As we begin to emerge from the rubble created for the Puerto Rican community by the 1980s as the so-called "Decade of the Hispanic." the 1990s present us with new challenges, although the numbers from the Census are all too familiar. Most of these statistics just wind up updating the picture of Puerto Ricans as the poorest of the poor. While there have been a number of areas in which some progress could be seen occurring in the 1980s, such as in educational attainment and increases in median household income, the overall picture today is not encouraging. The election of the Clinton Administration and the potential growth of Puerto Rican political clout as a result of redistricting, however, provide us with new potential elements for empowerment that can be used by a reenergized and more creative grassroots community leadership.

Continuing Invisibility

One of the continuing problems Puerto Ricans have been facing has been our invisibility. In the 1970s, more Puerto Ricans were returning to Puerto Rico than coming to the United States, a process that reversed itself in the 1980s. The Puerto Rican population began, as a result, to level off during the early 1980s while that of other Latinos began to dramatically grow. In the 1980s, the focus was on so-called "model minorities" and those that were making it in American society; Puerto Ricans were, in contrast, falling behind and began to be lost from sight as a specific community.

By the 1990s, however, the Puerto Rican population had grown in size, and this increased presence was successfully utilized in a number of instances to make the Voting Rights Act work for us during the redistricting process, resulting in the largest cadre of Puerto Rican elected officials to date at the local, state and federal levels of government. This decade also brought the debate on the status of Puerto Rico to a new level. These and other developments, one can safely say, put Puerto Ricans in a different place in the discussions of social policy, politics and in-ternational relations in the United States.

The 1990 Census Bureau counted 2.7 million Puerto Ricans in the States, and another 3.5 million in Puerto Rico. Excluding Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans accounted for only 1.1 percent of the United States population; including Puerto Rico, this figure increases to 2.5 percent. Between 1980 and 1990, the Puerto Rican population outside of Puerto Rico grew by 35 percent, and in Puerto Rico it grew by 7 percent. The combined Stateside and Island populations grew during this period by close to 18 percent.

If these population growth rates continue through the year 2000, the population of Puerto Rico will be 3.8 million, while the Puerto Rican population in the United States will number 3.7 million. By the end of the decade, therefore, the equivalence in size between the Stateside and Island populations will no doubt change the dynamics of the relationship between them. These changes will, of course, be dependent on such factors as the rate of migration, the impact of possible changes in the political status of Puerto Rico, and changes in the place of the United States in the global economy.

In comparison to the Puerto Rican population growth rate of 35 percent within the United States, Whites grew by only 6 percent and Blacks by only 13 percent during the 1980s. If current population growth rates continue for each group in the 1990s, when the population of Puerto Rico is included, by the year 2000 the total Latino population will have increased to 34.2 million, compared to 33.9 million for Blacks. This would make Latinos the largest racial-ethnic minority group in the country at the start of the new century. As we have seen, with the inclusion of Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican segment of a dramatically growing and influential Latino population will also increase. In fact, if Puerto Rico were to become a state, its delegation to the Congress, combined with that of Stateside Puerto Ricans, could make Puerto Ricans the largest Latino voting block in both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.

Strategically Concentrated

While only a small segment of the total United States population, Puerto Ricans become a socially and politically significant group because of our concentration in urban centers in the Northeast and other regions. Within the United States (excluding Puerto Rico), 69 percent of Puerto Ricans were concentrated in the Northeast in 1990, followed by 15 percent in the South, 9 percent in the Midwest and 7 percent in the West. More than 85 percent of the Stateside Puerto Rican population resided in only ten states in 1990.

New York State continued to have the largest concentration of Puerto Ricans, with 40 percent of the total. The dispersion away from such traditionally Puerto Rican states as New York and New Jersey continued in the 1980s. Florida, for example, became the state with the third largest Puerto Rican population, with 9 percent of the total (as much as the total Puerto Rican population of the Midwest and more than that in the West).

Puerto Ricans are 5 percent or more of the populations of six major states that combined represent 118, or 21.9 percent, of total votes in the Electoral College and are, therefore, important states in the election of U.S. Presidents. Within these states, Puerto Ricans are significant percentages of the population of cities like New York, Chicago, Newark, Boston, Hartford and others.

In New York City, for example, while Latinos constitute about 15 percent of the city's electorate and Puerto Ricans are 50 percent of the Latino population, Puerto Ricans are over 70 percent of the Latino vote. This is the result of such factors as citizenship, length of residence and others. While hidden under the phenomena of the dramatic growth of non-Puerto Rican Latinos, the Puerto Rican factor in many of the larger Northeastern cities and states is increasingly significant well beyond its public acknowledgment.

