A small Place-Chapter 2

A colonized territory has no word on what they want and what they don’t want for themselves. This is the story of many of the islands of the caribbean. Pretty much every single island on the caribbean was colonized by one of the major Countries like Spain, England, France or Portugal. The majority of them are by this day free but still have colonies. Puerto Rico was first colonized by the spaniards in the 16 century and then by the United States in 1898. The Spanish bring a huge change to the island, they bring with them slaves, new agricultural products and introduce new methods of transportation like the horse. These changes might seem like progression for some people but what they really were doing was killing the native Taino culture.

The mix of new cultures set a new future through the years and a new culture arose. From a native Taino culture we went to a African oriented culture. Many of today’s typical dressing, food and music came from the African. The industrialization of the island on sugar cane and human labor resource made people in the United States set eyes on our island. These changes brought by Spain made us attractive to an even bigger colonizer. In 1898 Puerto Rico fought a war on the United States to keep them from invading us but at the end they win and made us their colony. During the beginning of this time  changes were radical, schools had english as a first language, a language that the majority of people didn’t know. We didn’t had the right to vote for our own governor. We were living a dictatorship by the country that fight for democracy and freedom. Today more than a hundred years after our island still is under the same oppression as a hundred years ago, yes we have the right to elect our own governance, and legislation but honestly we have been so brain-washed that it is worthless because politics are just hungry for power and money and they do anything to shadow the great nation.

Democracy made us slaves, we have a flag but no space in the world’s affairs, we have a flag but no nationality, we have a flag and we don’t belong here o there. This democracy have kept us slave giving away money to keep our mouths shut but at the end we still have no vote in their politics, the politics that at the end have the higher power on us. Progression might have come with the colonization but at the same time we lost our identity when we sold our souls to the devil, our vocabulary became a non-sense mixture of spanish and english with words that are not present either on the spanish or the english dictionary, the modernization of the island came with big food chains that make us fat and unhealthy just like them, all the good they think they gave us is just some more of their poison in the world.