Making Never-Never Land : Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico

A series of crises, from outsized debt to climate fueled disasters, have led to massive protests and brought Puerto Rico greater visibility. Monica Jimenez argues that to fully understand how and why Puerto Rico finds itself in this current moment of precarity, we must look to a larger history of US settler colonialism and racial exclusion in law.

Puerto Rico has been an “unincorporated territory” of the United States for over a century. For much of that time, the archipelago has been mostly invisible to US residents and neglected by the government. However, a series of crises in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, from outsized debt to climate fueled disasters, have led to massive protests and brought Puerto Rico greater visibility.

Mónica A. Jiménez argues that to fully understand how and why Puerto Rico finds itself in this current moment of precarity, we must look to a larger history of US settler colonialism and racial exclusion in law. The federal policies and jurisprudence that created Puerto Rico exist within a larger pantheon of exclusionary, race-based laws and policies that have carved out “states of exception” for racial undesirables: Native Americans, African Americans, and the inhabitants of the insular territories. This legal regime has allowed the federal government plenary or complete power over these groups. Jiménez brings these histories together to demonstrate that despite Puerto Rico’s unique position as a twenty-first-century colony, its path to that place was not exceptional.