENTRO, 2003.)
11
Much of the public behaviour of Puerto Rican politicians in the United States
suggests that their electorates are located in the Caribbean as well as in North America.
Puerto Rico’s political status is a primary concern for ‘transnational’ politicians such as
Gutiérrez, Serrano and Velázquez, together with other issues that affect US Latinos, such as
bilingual education and immigration reform. Recently, several community leaders from New
York, Chicago and other US cities supported the ‘Peace for Vieques’ movement, which
sought to end the US Navy’s presence in Vieques, an offshore municipality of Puerto Rico.
Among others, the three representatives of Puerto Rican origin were arrested during peaceful
manifestations against military operations in Vieques. On 1 May 2003, due to public pressure
on the Island and abroad, the US Navy terminated its military exercises in Vieques. In
various ways, the Puerto Rican diaspora has helped shape US policies toward the Island.
Perhaps the most controversial issue is how the diaspora can contribute to solving
Puerto Rico’s political status. Until now, all local elections, referenda and plebiscites have
been restricted to Island residents. Nonetheless, Puerto Ricans in the United States have
reiterated their desire to participate in the definition of the political future of their country of
origin (Delgado, 2006; Falcón, 1993, 2007). Judging from the available evidence, the
ideological preferences of stateside Puerto Ricans are similar to those of Island residents. For
example, a public poll sponsored by the newspaper El Nuevo Día (2004) found that 48 per
cent of Puerto Ricans in Central Florida favoured the current Commonwealth status, while 42
per cent preferred the Island’s annexation as a state of the union and 5 per cent supported
independence. At the time of this writing (January 2008), a legislative project to celebrate a
new plebiscite on the status of Puerto Rico is still pending approval. The Puerto Rico
Democracy Act of 2007 (H.R. 900), a bill sponsored by Serrano and Fortuño, would extend
the right to vote to US residents born on the Island. It remains to be seen if the diaspora’s
participation would radically alter the plebiscite’s results in Puerto Rico.
12
A Transnational Nationalism
Puerto Ricans in Chicago have the reputation of being more nationalistic than their
compatriots on the Island and elsewhere in the United States. Anthropologist Ana Yolanda
Ramos-Zayas (2003) has argued that the leaders of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community have
often resorted to a nationalist discourse to further multiple ideological and material agendas,
such as the immigrants’ class, race and gender interests. Nationalism has brought together
numerous activists and residents of the Puerto Rican barrio in the Humboldt Park area, where
immigrants from the Island clustered since the 1950s. That neighbourhood now boasts Paseo
Boricua [‘Puerto Rican Promenade’], an urban revitalization project extending over a mile
along Division Street, marked by two enormous steel flags of Puerto Rico. There one finds
bakeries, grocery stores, restaurants, cafeterias, record stores, cultural centres, housing
cooperatives, schools, churches and a casita [‘little house’] in honour of the nationalist leader
Pedro Albizu Campos. Every year, multitudinous public events are celebrated, such as Three
Kings Day, Desfile del Pueblo [‘People’s Parade’] and Fiesta Boricua [‘Puerto Rican
Festivity’]. Paseo Boricua is one of the most successful community efforts of Puerto Ricans
in the United States (see CENTRO, 2001; Flores-González, 2001; Pérez, 2004; Rinaldi,
2002).
According to Ramos-Zayas, Puerto Rican immigrants and their descendants have
elaborated nationalist symbols (such as Albizu Campos’s mythical figure) as proofs of
cultural authenticity.9 These symbols have been disseminated through community institutions
such as the Roberto Clemente and Pedro Albizu Campos schools, the Juan Antonio Corretjer
and Segundo Ruiz Belvis cultural centres, the Institute of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture and
the Puerto Rican Arts Alliance. Unlike on the Island, Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago
combines an anticolonial ideology with cultural practices that do not rely exclusively on
13
Hispanic traditions. Instead, it combats the public representation of a criminalized and
marginalized community, by asserting its hybrid identity, including the use of rap music and
‘Spanglish’, the mixture of Spanish and English.
