‘It’s in my blood, in my food and in my soul’: current understandings of Puerto Ricanness within the Puerto Rican nation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although the United Nations no longer classifies Puerto Rico as a colony, Puerto Rico poses theoretical and empirical challenges to inquiries about national identity within (post-)colonial situations. Gazing through a sociohistorical lens, the present study explores how beliefs about legitimate membership criteria relate to self-identified Puerto Ricans’ understanding of their and in-group others’ national identity. By contextualizing current perceptions of national identity as linked to an emergent Puerto Rican nationalism throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth-century, this paper relates individual-level conceptions of membership criteria to institutional and discursive interventions, thereby contributing to studies of national identity in colonially (un)settled times.