Repeating Islands of Debt: Historicizing The Transcolonial Relationality of Puerto Rico's Economic Crisis

Radical History Review
Repeating Islands of Debt
Historicizing the Transcolonial Relationality

of Puerto Ricos Economic Crisis
Jos I. Fust
On the third weekend of January 2016 approximately three hundred thousand

people converged in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, to celebrate the Fiestas de la Calle
San Sebastin, the islands largest public celebration. Punctuating the constant
bevy of carousers traversing the citys crowded streets were performative interludes
reminding spectators of the voluminous emigration of Puerto Ricans to the United
States mainland in the last decade. There was a man costumed as an iconic jbaro
(country man) with tattered clothes and emptied pockets, carrying a guitar and a
black suitcase emblazoned with large letters that read: there is no work, so I too am
leaving after the festival (fig. 1). Elsewhere, a street theater troupe crisscrossed the
densely packed multitudes featuring actors dressed as emigrants holding large, card-
board pieces of a mock commercial airliner around them. As they pretended to lift
off, they sang excerpts of canonical songs from the era of the mid-t wentieth-century
Great Migration of Puerto Ricans, such as En mi viejo San Juan, a somber bolero
about the nostalgia of an island-born Boricua living afar who is unable to return to
his birthplace before his death.1
If carnivals are spectacles for venting, these performative interruptions exude
a disquietude that cannot be repressed. In 2014, Puerto Rico lost a net amount of
sixty-four thousand people to emigration. The twin causes for this exodus are the

Issue 128 (May 2017) doi 10.1215/01636545-3857830
2017 by MARHO: The Radical Historians Organization, Inc.
91
Published by Duke University Press

92Radical History Review
Figure 1. Street performer as

a penniless jbaro emigrant,
Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastan,
2016. Photograph by the author
decade-long economic depression that has destroyed its economy and eroded its
tax base, and the rise in the local governments cumulative bond debt to 97 percent
of the islands GNP in 2014.2 These public displays remind us that Puerto Ricos
economic implosion is not just a crisis of red ink. It is also a tragedy of disappear-
ing communities, of crumbling infrastructures, and of dismantling safety nets. This
socioeconomic hurricane has also propagated an epidemic of pessimism and anxiety
among Puerto Ricans about their futures. Polling data from 2015 suggest that cyni-
cism about political parties and their economic prescriptions has been historically
high.3 There does not appear to be a clear consensus among islanders about how they
should collectively respond to this impasse. If the point of radical history is to create
histories that make people want to act,4 then we must reexamine the trajectory of
the oldest continuously colonized location in the world through underexplored per-
spectives. One can only hope that in doing so we may be able to assist Puerto Ricans
in connecting with colonial subalterns in other corners of the US empire by realizing
their mutual imbrication in a common power matrix and thus seeking common cause
with them.
In examining the Puerto Rican debt crisis, I argue for a relational, trans
colonial reconsideration of the historical interplay between the forces of US impe-

Fust | Repeating Islands of Debt 93
rialism and neoliberal capitalism in Puerto Rico.5 Relational historiography traces

causal interrelationships through time between seemingly disconnected peoples
and places. It resists either generalizing or particularizing excessively. Instead, it
pinpoints linkages while remaining attuned to situatedness and contingency. In the
following pages I employ this lens as a way of uncovering how the factors that led
to Puerto Ricos downturn extend to other sites of US colonialism. My analysis here
converses with the scholarship of those who urge us to transcend the blinders of
nation-centric historiography.6 I do not dismiss the relevance of considering how
the particularities of this island-archipelagos geography, its political status, and its
local socioeconomic vicissitudes shape events as they unfold over time. However,
our commitment to historical nuance and depth demands that we also consider the
myriad economic, political, legal, and cultural determinants that emanate from and
extend beyond the Puerto Rican nation and that are therefore never neatly con-
tained by it. To this end, my approach engages the work of other scholars who have
begun to map the translocal flows of the causes and effects of US imperialism across
the places imprinted by US territorial expansionism. This article joins their efforts
by further illustrating the expansiveness of the United States chains of empireto
borrow Julian Gos apt phraseboth in space but also over the longue dure of US
imperial history.7 For Puerto Rico, those chains are fastened to other colonial loca-
tions. They also stretch across the span of time between 1898 and the contemporary
neoliberal moment, albeit with undeniable interruptions and deviations.
To this end, my analysis here also converses with the works of scholars
who have theorized the structural interrelations and historical overlaps that inter-
twine different manifestations of colonialism in the center and peripheries of the
US empire. Ann Laura Stoler writes about imperialism as a system that combines
formations. These are not steady states but rather states of becoming, whose
technologies of rule thrive on the production of exceptions and their uneven and
changing proliferation.8 Aliosha Goldstein invites us to use this layered conceptu-
alization of the fluctuations of intersecting, ever-adapting logics, forces, and struc-
tures that the United States colonial formations comprise. He proposes that we
adopt a relational analytical lens that adequately captures how multiple modes of
colonialism constitute the US nation-state, not as a monolith but as a volatile assem-
blage and shifting empirical configuration that cannot adequately contain or cir-
cumscribe scholarly inquiry, . . . [one] that has nevertheless insinuated and asserted
its authority in ways that resist being undone by mere exposure or repudiation. 9
He argues against a comparative examination that is encumbered by the disciplin-
ary periodization common within comparative studies that would ascribe an origin,
culmination, and subsequent decline or end to US colonialism and the tendency
to subscribe to a mode of comparison whose objective is to establish a norm of
colonial power and practice by which different historical cases can be comparatively
juxtaposed and evaluated (2). Instead, Goldstein calls for an approach that is atten-

tive to the complex reciprocities, seemingly opaque disjunctures, and tense entan-
glements evident in the diversity of US colonial pasts and presents that reveal the
epistemological antagonisms and affinities that offer new insights for anticolonial
struggle and new possibilities for critical inquiry (2). Part of this involves placing
US overseas empire and settler colonialism into the same analytic framenot only
as a means of comparison, but as sometimes mutually constitutive and sometimes
conspicuously disjointed formations (4).
This article traces some of the colonial formations that have historically
interlocked the United States far flung colonies while accounting for differing out-
comes in each place. As I argue below, those divergences are partly determined by
the US empires proclivity for divide and rule strategies, as well as its sophistication
with tailoring colonial modalities to specific locations and learning from mistakes
made in past instances of US territorial expansionism. An apt heuristic for envi-
sioning the moving parts of such formations is to think of them as tectonic-like
encounters between colonized sites and the subaltern populations in them that have
been overdetermined by the dominant discourses and social forces of US empire.
These places and peoples follow different historical vectors, yet in a manner of
speaking they sometimes align and other times offset each other at scales that are
beyond simple discernment.
I begin with an overview of how between 1901 and 1921 the Supreme Court
contrived a common state of constitutional exception for the United States far-flung
insular colonies that was derived from judicial precedents allowing for the continued
settler colonization of Native American tribes and lands. Next, I foreground another
point of contact between Puerto Rico and its homologues within the US empire:
interrelated geostrategic and economic logics from the early twentieth century that
helped US interests reap benefits and profits from the insular territories while leav-
ing behind precarious economies in each place. Finally, I extend this transcolonial
relational approach to analyze the precipitating factors and ramifications of Puerto
Ricos contemporary fiscal emergency. One of this articles main goals is to dem-
onstrate how other colonial places within the United States jurisdiction are facing
potential debt spirals similar to Puerto Ricos as the motivations behind US imperi-
alism and global hegemony shift from seeking geopolitical control and capital accu-
mulation through proletarianization, to exerting influence through finance capital.
The Legal Origins of Puerto Ricos Transcolonial Connections

