Puerto Rico’s “massive debt”

Trump’s predictably haughty reference to Puerto Rico’s (pre-Hurricane Maria) “broken infrastructure” and “massive debt [or ‘billions of dollars’]” owed to “Wall Street and the banks” should be viewed in the grim light of the country’s colonial and post-imperialist experience. A nice introduction to the relevance of this historical narrative and its lingering deleterious effects is found in this piece by Linda Backiel from the Monthly Review a couple of years ago: “Puerto Rico: The Crisis Is About Colonialism, Not Debt.”

And here is a comparatively short list of relevant literature:

• Carr, Raymond. Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
• Corretjer, Juan Antonio. Albizu Campos and the Ponce Massacre. New York: World View Publishers, 1965.
• Denis, Nelson A. War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony. New York: Nation Books, 2015.
• Enck-Wanzer, Darrel, ed. The Young Lords: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
• Falcón, Luis Nieves. Violations of Human Rights in Puerto Rico by the U.S. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Puerto, 2002.
• Fernandez, Ronald. Prisoners of Colonialism: The Struggle for Justice in Puerto Rico. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994.
• Fernandez, Ronald. The Disenchanted Island: Puerto Rico and the United States in the Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2^nd ed., 1996.
• Foner, Philip S. The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, Vols. 1 and 2, 1895-1902. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.
• Lee, Sonia Song-Ha. Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
• Maldonado-Denis, Manuel. Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation. New York: Random House, 1972.
• Melendez, Miguel. We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003.
• Monge, José Trías. Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
• Rivera, Oscar López, “A Century of Colonialism: One Hundred Years of Puerto Rican Resistance,” in Joy James, ed. Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007: 160-189.
• Rivera, Oscar López (Luis Nieves Falcón, ed.) Between Torture and Resistance. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013.
• Silén, Juan Angel. We, the Puerto Rican People: A Story of Oppression and Resistance. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
• Torres, Andrés and José E. Velázquez, eds. The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998.
• Wanzer-Serrano, Darrel. The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2015.
• Young Lords Party and Michael Abramson. Palante: Young Lords Party. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.
• Zavala, Iris M. and Rafael Rodriguez, eds. The Intellectual Roots of Independence: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Political Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980.