Introduction
Culture-specific characteristics permeate individuals’ attitudes to life, spirituality, and self-perception on multiple levels, thus giving rise to conflicts. Since the secession of Puerto Rico from the U.S., dissimilarities between Anglo and Puerto Rican cultures have been shaping the groups’ relationships. Prominent heterogeneities, including the preferred expansions of Catholicism and perspectives on race, have created inter-group relations imbued with misunderstanding, unequal power distribution, and restricted religious representation.
Main body
The first difference, both groups are Catholic, but Puerto Ricans’ sources of religious rituals and the preferred form of spiritual self-expression are greatly dissimilar from those in Anglo cultures. Specifically, in Puerto Ricans on the island, Catholicism is mostly reflective of the practices of Italian and Spanish churches (Healey and Stepnick 318). This unique characteristic has required Puerto Ricans to assimilate to the U.S. mainland’s Anglo culture after Spain’s loss in the Spanish-American War and predetermined their estrangement from the church in the U.S. Nowadays, Puerto Ricans still represent a tiny minority of Catholic priests in the U.S. (Healey and Stepnick 318). These facts reveal Anglo cultures’ obvious and ongoing domination in the realm of spiritual practice.
Another crucial difference between the cultures revolves around attitudes to the issue of race. Similar to other groups in the Caribbean region, Puerto Ricans regard race as a multidimensional concept and a spectrum of options (Healey and Stepnick 318). In Anglo cultures, especially the U.S., race represents an oversimplified dichotomy between white and non-white individuals, with limited attention to the innumerable combinations and intermediate states between total whiteness and total blackness. Regarding impacts on relationships, this point of difference led to mutual misunderstanding in the Jim Crow era, with Puerto Ricans’ inability to adapt to the U.S. racial segregation system despite having experiences with slavery. A profound understanding of the racial continuum gave the green light to marriages between dissimilar racialized ethnicities in Puerto Rican culture, which would be impossible in the U.S. (Healey and Stepnick 318). Based on recent survey research, Puerto Ricans’ dissatisfaction with how Anglos decode their racial self-identification and label them as black is significant (Healey and Stepnick 318). With that in mind, this inter-group discordance is not a thing of the past.
To continue relationships, Anglo cultures’ unwillingness to alter the theories of race to incorporate fluidity has also created certain tensions and added to Puerto Ricans’ limited sense of safety. In the past, including a large portion of the 20th century, Puerto Ricans’ factual non-whiteness and usefulness as a cost-effective workforce source factored into their exclusion from Anglo-dominated academic spaces (Healey and Stepnick 328). Nowadays, white U.S. citizens still demonstrate a perception of any non-white compatriots as those incapable of becoming legitimate Americans at the conceptual level (Healey and Stepnick 319). For Puerto Ricans, this perspective has become a source of possible discrimination. Among other things, such discrimination includes the Anglo public’s uncertainty regarding U.S.-born Puerto Rican Americans’ right to fulfill senior positions in federal agencies (Healey and Stepnick 319). Therefore, the roughness of race constructs in Anglo cultures has shaped certain power imbalances in the dialogue between the groups in question.
Summary
In summary, Puerto Rican and Anglo cultures differ in their theories of race and religion, which has contributed to inequality-based relationships. Puerto Ricans’ Catholicism, with its spontaneity and passionate expression, has created the need for assimilation to the Anglo cultures’ reserved practices. The dissent of opinions on the complexity of race has resulted in the forced identification of Puerto Ricans as non-white, with essential power-related consequences.
Work Cited
Healey, Joseph F., and Andi Stepnick. Diversity and Society: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender. 6th ed., Sage Publications, 2020.