At the turn of the twentieth century, the US government wrote statutes and estab-
lished judicial precedents that thrust colonial subjects in the US mainland and in
the insular colonies into a tectonic-like historical interrelationship with one another.
The federal judiciary assumed jurisdiction over the archipelagos acquired in 1898,
but the Supreme Court soon determined that although these locations were under
the US flag they would not be incorporated, meaning they would not be annexed as

territories in which all constitutional rights automatically applied. Before the United
States invaded these Caribbean and Pacific islands, tradition dictated that when-
ever a recently formed or annexed territory acquired a properly constituted govern-
ment, the US constitution would fully apply within its boundaries. Congress allowed
Puerto Rico to have an organized government with the signing of the Foraker Act
of 1900, but the Supreme Courts opinions in the 1901 Insular Cases sanctioned its
unincorporation along with other territories including Guam, the Philippines, and
to some degree Cuba and Hawaii.10 By doing so, the justices created a state of con-
stitutional exception expressly devised for the overseas colonies. The court, however,
did not invent this new territorial designation out of whole cloth. It was reminiscent
of how Native American communities besieged by settler colonial expansion had
been similarly deprived of constitutional protections and full US citizenship.
Since legal scholars began to critically dissect the Insular Cases four decades
ago, they have tended to overlook the historical relationality between how the US
courts legally defined the United State overseas colonial territories and subjects
and how US judges constructed indigenous colonial subjects a century before.11 This
may be because the Courts opinions in the Insular Cases make little direct mention
of Native Americans or key cases pertaining to them. There is no doubt, however,
that the justices were mindful of the extraconstitutional status given to the Indian
tribes as a model for the status they crafted for the insular colonies.12 That connec-
tion becomes evident in the fact that the Supreme Court drew from a tried-and-true
racialist colonial logic to make sense of what kind of legal subjects insular colonial
subjects ought to be vis--v is tribal Indians. Ultimately, the justices decided that,
like Native Americans, people living in the colonial archipelagos were unfit for auto-
matic citizenship or for territorial sovereignty and representation in the US federal
government on par with states. Thus, they allowed the US government to place
insular colonial subalterns under a period of political tutelage. Under this arrange-
ment, Congress would decide on a case-by-case basis which islands would gain US
citizenship rights and which constitutional protections would apply to each location.
The courts racial triangulation of insular colonial subjects vis--v is tribal
Indians and residents of incorporated territories and states is particularly evident in
the majority opinion in one of the landmark 1901 Insular Cases, Downes v. Bidwell
(1901). There, Justice Henry Billings Brown warned that the annexation of outly-
ing and distant possessions posed grave questions related to differences of race,
habits, laws and customs of the people, as well as differences of soil, climate and
production. These could require action on the part of Congress that would be
quite unnecessary in the annexation of contiguous territory inhabited only by people
of the same race, or by scattered bodies of native Indians.13 Thus, according to
Browns logic, annexed areas with more than a few scattered bodies of Native Amer-
icans could require exceptional actions by Congress, as would perhaps the United
States newly conquered archipelagos. Brown here was arguing for giving Congress

the type of plenary power that the Supreme Court had already conceded to Con-
gress over tribal Indians and their lands. This form of unrestrained control was not
directly mandated in the Constitutions territorial clause. It was instead inferred
by US courts through their application of the discovery doctrine toward Native
Americans besieged by the settler state. Uncoincidentally, in his concurring opinion
in Downes, Justice Edward Douglass White called on this precept to partly argue
for why the overseas territories ought to become indefinitely unincorporated.14
Thus, when the Supreme Court classified those living in the overseas colo-
nies as residents of unincorporated territories with diminished rights, they con-
trived a version 2.0 of the kind of classification that US courts had used to give the
US government near absolute power over Native American tribes and their lands.
If the justices were looking for a way to disenfranchise the islanders that the United
States conquered after 1898, they could not simply legally classify them as tribal
Indians, since Chamorrxs, Filipinxs, and Puerto Ricans had already been subjects
of the Spanish empire for centuries before.15 Because many of these islanders had
been agents of Spanish colonization, they therefore did not fit the mold established
by the courts for identifying tribal Indians as previously self-governing peoples
with a limited pre-existing sovereignty that had to be forfeited to the discover-
ing state.16 Nor could they categorize them in the same way that they had classified
those living in territories slated to become states. Thus, they had to invent a differ-
ent kind of second-class, non-citizen status for the inhabitants of insular territories
that withstood the 14th Amendments jus soli requirement that all persons born
or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citi-
zens of the United States. It is important to note that the subject of the jurisdic-
tion thereof prescription was designed to exclude those referred to as Indians not
taxed in Article I, Section 2, of the US Constitution and again in the second sec-
tion of the 14th Amendment from gaining birthright US citizenship. Consequently,
like the Native Americans who gained citizenship through the 1924 Indian Citizen-
ship Act, and before then through gradual conferral, when Congress granted Puerto
Ricans citizenship in 1917, it was of a different statutory kind, since, technically,
being born on the island was not equivalent to being born in one of the fifty states.17
The Supreme Court justices did not invent the arguments in favor of unin-
corporating insular territories on their own. Other legal scholars and imperialist
officials helped them. At the dawn of the twentieth century, imperialist and anti-
imperialist politicians and policy makers argued about whether annexing Caribbean
and Pacific archipelagos would lead to the enfranchisement of peoples that were
presumed to be inherently inferior and unruly.18 This debate took place at a time
when many white Americans were still rankled by the passing of the Reconstruc-
tion amendments that enfranchised black Americans. It was also an era in which
the US governments Allotment policies were inveigling Native Americans to relin-
quish their collective land claims and assimilate as preconditions for naturalization.

In response, Harvard law professors James Bradley Thayer, Christopher Columbus

Langdal, and Abbott Lawrence designed legal arguments that would allow the US
government to circumvent any kind of automatic enfranchisement for island colonial
subjects.19 There are noticeable similarities between the opinions in some of the
1901 Insular Cases and the arguments presented by these influential imperialist
jurists in their law journal papers two years earlier.
The justices were likely also being swayed by lawyers working for the aggres-
sively expansionist Republican White House. As soon as the Spanish-American War
concluded, President William McKinley hired lawyers with creative ideas about the
constitutionality of US overseas colonization and placed them in key administrative
positions in Washington, DC, and in the islands. This included Elihu Root, a top
Wall Street lawyer who became McKinleys and President Theodore Roosevelts sec-
retary of war, and later a secretary of state. In 1899 he filed a report with Congress
extolling the economic and military potential of the newly acquired colonies while
laying out a proposal for how to avoid incorporating these lands and enfranchising
those living in them.20 There was also Charles Magoon, another reputable attorney
who joined the law office of the Division of Customs and Insular Affairs in 1899
and later became a governor of Cuba and of the Panama Canal Zone. In addition,
William Howard Taft, who began his career as a lawyer and as a federal judge, was
tapped by McKinley in January of 1900 to help commission a civilian government in
the Philippines. Soon after, he was appointed governor general of the Philippines in
1901, then governor of Cuba, and later secretary of war, after which he succeeded
Roosevelt as US president and ended his career as the Supreme Courts chief justice
who wrote the majority opinion in Balzac v. Porto Rico (1921), the last of the land-
mark Insular Cases.21
Thus, the ideas that shaped the unincorporation of the insular territories in
1901 were conceived by a cadre of imperialist officials, notable jurists, and judges
as a way of modernizing nineteenth-century colonial jurisprudence and policies.
It is also likely, however, that the legal architects of overseas US colonialism were
not just looking to the lessons learned from Native American colonization but were
also reacting to contemporaneous events on the ground inside the newly conquered
archipelagos. For example, in the Downes concurring opinion, when Justice White
compared the residents of the overseas territories to fierce savages, he was likely
responding to the insurrection against the US occupation that broke out in the Phil-
ippines in 1899 in which thousands of US soldiers and hundreds of thousands of
Filipinxs were killed .22 There was no comparable violence in Puerto Rico or Guam,
yet the Supreme Courts mandate to generate a uniform legal architecture for colo-
nial locations of the same category dictated that all overseas territories would ini-
tially acquire the same designation of unincorporation. From then on the Supreme
Court continued to empower Congress to incentivize acquiescence in the islands by
offering to gradually incorporate each place based on conditions on the ground. In

