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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 U.S. Virgin Islands, who are denied the right to vote. I choose a president, as they can’t. I choose senators, as they can’t. I choose representatives who can actually vote in Congress, as they can’t. “Growing up, my parents taught me that voting wasn’t just about me and what I wanted but about my community and what it needed,” Micaela Torregrosa-Mahoney, who is boricua and lives in Florida, told me. “Some of the people I vote for here will have decision-making power over Puerto Rico, where half my family and friends still live.”
There is so much on the line for my loved ones back in Puerto Rico today: the island’s political status, that most of Congress refuses to address; the U.S. policies that keep the island in poverty; the all-consuming debt crisis that will be felt by generations; the disastrous handling of Hurricane Maria; the lack of access to affordable health care made worse by Medicaid caps; and so much more. Axel Diaz, who moved to Florida five…
