They were denied prepaid car rentals, blocked from buying drinks at a grocery, and prohibited from boarding their flight in different parts of the US.
All were from Puerto Rico, whose residents have been American citizens since 1917. But all were recently mistaken for international travelers lacking proper identification and denied services for which they had already paid, highlighting the prejudice that people from the largely Spanish-speaking island – and Spanish speakers in general – face in the US.
Blanca Anderson, a retired college professor who taught on Puerto Rican identity, said she believes the problem began when many Americans either failed to teach or learn that the US gained control of the island by invading it in 1898 during the Spanish-American war.
Amid the first world war, the US enacted a law which gave Puerto Ricans US citizenship (and the American military about 20,000 more troops). Puerto Rico has remained a commonwealth but did not become a state.
Over the years, those facts have been forgotten or ignored. To many Americans, Spanish-speaking people from Puerto Rico are indistinguishable from Latinos with descendants from foreign countries south of the border, Anderson said. “It’s ignorance – they don’t know their history,” said Anderson, who retired to North Carolina after teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans. “Everyone who is Latino is looked at the same, even though we’re not.”
Anderson was a college student in Boston when she first confronted the price people from Puerto Rico have paid for their commitment to preserving a cultural identity that is separate from the 50 US states. This identity includes fiercepride in the island’s flag, its anthem La Borinqueña, its other music, its dancing, its cuisine and the elite athletes who have hailed from there.
While out dancing salsa, Anderson partnered up with a man who told her he was running for mayor, and she promised to go vote for him. When she later went to register to vote, the clerk wouldn’t let her sign up after learning she was a local resident originally from Puerto Rico.
Anderson, who eventually did manage to vote in that election, recalls that was one moment which crystallized the reality that “we’re a colony – period”.
“You can’t call it a colony because we don’t like that word now,” Anderson said. “But it’s a colony – a spoil of war.”
All of which explains why it was no surprise to her when she heard the father of a student at the university where she once taught met with trouble at the Hertz desk at New Orleans’s airport. The incident happened in May when he tried to pick up a reservation with a Puerto Rican driver’s license.
The clerk refused to honor the reservation for which Humberto Marchand, a retired federal probation officer, had already paid. The clerk insisted that he was foreign and needed to present a valid passport.
When Marchand remarked repeatedly that he had “a valid ID”, the clerk called a police officer who made Marchand leave, telling him that if he didn’t, he would face arrest for creating a disturbance. The police department which employs the officer launched a disciplinary investigation into his tone and manner during the confrontation with Marchand, though the agency has not announced the results.
Around the time Marchand’s story went viral, there also came word that Francisco Melendez had a similar experience at an Avis rental car office near Dallas. The clerk there refused to let him use his Puerto Rico driver’s license to collect his reservation and instead demanded a passport.
There was also Spirit Airlines’ blocking Marivi Roman Torres, her husband Luis and their two-year-old son Alejandro from boarding a flight to visit family in Puerto Rico because the parents didn’t have a passport for their toddler. The Roman family had no problem getting replacement plane tickets from JetBlue, albeit at a higher price.
Another case which raised eyebrows was that of military veteran Ricardo Florit, who went to a Kroger in Savannah, Georgia, and tried to use a Puerto Rican ID to pay for a $160 grocery run which included a bottle of wine and a beer. The clerk insisted on a passport, saying his store “used to accept” Puerto Rican licenses but no longer did.
“I have been up and down the states left and right, north and bottom, and I know it’s just as valid as an ID,” Florit said, according to the local WJCL television.
A manager later tried to back the clerk before relenting and letting Florit pay for his groceries.
Hertz, Avis, Spirit and Kroger all later apologized and promised to retrain their employees on their policies, which call for treating valid Puerto Rican licenses the same as ones from other parts of the US.
Marchand told the Guardian this week that virtually everyone he knows who is from Puerto Rico and has traveled in the mainland US has had an encounter like his. He said that he suspects some US English speakers see words in Spanish on Puerto Rican people’s licenses, hear them sometimes speak with an accent, conclude they’re foreigners and occasionally go on the attack.
“Language is a trigger,” said Marchand, who had gone to New Orleans to move his son out of an apartment at the end of the academic year at Loyola. “That has always been a struggle for decades.
“But the reality is wherever [Puerto Ricans] move around the United States with a valid Puerto Rico driver’s license, they are domestic travelers. And whoever has a driver’s license from Puerto Rico and is moving around the United States has a legal ID to show.”
Ultimately, it took a journalist born in Lafayette, Louisiana, to thrust the plights of Marchand, Melendez, Florit, the Roman Torres family and countless other Puerto Rican travelers before them into the mainstream news landscape.
CBS News correspondent David Begnaud brought international attention to Puerto Rico and the neglectful federal response it endured after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017. Begnaud said he has since developed a kinship with Puerto Ricans and often invests his personal time in reporting on pressing issues that are affecting them.
When he learned of Marchand’s experience in New Orleans, he published a report of it on his Instagram and TikTok social media accounts. He did the same with the other cases, prompting numerous local and national media outlets – including his own employer – to take note.
Begnaud said he took the time to produce those reports because for years people from Puerto Rico have described receiving second-class treatment across the US, and it was an opportunity to show as many Americans as possible why that was.
“To me, this is emblematic of being treated like a second-class citizen,” Begnaud said. “And this is proof. This is proof.”
Days after those remarks, Begnaud reported that the Shane jewelry company apologized after a clerk at its store in Roseville, California, wouldn’t sell an engagement ring to US military member Abdiel Gonzalez because he showed his Puerto Rican driver’s license. The clerk had also rejected Gonzalez’s military ID, and the company said it would provide the worker additional training.
“I felt discriminated and treated like I was a lie,” Gonzalez told Begnaud.