this way, they modified an earlier but similar approach of incorporating and grant-
ing citizenship to Native American tribes in piecemeal fashion, as converging set-
tler interests saw fit. This partly explains why Congress extended US citizenship to
Puerto Ricanswho routinely cast themselves as docile and assimilable, compared
to their counterparts in other coloniesin 1917. In contrast, that same year Con-
gress denied citizenship to Filipinxs, whom they still deemed to be too unruly and
unassimilable to deserve this privilege.23
Geostrategic and Capitalist Transcolonial Formations

in the Twentieth-Century US Empire
In addition to collaborating to lend constitutional validity to overseas colonization
and convince US courts to bestow Congress with plenary power over insular ter-
ritories, imperialist architects at the turn of the twentieth century pushed to use
these archipelagos to increase the United States geostrategic footprint in the Pacific
and Atlantic regions. Thus, they immediately set out to facilitate the United States
long-term military presence in the islands. Puerto Ricos four military governors
between 1898 and 1900who were all former veteran commanders of the Indian
Warsprioritized fortifying and garrisoning its military infrastructure.24 This was
done to ward off foreign influences in the region, but also to control the resident
population and thus solidify the rule of US colonial local laws and ordinances.25
Two years after the War Department expropriated lands in the San Juan Bay
to build a coal fueling station there, President Roosevelt signed an executive order
declaring all lands and structures on the island of Culebrain the easternmost part
of the Puerto Rican archipelagoto be under the control of the US Navy.26 As the
US military had done before with Native Americans on the mainland, this order
wiped away most of the barrios that dotted this remote, pastoral landscape and relo-
cated its 700 inhabitants to a narrow belt hugging the islands only natural bay. They
named it Dewey in honor of George Dewey, the most famous naval commander
of the Spanish-American war.27 The War Department then built a naval station in
Culebra and called it Camp Roosevelt in honor of the recently inaugurated presi-
dent and champion of overseas colonization. Together with its stations in San Juan
and in Guantnamo Bay, this station would complete the network of outposts and
bases defending the eastern entrance to the Panama Canal. Later, the War Depart-
ment added more naval installations east of Puerto Rico in 1917 when Congress
purchased St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix from Denmark.28 The expropriation
and displacement of islanders for the sake of military security was later repeated
in the neighboring island of Vieques during World War II, when more locals were
displaced for the creation of yet another Navy base comprising three quarters of the
island.29 In 1899, in conjunction with these geostrategic developments, the US Navy
expropriated land and built naval stations in American Samoa, Guam, the Philip-
pines (Subic Bay), and Hawaii (Pearl Harbor).30

As troops and vessels hoisted the US flag in these Caribbean and Pacific
locations, US business interests shifted into high gear to carve out opportunities
for converting over-accumulated capital into profits from these lands. US economic
strategists and businessmen called for the country to project its trade influence in
Latin America and Asia by securing unfettered access to these archipelagos. Pro-
ponents of this idea wrote numerous reports extolling the potential benefits of the
new markets of consumers on these islands, of the countless acres of cheap arable
land, and of the millions of ununionized workers in them whose labor they could
exploit.31 To this end, in the early 1900s US governors and bureaucrats in Puerto
Rico implemented economic policies that combined capital accumulation by dispos-
session and proletarianization. By the former, I am referring to what Marx described
as primitive (i.e., originary) and even violent dispossessive forms of wealth accu-
mulation that supposedly preceded modern capitalism. Glen Coulthard, a scholar
from the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, contends that this form of accumulation
did not die in the eighteenth century, since for subjects of settler colonialism in the
United States and Canada, it continues to this day.32 In early twentieth-century
Puerto Rico, the modernization of the islands economy created a system whereby
capital was pursued and generated through productive contradictions between pro-
letarianization and dispossession, yet the latter happened in less overt ways. Limited
trade liberalization and the successful transformation of workers into wage laborers
offered the appearance that the island now had a free-market economy with oppor-
tunities for all. However, US federal officials simultaneously tilted the local eco-
nomic playing field in favor of mainland US investors by bending and circumventing
laws meant to restrict excessive influence from large US businesses, and by pursuing
policies that assisted US investors in buying out local competitors and their lands,
thus dominating the islands largest export industries.33
In this regard, there were additional parallels between how settlers colo-
nized Native American land on the mainland and how US companies sought and
acquired land in the overseas territories. Before considering this claim, we should
first underscore that there were significant qualitative differences between main-
land US settler colonization and the colonization of a place like Puerto Rico. The
taking of Native American lands in the United States by white settlers happened
not only through violent usurpation, homesteading, and government expropriation
but also through purchases within asymmetric relationships of wealth and power.34
After the Dawes Act of 1887 allotted individual tracts of land to indigenous families,
factors such as lack of capital and sufficient acreage and fractionalization of land due
to inheritance led many Native Americans to sell their properties to white settlers
at bargain prices. As this law was being debated, Sen. Henry M. Tellerwho would
later become the leading antiimperialist in Congress on the eve of the Spanish-
American Warwarned that the real aim of allotment was to remove Indians from
lands coveted by settlers, and there is evidence that special interests (e.g., land com-

panies and railroads) influenced the way the act was drafted and put into effect.35
At first glance, the history of early twentieth century land dispossession in Puerto
Rico would seem incongruous with this other trajectory since there was no pressure
by masses of individual white settlers who wanted to permanently move there. One
could argue, however, that there was a more sanitized, legalized process of state-run
dispossession in Puerto Rico that rigged the economy in favor of US interests.
In Puerto Rico, between the 1900s and the 1920s, US officials institutional-
ized statutes and policies that led middle-and lower-class islanders to lose own-
ership and control of arable lands. This included not only small landowners but
also laborers who in previous eras could access underutilized or idle landholdings
in the littoral for subsistence farming. For example, the local colonial government
established a system of taxation for Puerto Rico that was significantly different
from the one that existed in the United States forty-five states at the time, and in
incorporated territories like Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. Because of the
Insular Cases, they were able to do so in spite of the constitutions clause that all
Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.36 At
the helm of this transformation was another influential colonial technocrat, Jacob
H. Hollander, a professor of finance at Johns Hopkins University who was tapped
by President McKinley to become Puerto Ricos treasurer in 1900, that is, when
the island was still under the command of military governors. Hollander radically
transformed how the island government approached taxation. First, he pushed Con-
gress to exempt the island from the mainlands internal revenue codes, which they
did in the Foraker Act of 1900. He also joined forces with the sugarcane lobby to
convince Congress to exempt Puerto Rico from tariffs against sugar imports. This
cleared the way for sugar trusts to fully exploit the islands agricultural potential.
The tax reform law devised by Hollander that passed in 1901 imposed a direct tax on
real and personal property and continued the levying of excise taxes on liquor and
tobacco products that protected US industries as local producers complained that
these taxes would drive them out of business. The historical consensus today is that
these reforms partly accounted for the erosion of local landownership and produc-
tive capacity subsequent to the passing of this law.37
Diane Lourdes Dick refers to the implementation of these types of legal and
policy instruments as instances of tax imperialism. It may seem as though these
changes mirrored the modernization of tax policies on the mainland, but in the case
of Puerto Rico, Dick points out that these taxes were not created through legitimate
law-making processes. As a result, the US regime established a pattern of rewriting
laws to reduce taxation of US corporations doing business in the island and to increase
direct and indirect taxation of Puerto Rican consumers, landowners, and native
enterprises. In addition, this new tax regime caused local landholding elites to lose
power, facilitated the dominance of US sugar trusts, and accelerated proletarianiza-
tion.38 The malaise of the Puerto Rican economy in the early 1900s worsened as US