Geographic Dispersion

While there has been an increase of Puerto Ricans in what could be called the more traditional settlement centers in the Northeast, there has been a more dramatic increase in the Puerto Rican presence in states like Florida and Texas. In these newer locales, Puerto Ricans appear to be in relatively better socioeconomic positions (although pockets of Puerto Rican poverty also exist in some of these places). In Texas, many of the Puerto Ricans are professionals, while in Florida there are large number of Puerto Rican businesspeople. Much of this reflects a relatively new direct migration to these States from Puerto Rico of professionals and entrepreneurs, a departure from the past pattern that had New York City playing the role of hub from which Puerto Ricans would migrate to other cities in the United States.

Ignoring Puerto Rico's Population

As a proportion of the country's Latino population, Puerto Ricans lose major visibility because of how the population of Puerto Rico is treated by the Census and social analysts. The Census routinely does not include Puerto Rico when it looks at the Puerto Rican population. By their definition, Puerto Ricans are 12.2 percent of all Latinos in the United States. But if Puerto Rico is included, Puerto Ricans more than double to 24.2 percent of total Latinos. Mexicans are the largest Latino group, making up 60.4 percent of the total (52.2 percent if Puerto Rico is included), while Cubans make up 4.7 percent (4.0 percent if Puerto Rico is included). Therefore, whether or not Puerto Rico is included in these population figures can be important.

The rationale for consistently excluding the Island population from these figures is not entirely obvious. While it could be argued that Puerto Ricans on the Island do not pay federal taxes directly, do not vote for President, and so on, it is a fact that the residents of Puerto Rico have been U.S. citizens since 1917. This ambiguity only serves to arbitrarily minimize the Puerto Rican presence in the United States. The sources of this problem need to be critically reviewed.

Increased Latino Diversity

This question of visibility becomes even more exacerbated at the local level where the Latino populations of major cities are becoming increasingly diverse. For example, based on ancestry data from the Census, in New York, the city of largest Puerto Rican concentration, there were 1.7 million Latinos in 1990, of which Puerto Ricans comprised 49.5 percent. The next largest Latino groups in the city were: Dominicans (19.1 percent of total Latinos), Colombians (4.9 percent), Ecuadorians (4.5 percent), Cubans (3.3 percent), Mexicans (3.2 percent), Salvadorians (1.4 percent), Peruvians (1.3 percent), Hondurans (1.3 percent), and Nicaraguans (0.5 percent). This diversity raises a number of important issues for Puerto Ricans about the nature of Latino intergroup relations and the role that Puerto Ricans are to play in this new context. This is certainly a critical issue facing Puerto Rican community leaders in the 1990s with greater force than ever before.

Education Attainment

When we turn to the socioeconomic profile of Puerto Ricans in the United States (outside of Puerto Rico) that emerges from the 1980s, there is cause for both alarm and for optimism. Puerto Ricans in the United States are a young population. In 1990, 31 percent were under age 15, while only 4.7 percent were over 64 years of age. This continues to make education an important issue for Puerto Ricans.

In terms of educational attainment for those Puerto Ricans 25 years of age and older, while 24.3 percent had less than a high school education, 25.0 percent had attended college (10.1 percent were college graduates). The youthfulness of this community has also been one of its strengths in the energy and potential it represents. However, the problem of relatively low educational attainment (including a persistently high dropout rate), of high rates of teenage pregnancies, high youth unemployment rates, the AIDS epidemic and so on, remain troubling. There is the worsening problem, as well, of what appears to be the weakening of the transmission of Puerto Rican cultural values and political traditions between generations.

Labor Force Participation

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Puerto Ricans continued to have the lowest labor force participation rates of Latinos, Whites and Blacks. In 1990, of those 16 years and older, only 57.1 percent of Puerto Ricans were in the labor force, compared to 66.1 percent of Latinos as whole, 66.6 percent of Whites and 62.6 percent of Blacks. Related to this pattern, the median family income of Puerto Ricans was only $18,008, while it was $23,431 for all Latinos, $36,915 for Whites and $21,423 for Blacks.

The rate of single female headed households among Puerto Ricans is comparable to that of Blacks, 43.3 percent and 45.9 percent, respectively. The rate for all Latinos was only 23.8 percent and for Whites it was only 13.2 percent. This is highly correlated with poverty rates, but in this respect, Puerto Rican poverty rates exceed those of Blacks. The poverty rate (for persons) for Puerto Ricans was 40.6 percent, compared to 31.9 percent for Blacks, 28.1 percent for all Latinos, and 10.7 percent for Whites. These problems highlight the so-called "underclass" status of the Puerto Rican community that make Puerto Ricans poorer than African-Americans. The depth of Puerto Rican poverty in the United States is a problem that is not well understood by Americans because of the dominant focus on Black poverty, particularly in current discussions on this "underclass" problem.

