Six weeks prior to President Trump’s now infamous visit to Puerto Rico in October of this year, where he flung rolls of paper towel to islanders at a church that was doubling as a collection center in the aftermath of Hurricane María (Kenny 2017), two local activists vandalized with graffiti a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Old San Juan. The graffiti read “Racist,” in black spray paint. The activists were quickly identified and arrested. And the statue was restored in a matter of hours, at the behest of San Juan mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz (Redacción 2017c).

All presidents who visit Puerto Rico get a statue on the south side of our capitol building. There are nine of them. The reason for or length of the visit is immaterial; their presence on the island is what matters. Barack Obama, for example, got his for a daylong campaign trip back in 2011, during which he attended three fundraising events. Trump, I imagine, will soon get his Puerto Rico’s seventy-four billion-dollar public debt permitting. These statues have been vandalized once or twice. And, at least prior to the hurricane, they had around-the-clock police security.

Lincoln, if you’re wondering, never visited the island. His statue stands on the grounds of the Abraham Lincoln public elementary school. It was vandalized on the heels of the white nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, that claimed the life of 32-year-old counter-protester, Heather Heyer. Since that day, at least 50 Confederate monuments have been targeted by anti-racist activists across the southern USA, and/or have been removed by the corresponding authorities.¹ It just so happens that there are no Confederate memorials in Puerto Rico to target. Lincoln is the closest figure to the Old South that we have. And while he likely would not crack most Americans’ top ten lists of all-time racists, the fact that there’s a statue of him in Puerto Rico has something to do with American racism.

Some context: Puerto Rico, a small Caribbean island of Taíno and Afro-diasporic provenance, has been a colony of the USA since 1898, when Spain ceded control over the island after the Spanish-American War. In 1952—following decades of military and US-appointed governors—the colony became the Commonwealth. In 1953, Puerto Rico was taken off the United Nation’s list of colonial lands. Puerto Ricans, though US citizens by birth since 1917, cannot vote for the US president and do not have voting representation in Congress. We can vote for our own local representatives, as guaranteed by the Constitution of the Commonwealth. Congress, however, maintains plenary powers over the island and its people. Thus, it is Congress that chooses which provisions of the US Constitution apply to Puerto Rico, as well as which pieces of federal legislation are to be made extensive to islanders. Congress can also overturn any local legislation. And, ultimately, Congress can, if it so chooses, cede the island to another country. Thus, while not officially termed a colony for most of its 119-year colonial history, Puerto Rico continues to exist in the American legal landscape as an unincorporated territory of the USA. As such, it formally belongs to, but is not part of, the nation (Ayala and Bernabe 2009).

To belong to, but not be a part of, has, over time, put Puerto Ricans in precarious and paradoxical positions. As American citizens, islanders have been, and continue to be, able to travel freely between the island and the mainland. However, islanders have, at times, been pushed out of their lands, rendered “excess” population, and “made” to leave for the states (Meléndez 2017). As American citizens, they have been drafted to and/or participated in every war the USA has waged since World War I. This includes their participation in segregated army battalions, for Puerto Ricans have been deemed culturally—when not racially—different from and inferior to white Americans (Franqui-Rivera 2015). As American citizens, Puerto Ricans are called to respect, if not honor, the particular political “relationship” the island has with the mainland. Honor, here, means to gloss over and/or disregard how islanders are the poorest of all US citizens, and how the island—under US rule—has, over time, become a severely unequal, unsafe, and unsustainable place to live (Moyers 2017). It is also, presently, one of the most debt ridden.

As it pertains to the debt, the Puerto Rican government—officially bankrupt—cannot fulfill its obligations to its creditors. As a result, local administrations have, over the past decade, instituted ever more aggressive austerity measures which have deprived the citizenry of key social services in education, health, and employment, undercut workers’ rights, increased social inequality, and directly contributed to the largest wave of migration in history from the island to the mainland (Moyers 2017). The USA, in turn, has refused to offer the island any form of debt relief or economic stimulus package. Congress did, however, pass special legislation to attend to the island’s economic crisis.

