RACISM OR RACISMS?: RACIAL INEQUALITY IN PUERTO RICO

César Ayala Casás & Diego Ayala McCormick

“No doubt there are certain general features to racism. But even more significant are the ways in which these general features are modified and transformed by the historical specificity of the contexts and environments in which they become active.” […] [The belief that all varieties of racism are the same] “is often little more than a gestural stance which persuades us to the misleading view that, because racism is everywhere a deeply anti-human and anti-social practice, that therefore it is everywhere the same—either in its forms, its relations to other structures and processes, or its effects.”

Stuart Hall. “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 23.
 

In the wake of the recent protests against police brutality in the United States, which have once again brought to the forefront the immense racial inequalities in that country, the issue of racial inequality in Puerto Rico has begun to be discussed with greater attention. This focus is reflected not only in the previous issue of Categoría cinco magazine, but also in several discussion forums in the U.S. academy.

Within many of these discussions, particularly those taking place in English in different parts of the U.S. academic press and blogosphere, there has been a curious tendency to reject modes of analysis that suggest that racial inequality is different in Puerto Rico than in the United States. Such a tendency manifests itself, for example, in the assertion, in an article on race in Puerto Rico published a month before the murder of George Floyd, that “there is no such thing as a ‘less violent’ form of anti-black racism” (Lloréns 2020). Another article, published in NACLA magazine a few months later, asserts without evidence that under the Commonwealth “many of the tools used in the United States to disenfranchise African Americans,” such as “redlining,” were used in Puerto Rico (Mercado Díaz 2020). The term redlining alludes to the practice of banks and federal agencies of marking in red on maps the edges of Black communities in the U.S. to indicate where to deny mortgage loans. Mercado does not document so-called redlining in Puerto Rico, but existing evidence suggests that in Puerto Rico “overall, segregation by race is modest when compared to residential segregation in the United States” (Denton and Villarrubia 2007, 51). Neither Lloréns’ racial indignation nor Mercado’s importation of empirically uncorroborated U.S. arguments can serve as a substitute for the necessary detailed investigation of racial inequality in Puerto Rico.

It seems to us that statements such as those of Lloréns and Mercado suffer from the “misleading belief” described by the Afro-British Marxist theorist Stuart Hall, that “because racism is everywhere a deeply anti-human and anti-social practice, that therefore it is everywhere the same—either in its forms, its relations to other structures and processes, or its effects.”  Hall argues that “in the analysis of particular historical forms of racism, we would do well to operate at a more concrete, historicized level of abstraction (i.e., not racism in general but racisms)” (Hall 1986, 23).

If racial inequality in Puerto Rico is to be confronted, a historically nuanced and contextualized analysis is needed. Nuance is necessary not only to understand precisely what anti-racist forces in Puerto Rico are up against, but also to increase the effectiveness of the strategy of struggle and the size of the anti-racist coalition. The enterprise of understanding racial inequality in Puerto Rico at a “more concrete and historicized level of abstraction” requires data and comparisons, especially with the metropolis whose political discourse exerts so much influence on the island.

Let’s start with the issue of violence. A relevant historical fact is that of lynchings. These are brutal acts of physical violence. Between 1882 and 1968, there were 3,335 lynchings of Black people and 1,295 lynchings of White people in the U.S., of which more than two-thirds occurred between 1890 and 1920, according to the Tuskegee Institute archives (University of Missouri-Kansas City, n.d.). African Americans, who constituted 10 percent of the U.S. population in 1930, suffered 72 percent of the documented lynchings between 1882 and 1968. To our knowledge, the practice of lynching did not exist in Puerto Rico. The absence of such acts of violence on the island constitutes an immense difference in the living conditions of people of African descent in Puerto Rico, and represents a difference in levels of racist violence between one society and another. The statement that “there is no such thing as a less violent form of anti-black racism” is simply not true.

Like the acts of violence, levels of inequality can also be compared. We will limit ourselves to a few provocative examples to make our point. Let’s start with more recent data. In 2010, in Brazil the proportion of Black women with college degrees (4.77%) was just 27 percent of the proportion of White men with college degrees (15.83%). In the United States in 2018, the ratio of Black women with college degrees (25.61%) / White men with college degrees (35.22%), was 73 percent, while in Puerto Rico it was 109 percent (Black women 28.31%, White men 25.89%). In other words, a Black woman was more likely to have a college degree than a White man. Meanwhile, the median income of Black women in Puerto Rico was 96 percent of the figure for White men, compared with 51 percent in Brazil and 58 percent in the United States (Ayala-McCormick 2021, 390, 396).

