“This is a brilliant and outstanding book, quite persuasive in the way it interrogates history. Dr. Rivera Ramos performs the immense service of providing a serious discussion of the complexity of Puerto Rican history and political culture as well as a provocative rethinking of how imperial power works.”
—Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, Princeton University
“The author places himself and Puerto Rican identity in the political and legal struggle over the status of the island… This is a brilliant and expansive book.” —The Low and Politics Book Review
“This important book analyzes the conviction among [many] Puerto Ricans that their stability is guaranteed by law… It is a colonialism with rights that enjoys the consent of the colonized, thanks to the employment of certain methods of persuasion and coercion (for example, criminalizing the independence movement). The fact is that Puerto Rico has lived under norms, determined by others… Provocative, extremely well documented, and innovative in many of its approaches.” —El Nuevo Dia
“[This book] makes an eloquent case for law as an ideological phenomenon, and for its centrality to the culture of colonialism in Puerto Rico.” —Susan U. Philips, author of U.S. Colonial Law and the Creation of Marginalized Political Entities