In 1990, the Puerto Rican unemployment rate of 11.6 percent was the highest among Latinos who, as a whole, had an unemployment rate of 9.9 percent. Blacks had the highest jobless rate, 12.4 percent, and Whites the lowest, 6.0 percent. Of those Puerto Ricans employed, the largest percentage were in the Technical and Support positions (32.0 percent), followed by Operators (20.7 percent). On the other hand, Puerto Ricans had a higher proportion of those employed in Managerial occupations (17.9 percent) than Latinos as a whole (13.0 percent).

This occupational structure of the Puerto Rican labor force, along with the disproportionately large number of Puerto Ricans outside the labor force, points to potentially serious economic divisions within the Puerto Rican community, even within such a high poverty context. As discussed earlier, these vertical class divisions are being replicated geographically with greater concentrations of Puerto Rican poor in the Northeast and the more affluent dispersed in other parts of the country.

Housing

The marginal economic position of Puerto Ricans even makes the type of housing mix they live in different from that of other major racial-ethnic groups. Puerto Ricans have the highest rate of housing rental than any other group. In 1990, 76.6 percent of Puerto Rican were renters, compared to 61.0 percent of all Latinos, 55.7 percent of Blacks and 30.8 percent of Whites. This is largely the result of the concentration of Puerto Ricans in Northeastern cities, where renting is more prevalent, and also of this community's high poverty rate. Type of housing tenure, as is widely acknowledged, has important consequences for how a community can be mobilized, as well as on the ideology of individuals from that group. As largely renters, Puerto Ricans live in poorer housing, are more concentrated than most other communities and pay a highly disproportionate share of their incomes on shelter. This high rental rate also reinforces greater rates of internal migration that makes community mobilization more difficult.

Transmission of Puerto Rican Values

In the 1990s, an issue of increasing concern is the transmission of Puerto Rican cultural and political values to a younger generation. There is growing evidence that with this community's continuing settlement dispersal within the United States, there is a significant segment of the Puerto Rican population that is losing its connection to its cultural and political traditions. One important indicator of this trend comes in terms of intermarriage patterns. According to the Census, Puerto Ricans have the highest rate of outgroup marriage than any other Latino group and than Blacks. In 1990, the percentage of Puerto Ricans married to non-Latinos was 19.4 percent, while marriage to non-Latinos by Mexicans was 17.3 percent and by Cubans it was 14.1 percent. Among Blacks, only 3.0 percent were married to non-Blacks. Other data has found a sharp increase in Puerto Rican marriage rates to non-Latinos as high as 40 percent among U.S.-born. While, to some, this is cause for alarm, to others this is positive evidence of Puerto Rican integration into American society.

An Agenda for the 1990s and Beyond

As Puerto Rican organizations and leaders develop their strategies for community empowerment in the 1990s through the Boricua First! Campaign and other vehicles, these are some of the issues that will need to be addressed. Of central concern to the Puerto Rican community will be the development of a new social policy that addresses the realities of the nation's poor, particularly in its urban centers, of persistent poverty, environmental racism, AIDS, and other related problems. At the same time, the Puerto Rican reality in the United States cannot be usefully discussed without reference to the political and economic status of Puerto Rico (including issues such as the fate of Section 936), which continues to disrupt the lives of its people by exporting poverty to U.S. urban centers as Puerto Rican migration out of Puerto Rico appears on the increase.

The early 1990s have also brought to our community's attention the issue of voting rights and the impact of redistricting in increasing significantly the number of Puerto Rican elected officials at all levels of government. This new political reality raises questions about the role of electoral politics in an overall strategy for community empowerment, particularly how to hold politicians, especially our own community leadership, more accountable to grassroots concerns. The 1990s, therefore, return us to many basic issues, but within a new context that makes their resolution even more complex, but no less urgent.
 

Angelo Falcón, a political scientist, is President and Founder of the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy. He is a co-author of the book, Latino Voices: Mexican, Puerto Rican and Cuban Perspectives on American Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992) and wrote a chapter on the the role of the Puerto Rican community in the United States in the proposed 1991 plebiscite on the status of Puerto Rico in the book, Colonial Dilemma: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Puerto Rico (Boston: South End Press, 1993), edited by Edwin and Edgardo Melendez. He is also author of the articles, "Puerto Ricans and the Politics of Racial Identity" in the book, Racial and Ethnic Identity: Pyschological Development and Creative Expression (New York: Routledge, 1985), and "Puerto Ricans and Post-Liberal New York: The 1992 Election" in Ethnic Ironies: Latinos and the 1992 Election (Westview Press). Mr. Falcón is publisher of Crìtica: A Journal of Puerto Rican Policy & Politics.