Despite its reputation as a bastion of radicalism, the ‘Chicago-Rican’ population
consists largely of immigrant workers unlikely to sympathize with Puerto Rico’s
independence or left-wing politics. However, compared with other centres of the diaspora,
Chicago’s community is better organized to resist ethnic prejudice, racial discrimination and
residential displacement. Ramos-Zayas’s analysis confirms that the nationalist discourse
enjoys more popularity in Chicago than in other Puerto Rican settlements in the United
States. In Philadelphia, for example, the main organizations of Puerto Rican immigrants were
fully incorporated into the civil rights movement spurred by African Americans since the
1950s (Whalen, 2001). In most diasporic communities, the great majority of Puerto Rican
voters have identified themselves with the liberal program of the Democratic Party.
Transnational Kinship Networks
As a result of circular migration for more than a century, thousands of Puerto Ricans
have developed multiple ‘home bases’ in the United States as well as in Puerto Rico,
allowing them to keep strong ties with the Island, even when living abroad for long periods.
As the sociologist Marixsa Alicea (1990) points out, displacements within extended
communities and families, sometimes very distant from each other, have become increasingly
common for Puerto Ricans over the last six decades. Many people now move routinely
between various households, located both on the Island and in the diaspora, to expand their
survival strategies and strengthen their kinship networks. This phenomenon requires
rethinking Puerto Rican migration as the spatial extension of family ties through an incessant
14
traffic of persons in both directions. A dense network of transnational connections makes
most Puerto Ricans experience migration directly, whether personally or through a close
relative. Thus, it is increasingly difficult to draw a sharp line between the Island and its
diaspora, given that a substantial proportion of Puerto Ricans spend part of their lives at both
poles of the migratory circuit.
Elsewhere, Alicea (1997) underlines the key role of women, who travel frequently
between Puerto Rico and the United States to take care of children and the elderly, organize
family gatherings and fulfil other ritual obligations. More often than men, Puerto Rican
women sustain transnational households with their domestic, kin and emotional work. At the
same time, many migrant women transgress patriarchal conceptions of home based on female
oppression. Maintaining ties to the homeland does not always lead to women’s freedom and
equality with men. Rather, women often occupy a contradictory position in the construction
of transnational communities, as they are both empowered and subordinated by migration.
(For excellent analyses of the role of gender in the Puerto Rican diaspora, see Muñiz, 1998;
Toro-Morn, 1999; Toro-Morn and Alicea, 2003).
Anthropologist Gina Pérez (2004) has extensively documented the social, cultural and
economic ties between Puerto Ricans in Chicago and the small town of San Sebastián. From
a transnational perspective, the constant flow of persons, ideas, relations and goods connects
members of several generations in both places. Unfortunately, return migrants – indistinctly
labelled as ‘Nuyoricans’, even when they come from Chicago – are often represented as alien
to Puerto Rico’s national imaginary. The popular pejorative phrase los de afuera [‘those from
outside’] refers to all persons whose values, speech or dress codes depart from dominant
cultural norms in San Sebastián. In turn, immigrants in Chicago retain a strong attachment to
their country of origin as a strategy of resistance vis-à-vis social exclusion and urban
restructuring, as dramatized by Paseo Boricua. Many remember the Island as a safe, tranquil
15
and authentic place, where they long to return someday to renovate their Puerto Rican
identity.
In her more recent work, sociologist Elizabeth Aranda (2006) analyzes the lasting
affective links between Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the United States, as well as the
impact of those links on their national, ethnic, racial and gender identities. Thousands of
Puerto Ricans form part of extended kinship networks that fill the ‘empty spaces of
migration’. Such spaces acquire personal meaning through emotional attachments to widely
scattered places of residence, family ties and cultural practices. As Aranda (2006, 10) notes,
‘“what is home” is more than a question; it is an expression of ambiguity and perhaps even
loss’, caused by uprooting from places of origin. The author identifies several emotional
consequences of migration (such as duality and alienation, including ‘circular settlement’,
consisting of alternating periods of residence in the United States and on the Island). Finally,
US citizenship promotes the constant movement of Puerto Ricans by providing immediate
access to public services, educational opportunities and exposure to US culture and the
English language on the Island.
Conclusion
The experience of the diaspora suggests that national identities may survive and even
prosper for long periods in a foreign country. Since the late nineteenth century, several
generations of Puerto Rican migrants have maintained tight links with their country of origin.
