Multi-racial in a Bi-racial United States

Puerto Ricans have been in a long struggle with United States to gain equality. The main reason that I feel that Puerto Ricans have not gained equality is because they are multi-racial in a bi-racial country. The Puerto Rican community does not feel it belongs to the black community or the white community. If they did not speak Spanish, they could melt into the U.S. system without a problem. I am not advocating that, because they would also lose their culture if they were to do so. Latino is another category that is thrown out to label Puerto Ricans, but when most people think of Latinos in the U.S., they think of people with very ethnic qualities. Not all Puerto Ricans are ethnic looking.

Puerto Ricans are more a nation than an ethnicity even though they are a common wealth of the U.S. That also blurs the line between ethnicity and nationalism. People do not know what to think of them. Puerto Ricans can be seen as many different ethnicities when just using their appearance. Appearance separates many minorities from one another. The Puerto Rican community does not have the luxury of looking different in a racial way to separate from the long standing ethnic labels such as black, white, or Latino. They are very stigmatized as a whole even though many people cannot pick Puerto Ricans out in the crowd. The feelings brought up by being stigmatized has lead Puerto Ricans to look inward and focus on each other, because mainstream America was not interested in them. The fact that they were forced to “dance with their own people” has made it even harder to gain the equality they seek due to not being visible in the rest of America’s eyes. The Young Lords made Puerto Ricans visible to the masses, even if it was only for a little while, but it was ultimately a phase that American media went through with them. In the end, it left the Puerto Ricans standing on the outside looking in and other directions still not finding their niche in bi-racial society of U.S.