Big Media's Big Fail over U.S. colonialism
Castillo San Felipe del Morro, San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 30, 2019. Photo by Refrina via Shutterstock
At a time when we are naming systems of oppression, why are some journalists avoiding the word colonialism?
The slaughter of Mexican Americans in El Paso, Texas, the murder of George Floyd, the wave of anti-Asian violence, and the January 6 violent assault on the U.S. Capitol by throngs of mostly white men have forced many U.S. institutions to grapple with a form of white supremacy that permeates this nation. This introspection has included an examination of the media. In an age of inescapable social media scrutiny, newsrooms are being held accountable for racism within and being pressured to dismantle the white-centered gaze that has dominated many narratives.
But this reckoning with the legacy of the nation’s violent, racist founding has left untouched another harsh U.S. reality: colonialism. This form of domination started with invasions and purchases of islands full of Black and Brown people and Pacific Islanders.
The United States possesses colonies, euphemistically referred to as “territories”: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands — St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John — American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Many USians — a term that appropriately describes residents of the United States, instead of defining Americans as only people of the United States — think of these places as vacation destinations or sites of devastation, or don’t know them at all.
In a colonial situation, the colonial power has ultimate authority and rule. It politically steers a colony as it economically extracts from it. This has been the U.S. relationship with its colonies for more than a century.
Street Art in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Photo by Erica González Martínez
Skipping over a colonial reality
Even though a Web search will yield decades of scholarly work and articles on U.S. colonialism, USians — including many news leaders — don’t think of this country as a colonial power. So it follows that accurate descriptions — colony, colonial, and colonialism— are absent from stories, editorials, and broadcasting panels, as well as school curricula and history courses.
These omissions fly against a reality in Puerto Rico. A thicket of U.S. policies and laws are arbitrarily applied to Puerto Rico — from writing it out of bankruptcy protections to subjecting it to unfair maritime shipping restrictions — many in the interests of U.S. corporations. Puerto Ricans recognize that whether it’s through Congress’ imposition of an unelected fiscal control board or through essentially an $1.1 billion annual tax on the island, that the treatment of Puerto Rico is colonial. What’s more, references to colonialism are used by Puerto Rican leaders across the political spectrum. And legislation to decolonize the island speaks to the colonial dilemma.
Legal cases and laws, in no uncertain terms, have also cracked open the illusion of U.S. democracy and “self-governance” in Puerto Rico. In Sanchez Valle v Puerto Rico, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the island does not have its own power to separately try defendants who have been convicted in a federal court. The court concluded that the “oldest roots of Puerto Rico’s power to prosecute lie in federal soil.” This ruling flew in the face of the arguable self-governance that had been established through the creation in 1952 of Puerto Rico as a commonwealth, or Estado Libre Asociado. In protest, then-Governor Alejandro García Padilla requested time before the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization.
A few weeks after the ruling, Congress and then-President Obama ushered in a law known by its acronym as PROMESA, ostensibly to provide Puerto Rico with a means to negotiate its massive unaudited debt. Under this law, a Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) was created to restructure the debt. PROMESA allows the unelected FOMB to override the government of Puerto Rico, and the board is doing exactly that as it takes a hatchet to public services and institutions.
Puerto Rico’s challenges
Hurricane María, Trump’s attacks on the island, and projections about how islanders displaced to the states would vote in U.S. elections provoked a flurry of articles that gradually waned. In story after story, the background too many reporters typically offer on Puerto Rico is a reference to crises the island faces and explanations about how residents of the Island cannot vote in presidential elections and don’t have congressional representation with full voting rights. The focus on voter disenfranchisement is used to mask long-standing policies and a history of violent treatment that comprise a colonial operating system. Instead of doing the work, producers, editors, and reporters ignore U.S. colonialism and place Puerto Rico in a box that is familiar to them.
This U.S. narrative defines the experience of Puerto Rico as a civil rights chronicle — a minority community struggling to win the right to vote and being blocked from the opportunity to assimilate into a “benevolent” empire. This is a deceptive and ahistorical narrative. Puerto Rico is a country of people with their own identity, language, and customs that existed long before the United States attacked the island in 1898. Puerto Rico was forced into the U.S. sphere through war, with an ensuing treaty between one imperial power, Spain, and an emerging one, the United States. Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Filipinos and Chamorros were excluded from that mesa.