Figure 2. From a 1900 stereograph, workers taking a break on a sugar plantation, around the time when
the sugarcane lobby was convincing Congress to exempt Puerto Rico from tariffs against sugar imports.
Created by the Keystone View
colonial administrators retired the peso at sixty cents to the US dollar, provoking a
massive contraction in the worth of local holdings. Wages quickly adjusted to the
lower exchange rate, reducing the purchasing power of locals. Devaluation facilitated
large land purchases by US agribusiness. Also, as the ability to borrow increased with
the arrival of US banks, the amount of private debt rose sharply and many small land-
owners defaulted on loans and had to let go of their properties.39 Thus, we should con-
sider that many land sales in early twentieth-century Puerto Ricoespecially to US

corporationsseemed to be voluntary on the surface but were actually made to

repay debts that were prompted by US monetary and tributary policies imposed on
Puerto Ricans. This arrangement benefitted US trusts and their Puerto Rican creole
partners. As bad as the island economy was in the nineteenth century, changes during
the opening phases of the United States colonization of the island in the early 1900s
made matters equally bad or worse.40 As the twentieth century progressed and sugar
cultivation temporarily boomed, tobacco cultivation declined, as did coffee farming.
The influence of large US agricultural interests in shaping colonial policies
in the insular territories was not limited to Puerto Rico, and neither were its effects.
What happened in one place conditioned historical trajectories in other colonial
locations. First, the taking of land in the Philippines, Guam, and later the Virgin
Islands also happened through supposedly free market exchange and not so much
through force or fraud. Nevertheless, as in Puerto Rico, the thumb of US colonial
executors habitually tilted the scales of the market in favor of connected US busi-
nesses in these other colonial locations.41 Also, competition between sugar manufac-
turers on the mainland and cane sugar manufacturers in the overseas colonies led
to an aggressive push by stateside growers to farm beets in uncultivated parts of the
US Midwest and West. This exerted additional pressure for land on Native Ameri-
can communities already engulfed by settler colonialism.42 These policies also cre-
ated competition between Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, and the US neo-
colony of Cuba for market share in cane sugar cultivation and refining. Ultimately,
between the 1900s and 1930s, sugarcane operations in Puerto Rico and Hawaii
refined and sold more sugar than the Philippines, where local growers were slower
to adopt modern mills that produced the higher-quality sugars that US Americans
and Europeans desired. Eventually, Filipinx sugar production briefly edged out
its colonial competitors after the US government further removed tariffs against
Filipinx sugars, and as Puerto Ricos sugar economy came to a standstill due to
high production costs.43 Throughout the early twentieth century, however, Filipinx
laborers increasingly lost control of land and progressively became dependent on
sharecropping.44 This allowed Hawaiian and US mainland growers to lure Filipinx
migrants to these other locations, unwittingly becoming settlers themselves as they
tried to survive by selling their cheap, exploitable labor. Comparably higher levels
of poverty, unemployment, and dispossession in the Philippines vis--v is other US
colonies also inflamed discontent and fueled an almost five-decade-long insurgency
against the US military, which in turn led Congress to deny Filipinxs citizenship as
they granted statutory citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917.45
These examples point to how capital accumulation after 1898 in Puerto Rico
did not happen simply through isolated operations of the free market. The eco-
nomic asymmetry that existed between the Puerto Rican people and US interests
was exacerbated by the monetary and tax policies of the US colonial governments
that tilted the scales in favor of US businesses. I do not mean to reproduce an abso-

Figure 3. A needlework factory in the vicinity of San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1942. US investments in Puerto
Rico created a dependent economy in which outside capital became increasingly dominant. Photo by
Jack Delano, Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress
lutist dichotomy that paints US Americans as greedy imperialists and Puerto Ricans
as innocent colonial victims. These enterprises could not have happened without the
active support of locals who benefitted from the joint enterprises they created with
US businesses.46 However, there is no denying that the arrival of US investments
created an economy in which US outside capital dominated Puerto Ricos economy,
and that these pressures were related to pursuits of geopolitical and economic domi-
nance in the United States other colonial archipelagos. Early US twentieth-century
colonial policies greatly benefitted US banks and other financiers, who began to
make profits from lending money to people and local businesses in the colonies in
these turbulent economies.
This early twentieth-century economic model that was undemocratically
imposed on the Puerto Rican people cemented a particular pattern of economic
dependency vis--vis outside interests that connects to the present crisis. As tobacco,
coffee, and then sugar cultivation gradually disappeared, these sources of
employment would be replaced with manufacturing ventures enticed to the
island by US colonial administrators during the Great Depression, and later on
by refineries and pharmaceuticals lured with federal and local tax exemptions.

Even after Puerto Rico became a free associated state in 1952 and was removed
from the UNs list of non-self-governing territories, its economy continued to be
overdetermined by federal policies. During the 1950s and 1960s, efforts by the
commonwealth government and their partners in Washington, DC, to incentivize
foreign investment to draw manufacturers to the island and thus generate growth
and employment proved to be only temporarily successful. The islands economy
made gains in employment, income, and GDP growth, but only by relying on a
model of export-led industrialization dependent on foreign capital that would
eventually falter.47 Meanwhile, the US cabotage laws that applied to Puerto Rico
since the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 banned foreign-flagged ships from carrying
cargo between Puerto Rico and US ports. This protectionist measure has been a
boon for the US shipping industry. However, it has undermined Puerto Ricos ability
to diversify its economy by becoming a transshipment hub.48 In other US territories,
similar prescriptions of accumulation by outside capital investment also failed to
produce long-term economic security.49
Puerto Ricos Contemporary Transcolonial Relationality: From Military Occupation

and Capital Accumulation to Colonial Control through Debt
The US governments liberalization of taxes in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico
helped enrich outside investors while restricting the island governments ability to
raise its own revenues. Lacking the power to design its tax and fiscal policies until
1917, the central government and its municipalities resorted to borrowing money
by issuing bonds. As a way of providing the islands local colonial government with
access to cheaper credit, Congress granted it the ability to issue triple tax exempt
bonds, meaning that anybody who invested in these securities would not pay taxes
anywhere regardless of where they lived in the United States. A 1906 congressional
report that called for the passing of H.R. 18206, explained that the bill was designed
to provide for the exemption from taxation of all bonds issued by the government
of Porto Rico for the construction of public highways, bridges, and other public
improvements and extend the same provision to other unincorporated territories.50
This was touted as a powerful instrument for granting territorial governments the
ability to borrow at lower interest rates to fund infrastructure programs. Ultimately,
the Puerto Rican government secured this triple-tax exempt bond arrangement
through a section of the 1917 Jones-Shafroth Act. This incentive was subsequently
extended to other overseas territories and remains in place to this day. It has been a
boon for financial traders who push these instruments on investors seeking a higher
rate of return.
The Puerto Rican governments dependency on bond borrowing temporarily
decreased in the 1940s when New Deal Governor Rexford Tugwell instituted Keynes-
ian policies to revive the Puerto Rican economy during the Great Depression.51 How-
ever, by the mid-1950s, bond issuing was on the rise again, to the point that between

