Territorial status

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 The United States wrested Puerto Rico from Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War, along with Cuba, the Philippines and the Mariana Islands.

Shortly after, a series of Supreme Court rulings called the “Insular Cases” – made by the same court that found racial segregation constitutional in Plessy v. Ferguson – deemed most of America’s new territories to be inhabited by “alien races,” ungovernable by “Anglo-Saxon principles.”

These cases labeled America’s island territories as incorporated or unincorporated, each with a different set of rights. Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory. It is similar to U.S. states in many ways but its taxpaying residents lack voting representation in Congress, cannot vote for president and do not enjoy all the same constitutional rights as other Americans.

Without a vote in Congress, Puerto Rico’s needs are not well represented in Washington.

Puerto Rico’s legal status all but defines politics on the island.

Rather than offering clear left- or right-wing policies, Puerto Rico’s two main political parties are traditionally defined by their stance on statehood. The Popular Democratic Party generally favors keeping Puerto Rico a territory; the New Progressive Party is pro-statehood. Both have Democratic- and Republican-aligned members.

The New Progressive Party’s grip on the statehood cause loosened in 2020. Some 215,000 Puerto Ricans who voted for statehood voted against its pro-statehood gubernatorial candidate, Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia, who won his race very narrowly. The New Progressive Party’s candidate for resident commissioner – Puerto Rico’s nonvoting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives – received 132,000 fewer votes than statehood did.



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