Another excerpt
The Puerto Rican colony
Bad Bunny was born in 1994 in Puerto Rico, an unincorporated U.S. territory that the country acquired after the 1898 Spanish-American War.
It is home to 3.2 million U.S. citizens by birth. If it were a state, it would be the 30th largest by population, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.
But Puerto Rico is not a state; it is a colony from a bygone era of U.S. overseas imperial expansion. Puerto Ricans do not have voting representatives in Congress, and they do not get to help elect the president of the United States. They are also divided over the islands future. Large pluralities seek either U.S. statehood or an enhanced form of the current commonwealth status, while a smaller minority vie for independence.
But one thing is clear to all Puerto Ricans: Theyre from a nonsovereign land, with a clearly defined Latin American culture one of the oldest in the Americas. Puerto Rico may belong to the U.S. and many Puerto Ricans embrace that special relationship but the island itself does not sound or feel like the U.S.
The over 5.8 million Puerto Ricans that reside in the 50 states further complicate that picture. While legally they are U.S. citizens, mainstream Americans often dont see Puerto Ricans that way. In fact, a 2017 poll found that only 54% of Americans knew that Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens.
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