Breve Historia de Puerto Rico luego de 1898
Puerto Rico Ayer y Hoy
El año 1898 trajo grandes cambios al estallar la Guerra Hispanoamericana. y transferirse la isla, de España a los Estados Unidos. Unos años más tarde, en 1917, se le concedió la ciudadanía estadounidense a los puertorriqueños. Para mediados de siglo, tuvieron lugar varios cambios fundamentales, al lograrse la designación de don Jesús T. Piñero como primer gobernador puertorriqueño. También, la posterior elección del primer gobernador puertorriqueño por el voto del pueblo, distinción que recayó en don Luis Muñoz Marín.
En 1952, el País adoptó su propia Constitución con la aprobación del Congreso de los Estados Unidos, bajo la fórmula política de Estado Libre Asociado, un documento redactado por una asamblea constituyente y ratificado mediante voto mayoritario.
La Constitución del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Ricoestá basada en un sistema presidencial similar al del gobierno federal y cuenta con tres ramas de gobierno ejecutiva, legislative y judicial.
Actualmente, la isla elige un gobernador cada cuatro años, un comisionado residente en Washington con voz, pero sin voto en el Congreso, una Cámara de Representantes y un Senado. Todos son electos por el voto mayoritario del pueblo, así como los alcaldes de sus 78 municipios. El gobernador nombra los miembros de la Rama Judicial con el consejo y consentimiento del Senado
Datos Generales sobre Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico is a self-governing island commonwealth of the West Indies, associated with the United States. The easternmost island of the Greater Antilles chain, it lies approximately 50 miles (80 km) east of the Dominican Republic, 40 miles (65 km) west of the Virgin Islands, and 1,000 miles (1,600 km) southeast of the U.S. state of Florida. It is situated in the northeastern Caribbean Sea, its northern shore facing the Atlantic Ocean. Two small islands off the east coast, Vieques and Culebra, are administratively parts of Puerto Rico, as is Mona Island to the west. Compared with its Greater Antillean neighbours, Puerto Rico is one-fifth as large as the Dominican Republic, one-third the size of Haiti, and slightly smaller than Jamaica. It is roughly rectangular in shape, extending up to 111 miles (179 km) from east to west and 39 miles (63 km) from north to south. The capital is San Juan.
Puerto Ricans, or boricuas, or puertorriqueños, have an intermingled Spanish, U.S., and Afro-Caribbean culture. The island's social and economic conditions are generally advanced by Latin American standards, partly because of its ties with the United States (including the presence of U.S.-owned manufacturing plants and military bases in the commonwealth). Although that relationship has become politically controversial, the vast majority of Puerto Rican voters have continued to favour permanent union with the United States, with a slightly greater number favouring the current commonwealth relationship rather than statehood. A small but persistent minority has advocated independence.
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Land Topography and Relief
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Click for More InformationLand - Relief
Puerto Rico is largely composed of mountainous and hilly terrain, with nearly one-fourth of the island covered by steep slopes. The mountains are the easternmost extension of a tightly folded and faulted ridge that extends from the Central American mainland across the northern Caribbean to the Lesser Antilles. Although Puerto Rican relief is relatively low by continental standards, the island sits less than 100 miles (160 km) south of a precipitous depression in the Earth's crust: an extensive submarine feature of the Atlantic known as the Puerto Rico Trench, which descends to more than 5 miles (8 km) below sea level—the Atlantic's deepest point—at a site northeast of the Dominican Republic. Powerful tectonic forces that over millions of years have created these features still occasionally cause earthquakes in Puerto Rico. The island's highest mountain range, the Cordillera Central, trends east-west and exceeds 3,000 feet (900 metres) in many areas; its slopes are somewhat gentle in the north but rise sharply from the south coast to the loftier peaks, topped at about 4,390 feet (1,338 metres) by Cerro de Punta, the highest point on the island. Near the island's eastern tip, the partly isolated Sierra de Luquillo rises to 3,494 feet (1,065 metres) at El Yunque Peak. The northwestern foothills and lowlands are characterized by karst features, including sinkholes ( sumideros), caverns, and eroded mogotes, or haystack hills ( pepinos). There is a continuous but narrow lowland along the north coast, where most people live, and smaller bands along the south and west coasts that also include densely populated areas. The Caguas Basin, in the Grande de Loíza River valley south of San Juan, is the largest of several basins in the mountains that provide level land for settlements and agriculture. The islands of Mona, Vieques, and Culebra are generally hilly but ringed by narrow coastal plains; Vieques rises to 988 feet (301 metres) at Mount Pirata.
