Introduction

...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: puerto rico Introduction Colonial Capitalism: Crisis and Response in Puerto Rico S ince 1901, when the first duties between puerto Rico and the United States were abolished, the island’s economy has served as a kind of experi­ment in what we today call neoliberalism...

...ment ran out of money and temporarily laid off has served as Meanwhile, the pro-independence moveabout 80,000 public employees...

...The ex­periment in crisis management through tax exemptions, Bernabe argues, is now itself in crisis...

...Michael González-Cruz, a member of the Nueva Escuela collective, argues herein that the best bet for building an anti-colonial con­sensus in Puerto Rico lies precisely in poor, marginalized communities, where popular education may play a cru­cial role in linking national liberation with local struggles for sovereignty, like the one described by Cándida Cotto on one community’s successful fight against a massive ca­sino development...

...Its first major crisis was during the world reces­sion of 1974–75...

...citizens but bars them from voting in federal elections (and paying federal tax­es), as unconstitutional...

...This century-old tion seems to have crystallized, one that interprets Puerto Rico’s technical status as an “unincorporated territory,” which makes Puerto Ricans U.S...

...As Angelo Falcón notes, each bill has been accused of bebrand of colonial capitalism has been adjusted For more than a ing biased toward statehood or the commonand readjusted over the years, often in response to system-wide shocks—most recently and dramatically in 2006, when the insular govern- century, Puerto Rico’s economy wealth, showing that discord over the status issue is as prevalent among the stateside Puerto Ricans just as it is on the island...

...A pair of competing congressio­nal bills, both submitted by Puerto Rican representatives from New York, reflect a struggle over this...

...Now that most incentives for U.S...

...This position has long, however, incentives, offering U.S...

...A mainstream posi­ Puerto Rico’s per capita GDP has hovered near the halfway point between that of the United States and those of its impoverished neighbors...

...mainland, and its de­pendence on U.S...

...legislation avoids The program’s centerpiece was its tax and other today call altogether...

...imports...

...As Rafael Bernabe argues in this Report, last a kind of ment has worked tenaciously since the 1970s within the United Nations, securing a number year’s fiscal crisis represented the end of an era, experiment of nonbinding resolutions defining Puerto Rico one beginning in 1950 with the industrializa­tion program known as Operation Bootstrap...

...Like today’s maquiladoras, most of the factories built during Operation Bootstrap were enclave assembly operations, importing raw materials and exporting their output...

...The adjustments that followed between 1976 and the mid-1990s merely propped up a faltering economy, only deepening the tax breaks, until Congress reversed course and began phasing them out in 1995 in an effort to get companies operating on the island to pay their due...

...The reggaeton nation, even as it faces grave eco­nomic and political uncertainty, makes its mark in the global economy, “playing the national game,” the authors write, “better than ever...

...Still, almost half the island lives below the poverty line...

...system...

...after all, since 1950, of a third world country but within the U.S...

...been a minority view...

...in what we as a colony and calling for its national libera­tion (a framework the U.S...

...corporations in Puerto Rico are gone, interest in resolving the perennial “status question” has increased in Washington, especially since 2005, after a presidential task force recommended a new round of voting to determine if Puerto Ricans want to do away with the commonwealth...

...Puerto Rico has long been notable for its deep integration into the North American system, the maximal fluidity of labor and capi­tal flows between it and the U.S...

...capital all the benefits neoliberalism...

...Finally, Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Raquel Z. Ri­vera describe Puerto Rico’s flexible cultural nationalism through the story of reggaeton music—initially dispar­aged and even criminalized as obscene, now embraced as “the island’s most important cultural export since Ricky Martin...

...It is thus tragically fitting, then, that the fiscal crisis occurred the same year that the phaseout was completed...