We Are a Spirit Republic: The Role of Community Institutions in Negotiating Puerto Rican Citizenship

“‘We are a Spirit Republic:’

The Role of Community Institutions in Negotiating Puerto Rican Citizenship”

In 1967, Puerto Rican leaders in New York City co-organized a conference with city authorities entitled “Puerto Ricans Confront Problems of the Complex Urban Society: A Design for Change.” Expressing their commitment to solving issues plaguing New York Puerto Ricans at the time, one key resolution adopted at this conference was community activist Manuel Díaz’s argument that “institutions are the instruments through which a community speaks and sets goals.” Following this conference, and answering Díaz’s call for community action, various cultural institutions were founded to provide platforms for Puerto Ricans that helped them redefine and reimagine national and cultural identity.

This paper looks at the upcoming 50th anniversary of the 1967 conference and the centennial of the 1917 Jones Act to demonstrate the role of community institutions in negotiating and complicating Puerto Rican citizenship. Former Young Lords member and lifelong activist Eddie Figueroa came up with the idea of an imaginary nation, El Spirit Republic de Puerto Rico, in 1979 to empower Puerto Ricans in creating their own national identity. In 1990, this concept found a home in El Puerto Rican Embassy, an institution without a physical location just like El Spirit Republic, co-founded by Figueroa, poet Pedro Pietri, and visual artist Adál Maldonado. They created physical passports for an imagined nation to take the matter of citizenship into their own hands, protesting the U.S. and Spanish colonial history of their island “to escort our eternal tropical contemporary urban lifestyle into the 21st Century,” as Pietri writes in the official manifesto. Instead of letting a government determine their national identity, the passports would leave it open to its members—who identified, for example, as Nuyorican, Puertorriqueño, Mexijentirican, or Boricua—to define themselves on their own terms.