×Papa
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Click for More InformationMother
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Click for More InformationPlant and Animal Life
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Click for More InformationPlant and Animal Life
Plant life is abundant and varied. Tropical rainforests cover parts of the north side of the island, and thorn and scrub vegetation predominates on the drier south side.
Most of the island's original vegetation was removed through centuries of agricultural exploitation, particularly during the first two decades of the 20th century, when farm settlers and plantation workers destroyed large tracts of coastal forest and used the lumber for railroad ties and fuel. Although some woodlands have been replanted since the mid-20th century, introduced varieties of trees, shrubs, and grasses now predominate.
The scarlet- and orange-flowered royal poinciana, or flamboyant ( Delonix regia), and the African tulip tree ( Spathodea campanulata) are among the flowering trees that dot the mountains with patches of vivid colour against a lush green background. The Caribbean National Forest in the Sierra de Luquillo southeast of San Juan preserves rare species of orchids and the small green Puerto Rican parrot, an endangered species.
Puerto Rico has more than 200 species of birds, but land animals are mostly confined to nonpoisonous snakes, lizards, mongooses, and the coquí ( Eleutherodactylis portoricensis), a frog whose name is onomatopoeic with its call ("co-kee!") and which has become a kind of national mascot. Numerous varieties of fish abound in the surrounding waters, but edible and inedible species mingle together, limiting commercial fishing there.
×Settlement Patterns
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Click for More InformationSettlement Patterns
In the early 16th century Spanish explorers founded San Juan, which prospered throughout the colonial period as a trading port. The island's other colonial settlements, also predominantly coastal, expanded slowly. From the time the United States took possession of the island in 1898 until the mid-20th century, settlement in Puerto Rico was characterized by dispersed rural farmsteads, as well as some large sugarcane plantations, but the commonwealth subsequently became predominantly urban. Nearly three-fourths of the population now live in cities and towns, with only scattered settlements in the mountains. The population of the San Juan metropolitan area, which had swelled to about 400,000 people by 1950, had increased an additional threefold by 2000. A nearly continuous urban area has developed from Caguas to San Juan and along the north coast from Fajardo through San Juan to Arecibo. Ponce on the south coast and Mayagüez on the west are other urban cores. Few places on the island are more than an hour's drive from a major urban area, each of which sprawls with modern shopping centres and residential developments such as those found in comparably sized cities in the United States.
×Ethnic Composition
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Click for More InformationEthnic Compositiion
Puerto Rico's population is ethnically mixed because of centuries of immigration and cultural assimilation. There is little overt racial discrimination, although people of Spanish and other European ancestry are still esteemed among most elite members of society. Between 20,000 and 50,000 Taino Indians inhabited the island when Columbus arrived there in 1493, but European diseases and maltreatment largely decimated them. The Spanish brought only a limited number of African slaves to Puerto Rico compared with other islands in the region because the local plantations remained relatively small and unimportant. Spanish males, who constituted the largest group of immigrants, freely intermarried with indigenous women and Africans. When slavery was abolished in 1873, only about 5 percent of the population was of entirely African ancestry. Some Chinese, Italians, Corsicans, Lebanese, Germans, Scottish, and Irish also found their way to the island in the mid-19th century, a time when the population was growing steadily. Additional immigrants arrived from the United States after 1898, and more than 20,000 Cuban exiles joined them after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959. In subsequent decades an even larger number of job-seeking immigrants arrived from the Dominican Republic.
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