“Mariluz Franco Ortiz, a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Institute of the UPR in Cayey, is co-author of this column.
2021 has been one of important achievements for the anti-racist fight in Puerto Rico. We learned that the majority of the Puerto Rican population no longer identifies as “white” in the 2020 federal population census, a goal that the Ilé Collective sought to achieve with its anti-racist campaign. The precipitous drop from 76% to 17% in a decade of people who self-identified as white only, as well as the predominant use of “other race”, evidenced profound changes around how we perceive ourselves in front of the American population.”