Their community organizations have selectively appropriated discourses and practices
traditionally associated with Puerto Rican culture. Many of these groups continue to represent
themselves as a nation in the diaspora. ‘Nuyoricans’ (and other stateside Puerto Ricans) have
extended the hegemonic conception of Puerto Rican culture beyond the Spanish language to
16
incorporate English speakers with family and emotional connections to the Island. Diasporic
communities remain tied to the Island through the constant circulation of people, money,
material and symbolic goods, and cultural traditions. The rise of multiple identities such as
‘Chicago-Rican’ or ‘Flori-Rican’, as well as hybrid practices such as salsa and reggaetón
music, reflects the intense and ongoing exchanges between the Island and the US mainland.
The Puerto Rican diaspora has often nurtured ‘long-distance nationalism’ (see Anderson,
1992), by reclaiming an identity rooted in the Island, but increasingly disseminated
throughout the US mainland. Nowadays, being born in Puerto Rico, speaking Spanish and
living on the Island are not exclusive markers of Puerto Rican identity. As the poet Mariposa
asserts in the epigraph to this chapter, ‘being Boricua has nothing to do with geography’.
In sum, the diaspora has broadened the territorial and linguistic borders of the nation.
To return to the beginning, Puerto Rico has become a transnational nation, a country
crisscrossed by nomadic subjects moving back and forth between the Island, the US mainland
and other Caribbean countries, especially the Dominican Republic. In this context, Benedict
Anderson’s well-known definition of the nation as a political community imagined by its
members ‘as both inherently limited and sovereign’ (1991, 6) requires revision. The Puerto
Rican diaspora in the United States shows eloquently that national imaginaries are not always
anchored in a circumscribed space nor are equivalent to independent states. Fluency in a
vernacular language is also not essential as proof of cultural authenticity.10 Not even
citizenship in a juridical sense needs to coincide with nationality in a cultural sense. Instead,
nations can be thought of as translocal communities intertwined by affective, family and
cultural links, as well as a tenacious sense of personal affiliation and collective belonging that
overflows the country of origin. In turn, this redefinition of the nation in a more emotional
and intimate sphere has enormous social and political consequences, which require more
analysis. For the moment, the crucial challenge posed by the growing dispersal of the Puerto
17
Rican population is imagining a nation whose physical and symbolic borders are constantly
transgressed and redrawn by migration.
18
NOTES
1. I would like to thank Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas, Elizabeth Aranda, Jean Stubbs,
and Emilio Pantojas for their excellent comments on earlier versions of this chapter. I would
also like to acknowledge the careful editing of the text in Spanish by Ana Victoria García.
For revising a later French translation, I thank my long-time friend and classmate Marian Z.
Sugano. This chapter is an abridged version of an article published in Spanish in the Revista
de Ciencias Sociales (New Series) 17 (2007), 118–53.
2. The epigraph is taken from the author’s comments about her poem (Fernández,
2008).
3. Throughout this chapter, I use the term ‘diaspora’ in its broad sense of the dispersal
and settlement of a population outside its place of origin. For discussions of the concept, see
Clifford (1994) and Tololian (1991).
4. Because of the ‘Great Famine’ (1845–1848), more than 2.5 million Irish had to
emigrate, principally to the United States. This figure represented around 38 per cent of the
Irish population at the time (Miller and Wagner, 1994, 29).
5. Following the anthropologist Nina Glick Schiller and her colleagues (1992), I view
transnationalism as the process through which migrants establish and maintain sociocultural
networks across geopolitical frontiers. In this case, the frontiers do not coincide with the
juridical borders of the nation-state, because Puerto Rican migrants move within a colonialmetropolitan circuit.
6. Scholars do not yet agree on the terminology to refer to Puerto Ricans in New York
and elsewhere in the United States. Among the suggested neologisms, one finds ‘Neo-Rican’,
‘Neoyorican’, ‘Neo-Rican’, ‘Niuyorrican’, ‘Ame-Rícan’ (coined by the poet Tato Laviera)
and ‘Diasporican’ (proposed by ‘Mariposa’ Fernández). The latter term reflects the growing
19
dispersal of the Puerto Rican diaspora. I prefer ‘Nuyorican’ when alluding specifically to
Puerto Ricans in New York.
7. Besides, the US Census Bureau (2008) estimated that 114,487 residents of Puerto
Rico had been born outside the Island and the United States in the year 2006. For more
information on Dominican and Cuban immigrants in Puerto Rico, see Duany (2003).
