so, this tweet has popped up on my tl and I get that my mutuals who have liked it have their best interests at heart, but puerto rico doesn't "deserve" statehood. statehood would not get rid of colonialism, it would push us deeper in it

sure, statehood would grant us representation in the US government and all the full rights and powers US citizens are supposed to have (on paper), but we are still an ethnic group with our own national identity who were invaded, the US will never stop seing us as "the other"

we may technically stop being a colony, but the US and the PR political class which is comprised by monied white latine who only care about getting richer, will continue trying to turn this into a tourist's paradise and enforce policies that drive off locals by the thousands

statehood means our colonizers get to continue working towards the future they want: a future where most puerto ricans are displaced in the diaspora and only the monied white latine and monied USians looking to live in a tropical paradise remain

and lets be real, they don't even want most of us displaced, so much as they want us dead. just look at what government officials said in the telegram chat that kicked off last summer's protests. the statehood party wants us dead

(to translate that first screenshot for the people who don't speak spanish: that's a government official joking about feeding the dead bodies that were piling up after hurricane maria to the vultures)

I'm not gonna list all of the atrocious things the US has done to Puerto Rico but, they've oppressed us, suppressed us, they've experimented on us, they've tortured us, they've murdered us, and after all of that, why the hell would tying the knot with them make things better

this thread is not very cohesive, I might try to elaborate my thoughts more effectively in the future but TL:DR statehood bad