On Aug. 1, millions of Puerto Ricans held their breath for 12.37 seconds as Jasmine Camacho-Quinn ran in the women’s 100 meter hurdles final at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. She had already broken the Olympic record in the semifinals. They collectively exhaled and cheered as she won Puerto Rico’s second gold medal in the country’s history. For some U.S. audiences, it might have been a surprise that Camacho-Quinn, born in South Carolina and a University of Kentucky alum, was running for Puerto Rico. For her mother and family members who celebrated with screams and tears of joy, it was a victory for their country, Puerto Rico.
Camacho-Quinn’s Olympic gold medal is a powerful reminder that Puerto Rico is, in fact, a U.S. colony in the 21st century. But although Puerto Rico lacks sovereignty, Puerto Ricans have created complex, fluid and ever-changing national identities in this context. That is, they have crafted a shared sense of belonging to a collective group with shared pasts, cultures and struggles. For Puerto Ricans, Camacho-Quinn’s victory is historically important in its own right. But it also forces us to reckon with the fact that Puerto Rico is, in the words of anthropologist Jorge Duany, a nation on the move, one that encompasses a large number of Puerto Ricans now living outside the archipelago itself.
Puerto Rico is a Caribbean archipelago that was first inhabited by Indigenous communities almost a millennia ago. The Spaniards first arrived in 1493 and began its colonization 15 years later. It remained a Spanish colonial possession until 1898 when the United States waged war against the decaying Spanish Empire. In the Treaty of Paris, signed Dec. 10, 1898, Puerto Rico became a colonial possession of the United States.
