Carlos Munoz's Dichotomy
Perhaps more revealing is that a legal definition, or conferment, of citizenship is not enough to enjoy the protections of said citizenship against institutional violence because other components come to define it, such as country of descendance, socio-economic status, race, and ethnicity. Once other things come to define citizenship other than being born in the U.S. or going through the naturalization process, its definition moves from the objective and becomes subject to how we individually imagine what a citizen is. Consequently, how the diaspora was portrayed excluded them from this definition of citizenship in the U.S.’s imagined community. This unveils the dichotomy that exists of being born in the U.S. yet feeling like a foreigner, of
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It results in the community finding its culture and social organization under constant attack from a racist society” (2007). In other words, while a once colonized people may enjoy equal rights in theory, it’s the informal reality created by legal violence that facilitates the perpetuation of a colonial status long after the initial conquest. Munoz’s internal colony can also be used to better understand the condition of Latinos in general, and, for the purposes of this paper, the Puerto Rican diaspora in specific. Certainly, Juan Gonzalez, who would go on to cofound the revolutionary Young Lords, agrees, writing that, “both Puerto Ricans and Mexicans [are] descendants of conquered peoples who had been forcibly subjugated when the United States annexed their territories during expansion” and were thus comparable to other colonized peoples …show more content…
Or, as Gonzalez writes, “it underscores an unresolved contradiction of U.S. history—between our ideals of freedom and our predilection for conquest” (2011). The consequence of this contradiction is that little has changed in the metropole’s treatment of the diaspora, justifying legal violence and internal colony treatment towards Latinos as a whole since, “most Americans didn’t differentiate one group of Latinos from another” (Suarez,
It results in the community finding its culture and social organization under constant attack from a racist society” (2007). In other words, while a once colonized people may enjoy equal rights in theory, it’s the informal reality created by legal violence that facilitates the perpetuation of a colonial status long after the initial conquest. Munoz’s internal colony can also be used to better understand the condition of Latinos in general, and, for the purposes of this paper, the Puerto Rican diaspora in specific. Certainly, Juan Gonzalez, who would go on to cofound the revolutionary Young Lords, agrees, writing that, “both Puerto Ricans and Mexicans [are] descendants of conquered peoples who had been forcibly subjugated when the United States annexed their territories during expansion” and were thus comparable to other colonized peoples …show more content…
Or, as Gonzalez writes, “it underscores an unresolved contradiction of U.S. history—between our ideals of freedom and our predilection for conquest” (2011). The consequence of this contradiction is that little has changed in the metropole’s treatment of the diaspora, justifying legal violence and internal colony treatment towards Latinos as a whole since, “most Americans didn’t differentiate one group of Latinos from another” (Suarez,