Making Never-Never Land

Myths about the powers held by the United States are often supported by the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, which derives its logic from the interpretation of a document that the US itself developed. Therefore, when pressure is placed on a specific legal precedent, the shallowness of its validity is revealed. Dr. Mónica A. Jiménez accomplishes this kind of scholarly work in her recently published book Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). By tracing the legal logic of what continues to animate the colonial dynamics between the United States and Puerto Rico, Jiménez offers a “genealogy of racial exclusion in law” (36) that both folds time and space to make clear how late-19th century Supreme Court logics and opinions continue to subjugate the land and people of Puerto Rico to colonial violence.

Split into two sections, the first half of the book details the key case Downes v. Bidwell (1901), while the second half explores how the legal ramifications of Downes continued to haunt the archipelago. The first chapter focuses on the development of Downes and its outcome, which argued that territories of the United States were not allowed to access certain provisions of the U.S. Constitution. The ambiguous legal foundation for this decision was established in 1900 after Puerto Rico was acquired by the United States when the US Supreme Court established the territorial incorporation doctrine, effectively creating the legal category of “unincorporated territory." Chapter two probes the white supremacist U.S. legal landscape to offer a “genealogy of racial exclusion in law” (36) that shows the reader how U.S. settler colonialism and empire-making are dependent on the reuse and recycling of legal precedents and tactics that disenfranchised and dispossessed racially marginalized communities. By excavating the legal opinions handed down during the Marshal Trilolgy and Dred Scott v. Sandford – a collection of Supreme Court cases that defined 19th-century legal policy for Native Americans and African Americans, respectively – Jiménez makes clear that “It is not a coincidence that the most shameful cases in the United States’ legal history of race should serve as direct precedents to a decision that continues to serve as the basis for Puerto Rico’s exclusion more than one hundred years after it was handed down” (9).

With a solid understanding of Downes and its precedents, Making Never-Never Land continues into the 20th century to show how the colonial dynamics between Puerto Rico and the U.S. have played out. Chapter three centers on how race, racism, and anti-blackness developed in the metropole and found its way to the archipelago through various medical, political, and cultural experiments carried out by the U.S. on Puerto Ricans. Jiménez writes mostly about health, labor, and policing in Puerto Rico in the early 20th century and applies gendered and racial lenses to see how Puerto Ricans have been surveilled by U.S. colonial policy. Chapter 4 recounts the changing legal standing between Puerto Rico and the U.S. through Operation Bootstrap during WWII to the post-WWII creation of the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA). By following the political agendas of Luis Muñoz Marín, a hopeful Puerto Rican politician turned colonial mouthpiece, the chapter shows how the ELA had provided a moment of hope for Puerto Ricans while under colonial subjectivity. “No matter how much the ELA had tried to obfuscate or dress up Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States,” writes Professor Jiménez, “its colonial underpinnings were still present” (112). Chapter Five jumps to 2015 during Puerto Rico's recent debt crisis, which resulted in the Puerto Rican Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), and the imposition of a financial oversight board for Puerto Rico, proving that Puerto Rico was still very much operating from the colonial legal precedents set in 1901 with the Downes case. Puerto Ricans voiced their disapproval by protesting and placing political pressure on Puerto Rico’s elected officials. 

Dr. Jiménez writes with vital urgency about the current state of Puerto Rico after over a century of colonial violence resulting from racially coded laws that have harmed marginalized peoples across U.S. history. She writes, “The stakes are high for Puerto Rico and for Puerto Ricans. As the environmental and human-made disasters continue to pile up, and vulture capitalists and gentrifiers set their sights on the natural beauty of the archipelago, Puerto Ricans are being forced to make difficult decisions under ever more impossible circumstances” (11). As long as the legal underpinning in the form of Downes continues to accrue legitimacy in the US Supreme Court, Puerto Rico will continue to suffer under the powers of the United States. Making Never-Never Land is a legal history that will provide academics and non-academics with a solid foundation of how Puerto Rico's status as a commonwealth began, how it was maintained, and how it can be undone. One of the first books published by UNC’s Latinx History series edited by Professor Lori Flores and Micahel Innis-Jiménez, and surely builds excitement about the forthcoming manuscripts.