Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-2026

Abstract

This Article argues that the constitutional law of U.S. colonialism as it applies to Puerto Rico should be understood as a form of collective gaslighting. The United States has been gaslighting Puerto Ricans for a century-and-a-quarter. By defining their constitutional status as a series of contradictions — starting with defining Puerto Rico as “foreign,” but only in a “domestic sense” — the federal government has caused Puerto Ricans to question their capacity to judge their own reality, thereby solidifying U.S. power over the island and undermining Puerto Rican resistance.

Not only has the United States been gaslighting Puerto Ricans since annexation, but it has been distressingly successful at it. In Puerto Rico, the United States has effectively recruited large numbers of its colonial subjects to make the case for their subordinate status on its behalf: to argue — to believe — that it is not merely constitutional but desirable, and consistent with decolonization, for the people of Puerto Rico to remain, forever, neither a state (with the equal representation it would bring) nor an independent country (with the equal sovereignty it would bring); to insist that over three million U.S. citizens continue living on U.S. soil and subject to U.S. laws while being denied voting representation in the federal government. Forever. In a veritable triumph of gaslighting, the United States has somehow succeeded in keeping a colony while claiming — accurately — that its colonial subjects asked for it.

In this Article, I argue that the United States accomplished this feat through collective gaslighting. In Part I, I offer a working definition of gaslighting, including its collective form. In Part II, I discuss the Insular Cases of 1901, which introduced into U.S. constitutional law a doctrine according to which certain territories have been annexed by, but not “incorporated” into, the United States, and I show how these decisions set the stage for Puerto Rico’s gaslighting by the United States by creating a surreal and subordinate status. In Part III, I turn to Puerto Rico’s transition to what became known as “commonwealth” in 1952, and argue that it constituted the culmination of the United States’ successful collective gaslighting of large swaths of the population of Puerto Rico through manipulation resulting in coerced complicity. In the Conclusion, I turn the spotlight on myself.

Disciplines

Constitutional Law | Law | Puerto Rican Studies

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