Boricua Power: A Political History of Puerto Ricans in the United States

Introduction

Introduction Every social act is an exercise of power, every social relationship is a power equation, and every social group or system is an organization of power.1 Power here. Power there. Power is everywhere (Boulding 1990, 131). Power exists as much in the way that lovers relate to each other as in electoral contests for political office.2 We’ve learned that power can be conveyed and shaped by conversation and by the way we organize the space in which we live and work (Korda 1975; Goodsell 1988). However, though it seems as though we know more now about the many places where power can be found, we don’t know much about how power grows or is lost. Existing theories of power avoid or fail to adequately explain how power gets created and destroyed. In most cases, the reason for this failure is simply that these theories insist on treating power as if it were an object. Power is viewed as an instrument, a structure, a possession, a finite object like gold that can be held, lost, or taken from others. Power, in this sense, is never destroyed or created. It is simply hoarded, taken or passed from one person, institution, or state to another. But power, this study argues, is not object but movement. It is not fixed but dynamic. It is not dead but alive. It is always either building up or breaking down. Power is always a movement initiated not by solitary individuals but between couples, groups, and communities. Because it is something we set in motion, power is in fact a dance.3 The deficiencies of the thing-like approach to power become clear in popular language, current debates, and history. During the last fifteen years, for example, analysts and pundits have made extravagant claims about the emerging power of the Puerto Rican and Latino community in the United States based simply on the expectation of growing population size. The “Year of the Hispanic” quickly turned into the “Decade of the 1 Hispanic.” The reality is that though Puerto Ricans and Latinos now have more people, they are not, by most people’s estimates, any more powerful. None of the predictions considered whether having more people would really allow Latinos to make more policy decisions, set more political agendas, or influence and manipulate the self-interest of others (see Sanchez 1994). The reason is that these predictions assume, with many other theoretical approaches, that power is thing-like, something that can be amassed by pure addition, piece by piece or person by person. Power is not, in reality, anything like that. The analysis in this study of Puerto Rican community history demonstrates that, frequently, power is amassed according to processes that are exactly at odds with the thing-like approach. In fact, being small in numbers , having little money, and controlling few votes did not prevent Puerto Ricans from gaining power during the early part of the twentieth century. That story of a powerful, yet small Puerto Rican community in the early twentieth century has much to teach us about the nature of power and how Latinos or any group can acquire it. Contrary to the predictions of Latino emergence, Puerto Ricans today have very little power. They lack what Isaac has called the “enduring capacity to act” in society (1987, 142). In simplistic and crude terms, Puerto Ricans are acted upon. And yet we know that Puerto Ricans do, of course, act. Is it that when they do so, they leave no real mark? The broad scholarly and popular consensus seems to be that when Puerto Ricans act, the tracks and imprints of their impact quickly disappear. The social landscape and its inhabitants remain relatively unchanged by their presence. It is as if Puerto Ricans walk perpetually on wet sand. This conclusion is a common and popular one, even among Puerto Ricans, and yet, basically, it is not true. Puerto Ricans are generally not that powerful a group. However, in different historical periods, Puerto Ricans have increased their power as well as lost it. How did the Puerto Rican community get and then lose power? The existing theoretical approaches to explaining power offer little help. The main reason is that most cannot explain what makes power possible. In some theories, power is reduced to the making of decisions (Dahl 1957). But power is, as Dahl’s critics have aptly pointed out, not simply the making of decisions. It is more...