Arguably, these figures in Puerto Rico represent an injustice, as they imply that Black women, despite having higher levels of education, achieve somewhat lower median incomes than their White male compatriots. However, in comparative terms, they also suggest a relatively low level of economic inequality by race in Puerto Rico compared to Brazil and the United States.

The historical origins of the relatively low levels of racial inequality in Puerto Rico compared to the U.S. are the product of three important structures: the existence of a free Afro-descendant population much larger than the enslaved population throughout the nineteenth century, the existence of a multiracial working class and multiracial agrarian middle classes, and the paradoxical legacy of the slave regime, which created a layer of skilled Black workers in the sugar industry.

Jack Delano, Sugar Worker’s Family, Guayanilla (1942)

https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/family-of-a-sugar-worker-living-in-one-of-the-company-houses-behind-the-mill

In 1910, the year in which the U.S. census in Puerto Rico divided the population into three categories (White, Mulatto and Black), the average income index of Black men was 107 percent, and that of Mulattos 97 percent, of that of White men. This surprising and counterintuitive fact corresponds to the urban/rural reality in Puerto Rico in the early twentieth century. Census enumerators determined the race of the respondent in 1910 and 1920. Those classified by the census as Black were the most urban group in the population, followed by those classified as Mulatto. Whites, significantly, were the most rural group. In the United States, just the opposite was true: Blacks were more rural than Mulattos, and Mulattos were more rural than Whites.

	Relative income (White men = 100%)			Percent Urban of Population
Racial group	Puerto Rico	Louisiana	USA	Puerto Rico	Louisiana	USA
Whites	100%	100%	100%	24%	36%	47%
Mulattoes	97%	75%	75%	35%	32%	36%
Blacks	107%	69%	69%	45%	21%	25%

The table above contains comparative 1910 statistics for Puerto Rico, the sugarcane-growing state of Louisiana, and the U.S. as a whole, constructed from the IPUMS database, specifically the 12 percent sample of the 1910 Puerto Rico census located in that repository (Ruggles et al. 2023). As can be seen, there are large differences in the levels of income inequality and in urbanization rates. The historical roots of these levels of inequality are very complex, and their analysis is beyond the scope of this essay, but in general terms, they correspond to the fact that the majority of people of African descent in Puerto Rico throughout the nineteenth century were free, while in the U.S. the vast majority of people of African descent were slaves. They also correspond to the existence in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico of other forms of forced labor, as the Spanish colonial state coerced peasants of all “races.” The coercion exercised against the peasants intensified with the infamous Reglamento de Jornaleros of Governor Juan de la Pezuela in 1849, which created the so-called libreta regime, which forced peasants without land titles to seek work on the estates of the hacienda owners and required the latter to sign the peasant’s libreta indicating that he was employed. Otherwise, the peasant could be declared a vagrant and imprisoned (Gómez Acevedo 1970; Picó 1976).

This pattern of differences in levels of inequality was already evident, in comparative terms, not only at the beginning of the twentieth century but also as early as the nineteenth. In 1860, on the eve of the U.S. Civil War, while 89 percent of people of African descent in the United States were enslaved, in Puerto Rico 85 percent of people of African descent were free (Bergad 2007, 123; Figueroa 2005, 48). The so-called “Tannenbaum thesis” (Tannenbaum, 1946), according to which there were fundamental differences between slavery in Ibero-America and in the United States, had until recently been dismissed by historians. However, it has recently undergone a revival, in a modified version, with the realization that the difference between the different racial regimes lies not so much in slavery itself but in the relative size of the free and slave populations of African descent. The size of the free Afro-descendant population, in turn, was based on the legal figure of coartación, which allowed slaves to buy their freedom in Ibero-America (de la Fuente 2004). The United States is the exceptional case in the Americas because of the very small size of the free Afro-descendant population relative to the slave population. In Ibero-America, on the other hand, free Afro-descendant populations were already a majority relative to slave populations in 1800 (Andrews 2004, 41; Klein and Vinson III 2007, 196-97) and occupied a central role in market economies, even during the colonial era (Bergad 2007). Differences in levels of inequality were also a product of the severe geographic mobility restrictions imposed on people of African descent in the United States (Klein 2012). The urbanization rates of people of African descent in Puerto Rico are indicative of the size and antiquity of its free Afro-descendant population and an indication that this population enjoyed freedom of internal movement since the nineteenth century, and probably since much earlier than that.

