Puerto Rico's history: four centuries a Spanish fortress, then a territory that never stopped being one

Who lived on Borikén before Columbus

Settlement began with the Ortoiroid, from the Orinoco region of South America, whose presence some scholars date back four thousand years. A dig on Vieques in 1990 recovered the remains known as Puerto Ferro man, dated to around 2000 BC. The Ortoiroid were displaced by the Saladoid, from the same region, arriving between 430 and 250 BC.

The Taíno culture developed from Arawak settlement between the seventh and eleventh centuries and was dominant by around 1000 AD. They called the island Borikén, and at Columbus's arrival an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 Taíno lived there under the cacique Agüeybaná, in villages living by hunting, fishing and cassava.

The Taíno were declared to have vanished fifty years after 1493, and that declaration was wrong. Skeletal remains and DNA testing have since established that Taíno descent survives in the modern population. What survived in plainer view is the vocabulary: maracas, the güiro, the hammock, the place names Mayagüez, Arecibo and Caguas, and two words that entered English through Spanish, barbecue from barbacoa and hurricane from huracán.

Why Spain fortified the island rather than settled it

Columbus landed on 19 November 1493 and named the island San Juan Bautista. Juan Ponce de León founded Caparra on 8 August 1508; the colony moved the following year to an islet with a better harbour called Puerto Rico, the rich port, and by the 1520s the names had swapped: the island became Puerto Rico and the port became San Juan.

The encomienda system distributed Taíno people to Spanish officials as forced labour. A revolt in 1511, in which the cacique Urayoán had the soldier Diego Salcedo drowned to establish whether the Spanish were immortal, was crushed within weeks, and disease, violence and suicide destroyed most of the population inside a few decades. African slaves were brought from 1513.

What shaped the next three centuries was strategic position rather than wealth. Puerto Rico was the first landfall on the passage from Europe to Cuba, Mexico and the Spanish Main, which made it worth defending and not worth developing. Spain built accordingly.

La Fortaleza went up from 1532 and Fort San Felipe del Morro from 1539, redesigned in 1587 by the engineers Juan de Tejada and Juan Bautista Antonelli in the form it still stands in. Philip IV added San Cristóbal in 1634 inside a ring of sandstone walls.

The consequence for the society underneath was a small one. A census in 1765 counted 44,883 people, of whom 5,037 were enslaved, a share far below the sugar islands nearby. Spain's late attempt to change that was the Royal Decree of Graces of 1815, printed in Spanish, English and French, offering free land to European settlers who swore loyalty to the Crown and the Church, and it brought families from Asturias, Catalonia, Mallorca, Galicia, Corsica, Ireland and the Canaries. Slavery was abolished only in 1873, and then with a three-year contract obligation and compensation paid to owners rather than to the enslaved.

How the United States acquired the island

The Treaty of Paris of 1898 ended the Spanish-American War and transferred Puerto Rico to the United States. The change was immediate and thorough: the currency moved from the Puerto Rican peso to the dollar, the name was respelled Porto Rico until 1932, a public school system opened, and the postal service was extended.

It was also a military government, and it lasted until the Foraker Act of 2 April 1900 created a civil one. That government was appointed rather than elected in its upper reaches: a governor named by the President, an executive council of five Puerto Ricans and six Americans, and an elected 35-member legislature whose acts the governor could veto. Puerto Rico could send a Resident Commissioner to Congress, and Federico Degetau took that seat on 14 March 1901.

The economy was remade at the same speed. The Hollander Act of 1901 taxed rural property and forced landowners to sell; American sugar corporations, borrowing at Wall Street rates against local owners borrowing at local ones, consolidated the land into monoculture plantations. By 1914 the coffee crop that had been steady for a century had failed, and 95% of Puerto Rican trade went to the United States.

What the Jones Act granted and withheld

Signed on 2 March 1917, the Jones Act made Puerto Ricans United States citizens and made Puerto Rico an organised but unincorporated territory.

Both halves of that sentence matter. Citizenship was collective and restricted: residents of the island did not gain the right to vote for the President, and they have not since. What citizenship did carry immediately was conscription, and 20,000 Puerto Rican soldiers entered the United States Army within months.

The Partido Unión had opposed the offer in 1912 on grounds that turned out to be exactly right. Citizenship without statehood, they argued, was not a step toward anything: it foreclosed independence while promising nothing. Congress retained the power to veto or amend anything the territorial legislature passed, appointed the heads of six government departments, and made English the language of the courts, the government and the schools.

Why the Nationalists turned to violence

The Partido Nacionalista was founded on 17 September 1922 and Pedro Albizu Campos became its president in 1930. Failing to win electoral support, it withdrew from elections, and the confrontation that followed ran through the 1930s in a sequence each side treated as retaliation for the last.

