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USA rhetoric about Puerto Rico aims to legitimize but at the same time deny unaccountable USA rule over a foreign, stateless, colonized Latin American nation. That's why their laws say we're not part of the USA ("foreign in a domestic sense") while their media insists we are.
That's why they love circumlocutions such as "the 3.3 million American citizens of Puerto Rico" instead of "Puerto Ricans," talking about us as a geographical aggregate of Americans instead of a foreign, stateless, colonized Latin American nation.
That's why they talk about us as "minorities" when we're more than 95% of the population of our ancestral homeland, which the USA claims for itself and denies to us. They're the ones who are the minority, at no more than 1.1%.
https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/16_5YR/DP05/0400000US72
https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/16_5YR/DP05/0400000US72
That's why they refer to themselves as the "mainland" relative to us; our actual mainland is the big island of the archipelago of Puerto Rico. That's why it's unthinkable in the US media to call Puerto Rico a "country," which is the normal designation in Puerto Rico ("el paĂs").
Source for screenshots: https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/hurricane-michael-s-historic-strength-a-case-for-climate-study-1341533251922
The Harvard Law Review had an issue in 2017 with some good pieces on US constitutional law about Puerto Rico an other "unincorporated territories" (the US constitutional term for colonies). Here's one of the two.
https://harvardlawreview.org/2017/04/us-territories-introduction/
https://harvardlawreview.org/2017/04/us-territories-introduction/
Some choice passages from that chapter, articulating the "territorial incorporation doctrine"—the US policy that Puerto Rico belongs to but is not part of the USA.
Also very worth reading is this chapter, which covers, among other things, how the United Nations after WWII allowed the USA to get away with keeping its colonial empire unchallenged and unsupervised.
https://harvardlawreview.org/2017/04/the-international-place-of-puerto-rico/
https://harvardlawreview.org/2017/04/the-international-place-of-puerto-rico/
Another source worth reading are contemporaneous materials on the 1900 USA election, particularly on the Democratic side where US imperialism was fiercely denounced.
All debate on this would soon vanish. https://twitter.com/midnucas/status/1112250863945306113
All debate on this would soon vanish. https://twitter.com/midnucas/status/1112250863945306113