The census of professions on the island of Puerto Rico in 1860 suggests the already established existence of a multiracial middle class. On one hand were the clergy, the civil service, the teaching profession and the military career, monopolized by Whites (and more precisely, according to more qualitative historical evidence, by Spanish peninsulares) (Carroll 1899, 28, 32, 252, 621, 655). On the other, there was the proportion of free “colored” persons who were day laborers (39.7 percent), which was higher than the equivalent figure among Whites (23.3 percent)—although if only White Creoles were considered, the differences would be smaller.

The dispossession of the peasantry advanced by leaps and bounds, especially with the consolidation of the hacienda system in the coffee-growing area of Puerto Rico in the last three decades of the nineteenth century (Bergad 1983), leveling the rates of proletarianization. At the end of the Spanish colonial era, more than two-thirds of families of all “races” did not own land titles (Ayala and Bergad 2020).   The existence of a multiracial dispossessed peasantry is the basis of the multiracial proletariat of the twentieth century.

As for the multiracial middle classes, in 1860 11 percent of Whites were called “proprietors” in contrast to 8.3 percent of the “colored” population; 21.6 percent of Whites compared to 17.6 percent of the “colored” population were “labradores“—a category which, unlike “day laborer,” implies independent management of a farm, whether under lease, sharecropping, or ownership. One percent of Whites and 0.9 percent of the “colored” population were “industriales,” a category suggesting ownership or operation of small manufacturing workshops (Junta General de Estadística 1863).

The low levels of racial income inequality evident in the early twentieth century also correspond to the existence of a layer of Black skilled workers in the sugar zone, whose origins date back to the slave era. The existence of a layer of skilled laborers in the sugar industry stems from the coexistence of different modalities of forced labor in the nineteenth century, mentioned above. The sugar mills used different types of coerced laborers: enslaved workers on the one hand, and passbook or libreta workers and agregados on the other hand. Landowners preferred to train enslaved persons in skilled labor rather than workers subject to the libreta or agregados because of the greater reliability of slaves during slavery, and of freedmen during the apprenticeship period of the transition from slavery to free labor. Unlike free peasants, enslaved persons — and freedmen during the first years after abolition — were under the strict control of their masters or employers and had to show up for work. On this, there is agreement between historian Andrés Ramos Mattei and anthropologist Sidney Mintz (Ramos Mattei 1982, 113; S. W. Mintz 1974, 110-11; S. Mintz 1951; 1953). This layer of skilled workers was reproduced in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, even though the sugar industry was in decline. As a consequence of this historical pattern, in the coastal municipalities during the sugar boom of the first decades of the twentieth century, Black workers were over-represented in the skilled trades. We were certainly surprised to find that in 1910 the average income of Black men in Puerto Rico was higher than that of White men, due to the higher rate of urbanization and the existence of skilled workers in the fields. The situation in the United States at that time was very different from that of Puerto Rico.

Indicators of Racial Inequality, 2021

	United States		Puerto Rico
	Black	White	Black	White
Unemployment rate (%)	10.4	5.0	14.3	12.2
Population below poverty line (%)	24.8	11.4	41	41.7
Food stamp recipients (%)	29.9	9.4	59.5	54
Median household income ($)	57,200	89,000	27,400	27,000
Top 1 % household income ($)	365,000	629,000	213,000	248,720

The current differences in levels of inequality can be seen by comparing some indicators that are available in the U.S. Census surveys. In these surveys, conducted in 2021, racial designation is determined by the respondent. According to these data, the unemployment rate of Blacks in Puerto Rico is 17 percent higher than that of Whites, but in the U.S. it is 108 percent higher. The percentage of Blacks living below the poverty level in Puerto Rico is actually somewhat lower than that of Whites, but in the U.S. it is 118 percent higher. In Puerto Rico, the proportion of the population receiving food assistance is 10 percent higher among Blacks than among Whites, but in the U.S. it is 218 percent higher. Median household income is $400 higher among Blacks than among Whites in Puerto Rico, which in practical terms means that Black and White household incomes are equal, but in the U.S. median household income is 56 percent higher among Whites than among Blacks. Even in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, the difference in favor of Whites is 17 percent in Puerto Rico vs. 72 percent in the United States. It should be noted that these figures reflect the poverty of the white population of the highland municipalities in Puerto Rico, and that a regional analysis of the San Juan metropolitan area will reflect higher levels of inequality than those reflected in the island as a whole.

