Puerto Rican Culture Essay

Since the end of World War 2, Puerto Rican culture has undergone a generational shift, which is evident in the music we listen to. This shift is a result of an ethnic divide within Puerto Ricans due to whitewashing within our culture and to a large extent a change in how we as a community view ourselves. Being a part of this community has given me access to a wide variety of different views and peoples within my community. When you explore within, you have people born and raised on the island who only speak Spanish but also people who have only lived in the mainland United States their entire lives. There are many different ways to be a part of this circle and me being a New-York raised Puerto Rican I have been able to see a place and people

What it means to be a Puerto Rican has changed. You have people of all sorts of ethnicities which introduces families that are a mix of Puerto Rican and a host of other ethnicities. I know a lot of people that are half-Puerto Rican, but even though they might not fully be Puerto Rican they are still connected to our community and participate within our culture. With my community expanding beyond people just from the island and a growing population being raised solely in the mainland and or being raised into mixed families, a growing number of them are being forced to change their identity when filling out documents like the census where they are being forced to put down an answer that doesn't match who they are. Going back to the 1960s there were census takers that would decide people who were mixed-race and often changing their choice from black to white was common during this time. This practice resulted in many Puerto Ricans being forced into a group they were not and through the decades accepted their “whiteness” so that they would not either be discriminated against when living in the United States. I have gone through this type of discrimination that is mentioned within the article, I have been grouped into a race that I don’t identify with just because the place I applied too didn’t recognize that being Latino was a race (pretty surprising right). It is not just Puerto Ricans being forced to put white as their ethnic identity, many Puerto Ricans are forced to put down their ethnic identity as black when in reality they are not or if they are Afro-Latin are a mix of races not just black. “Many Puerto Ricans say they also feel that choosing black erases their unique cultural identity — including language, food and customs — and aligns their experience too closely with that of