In one decade, Puerto Ricans identifying as white fell from 75.8 to 17.1 percent
The people of Puerto Rico did not change between 2010 and 2020, but the way they described themselves did. Three in four checked white on the 2010 census; ten years later fewer than one in five did, and three quarters chose another race or several. The shift says a lot about how race gets defined.
Puerto Ricans, who often call themselves Boricuas after the Taíno name for the island, Borinquen, number somewhere between 8 and 10 million, most living either on the island or on the US mainland, especially in New York, Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. As citizens of a US territory they are American citizens by birth. Their culture is Spanish-speaking and largely Christian, and draws on three main roots: Indigenous peoples such as the Taíno, Spanish and other European settlers, and Africans brought through the Atlantic slave trade, including Yoruba, Igbo and Kongo people.
Waves of newcomers shaped the mix. Canary Islanders arrived in such numbers during the 18th and 19th centuries that they founded whole towns, and through them many Puerto Ricans carry a trace of ancestry from the Guanches, the Berber-related original inhabitants of the Canaries. French planters fled the 1791 revolt in Saint-Domingue to the west coast, and a Spanish decree of 1815 designed to attract non-Spanish Europeans brought Corsicans, Germans and Irish escaping the famine. Jewish refugees came in the 1930s and 1940s, and Cuban Jews in the 1950s.
Genetic studies put the average ancestry at roughly 64 percent European, 21 percent African and 15 percent Indigenous, with European heritage strongest in the west, African in the east and Indigenous in the southwest. Individuals vary enormously, and one study found African ancestry ranging from under 10 to over 50 percent.
Racial categories themselves shifted with rulers. Under Spain, a practice called the Regla del Sacar let people of mixed ancestry pay a fee to be classified as white, the reverse of the American one-drop rule. The island went from about two-thirds Black and mixed-race in the early 1800s to nearly 80 percent white by the mid-20th century, at least on paper.
Source: Puerto Ricans