In June 2016, Congress approved the Puerto Rico Oversight , Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), which allowed for the creation of President-appointed seven-member fiscal control board to oversee the island government’s budget, debt repayment, and other financial affairs.² Though officially termed an oversight board, upon its creation, the entity claimed jurisdiction over all governmental departments, agencies, and public corporations (Univision 2016). The “junta,” as it is locally called, has veto power over all legislation. As such it functions as a de facto government of unelected, federally appointed officials who have full reign over all aspects of Puerto Rican public policy matters and whose members do not answer to either the local government or island residents. Board members, in fact, have full legal immunity.

According to PROMESA, the board has two main objectives: (1) debt repayment and (2) the restoration of Puerto Rico’s reputation in world financial markets. Ariadna Godreau Aubert (2018), in her analysis of PROMESA, denounces how rights-based considerations in the law are strictly limited to creditors’ rights to repayment. Thus, the austerity measures designed by the board to ensure the government’s compliance with its contractual responsibilities lack any discernible limits as it pertains to their anticipated effect on people’s education, labor, healthcare needs, and entitlements. These seem to have fallen somewhere outside of the margins of the law. It is as if they were considered to be an unruly excess and dutifully pushed out.

I should state for the record that there was a Puerto Rican Neo-Nazi in Charlottesville. Alex Michael Ramos, a resident of Atlanta, was arrested for his participation in the beating of counter-protester DeAndre Harris, an African-American teacher and artist. Prior to his arrest, Ramos posted a video on Facebook where he explained that the white nationalists at the rally “weren’t racist with him.” They were, in fact, “cool” with him. He then proceeded to blame Black Lives Matter activists for the violence that took place on that day (Noticel 2017).

Puerto Ricans on the island and abroad were incensed by Ramos’ actions and remarks, which drew the expected (and necessary) reproach.³ The Lincoln graffiti, on the other hand, did not draw nearly a fraction of the attention on the island. And none on the mainland, because it doesn’t matter how many statues of former presidents the colonial government puts up, the persistence of the colony is the only thing that matters, and, in these postcolonial times, colonies can only persist in near-total obscurity. And yet, it’s Lincoln as racist that most resonated with me, as I perused social media for the selfies that local government officials took with President Trump during his visit.⁴ Judging from their big smiles, it was safe to assume that he was “cool” with them too.

Three weeks prior to Trump’s visit, Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico as a category 4 hurricane. It decimated the island’s already feeble infrastructure, destroying roads and bridges, leaving towns and communities isolated and uncommunicated. The totality of the population was without power, water, internet, and cell phone service, making it many weeks and months before islanders could receive proof of life notifications from relatives and actually see the extent of the damage across the island. Both the local and federal government’s responses were found to be lacking and were criticized the world over, as reports of food stuffs and necessary aid left to rot on the docks, made international news (Blewitt 2017). As of this writing, power has yet to be restored to nearly a third of the population, some communities continue to be without water service, and while the government insists on an official death toll of 64, it is estimated that well over a thousand people died as a result of the hurricane (Robles et al. 2017).

Curiously, the number of deaths was one of the president’s focal points during his visit. Specifically, he marveled at how so few people had died as a result of María, when compared to other—purportedly more serious—disasters. Another point of emphasis was the expected cost of the relief effort. Trump, upon setting foot on the island, seemed to be upset at the island (or at islanders) for throwing the federal budget “out of whack” by letting themselves be caught by the hurricane (Relman 2017). Then he congratulated himself for the botched relief effort. And then he threw rolls of paper towels at people. Curiously, nobody in the governor’s staff seemed bothered by any of this. They all seemed to be “cool” with it.

The president’s actions did incense people in the states, though. Whereas Trump, through Twitter, had emphasized the vast amount of water surrounding the island, more sensible Americans—public figures and lay people alike—countered with often moving allocutions in defense of our rights as American citizens. The consensus seemed to be that we deserved better from the White House and from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and from Americans as a whole insomuch as we were Americans too. Sort of. American enough, at least, to pass for white in Virginia chanting white power. American enough, at least, to denounce Abraham Lincoln’s racism in a public school in San Juan, even though stateside monuments to Lincoln are much more likely to be the target of racist graffiti than of anti-racist interventions.

During Trump’s visit, Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, did not once attempt to challenge the president while he congratulated himself and his staff for such an underwhelming relief effort. Local pundits for the most part lauded the governor for his restraint, because—as the logic went—only through total and utter deference and submission would the Puerto Rican government have any hope of receiving the necessary aid and desired financial stimulus package. It did not. Where the governor was silent, however, the San Juan mayor was vocal, ...