1969 and 1973 the islands public borrowing increased by almost 90 percent.52 The
1973 international oil crisis worsened this trend, as it caused a sharp decline in local
oil refining. In 1974, Puerto Rico experienced its first unconstitutional deficit when it
surpassed debt limits specified in its constitution. Within two years, the public debt
rose to 74 percent of GNP.53 The final nail in the coffin of Operation Bootstrap
the mid-t wentieth-century program aimed at industrializing Puerto Rico by luring
capital-intensive heavy industries such as petrochemicals to the islandwas driven
when the conservative 1990s Congress phased out the tax exemptions that federal
and local authorities had used during previous decades to attract these companies.
Thus, since the early 1970s, in spite of clear warnings by economists, the Puerto
Rican government entered a four-decade-long debt spiral with brief ups and downs,
but ultimately leading down to the seemingly bottomless economic hole that the
island finds itself in now.54
Nearly all other US colonial locations today also have dependent and volatile
local economies compared to the economies of the fifty states. Native Americans as
a whole have almost double the poverty rate of the US nation (28.4 percent com-
pared to 15.3 percent). About 22 percent of the United States 5.2 million Native
Americans live on semiautonomous tribal reservations. In some of these quasi-
sovereign locations, the poverty range can be as high as 50 percent, and the unem-
ployment range can rise to between 80 and 90 percent.55 In comparison, the number of
individuals living below the poverty line in Puerto Rico in 2009 was 45 percent.56
In the United States, the overall poverty rate was 14.3 percent in 2009. In Missis-
sippi, its poorest state that year, 21.9 percent of individuals lived below the poverty
line.57 In other territories, the poverty rate in 2009 ranged from 22.5 percent of US
Virgin Islands residents and 22.9 percent of Guam residents living under the poverty
line to 57.8 percent of American Samoa residents and 52.3 percent of residents of
the Northern Marianas.58 If we add the residents of Puerto Rico to these other US
territories, and to Native Americans living in tribal reservations under concentrated
colonial conditions, the total sum consists of about 5,070,881 inhabitants. That is a
substantial number, considering that twenty-eight of the fifty US states have smaller
populations than that. These five million colonial subalterns tend to have compara-
bly weaker labor participation rates in addition to lower incomes and rates of per-
sonal savings. Out of these 5.07 million, about 4 million have no right to vote for a
US president as long as they reside in the overseas territories.
All of these seemingly disparate colonial locations share a lack of economic
autonomy compared to US states, as well as a deeply rooted pattern of dependency
on the US federal government. There are, however, important differences between
the twenty-first-century economies of these colonial locations. Puerto Ricos median
household income in 2009 was $18,627. It was much lower than that of the United
States, which was $51,425, and Mississippis, which was $36,796. Instead, it is much
closer to American Samoas, which was $23,892 and the Northern Marianas, which

was $19,958. However, it was lower than Guams, which was $48,274 and the US
Virgin Islands, which was $37,254. The latter two places have become exceptional
in the sense that they have undiversified economies stemming from their colonial
status that have generated local economic growth between the 1970s and the 2000s.
In the case of the US Virgin Islands, tourism accounts for 80 percent of GDP. This
industry was significantly built up in the late twentieth century thus lowering unem-
ployment and raising incomes. However, the US Virgin Islands economy was also
heavily dependent on the Hovensa oil refineryt he largest employer in the three
islands, which closed in 2012 and contributed to a notable decrease in the GDP
(-13 percent in 2012, and -5.4 percent in 2013) and also a notable increase in unem-
ployment (from 8.2 percent in January to 13.3 percent in December 2012).59 Guams
present economy is unique in that it depends mostly on the US militarys presence
on the island (roughly 30 percent of GDP), and on tourism to a lesser degree. There
has been a buildup of troops on the island since 2006, which has created more jobs
connected to the military.60 Guams economy, therefore, is secure for now but future
stability is not guaranteed. Its sustainability is dependent on geostrategic decisions
made in Washington, DC, that may change as national security priorities shift. In
contrast, the economy of American Samoa depends heavily on fishing and canner-
ies and the Northern Marianas have depended on garment manufacturing. These
industries set up shop in these remote locations to take advantage of cheaper labor
and productions costs, but some have either left or are threatening to relocate to
other parts of the Pacific and Asia where they can reduce costs even more, posing a
serious threat to these undiversified economies.61 We do not know if each of these
dependent would fare better with independence, but we do know that at present
there is a firm ceiling restricting their growth that is connected to their collec-
tive status as US territories. It is no coincidence that, like Puerto Ricans, there are
now more Chamorrxs from Guam and the Northern Marianas and more American
Samoans living on the US mainland than in their ancestral archipelagos.62
Puerto Rico also shares with these other locations high levels of debt in all
forms. A report by the commonwealth government from 2014 estimated that as of
July of that year, the islands total public debt ascended to $67.3 billion, which was
equivalent to roughly $18,960 per resident. Todays debt is thought to be more sub-
stantial, but even this conservative estimate is much higher than in Connecticut
the most indebted US statewhere the 2014 per capita debt was $5,807 per resi-
dent.63 In comparison, in 2016 the US Virgin Islands per capita public debt was
even higher than Puerto Ricos, at $2.40 billion or $22,914 per person.64 In con-
trast, in 2015 Guam owed $1,48 billion, which translated to $9,051 per capita, but
one has to consider that that debt doubled between 2007 and 2014.65 Most Native
American tribal governments are in a similar situation. Historically, tribes have had
limited access to public loans in the form of bonds and have instead relied on pri-
vate loans. However, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 allowed

tribal governments to access tax-exempt bond loans for nonessential government

purposes.66 Some see this as an opportunity to invest in education and infrastruc-
ture improvements to improve their local economies, but we should also worry that
the more than five hundred federally recognized nations who now have access to
these funds will also end up with precariously high public debts. Such has been the
case with some of the wealthier tribes with access to casinos and other forms of
loan credit that have borrowed beyond their means. For example, the Mashantucket
Pequot Tribe, which owns Foxwoods, one of the largest casinos in the world, is cur-
rently $1.7 billion in debt, in part because of competition with nearby casinos and
an expansion they began during the 2008 recession. There are only 1,003 enrolled
members in that tribe, so if we translate that to a kind of per capita public debt, it
is equivalent to $1,694,915 per person. In the past year, other casino-owning tribes
have also struggled to cover their costs and their revenue distributions to enrolled
individuals through borrowing.67 Also, as in Puerto Rico where personal debt has
been escalating since the 1970s, individual and family debt is prevalent in Native
American communities. Recently, the director of Native Community Finance,
a US Treasury-chartered Native Community Development Financial Institution,
remarked that tribal reservations have become credit ghettos whose residents can
only get loans from outside predatory lenders.68
Conclusion
This article makes visible some of the intertwined logics, forces, and structures that
bind the historical trajectories of the United States interior and peripheral colonial
locations to one another. By honing our analytical focus on these shifting colonial
formations, we are able to trace how these places and peoples are neither equiva-
lent nor wholly disconnected. Instead, they are rendered homologous to each other
by the adaptive yet systematizing tendencies of US federal law, military and civilian
colonial policy making, and capitalist accumulation. I argue here that the promot-
ers and facilitators of US overseas territorial expansionism endeavored to institute
a modified version of US colonialism that was in line with the modernizing ethos
of the early twentieth century. Their goal was to make overseas colonialism more
efficient and effective. Such an undertaking was tested and refined in Puerto Rico in
relation to what transpired in other mainland and overseas colonial locations.
The underacknowledged legal relationality between indigenous colonial
subjects in the US mainland and in Alaska, and unincorporated subalterns in the
United States colonial archipelagos deserves more scrutiny today, particularly in
light of contemporary judicial developments related to Puerto Ricos crisis. In June
2016 the Supreme Courts majority opinion in Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle affirmed
the island commonwealths lack of any substantive sovereignty according to the laws
of Congress. While curiously avoiding referencing them, this decision conrmed
the Insular Cases as binding precedent.69 The lawsuit that brought the case to the

