Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico

Mónica A. Jiménez's Making Never-Never Land is a one-sided, unbalanced diatribe against US rule in Puerto Rico that reduces the historical experience of colonialism to the racial-legal dimension, at the expense of other dimensions of colonialism—for example, the effect of free trade or the protectionist tendencies of US farmers. Such one-sidedness makes this short book appear as more a legal brief than a historical study. The argument is as follows: In the case Downes v. Bidwell (1901), the US Supreme Court created the concept of “unincorporated territory” to distinguish Puerto Rico from conventional continental territories created during the nineteenth century on the basis of settler colonialism. The Downes decision granted the US Congress extraordinary plenary powers over Puerto Rico, where the United States could henceforth rule without the colonized being protected fully by the US Constitution. The colonized enjoy to this day only such protections as Congress sees fit to...