Neocolonial Necropolitics in U.S.-Puerto Rican Relations
May 2025
The “Caribbean Basin,” (Eaton et al., Fig 1), a crescent-shaped collection of islands, lies at the intersection of the Greater and Lesser Antilles and the Caribbean Sea. Among the various water-locked landmasses exists a tropical archipelago with the official title of Puerto Rico (Piasecki and Harmsen, 1), though it is known vernacularly as Borikén (Castanha). This minor discrepancy in nomenclature is remarkably representative of the island’s turbulent history with foreign colonial powers. Puerto Rico has a relatively modest surface area and population (Martinuzzi et al., 288–297), but it has played a surprisingly significant role on the global stage for over 500 years. However, Puerto Rico’s political relevance is not a result of its aggressively expansionist foreign policy—as was the case for most other prominent nation-states throughout history—but rather the exact opposite. Puerto Rico experienced a half-millennium of colonial subjugation at the hands of the English and Spanish monarchies (Caban, 516). As of a 1983 United Nations conference, Puerto Rico has been internationally recognized as a “commonwealth” of “non-colonial status” (Leibowitz, 163). However, colonial dynamics continue to pervade U.S.-Puerto Rican relations, particularly in the form of biopolitical control (Khoshneviss, 1-15) through a politics of sovereign exception. Khoshneviss argues that these themes are not strictly remnants of a previous era but actively influence modern-day structures of power, raising a crucial question: How does a supposedly “post-colonial” political relationship continue to exhibit colonialist dynamics, and what philosophical justifications inform this paradox?
Malignant Citizenship
One stark example of an ongoing colonial dynamic in Puerto Rico can be observed within U.S. citizenship policy; there are three main points of interest along Puerto Rico’s legislative timeline. This includes the Foraker Act of 1900, the Jones Act of 1917, and the Nationality Act of 1940 (Caban 13). On the surface, these government decisions appear to be sincere efforts at enhancing legal clarity regarding access to citizenship; they are in reality the veiled innerworkings of the colonial machine. Ileana Diaz, an author in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo, coins the term “malignant citizenship” in her article Malignant Citizenship: Race, Imperialism, and Puerto Rico-United States Entanglements to describe how access to citizenship is an inescapably biopolitical form of control. “As much as citizenship denotes the rights of belonging to a polity,” Diaz writes, “it also ensnares bodies into the control of such entities”. She later elaborates on this definition, explaining that intentional inclusion/exclusion from citizenship represents the “ways in which colonial power is able to differentiate its citizens based on race and location” and creates new sociopolitical hierarchies. Puerto Rico exemplifies this colonialist structure of citizenship, as it was labeled an “unincorporated territory” containing “statutory citizens” —two linguistically charged terms with the explicit intention of alienating Puerto Ricans from broader American society (Cordova 49-59). They are pushed to the margins of the political sphere, as they are forced to occupy an oxymoronic identity of a citizen both “inside” and “outside” of the American nation. Puerto Rico is referred to as a territory, not a state, and citizenship-related policy applies differently to Puerto Ricans than mainland Americans. This represents a politics of “sovereign exception”, where the state “exempts itself from its own laws or standards of justice” (Cordova 49). Citizenship in Puerto Rico functions as a biopolitical mechanism to further the colonial project by creating arbitrary distinctions between Puerto Ricans and other groups of Americans.
The State of Exception
The U.S. perpetuates politics of sovereign exception in not only the context of citizenship & policy action, but also during its process of providing Puerto Rico with disaster relief. America exercises biopolitical regulation through a convoluted tactic of intentional abandonment during times of crises premised upon the “let die” approach, a process where a sovereign power refuses to aid a subjugated population until they reach the point of peril (Agamben and Heller-Roazen). The United States government was aware in advance of the catastrophe Hurricane Maria would create when it reached Puerto Rico yet made no effort to provide aid or alert Puerto Rico of this crucial information before the storm hit (Khoshneviss, 1-15). The practice of neglect—both to warn Puerto Rico of said crisis as well as inadequate provision of economic aid—effectively redistributes the responsibility of reparation to that of Puerto Rico alone. Khoshneviss stresses that this pattern is not unintentional, but rather represents a deliberate strategy of biopolitical control. By withholding essential information and restricting resources, the United States shifts the burden away from the colonizer and places it squarely on the shoulders of the colonized. The naturalization of disaster as an ontological component of Puerto Rican existence represents America’s condemnation of Puerto Rico to a circumstance termed the “state of exception” (Agamben 87). This condition is characterized by a sovereign state’s intentional failure to address crises approaching the colony that it (the state) predicted in advance (Mbembe, 11-40), a process clearly utilized by the United States to subjugate Puerto Rico. In Slow Emergencies: Temporality and the Racialized Biopolitics of Emergency Governance , a research article regarding state securitization of marginalized bodies, Mbembe’s definition is further deconstructed. The article explicitly draws a connection to the role of colonial influence, stating, “the state of exception…is contingent on banal practices that sustain colonial rule” (Anderson et al., 628). This reveals a layer of further nuance, for it demonstrates that the United States engages in a necropolitical relationship with Puerto Rico; a practice of biopower situated within a violently colonial context (Anderson et al). Therefore, the practice is not applied to American citizens on the mainland and is instead exclusive to those living in Puerto Rico. The extreme degree of neglect leveled upon the Puerto Rican population is understood to be rooted in a colonial politics of sovereign exception, similar to Diaz’s malignant citizenship.
Ideological Justifications
However, it is crucial to not exclusively consider the colonial implications of U.S. policy but additionally confront the underlying ideologies that justify said systemic violence. Aníbal Quijano, a Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker at the forefront of critical theory in Latin America, develops and establishes the philosophical perspective that underpins Western colonialist incentives. Quijano’s primary focus is on the way in which the racialized dynamic of Western settler colonialism (and therefore the aforementioned neocolonial necropolitics) has been directly facilitated by European dualism. The concept of “rationality” that emerged during the Enlightenment created a dichotomy between the “rational” Westerner (who represented the “subject”) and the “irrational” foreign Other (who thus became the “object” of subjugation at the hands of the white man).The designation of the non-Westerner to the position of the “object” then enabled a structure of race-based superiority and inferiority. This dynamic can be understood as the foundational rationale used by Western powers (such as America) to justify heinous acts of colonial violence upon vulnerable nations like Puerto Rico.
Conclusion
Puerto Rico represents an example of enduring colonial oppression, where authentic sovereignty is an illusion rather than reality. Citizenship serves as a tool of the imperial empire; it unforgivingly assigns a cryptic legal status to the Puerto Rican population and differentiate them from mainland Americans. The colonial dynamic between America and Puerto Rico covertly reveals itself through biopolitical policy action that functions to determine which lives are worth living, and which are acceptable to sacrifice. Malignant citizenship and disaster colonialism both perpetuate the politics of “sovereign exception”, a biopolitical framework that privileges the sovereign state. These exercises of biopower are a strategy to maintain imperial control, as the colonial project is firmly underpinned by racialized rhetoric developed by Western rationality. Puerto Rico’s modern relationship with the U.S. is situated within a colonial context that enables the state to determine who lives and who dies.