courts attention originated when Puerto Rican prosecutors attempted to try a felon
that had already been convicted in the local federal district court by charging him
for the same criminal offense. Supreme Court precedent establishes that state gov-
ernments have the power to try a criminal defendant who is being prosecuted for the
same alleged offenses at the federal level, as do recognized tribal nations. Instead,
in Sanchez Valle, the court determined that Puerto Rico did not have the kind of
primeval sovereignty required to exercise shared sovereignty with the federal gov-
ernment.70 The court cited the Marshall Trilogy cases of 182332 as precedent
for validating the ability of Native American tribes to exercise split sovereignty. The
reasoning was that those cases determined that tribes were sovereign nations of
their own before European and US colonization, whereas Puerto Rico had always
been a colony since 1493. Ironically, almost two centuries ago, these were the same
cases in which the court decided to deny constitutional jurisdiction and protections
to Native American tribes while refusing to grant them any actual sovereignty.
This article has also highlighted how Puerto Ricos economic rut did not
appear in the late twentieth century but is rather a continuation of a pattern of
dependency and debt that goes further back. When the sugar industry that domi-
nated the islands economy contracted in the 1930s and 1940s, that downturn left
economic vacuums that the US and local governments filled by bringing in main-
land industries inclined to outsource as they searched for tax incentives and cheaper
operational costs. However, many of those industries later relocated abroad as they
looked for even cheaper costs, leaving behind unemployment and debt, abandoning
an infrastructure that was partly built for them that the government cannot afford
to maintain. A similar process of outsourcing has affected American Samoa (fishing
industry) and the Marianas (textile industry). In all these colonial locations, outside
corporations investing US capital were able to reap substantial profits by employing
locals and by paying them below federal minimum wage. Now that locals in these
places have demanded higher wages, these industries are relocating to more cost-
effective global southern locations, leaving behind negative externalities that have
reverberating effects on the economies and environments of these archipelagos.
There are other translocal, tectonic-like points of contact, pressure, and
movement between these locations worth mentioning. In terms of military move-
ments and geostrategy, when Puerto Ricos military bases began to close in the late
twentieth centuryin part because of policy changes in Washington, DC, but also
because of local political pressure in Puerto Ricothe United States Guantnamo
Bay base in Cuba began to grow in significance and size. By the same token, after
the Philippines became independent in 1946 and subsequently experienced four
decades of neocolonial pseudo-democracy and then dictatorship, when the Filipino
government refused to renew US leases of military bases in 1992, Guams bases
were built up. In terms of migrations induced by these transcolonial formations,
the rise in export-led industrialization in Puerto Rico as a substitute for a predomi-

nantly agrarian economy provoked hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to

move to the US mainland between the 1940s and 1960s. This led Puerto Ricans to
have to compete with other poor and working-class laborers in the US mainland
many of whom were racial subalterns and living in segregated cities with limited,
overpriced housing reserved for them only. In effect, it put Puerto Ricans in the
ironic position of becoming colonial subaltern settlers of color who would join the
collective national project of seeking personal advancement by laying stake to the
territorial and economic expansion of the United States. Likewise, during the time
of the US colony in the Philippines, many Filipinxs left the island in search of better
jobs in Hawaii and in Guam, effectively becoming settlers of color there as well.
Such is the complicated nature of racial/colonial capitalism. It relies on divide-and-
rule effects in which some groups benefit from the marginalization of other groups,
while liberalism and its reliance on a legal subject that is purportedly colorless and
colorblind disallows group rights and delegitimizes reparations for broad constituen-
cies affected by colonialism. In other words, the tectonic nature of US transcolonial
formations means that colonial subalterns do not move through history in unison but
are instead put in positions in which they inevitably exert friction against each other.
In the past thirty years, as capital accumulation through outsourcing, pro-
letarianization, and legalized dispossession waned in the United States overseas
colonies, these locations have become attractive not only as consumer markets for
US products, but also for the US finance industry. In this recent neoliberalization
of twenty-first-century US colonialism, capital accumulation has shifted from dis-
possessing peoples lands and labor to dispossessing their individual and collective
assets. It would seem then that the United States has kept Puerto Rico in its cur-
rent configuration because its economic landslide appears as a bonanza for finance
capital investment. For example, in a move typical of turn of the twenty-first century
disaster capitalism, Puerto Ricos debt is also being purchased by vulture funds
that are acquiring depreciated bonds at bargain prices and are using their lobbying
power and legal muscle to compel the commonwealth to repay these same bonds
in full.71 They have also been claiming publicly that extending bankruptcy rights to
Puerto Rico would increase the cost of borrowing for other island territories that rely
on these same triple-tax exempt bonds, which further underlines the underacknowl-
edged connections between these colonies in this new era of financial colonialism.
Postscript
While voting on the PROMESA (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Eco-
nomic Stability Act) bill in the summer of 2016 that authorized the financial control
board that now effectively governs Puerto Rico, Congress made it clear that it has
no intention of offering the island government or its people any kind of redress.72
Instead, their priority seems to be to insulate the US municipal bond markets
from any further damage caused by the islands failure to meet its obligations. In

their public pronouncements on the PROMESA law, most members of Congress

eschewed any kind of federal responsibility for leading the Puerto Rican economy
to where it is now. Similarly, most media stories about Puerto Ricos crisis imply that
the blame for the islands troubles falls mainly on local politicians and, of course,
on the Puerto Rican people who keep them in place. This evidences how deeply
entrenched the century-old colonial discourses about the supposed racial and cul-
tural inferiority of Puerto Ricans seem to be. Meanwhile, the Federal Governments
disavowal of their role in directing Puerto Rico toward an economic cliff reproduces
the idea that the United States is an exceptional republic that left behind its colo-
nial/imperial past a century ago.
The continuous silencing of contemporary US colonialism and the concomi-
tant blaming of colonial subalterns as those solely responsible for their problems is
one more common denominator between the millions of people whose lives con-
tinue to be negatively affected by US colonial formations. We can only hope that
more awareness about the connections between these communities made insular by
both nature and by the social forces that separate and contain them will translate
into more bonds of solidarity and unison of purpose and message. Perhaps their
shared denunciation of their corresponding experiences will make the US nation
confront the temporal and geographic expansiveness of its ever-adaptive imperial
assemblages.
Jos I. Fust is an assistant professor of American and ethnic studies and global studies at the
University of Washington, Bothell. He is currently writing a book titled Entangled Crossings:
Afro-Latino Migrations between Race and Empire.
Notes
I would like to thank the reviewers and editors for their careful and honest comments and
recommendations. I am, of course, solely responsible for this articles errors and limitations.
This text could not have been written without generative conversations on this topic with friends
and colleagues including Antonio Carmona-Bez, Edgardo Garfalo, Maritza Stanchich, Leslie
Quintanilla, Amrah Salomon, Roberto Hernndez, Javier Arbona, Bob Johnson, and Colin
Fischer. I would also like to thank Megan Strom and Jade Power-Sotomayor for bestowing their
time to carefully read drafts and for suggesting key revisions. Lastly, I owe a debt of gratitude to
Robin Derby and all the other good people at University of California, Los Angeless Department
of History, and to the University of California Presidents Postdoctoral Fellowship for their
support during the early stages of researching and drafting this article.
1. The name of this theater company is Agua, Sol y Sereno. Boricua denotes a Puerto Rican,
especially one living in the United States.
2. In Puerto Rico during the last three decades the rate of personal debt has been steadily
rising as the rate of personal savings has gone down. Unemployment has stayed high relative
to the United States and the people living under the poverty line are double of what they are
in the poorest US states. The labor participation rate has also been about two-thirds what it
has been in the United States since the 1970s. See Commonwealth of Puerto Rico Planning
Board, Economic Report to the Governor; and Dietz, Economic History, 261, 275.