8. Due to its success during the 1940s and 1950s, Puerto Rico’s Migration Division
served as the organizational model for the French state agency, BUMIDOM – ‘Bureau pour
le développement des Migrations Intéressant les Départements d’Outre-Mer’ (see MiliaMarie-Luce, 2002, 2007).
9. Because of space limitations, I cannot elaborate on the impact of the relations
between Puerto Ricans and other ethnic groups, especially Mexicans, on the Puerto Rican
national imaginary in Chicago. For an astute discussion of this topic, see De Genova and
Ramos-Zayas (2003).
10. For a provocative discussion on the symbolic role of the Spanish language for the
assertion of Puerto Rican identity, see Pantojas-García (2005).
20
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29
Table 1
Geographic Distribution of the Puerto Rican Population in the United States, by State,
1960–2006
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
2006
California
28,108
50,929
93,038
126,417
140,570
160,130
Connecticut
15,247
37,603
88,361
146,842
194,443
221,658
Florida
19,535
28,166
94,775
247,010
482,027
682,432
Illinois
36,081
87,477
129,165
146,059
157,851
169,955
5,217
23,332
76,450
151,193
199,207
226,892
New Jersey
55,351
138,896
243,540
320,133
366,788
392,619
New York
642,622
916,608
986,389
1,086,601
1,050,293
1,071,394
Ohio
13,940
20,272
32,442
45,853
66,269
69,657
Pennsylvania
21,206
44,263
91,802
148,988
228,557
290,568
6,050
6,333
22,938
42,981
69,504
96,034
49,156
75,517
155,045
265,677
450,669
606,608
892,513
1,429,396
2,013,945
2,727,754
3,406,178
3,987,947
Massachusetts
Texas
Other states
Total
Sources: For 1960–1980, US Census Bureau (1963, 1982); for 1990–2006, US Census
Bureau (2001, 2008).
30
Table 2
Main Destinations of Migrants between Puerto Rico and the United States, by County,
1995–2000
Immigrants from
Emigrants to
Net Migration to the
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
United States
Orange, Florida
14,347
4,927
9,420
Osceola, Florida
7,600
600
7,000
Bronx, New York
13,853
8,534
5,319
Hillsborough, Florida
6,147
1,401
4,746
Miami-Dade, Florida
8,754
4,029
4,725
Broward, Florida
5,170
1,058
4,112
Hampden, Massachusetts
5,580
1,864
3,716
Hartford, Connecticut
6,250
2,708
3,542
New Haven, Connecticut
4,897
1,761
3,136
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
6,017
2,946
3,071
Other places
164,358
82,940
80,398
Total
242,973
112,788
130,185
Source: US Census Bureau (2004).
31
Figure 1
Caribbean Population in the United States and Its Country of Origin, ca. 2006
Puerto Rico
Jamaica
Barbados
United States
Trinidad and Tobago
Country of
origin
Cuba
Belize
Dominican Republic
US Virgin Islands
Haiti
0%
25%
50%
75%
Sources: Central Intelligence Agency (2007); US Census Bureau (2008).
100%
32
Figure 2
Net Migration from Puerto Rico to the United States, by Decade, 1900–2006 (Thousands
of Persons)
500
400
300
200
100
0
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
2006
Sources: For 1900–1919, Vázquez Calzada (1979); for 1920–1949, US Commission on Civil
Rights (1976); for 1950–1989, Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico (1972–1989); for 1990–
1999, Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico (2001); for 2000–2006, Government
Development Bank for Puerto Rico (2007).
33
Figure 3
Population of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the United States, 1899–2006
(Thousands of Persons)
4,000
3,000
United States
2,000
Puerto Rico
1,000
0
18991900
1920
1940
1960
1980
2000
2006
Sources: For 1899, Departamento de la Guerra (1900); for 1900, Gibson and Lennon (1999);
for 1910–1950, US Census Bureau (1953, 1973); for 1960–1980, US Census Bureau (1963,
1982, 1983); for 1990–2006, US Census Bureau (2001, 2008).
34
Figure 4
US-Born Population of Puerto Rico, 1950–2006 (Thousands of Persons)
250
200
150
100
50
0
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
Source: US Census Bureau (1953, 1963, 1973, 1983, 2008).
2000
2006