Puerto Rico generally doesn’t make it into K-12 school curriculums in the states. Third graders across the nation learn about the 50 states, but not the five inhabited U.S. territories. As they progress through school, 8th graders may see a sentence about how the U.S. acquired Puerto Rico.
In recent years, however, some online teacher resources have begun to include Puerto Rico in Hispanic Heritage Month materials. This may be the one time in the year when Puerto Rico gets mentioned in the classroom.
Hispanic Heritage Month can provide a platform to create greater pride in the influence of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the U.S. while also raising awareness of the problems inherent in the unique U.S.-Puerto Rico territorial relationship. Hispanic Heritage month can similarly invite Americans to confront a basic fact of their own democracy: millions of U.S. citizens live under a territorial system that most mainland students are never taught to understand.
In 2026, Hispanic Heritage month takes place from September 15 – October 15.
Bomba, Bad Bunny, and salsa
Puerto Rican heritage is not unfamiliar to kids who live in the states. Even people living in states with small Puerto Rican populations know about Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and piña coladas. They may or may not know that any of those American icons are Puerto Rican. Classrooms that do bring up Puerto Rico during Hispanic Heritage Month are likely to consider bomba or other kinds of music and dance, the coqui, or vejigantes masks. These are all good things to learn about. But, especially when it’s included with Mexican piñatas and serapes in a general lesson about Spanish-speaking cultures, it keeps Puerto Rico in the category of a foreign destination.
In fact, Puerto Rico is an unincorporated U.S. territory, where more than three million U.S. citizens live without the full protection of the constitution, full involvement in American democracy, and the other benefits of statehood.
As the Puerto Rico Report noted in 2018, “Before Hurricane Maria, 25 freshmen in a Midwestern college classroom were asked about Puerto Rico’s government. One student knew that Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States with just one, non-voting representative in Congress. He had learned this in high school, from the comments of one teacher. The rest of the class, which was about one-third of Hispanic heritage, believed that Puerto Rico was a separate country with some deal that allowed Americans to travel without passports. These students were confident that the President of the United States was not president in Puerto Rico, but had no idea who was responsible for governing the island. Some thought they might have a king.”
A new way of presenting Puerto Rico in Hispanic Heritage Month
Young children may start with a coloring sheet of a coqui. But as they grow, they should learn some basic facts about their country:
- The United States is made up of 50 states and 5 inhabited territories, including Puerto Rico.
- People born in Puerto Rico are birthright citizens of the United States under a law passed by Congress.
- U.S. citizens living in states can vote for the President of the United States and for their state’s senators and congressmen and women. U.S. citizens living in the territories can’t.
- The only representative of Puerto Rico in Washington, D.C., is a non-voting resident commissioner.
- Even though they do not get to participate in the federal government and are not protected by the U.S. Constitution as residents of state are, people living in the territories must still follow U.S. laws.
Sharing this information would fill a significant gap in the civics education of American students and help to ensure that U.S. students grow up realizing the reality that Puerto Rico is a part of the United States political family. Such education could enhance awareness that the Island does not have a permanent democratic political status. It is neither a state nor a nation, but a territory. Related classroom discussions could help ground current academic conversations over colonialism by pointing a finger to ourselves, and acknowledging the possibly painful reality that the United States cannot be an unblemished beacon of democracy while it holds colonial possessions.
