Puerto Rico is a large Caribbean island of roughly 3,500 square miles located in the West Indies. It’s the easternmost island of the Greater Antilles chain, which also includes Cuba, Jamaica and Hispaniola (divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic). After centuries of Spanish rule, Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States in 1898 and has been largely self-governing since the mid-20th century.
Native Population
Puerto Rico’s native Taíno population—whose hunter-gatherer ancestors settled the island more than 1,000 years before the Spanish arrived—called it Borinquén, and referred to themselves as boricua (a term that is still used today).
During his second expedition to the Indies in 1493, Christopher Columbus returned several Taíno captives to Borinquén and claimed the island for Spain, calling it San Juan Bautista. In 1508, Juan Ponce de León founded the first European settlement, Caparra, near a bay on the island’s northern coast; Caparra was renamed Puerto Rico (or “rich port”) in 1521
Over time, people began referring to the entire island by that name, while the port city itself became San Juan. Smallpox soon wiped out the vast majority of the Taíno, with many others enslaved by the Spanish to mine silver and gold and to construct settlements.
Foraker Act
In July 1898, during the brief Spanish-American War, U.S. Army forces occupied Puerto Rico at Guánica, on the island’s south side. Under the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the war later that year, Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and Cuba to the United States.
The interim U.S. military government established on the island ended in 1900 after Congress passed the Foraker Act, which formally instituted a civil government in Puerto Rico. Having enjoyed considerable autonomy in the latter years of Spanish colonial rule, many Puerto Ricans bristled under the control exercised by the United States.
In 1917, Congress passed the Jones-Shafroth Act, which granted U.S. citizenship to all Puerto Ricans and made Puerto Rican males eligible for the military draft; some 18,000 of the territory’s residents were subsequently drafted into World War I.