Class, racism and political movements

Puerto Rico has not historically had mass Black nationalist movements, although there have been Garveyist groups. There has never been an Independent Party of Color, as in Cuba. There were never racial conflicts comparable to the massacre of the members of the Partido Independiente de Color in Oriente in Cuba in 1912. After 1898, there were never prohibitions against Afro-descendant self-organization like the Morúa Law passed in 1910 in Cuba, named after the Afro-descendant president of the Cuban Senate who promoted it, in the name of the “unity” of the Cuban nation based “in the concepts of José Martí,” and which prompted the uprising of the Independent Colored Party. The great historian of the Caribbean, of capitalism and of slavery, Eric Williams (E. E. Williams 1944; 1970), raised the question of the obstacles to racial mobilizations in Puerto Rico:

“Negroes in Puerto Rico vote not as Negroes but as Puerto Ricans identified with one of the major parties. […] Thus it is that, by virtue of the absence of legal discrimination, the high degree of social mobility, the emphasis on class and  the political equality that prevails, unity among Negroes on the race question does not exist in Puerto Rico[…]” (E. Williams 1945, 313).

However, there is a long tradition of racially integrated union struggle in Puerto Rico, from the Free Federation of Workers (FLT), through the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) and all subsequent unionism. Today’s movements will draw on the legacies of yesterday’s movements. It remains to be seen whether a mass Afro-descendant movement is emerging in Puerto Rico. We do not have a crystal ball, but we do have access to the history and structures of the past, which condition the structures and movements of today.

The assertion that racial inequality in Puerto Rico is different from that in the U.S. should not be confused with the idea that it does not exist. Much less should it be confused with the idea that the independent organization of people of African descent is not necessary. That is a decision for people of African descent to make. Now, the comparatively lower level of racial inequality in economic terms may help explain why independent self-organization of people of African descent in Puerto Rico has historically been less prominent than in Cuba or the United States and why class organizations have been dominant in the struggle against inequality. In other words, far from being the product of a kind of false consciousness, as has been posited in some historical studies of the Puerto Rican labor movement (Meléndez Badillo 2021, chapter 2), it may be that the strategies of social mobilization in Puerto Rico, which have centered on multiracial class struggle, are the product of concrete historical realities that make that mode of struggle particularly effective. Of course it must be subjected to constant critique in order to refine it and to correct its limitations in terms of racial inequality.

Puerto Rico’s racial history is sufficiently different from that of the U.S. that we should take Stuart Hall’s challenge-to speak not of “racism” but of “racisms”-seriously. Far from denying racial inequality, it seems to us that the comparative enterprise is a necessary step in combating it. Research has revealed both more egregious aspects of racial inequality in Puerto Rico as well as more positive aspects. For example, Scarano (1984) has shown that productivity per slave on the Ponce sugar plantations was higher than that of the Louisiana sugar plantations during the first half of the nineteenth century, which, in the absence of mechanization, means that the labor regime was more intense and brutal in Puerto Rico. On the positive side is the existence of a large layer of skilled workers of African descent in Puerto Rico in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their prominent role in the creation of the formidable Puerto Rican multiracial union, the Federación Libre de Trabajadores (Quintero-Rivera 1983).

Understanding how racial inequality is structured in Puerto Rico and how it has evolved historically helps us to pinpoint what we are facing and what the priorities of the anti-racist movement should be. If we were to take as true Mercado’s assertion quoted above that there was a historical problem of redlining in Puerto Rico, we would have to approach the problem of the wealth gap between Black and White households as is being done in the United States. As a result of redlining in the United States, a much higher proportion of White families (73 percent) than Black families (45 percent) own their homes, and homes are the primary asset passed down from parents to children. The anti-racist movement in the United States is calling for state intervention to equalize opportunities for the Black population, since the wealth gap (which is partly a product of federal government redlining practices) is greater than the income gap, because white families have greater assets to transfer to their heirs than black families.. In the case of Puerto Rico, 72 percent of White families own their homes, compared to 69 percent of Black families (Ayala-McCormick 2021, 395). Whether that difference of 3 percent in Puerto Rico rather than 28 percent as in the United States elevates the issue of home ownership to a priority level on the agenda of the anti-racist movement in Puerto Rico would have to be debated. In any case, the uncritical importation of U.S. slogans is no substitute for the concrete analysis of inequality that needs to be carried out in Puerto Rico.

If we take Stuart Hall’s assertion as a question — how does Puerto Rican racism fit within the variety of racisms of the American continent — the comparative issue remains relevant. Highlighting the particularities of racial inequality in Puerto Rico, in turn, will allow us to advance a program of anti-racist struggle appropriate to Puerto Rico’s reality.

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