
The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States. Puerto Ricans are United States citizens—they can freely migrate between the island and the states, join the military, or even run for president. But they can’t vote for president, because the territory is not a U.S. state. In three referendums from 1967 to 1998, Puerto Rican voters rejected both political independence and U.S. statehood. However, in November 2012 a solid majority (61.3%) voted in favor of statehood. This kind of political nudging could quite possibly result in Puerto Rico becoming the 51st U.S. state … but only Congress and the president have authority over the matter, and analysts agree that approval is unlikely. This particular referendum also left off the option traditionally most favored by Puerto Ricans: continued commonwealth status. Many islanders appear to feel that statehood offers few additional benefits over citizenship; a majority of Puerto Ricans already live on the U.S. mainland (5 million vs. 3.7 million).
From the earliest days of intelligence testing, social scientists have taken a special interest in U.S. Hispanics. Proportionate to their numbers, it’s possible that more tests have been given to Hispanics than to blacks. But this special attention has also lacked focus. African-American test results have been subject to meticulous cataloging, synthesis and analysis (Shuey, 1966; Jensen, 1998; Jencks & Phillips, 1998) leading to somewhat of a consensus on the size and shape of the black-white cognitive performance gap. Yet there has not been a similar effort to process the disparate and voluminous literature on the abilities of U.S. Hispanics. Therefore there is less knowledge and consensus about the historical and contemporary test performance of Hispanic minorities.
Most of the U.S. Hispanic population is Mexican American (63%). Puerto Ricans are the second largest Hispanic minority (9.2% … or 15.3% including the Commonwealth). This post represents the first effort to comprehensively summarize the abilities of one of these two important American minority groups. Here I describe and analyze the results from over 70 studies that have measured the abilities of Puerto Ricans.
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