3. Lyons, Few Puerto Ricans; lvarez Jaimes, Evidente desgaste.

4. Irving, Radical History Book, 5865.
5. This type of relational analysis is common to ethnic, gender, and sexuality studies. See
Molina, How Race is Made, 119, and Feldman, On Relationality.
6. For a good critique of nation-centered Puerto Rican historiography, see Pabn, Nacin
Postmortem, and for a text that unpacks nation-centered US historiography, see Bender,
Introduction.
7. Go, Chains of Empire. Other examples of translocal, comparative, and/or relational
historiographic approaches to US imperialism include Paul A. Kramer, Power and
Connection, and April Merleaux, Sugar and Civilization, Lanny Thompson, Imperial
Archipelago, and Joanna Poblete, Islanders in the Empire.
8. Stoler, On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty, 128. Stuart Hall also advocated the use
of a similar concept of formations, which he defined as both the activities of emergence,
and their outcomes or results: both process and structure. See Hall and Gieben,
Introduction, 7.
9. Goldstein Introduction, 2.
10. Cuba was in a different position compared to other insular territories in that the Treaty of
Paris guaranteed that the island would gain its titular sovereignty in the near future, which
it did after the Platt Amendment of 1901. In Hawaii v. Mankichi 190 U.S. 197 (1903), the
Supreme Court decided that Hawaii became incorporated in 1900 when its inhabitants
gained US citizenship.
11. There are some texts that have attempted to unravel the connections between case law
pertaining to Native Americans and the people of the insular territories. For example,
see Cleveland, Powers Inherent in Sovereignty; and Torres Asencio, Las comunidades
especiales del imperio. The amount of texts pursuing this angle is minimal compared to
the voluminous scholarship that deals with either the Insular Cases alone or with Native
Americans and the US Constitution without regard to the island colonies.
12. Many of the justices that decided the Insular Cases presided over other cases in the same
period that further eroded sovereignty rights for tribal Indians and denied them citizenship
or full constitutional protections, including Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884), United States
v. Kagama, 118 U.S. 375 (1886), Talton v. Mayes, 163 U.S. 376 (1896), and Lone Wolf v.
Hitchcock 187 U.S. 553 (1903).
13. See Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244, 282 (1901).
14. See Downes 182 U.S. 244, at 306. The doctrine of discovery that Justice White uses to in
part argue his Downes concurring opinion was first applied by Chief Justice John Marshall
in Johnson v. MIntosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823), the earliest of the Marshall Trilogy cases that
granted Congress plenary power over tribal Indian lands. Through this decision, the court
adopted a limited possessor notion of native land rights, proclaiming that European
discovery of America gave exclusive title to those who made it, and that such discovery
necessarily diminished the power of Indian nations to dispose of the soil at their own
will, to whomsoever they pleased. Watson, Doctrine of Discovery, 999. The Doctrine
of Discovery was used as far back as the sixteenth century by European powers attempting
to legitimize the conquest of indigenous Americans and their lands. It provides that newly
arrived Europeans immediately and automatically acquired legally recognized property
rights in native lands and also gained governmental, political, and commercial rights over
the inhabitants without the knowledge or the consent of the Indigenous peoples. Miller,
Doctrine of Discovery, 2.

15. In this article, I use Chamorrx(s) and Filipinx(s) as gender-neutral designations.

16. See Johnson 21 U.S. 543 (1823).
17. The Insular Case Balzac v. Porto Rico, 258 US 298 (1921) ensured that full constitutional
protections did not apply in the insular colonies.
18. For more on how race was used for and against overseas expansion, see Love, Race Over
Empire.
19. See Thayer, Our New Possessions, Langdell Status of Our New Territories; and Lowell,
Status of Our New Possessions. Lowells influence is particularly apparent in Justice
Whites opinion in Downes that cemented the doctrine of incorporation.
20. US War Department, Annual Reports of the War Department, 26.
21. Balzac 258 U.S. 298. In this manner, Taft came full circle as a career colonialist. Magoon
also contributed congressional reports and internal policy papers further delineating this
new kind of legal architecture.
22. Torruella, The Insular Cases, 297.
23. After this, US courts continued to deny Filipinxs living in US states the right to naturalize,
even to those who participated in military efforts during World War I with the hopes
that that would fast-track their appeals for naturalization. US citizenship was ultimately
conferred by Congress to those living in the Virgin Islands in 1927, in Guam in 1950, and in
the Northern Marianas in 1986. Congress denied citizenship to Micronesia, the Marshall
Islands, and Palau before these places became US protectorates, and as recently as June
2016, the Supreme Court turned down an appeal that sought to reverse an appellate court
ruling affirming the denial of citizenship rights to American Samoans, who instead are
classified as American nationals. See Tuaua v. United States, 788 F.3d 300 (D.C. Cir. 2015).
24. The first of the four was Lt. Gen. Nelson Miles, who before then was known as the most
accomplished Indian-fighting commander in the US Army. He led forces during the Ghost
Dance War against the Lakota and also defeated Chief Joseph during the Nez Perce War.
The other three were Maj. Gen. John R. Brooke, Maj. Gen. Guy Vernon Henry, and Maj.
Gen. George Whitfield Davis.
25. A good example was how in 189899, US troops in Puerto Rico hunted revanchist mobs
that raided the haciendas of their former landlords and employers (i.e., before establishing
an insular police). See Pic, Puerto Rico 1898, 85100. In 1898, they also hunted down
rebel bands led by a proindependence radical bandit known as guila Blanca. See Santiago-
Valles, Subject People, 88.
26. Estades Font, Presencia militar.
27. US War Department, Report on the Census of Porto Rico, 1899.
28. Dookhan, History of the Virgin Islands.
29. At the peak of its military presence in Puerto Rico in the 1970s and 1980s, the Pentagon
operated over twenty-five military installations on the big island, Vieques, and Culebra
and owned or rented about 13 percent of all arable land in the entire archipelago. See
Fernndez, Prisoners of Colonialism, 63. Puerto Ricos military/geostrategic significance
increased during the Cold War. Most bases have since closed. There are still a few military
installations in Puerto Rico but they are of minor significance compared to the bases that
have closed.
30. Subic Bay closed in 1992 after the Filipinx government refused to renew the Navys lease. In
2015, the Philippines reopened the base for its own military use and for limited use by the
US military.
31. Most notably, US sugar barons wanted to fill the vacuum left by Cubas war-torn sugarcane
industry that had dominated markets in the eighteenth century.

32. See Coulthards introduction to Red Skin, White Masks. His critique is an intervention
that arises from conversations within critical indigenous studies, but Coulthard also both
critiques and expands on similar observations by Rosa Luxembourg and David Harvey
about the projection of primitive accumulation into the modern era. See Luxembourg,
Accumulation of Capital, and Harvey, New Imperialism, chap. 4.
33. For example, a 1901 law responding to antiimperialist pressures in Washington DC limited
the amount of land a corporation could own in Puerto Rico to 500 acres. It was, however,
virtually unenforced for the next four decades as a result of the influence that cane sugar
interests enjoyed among local officials. See Ayala and Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American
Century, 37.
34. See McDonnell, Dispossession of the American Indian.
35. See Otis, Dawes Act.
36. It is important to remind the reader that most of the original 1901 Insular Cases were about
disputes regarding tariffs and trade.
37. Dick, U.S. Tax Imperialism, 33, no. 179, and 3641.
38. Ibid, 51.
39. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico, 91, 261.
40. In Puerto Ricos mostly agrarian economy, the middle and upper middle classes consisted
largely of nineteenth-century European immigrants and their descendants who owned
small-and medium-size plantations. As slavery was phased out and ultimately abolished,
a wage system was gradually introduced. Until 1898, a majority of Puerto Ricans were
poor and illiterate, had short life expectancies, and found more opportunity in subsistence
farming than in most other forms of labor. In one debate about whether islanders gained
or lost lands when they became US colonial subjects, Csar Ayala and Laird Bergad
have shown that the number of landless families decreased between 1899 and 1910 as
the number of farms increased during the first decades of the twentieth century. This
was due to the fact that the economic changes brought about by the US invasion injected
capital into the local economy that allowed some Puerto Ricans to purchase small farms
in lands formerly belonging to nineteenth-century landowners with large holdings. The
new economy also incentivized cultivating new areas. However, in a later book, Ayala
and coauthor Rafael Bernabe clarify that this new system produced tremendous levels of
inequality in terms of the concentration of land in the farms of more powerful interests.
Thus, by 1935 there was a total of 52,790 farms in Puerto Rico. A very small share of these
(2.4 percent) included large farms with more than 200 Spanish acres (cuerdas), although
these held 45.2 percent of all land under cultivation. On the other hand, farms with up to
10 cuerdas constituted 51 percent of all farms, but they held only 11 percent of land under
cultivation. See Ayala and Bergad. Rural Puerto Rico, 7476, and Ayala and Bernabe,
Puerto Rico in the American Century, 50.
41. One of the companies that dominated the Puerto Rican sugar industry after 1898 was
the American Sugar Company. At the same time that this company gained control of
thousands of acres of sugar fields in Puerto Rico in the early 1900s, it was also acquiring and
launching sugar beet subsidiaries in recently settled territories of the western frontier such
as Utah, Idaho, and Oregon, particularly through a joint venture with leaders of the LDS
Church, that is, at a time soon after the Mormons had settled the region. See Havemeyer,
Biographical Record, 69.
42. See Merleaux, Sugar and Civilization, 43.
43. Ibid., 18690.
44. In 1908, 81 percent of land holdings in the Philippines were cultivated directly by their

