in partnership with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College 
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| in partnership with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College |
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The State of Puerto Rican Politics: Aquí y Allá Presented by Amílcar Barreto and Angelo Falcon |
 | ROSELLÓ ATTEMPTED TO DESTABILIZE STATESIDE PUERTO RICAN LEADERS |
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Roselló administration decided look we need to develop a lobby of support for statehood in the United States among Latinos but we don't really want to do it with the Puerto Ricans because the Puerto Ricans there are a pain in the ass and they're not going to listen to us. So they began all sorts of interesting initiatives to reach out to Mexican Americans and Cuban organizations. And started having Latino summits in Puerto Rico which Puerto Ricans from here got invited but when they came back they said: I don't think they really wanted us there. They started cultivating all sorts of relationships with groups like LULAC and other organizations.
I did a study of Latino nonprofits in Puerto Rico and I looked at this list of nonprofits that's issued by the IRS and there were about 900 non-profits in Puerto Rico -- formally non-profits. I was looking throught this list and there was a whole list of LULAC chapters. Now, LULAC is one of the oldest Mexican American organizations in the country. It's a membership based organization. Out of 900 nonprofits in Puerto Rico, there were 116 LULAC chapters. ¿Pero cono que esto? And they had all these little titles like La Estella 51. It turns out there was a strategy by this administration to use government workers to develop these chapters to basically influence this big Mexican American organization. So they had all these chapters that had votes and then they would always be taking positions supporting statehood for Puerto Rico, they say self-determination. The Mexican Americans were resentful of this Puerto Rican incursion into their organization. There was always a tension there. But that whole process all these years under Roselló has been basically a situation where the government of Puerto Rico has put itself in the position, I would say, of attacking the Puerto Rican leadership here. I remember Roselló at one point publicly threatening two Puerto Rican Congressmen, Luis Gutierrez and Nydia Velásquez, with running candidates against them. You may have recalled that. Now, that's outrageous that the governor of Puerto Rico would be threatening our representatives here in terms of running candidates. When Nydia Velásquez and Luis Gutierrez had their congressional districts challenged as being racist, the government of Puerto Rico had their hands in these cases. They were supporting the opposition. They would run candidates or would have people go in there and support that movement to destabilize these two politicians. So that's a politics now that you can argue won't be there. It's a politics that's going to be very different. |
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