soc.culture.puerto-rico

The group and its era

Every soc.culture group divides its readers into those at home and those away. soc.culture.puerto-rico divided them across a border that was not one. Puerto Ricans have held United States citizenship since the Jones–Shafroth Act was signed on 2 March 1917, and the commonwealth constitution that took effect on 25 July 1952 settled how the island was governed without settling what it was. Residents send one non-voting Resident Commissioner to the House of Representatives and do not vote in presidential general elections, though they take part in the parties’ primaries. Moving between island and mainland took a plane ticket and no paperwork. The group’s two halves were in the same country and, in most of the ways that mattered to them, in different worlds.

The stateside share of the traffic was large, and during the group’s lifetime it was changing shape. New York had been the overwhelming centre — around 1960 roughly seven in ten stateside Puerto Ricans lived in New York City — and its neighbourhoods remained the diaspora’s reference points in conversation. But these were also the years in which central Florida became a second capital; the Orlando area now holds the largest concentration of Puerto Ricans outside the island after the New York region. The news2mail gateway carried the group to e-mail between 2000 and 2004.

What was discussed

The status question was permanent and, by design, unfinished. Two plebiscites fell in the 1990s. On 14 November 1993 commonwealth took 48.9 per cent, statehood 46.6 and independence 4.5. On 13 December 1998 a five-column ballot produced the result that became known well beyond the island: none of the above took a narrow majority, a little over 50 per cent, against 46.6 for statehood, after opponents of the ballot’s definitions urged voters to use that column. Each position has a long-established party behind it — the Popular Democratic Party for commonwealth, the New Progressive Party for statehood, the Puerto Rican Independence Party for sovereignty. The group rehearsed the argument without adjudicating it, and neither does this page.

Language politics ran alongside. A 1991 law made Spanish the sole official language of the government; a 1993 law restored English beside it, and the question of how much English belonged in the schools outlasted both. From 1999 the protests over the Navy’s live-fire range on Vieques — set off by the death of David Sanes, a civilian security guard killed when a bomb went off target during exercises — brought civil disobedience on the island and demonstrations in the mainland cities. The Navy withdrew in May 2003, inside the gateway’s own years.

Culture supplied the rest, and on quiet weeks most of it: bomba, which took shape among enslaved plantation workers around 1800; plena, the urban song form of about 1900 carried on hand-held panderetas; salsa, remade in the 1960s and 1970s by Puerto Rican and Nuyorican musicians in New York out of Cuban dance music; and the underground cassette scene of the early 1990s, sold from the boot of a car and raided by the police in six San Juan record shops in 1995, which by the time the gateway closed had a name, reggaeton, and an audience far beyond the island. Food threads, the winter baseball league, which dates from 1938, and the Nuyorican literary current of New York’s Puerto Rican neighbourhoods recurred as reliably.

Context

What set the group apart from its neighbours in soc.culture.* was the constant traffic between its two constituencies. Puerto Rican migration is unusually circular: people, money and children move back and forth over a working lifetime rather than departing once. That produces a recognisable genre of question — what a returning family should expect of the schools, how a qualification or a licence transfers, who is flying down and could carry something.

It shows more plainly still in how the posts are written. Traffic ran in Spanish, in English, and in both inside a single message, switching mid-sentence in the way bilingual speakers do when both languages are to hand and neither is a performance. Usenet preserved that unedited, which makes the archived run a small record of how the community actually wrote at the turn of the century.

Wider regional material — the Antilles as a whole, other islands’ politics and diasporas — belonged to soc.culture.caribbean, and travel questions to rec.travel.caribbean; this group kept to Puerto Rico. A dispersed people whose political status had been open for a century had, for a decade or so, one public address at which any part of it could be argued out, and much of the argument is still there to read.