I Grew Up in a U.S. Colony. I Will Never Take Voting for Granted.
My ballot is a quiet love letter to nearly four million U.S. colonial subjects who are denied the right to vote
“Mamá Blanca will never get to do this.” That’s what crossed my mind every time I thought about casting my ballot in New York City on Election Day. My 85-year-old grandmother has believed in the political project of statehood for Puerto Rico all of her life, but she’ll likely die without ever voting for a president or having real congressional representation. The very country that calls itself a beacon of liberty and democracy will never allow her the opportunity to exercise the right to vote in federal elections. That’s the curse of being born in the oldest colony in the world: Knowing that innumerable decisions affecting boricuas’ everyday lives are made by people hundreds of thousands of miles away whom they didn’t elect.
Being forced to leave Puerto Rico in 2014 to seek a better future allowed me the privilege of voting beyond local island elections, shedding the weight of boricuas’ second-class U.S. citizenship. Ever since then, I’ve cast a ballot thinking of the 3.2 million Puerto Rican sisters and brothers, and the more than 350,000 other colonial subjects in American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the…