The intrusion of the United States in the years of battles and tension between Spain and colonies seeking autonomy was prompted by a U.S. expansionism agenda, one rooted in white supremacist entitlement to land and resources. Prior to leading the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico, General Nelson Miles led the U.S. Army in brutally pushing Native Americans off their lands to make way for white-settler colonialism.
That Puerto Ricans, including those who support annexation to the United States, testify before the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization — a body that oversees the human right of people to self-determine — shows how more complex this conversation is than what U.S. media portray.
The media has played a powerful role in colonialism. The spread of U.S. imperialism in 1898 was fanned by the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and other white men. Decades later, the use of phrases such as “commonwealth” or “self-governing territory” cloud this history and the enduring legacy of U.S. occupation, and help obscure the voices of Puerto Ricans.
In reporting and remarks by politicians in Puerto Rico, the island is frequently referred to as “el país.” The recent erasure of the same reference illustrates more than a lack of homework and understanding in U.S. news media, but also its reinforcement of a colonial power perspective over those under its thumb.
That glaring example is the changing of a quote from Olympic gold medal winner Jasmine Camacho-Quinn in USA Today. Camacho-Quinn, whose mother is from Puerto Rico, was born and raised in South Carolina and chose to represent the island. After winning in Tokyo, Camacho-Quinn referred to the island as a country. The newspaper was called out for altering her quote, changing “country” to “territory.”
The presumptions, as in this Boston Herald headline “D.C., Puerto Rico push for statehood…,” made about what Puerto Ricans should want for the island is also a colonial imposition. So is the insistence, for many Puerto Ricans, on simplifying the island’s predicament as one that is akin to D.C.’s voter disenfranchisement. That Puerto Ricans, including those who support annexation to the United States, testify before the U.N. Special Committee on Decolonization — a body that oversees the human right of people to self-determine — shows how more complex this conversation is than what U.S. media portray.
Supporters of Puerto Rico independence held a march on New York City on July 25, 2020, which marked 122 years of the U.S. invasion of the island. Photo by Steve Sánchez via Shutterstock
How do we get to a different place?
The refusal to call out U.S. colonialism, and the lack of history, context and accuracy in many media narratives around all of its manifestations represents a journalistic failure. The failure to also give the same scrutiny and inspection to the United States as a colonial power as given to Puerto Rico as a “territory” is a disservice to transparency, democracy and human rights. It’s racist because it sustains a white dominant lens over the voices of people of color with unique histories that date back centuries.
How do we get to a different place? It can start with updating style books so they don’t uphold half-truths. To recommend that writers simply refer to Puerto Rico as a “territory” or as “self-governing” does not reflect reality. The reduction of Puerto Rico’s colonial situation to just voting rights is not only inadequate but glaringly fails to even mention how the U.S. has set the rules.
Discussions should take place in newsrooms with institutions, such as the widely respected and independent Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, or with the scholarly and research-based Center for Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York and the Puerto Rican Studies Association. The Puerto Rico Syllabus, the bilingual podcast series La Brega, and the Spanish-language podcast En Qué Quedó are also important academic and journalistic resources for those who want to accurately frame and contextualize issues and understand the role of the U.S. in Puerto Rico’s multiple crises.
Opinion editors must also invite diverse Puerto Rican voices, including AfroBoricuas, to submit pieces with nuanced perspectives, and not limit inclusion to Puerto Rican politicians. Publications such as Latino Rebels, The Nation, and The Washington Post from time to time offer solid thought pieces by Puerto Ricans deeply-versed in the history, culture, and politics of the island and its diaspora.
In today’s era of truth-telling, masses of people are speaking clearly about structural oppression — from white supremacy to patriarchy, and yes, colonialism. The institutions that should be responsive to them include U.S. media, which should use accurate terms when talking about the systems that impact Puerto Ricans, Virgin Islanders, Samoans, and Chamorros.
That may not sit well with proponents of mythologies that disguise U.S. colonialism. But isn’t journalism about uncovering the truth?
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Erica González Martínez is the daughter of parents from Río Piedras and Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. She served as the Opinion Page Editor and then Executive Editor of El Diario/La Prensa in New York. She is the founding editor of the Latina analysis and stories channel IDAR/E at the Women’s Media Center, and with Power 4 Puerto Rico champions changes that will help the island. Erica is a board member with City Limits magazine and the Women’s Media Center, and serves as a Aronson Journalism Awards judge.