Puerto Rico: The Bastard Child of Hispanic Heritage Month
Last week I went on a job interview for a Latino-run non-profit, and I have rarely felt so dismissed. Over the course of the interview, we talked about the work of this organization, which is meant to foster leadership and professional and educational opportunities for Latino communities. The organization paints itself as an epicenter of aspirations, and I mentioned how this mission resonates with me because the Latino experience is more than just the immigration narrative of poor farmers. That Latinos come from all sorts of backgrounds and that the established narratives exclude a large number of Latinos. I mentioned how, as a Puerto Rican, I come from a military family, and the narratives around Latinos in the media and the political sphere completely overlook my experience.
The person interviewing me then interjected by emphasizing how the work they do with migrants is central to their mission and changed the subject.
To be clear, the experience of migrant farmers is important, but it is equally important to the experience of the millions of Latinos who don’t come from that background. Many Latino groups are war refugees, political exiles, and victims of domestic abuse. The reasons for migrating to a country are numerous, and yet, the narrative that non-profit organizations, media, and arts organizations cling to and promote the most is that of the migrant farmer — a profession that brings with it a noble veneer of hard working, humble, family oriented people who just want to make an honest buck and whose children inevitably achieve wealth and prestige in the promised land of the United States.
In fact, the immigrant narrative is one of guaranteed success. Failure is never mentioned, and the families of immigrants, regardless of the background, 100% of the time result in wealth and prestige. This is the narrative that mainstream media and Latino organizations, who in and of themselves are dedicated to a narrative of aspiration and success, promote relentlessly, and the message of the person interviewing me was clear: We only like Latinos whose backstory makes white people feel good and secures our funding.
This has never been the Puerto Rican story. We aren’t in this country to achieve an American Dream that even white people recognize is a scam. We are in this country as a war prize, invaded in July 1898, only to have our globally renowned coffee and sugar businesses destroyed, our agricultural business gutted to the point that 90% of our food is imported from the US rather than grown on the island, a third of our women sterilized and experimented on between 1930–70 for the sake of testing birth control medications, our political leaders assassinated, and activists disappeared, tortured, and murdered en masse for 125 years. On top of all of that, the United States gave us citizenship during World War One with the expressed desire to draft a substantial amount of Puerto Ricans so that white boys in Iowa wouldn’t be drafted. We are cannon fodder, and both of my grandfathers were drafted into Korea and Vietnam and barely survived, only to return home broken, empty shells of their former selves, and my family suffered because of it. The Puerto Rican story is not so much one of aspiration but of survival.
Puerto Ricans are often derided as party-goers, wild, dramatic, chaotic, and the like. Puerto Ricans are never spoken of with respect, until someone like Lin Manuel Miranda makes a loving ode to his colonial masters. Assimilation, through eradicating Spanish and loyalty to Puerto Rico, is a threatening and traumatic term, whereas other Latino groups, particularly those who lead the Latino political movements, want to assimilate. The goal of groups like the DREAMERS is to demean and dehumanize their birth countries so that they can be accepted by the United States. For Puerto Ricans, the horrors the US government makes us stand apart from a political, artistic, and social movement that desires only to be made part of the American fabric.
This is emphasized most during “National Hispanic Heritage Month” Sept 15-Oct 15, which should be renamed as National Mexican Heritage Month, since the only country who is even recognized is Mexico. Five countries mark their independence day as September 15, none of which are Mexico (whose day is the 16th), and yet I attended a Mexican independence day ceremony sponsored by the Consulate of Mexico on the 15th. Coverage of Hispanic Heritage Month solely focuses on Mexican traditions such as Day of the Dead and mariachis. The imagery of this month focuses entirely on Mexican culture and history, at the expense of the 20 other Spanish speaking nations, including Puerto Rico.
Yet it is Puerto Rico who is the most forgotten. While my Mexican friends and colleagues speak of their noble ancestors, I can’t help but think of the alcoholism, violence, child abuse, and infidelity that characterizes my own ancestors, many of whom were soldiers, which is to say, killers. Men trained to take lives for an empire that not only discarded them, but forced their children and grandchildren to live in a country where they couldn’t celebrate their culture. Nobody likes to talk about Puerto Ricans, we are a buzzkill, but more importantly, we stand as evidence of how evil and destructive this country is to Latin America. The price of assimilation and submission to Americans is social decay, economic stagnation, and an early death. Puerto Rico is bankrupt and overrun with crime and corruption, all thanks to the United States. But at least we have citizenship!
This is the story Hispanic Heritage Month doesn’t want to tell, and that this guy who interviewed me didn’t want to confront. I haven’t been called a spic since I lived in the South as a teenager, but he might as well have called me one. The existence of Puerto Ricans threatens the narrative that the US is a land of freedom and wealth and guaranteed success. We are the bastard children of Latin America, and this interviewer might as well have told me, Hey spic, we have no room for you here.