owners. By 1938, that figure had fallen to 49 percent. By the 1950s, approximately two-
thirds of the Filipinx population was left landless and often had to turn to sharecropping to
survive. Fast, Imperialism and Bourgeois Dictatorship, 76.
45. Due to its comparably smaller size and more distant location, throughout the twentieth
century, the United States saw Guams value as one of primarily geostrategic/military
importance. There was no large sugarcane industry there. There was, however, agricultural
development in the form of a small copra export industry (copra is the meat of the
coconut). There were also businesses set up around the military bases and a growing market
of consumers benefitting from those bases. The Philippiness designation as a formal colony
of the United States ended in 1946 when Congress granted its independence. However,
discounting Japanese occupation between 1942 and 1945, the archipelago remained a US
economic and military neocolony of the United States throughout the twentieth century.
Some would argue it remains so to this day. On this last point, see Rodrguez, Migrants
for Export.
46. See Dick, U.S. Tax Imperialism in Puerto Rico; and Ayala, Sugar Kingdom.
47. After serving as a showcase for this model of capitalist development in Latin America,
Puerto Rico lost its usefulness when some of that production was outsourced to other
parts of the global south with cheaper costs, limited unionization, and less stringent
safety protections and environmental laws. This led to the passing of more tax exemptions
for outside interests in section 936 of the 1976 Federal Tax Reform Act to try to further
incentivize capital investments and outside-owned production, but eventually, President
Clinton and the republican-led Congress eliminated section 936. See Quiones-Prez and
Seda-Irizarry, Wealth Extraction.
48. The negative impact of US cabotage laws in Puerto Rico was attested to by a 2015 report
on Puerto Ricos downturn written by economist Anne Krueger, a former manager director
of the IMF. See Working Group for the Fiscal and Economic Recovery of Puerto Rico,
Puerto Rico Fiscal and Economic Growth Plan.
49. The economy in Puerto Rico still relies on manufacturing, mainly of pharmaceuticals
(approx. 64 percent of manufacturing in 2014). Thus, total manufacturing constituted 47.5
percent of GDP but only created 8.6 percent of total employment in 2014. By comparison,
tourism contributes roughly 6 percent of the islands GDP and generates about 1.53
percent of employment. Also, about 75 percent of that manufacturing GDP is transferred
out of Puerto Rico annually. See Commonwealth of Puerto Rico Planning Board,
Economic Report to the Governor.
50. See US Congress, Exemption from Taxation of Porto Rican Bonds.
51. See Pic de Silva, Public Debt; and Catal Oliveras, Promesa Rota. In the 1930s1940s
the Puerto Rican government also gained additional avenues for taxation. See Dick, Tax
Imperialism.
52. The public debt rose sharply during this period as the Puerto Rican government increased
public spending to create 40 percent new jobs in those years. See Quiones-Prez and Seda-
Irizarry, Wealth Extraction.
53. Quiones-Prez and Seda-Irizarry, Wealth Extraction.
54. This slide into further bond debt is made evident in a report coauthored by James Tobin, a
Yale University economist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1981. Looking back,
the warnings and predictions in that report about Puerto Ricos potential slide into a severe
debt spiral were astonishingly accurate. See Committee to Study Puerto Ricos Finances,
Informe al Gobernador.

55. Champagne, Breaking the Cycle; Schilling, Getting Jobbed.

56. US Census, 2010 Census Island Areas.
57. Bishaw, Poverty: 2009 and 2010.
58. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Economy at a Glance; US Census, 2010 Census Island Areas.
59. Kossler, One Year Post-Hovensa; Virgin Islands Consortium, Hovensa and Wapa Effect.
60. Marianas Variety. Report.
61. Heidebrecht, Dependency and Development; Undercurrent News, Starkists American
Samoa Plant.
62. US Census, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Population: 2010.
63. For the 2014 Puerto Rico debt estimate, see Oficina del Gobenador, Informe econmico al
gobernador. For the 2014 Connecticut estimate, see Walczak and Malm, Where Does Your
State Stand. See also Norcross and Gonzalea, Ranking the States by Fiscal Condition.
64. Chappatta, More in Debt than Puerto Rico.
65. Daleno, Puerto Rico Debt Crisis is Lesson for Guam.
66. McGee, Navajos Ready to Bond.
67. Hartfordbusiness.com, Foxwoods, Mashantuckets.
68. Miranda Gierbolini and de Jess Collazo. Thinking about the Personal Debt; and Wessler,
Endless Debt.
69. US First Circuit Court (and native Puerto Rican) Judge Juan R. Torruella has stated in
various law review articles that the 1901 Insular Cases established a regime of political
apartheid. See Torruella, The Insular Cases, 286. In the Sanchez Valle opinions, the
justices curiously avoid mentioning the Insular Cases but they also steered away from
overruling this precedent. Six months before these opinions were published, in the cases
oral arguments before the Supreme Court Justice Bryer mentioned that if we simply write
an opinion and it says, Puerto Rico is sovereign, that has enormous implications. . . . The
Insular Cases are totally changed in their application. . . . The political implications Ill just
stay away from. See US Supreme Court, Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle: Oral Arguments.
70. Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle, 579 U.S. ___ (2016).
71. Dayen, How Hedge Funds.
72. This contrasts with the financial control board that Congress imposed on Washington,
DC, from 1995 to 2001 since in return for that oversight, in 1997, the federal government
assumed the citys debts, operated its courts and prisons, and even took over the citys
long-underfunded pensions. As of the writing of this article, Congress has refused to even
consider the idea that they would offer Puerto Rico any kind of rescue or stimulus package.
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Radical History Review

Repeating Islands of Debt

Historicizing the Transcolonial Relationality

On the third weekend of January 2016 approximately three hundred thousand

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Figure 1. Street performer as

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rialism and neoliberal capitalism in Puerto Rico.5 Relational historiography traces

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The Legal Origins of Puerto Ricos Transcolonial Connections

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In response, Harvard law professors James Bradley Thayer, Christopher Columbus

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Geostrategic and Capitalist Transcolonial Formations

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corporationsseemed to be voluntary on the surface but were actually made to

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Puerto Ricos Contemporary Transcolonial Relationality: From Military Occupation

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tribal governments to access tax-exempt bond loans for nonessential government

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nantly agrarian economy provoked hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to

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their public pronouncements on the PROMESA law, most members of Congress

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3. Lyons, Few Puerto Ricans; lvarez Jaimes, Evidente desgaste.

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15. In this article, I use Chamorrx(s) and Filipinx(s) as gender-neutral designations.

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