On 24 October 1935, police killed four Nationalists and a bystander at Río Piedras. On 23 February 1936, Nationalists killed the American-appointed police chief Colonel Elisha Francis Riggs and were killed in custody hours later. Albizu was tried, acquitted by a jury of seven Puerto Ricans and two Americans, retried before a jury of ten Americans and two Puerto Ricans, and convicted.

On 21 March 1937 a Nationalist march commemorating the abolition of slavery was fired on by police in Ponce. Twenty unarmed people were killed and between 100 and 200 wounded in what is remembered as the Ponce massacre.

The suppression outlasted the violence. Law 53 of 1948, the Ley de la Mordaza or Gag Law, made it a crime to sing a patriotic song or display the Puerto Rican flag, punishable by up to ten years in prison. It was signed by Jesús T. Piñero, the first Puerto Rican appointed governor, and passed by a Senate presided over by Luis Muñoz Marín.

How the Commonwealth was made

Congress allowed Puerto Ricans to elect their own governor in 1948, and Muñoz Marín took office on 2 January 1949 as the first elected to the post. The Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act of 3 July 1950 let the territory draft a constitution, which it did while the Gag Law was still in force.

The Nationalists rose against it. The revolts of 30 October 1950 included an attack on La Fortaleza and the Jayuya Uprising, put down by Puerto Rican military forces, and two days later two Nationalists attempted to kill President Truman at Blair House. In March 1954 four Nationalists fired from the visitors' gallery of the House of Representatives, wounding five congressmen.

The constitution was approved by referendum in February 1952 and by Congress subject to amendments. The Spanish name, Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, translates as Free Associated State, which was unacceptable in English because no statehood had been granted; the English name became Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. 1952 was also the first year the Puerto Rican flag could be displayed without risking a decade in prison.

Muñoz Marín, having reached office, was directed not to pursue independence. That was a reversal of his father Luis Muñoz Rivera's position and, in the reading of many of his own supporters, a betrayal of it.

What Operation Bootstrap built and what it cost

Operation Bootstrap, from 1950, offered mainland investors local and federal tax concessions, duty-free access to United States markets and wages well below mainland scales. It worked on its own terms, and the growth rates say so: 6% through the 1950s, 5% through the 1960s, 4% through the 1970s.

The island moved from agriculture to light industry to petrochemicals, and incomes rose well above the Caribbean average. It also came to import 80% of its food, and manufacturing carried electricity costs two to three times the mainland average.

The tax settlement was the whole structure, and it was temporary. Congress exempted companies in Puerto Rico from federal income tax on locally generated revenue in 1976, drawing in the pharmaceutical industry, then phased that exemption out over ten years from 1996 to 2006. Production moved elsewhere and a recession began that has not clearly ended.

Other losses stacked on it. The closure of Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in 2005, after protests over bombing practice, cost 6,000 jobs and 300 million dollars a year.

Why the debt and the hurricane arrived together

By early 2017 the outstanding bond debt had reached 70 billion dollars, around 12,000 dollars a head, against a poverty rate of 45% and unemployment of 12.4%. The Commonwealth had been defaulting since 2015 and, as a territory, could not file for bankruptcy the way a state's municipalities can.

Congress passed PROMESA in 2016, creating a federal Oversight Board with authority over the island's budget. The board approved an austerity plan that cut services to repay creditors, and it is appointed rather than elected, which is the constitutional position restated in fiscal terms.

Then the weather. Hurricane Maria struck directly on 20 September 2017, two weeks after Irma had already cut power to a million people. The grid, run by a utility that had effectively gone bankrupt that July, was destroyed; full power took nearly a year to restore. In May 2018 the Natural Resources Defense Council found 70% of the population living with water that violated United States law. Earthquakes in December 2019 and January 2020 knocked the grid out island-wide again.

People left. Over a million Puerto Ricans migrated to the mainland between 2009 and 2019, 130,000 of them in the three months after Maria. The population has fallen from about 4.0 million to about 3.2 million, and every departure is an American citizen moving inside their own country.

How the status question keeps being asked

Seven status votes have been held and none has changed anything, because under the Territorial Clause only Congress can act.

Support for statehood has risen in every successive vote. Congressional interest has not moved with it: the Puerto Rico Admissions Act drew 13.3% co-sponsorship in the House in 2018 and 5% in 2019, and no statehood bill has reached the Senate floor since 1898. The House passed a Puerto Rico Status Act on 15 December 2022 and it went no further.

In June 2025 the United Nations adopted another resolution in favour of self-determination for Puerto Rico, as it has repeatedly. The island remains an unincorporated organised territory of the United States, and the sentence begun in 1898 is still unfinished.