My parents migrated from Puerto Rico to New York, where I was born. They crossed water, not an international border. I say this as a daughter of the diaspora, not as an islander, and I do not pretend those experiences are interchangeable. The island and diaspora have been shaped by the same colonial relationship but in very different ways, and I am very well aware of this.

Moreover, I want to be clear that Puerto Rican food is distinctly Puerto Rican. I am not arguing that it should be absorbed into a generic American identity. I am asking why, inside the United States, it is treated as though it arrived with foreigners.

Congress made Puerto Ricans statutory U.S. citizens in 1917. The Supreme Court had already described Puerto Rico as “foreign in a domestic sense,” under U.S. sovereignty, but not fully incorporated into the country. That contradiction followed Puerto Ricans to the mainland and still haunts us to this day.

Too often, unfamiliarity is mistaken for foreignness. What I believe someone really means is not, “This food is foreign.” It is, “I did not grow up with it, and I have mistaken my experience for someone else’s.”

Puerto Rican food does not become less Puerto Rican because U.S. citizens brought it to New York or anywhere else in the country, for that matter. Recognizing it within American life does not erase the island’s identity. It simply refuses the hypocrisy of invoking our citizenship when useful while treating our culture as foreign when we show up as ourselves.

And our right to show up as ourselves is the part I’m not willing to let go of.

Sources / further reading:
Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History Since 1898 by Dr. César J. Ayala and Dr. Rafael Bernabe
 
The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World by José Trías Monge.
 
Puerto Rico: A National History by Dr. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution by Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall, editors ...