With its pristine beaches and majestic mountains, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is often packaged for tourists as a tropical paradise within reach, just 1,000 miles southeast of Miami.
“The island is beautiful, but the commercials are selling a paradise bliss that the residents of Puerto Rico rarely experience,” says Ignangeli Salinas-Muñiz, a Rackham political science Ph.D. candidate and 2024 Anti-Racism Collaborative Grant recipient.
Salinas-Muñiz researches U.S. occupied territories and commonwealths where racial and ethnic minorities experience limited democracy: Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Her current focus is on her homeland, Puerto Rico.
While every U.S. territory has different local governing bodies, different democratic processes to elect local officials, and different relationships to U.S. citizenship, they are all connected by their lack of meaningful representation in the U.S. federal government. Citizens residing in territories cannot vote in U.S. presidential elections, they do not have electoral college representation, and they do not elect voting representatives or senators to the U.S. Congress.
Salinas-Muñiz notes that if territories had representation in the Senate, there would be an additional eight senators to represent them and advocate for their needs.
Consequences of Imperialism
“The fact that many people experience poverty in the territories is a really important thing to keep in mind when we consider voting rights,” Salinas-Munñz says. “The conditions of U.S. imperialism create poverty—and one of the things that makes it hard for territories to negotiate access to relief programs provided at a federal level is the fact that they’re already so poor.”
In Puerto Rico, 42.2 percent of the population was living in poverty in 2022 according to Data USA. By comparison, looking at the same year, the official poverty rate in the U.S. was 11.5 percent.
She also notes that many territories offer the United States strategic military advantage on a global stage without the ability to elect their commander in chief.
“American students get taught about the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II, without much mention that Hawaii was a territory in 1941 when the attack happened. Guam was also attacked during World War II, but that rarely gets mentioned. Furthermore, one out of every eight residents of Guam works in the military, and the military owns one-third of their land. It’s their main economy, and yet they can’t vote for the executive,” she says.
Seeing Whiteness
One reason that Salinas-Muñiz believes that some territories become part of our national narrative—and are even granted statehood—is their proximity to whiteness.
“When the United States was incorporating states, one of the most important conditions was that they could assimilate into the United States—and that is greatly premised on the idea of whiteness,” she says, citing a nativistic law repealed in the 1960s limiting the speaking of Spanish in New Mexico as an example.
“All of the contemporary territories are populated by racial minorities: Pacific Islander, Black , and Latino residents,” Salinas-Muñiz says.
In part, Salinas-Muñiz believes the narratives about the reasons for U.S. imperialism rely on a racialized dynamic.
“Proponents of imperialism say, ‘These people can’t govern themselves.’ I remember in 2019, the president of the United States called Puerto Ricans ‘one of the most corrupt people on Earth.’ But when those conversations happen, they really don’t mention how territorial structures create those conditions,” she says.
Engaging Through Research
With funds from the 2024 Anti-Racism Collaborative Grant, Salinas-Muñiz is conducting a survey to build better understandings around Puerto Rican perceptions of their local government’s decision-making power, local officials’ relationships to the United States, and the federally imposed Fiscal Oversight Board.
When Puerto Rico declared it could not pay back its debt, Congress and President Barack Obama appointed a Fiscal Oversight Board to govern the commonwealth. According to Salinas-Muniz, this had an impact on Puerto Rican engagement with local elections.
“In 2012, before the oversight board was installed, voter turnout for local elections in Puerto Rico was around 78 percent. People voted. In 2016, turnout decreased to 55 percent, which was the lowest turnout in the history of Puerto Rico since their commonwealth. In 2020, we see similar turnout numbers and a 15 percent decrease in the number of registered voters,” she says.
While the decrease in voter engagement might be due to a number of factors, Salinas-Muñiz believes that many Puerto Ricans find the relationship between the U.S. and local governments—and the responsibility of each—to be blurry, which can make accountability a big challenge.
Most importantly, though, Salinas-Muñiz wants to know and share more about the perceptions of Puerto Ricans through her survey.
“Most national surveys don’t include Puerto Rico or any of the territories, which means we know very little about how these residents of the territories actually think about their own relationships with democracy.”
She notes that one reason that the territories are not represented in most U.S. surveys is that the data is incredibly expensive. “I’m grateful for the Anti-Racism Collaborative Grant, which will help fund this project and fill this data gap.”
Imagining New Futures
Another important aspect of Salinas-Muñiz’s scholarly work involves working with Mara C. Ostfeld, research director at the Center for Racial Justice and associate research professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, on a project that aims to interrogate the internalized distrust many Puerto Ricans feel about their ability to govern themselves and explore if alternate narratives can expand their political imaginations.
“Annexation and sovereignty didn’t occur on residents’ terms. They occurred on the terms of the people who governed them—and that usually does not lead to good outcomes,” Salinas-Muñiz says.
“There is legitimate fear among Puerto Rican residents that the United States could abandon them and just put them in a very precarious position. But we want to see if a change in narrative can help people start to think, ‘Hey, maybe the options that you’ve been given are not the only options that exist.’”
How Rackham Helps
In addition to her Anti-Racism Collaborative Grant, Salinas-Muñiz is the recipient of a Rackham Conference Travel Grant, supporting her travel to the International Society of Political Psychology conference in Santiago, Chile.
“The conference was extremely helpful,” she says. “Imperialism and colonialism are not frequently discussed in political science conversations in the United States. They are mostly seen as things of the past, things that happened long ago. Being with an international community at the conference is a reminder that this is something that many other people study and experience at the same time.”