Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
not create by fiat a cultural nationality.” The signal advantage of commonwealth
status, I would surmise, lies in its ability to reconcile the two
nationalities. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens; at the same time, you are
presently free to preserve your cultural identity, your distinctive language,
traditions, folk memories and mores.
Statehood, I would suppose, foresees a somewhat different future.
Puerto Rico, as the fifty-first state, would have to function on the same
basis as the existing fifty states. It would be well advised, for example,
to enact into law the executive order establishing English as a co-official
language, and to take seriously the “Project for Developing a Bilingual
Citizen” proposed last year by your Department of Education.
As a state, Puerto Rico would doubtless run the risk of an erosion of
cultural identity—not a total loss, it should be noted, for the U.S. is far
from a homogeneous nation. Among the existing fifty states Texas has a
very different cultural identity from Massachusetts, as Mississippi has a
very different cultural identity from Minnesota. Also, as I noted earlier,
there is no incompatibility between fidelity to the Constitution and the
laws and fidelity, as any individual may wish it, to ancestral traditions and
rituals. Still, statehood would, I judge, have the tendency in the longer run
to set Puerto Rico on the road to assimilation.
In mentioning the cultural choices involved, I do not ignore the economic
factors that may also weigh on one side or the other of your decision.
And, whatever you decide (short of independence), whether you will
go for an enhanced commonwealth status or for statehood, you will still
be citizens of the United States and will be so regarded and cherished by
your fellow countrymen.
Let us recall some words of Mahatma Gandhi—words that used to be
inscribed on public posters throughout India, a country far more fiercely
divided than America by ethnic and racial and religious and linguistic and
caste antagonisms. “We must cease,” Gandhi said, “to be exclusive Hindus
or Muslims or Sikhs, Parsis, Christians or Jews. Whilst we may staunchly
adhere to our respective faiths, we must be Indians first and Indians last.”
It is because India has abandoned these teachings of Gandhi that it is so
violently and tragically divided today. And as Gandhi’s great American
disciple Martin Luther King put it, “we are all caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality—tied into a single garment of destiny.... We must
either learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
In the spirit of Gandhi and of King, while we heterogeneous Americans
may staunchly adhere to our respective traditions and creeds, let us
never forget that we are one people, members one of another, Americans
first and Americans last, tied together in that single garment of destiny—
and let us never falter in the unending fight to make the American dream
an American reality for all our people.
• HOMINES • Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 125