The Impact On The Family And Sexuality

This article traces three stages in the consolidating process of U.S. hegemony in Puerto Rico since 1898, during which time the island has been subjected to intense Americanization but has managed to maintain a strong national cultural identity. There have been greater transformations in the area of family and sexu- ality during this period than is generally acknowledged, with a greater emphasis on legal marriage and the nuclear family as op- posed to the consensual unions and extended family patterns still prevalent today in the rest of the Hispanic Caribbean. With the support of U.S. social policy, legal marriage was reinforced as a sign of respectability, upward mobility and whiteness, and as a way of Puerto Ricans distancing themselves from the backward Other label imposed by the colonial order. Structural changes such as migration, urbanization and industrialization also promoted transformations in the family, as reduced family size throughout the Caribbean shows. But I would argue that the ideological changes imposed by U.S. hegemony definitely contribute to the dramatic decline in consensual unions in Puerto Rico in compari-