Flag of Puerto Rico

How to read it

Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States: the US Department of the Interior lists it as an unincorporated insular area and a commonwealth. Its flag is set by Law No. 1 of 24 July 1952, the flag law of the Commonwealth (Estado Libre Asociado), which adopted the flag “traditionally known until now as the Puerto Rican flag”: a rectangle of five alternating horizontal stripes, three red and two white, with a blue equilateral triangle next to the staff holding a white five-pointed star, the triangle’s vertical side covering the full height of the flag. The law names no shades and no proportions. It forbids using the flag as the emblem of a political party or candidate on the ballot, leaves the rules for its use to the Secretary of State, and requires government buildings to fly it alongside the United States flag with equal prominence. Law No. 68 of 1976 makes 24 July the day of the flag, anthem and coat of arms. The design itself dates from 1895, among Puerto Rican independence supporters in New York.

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Puerto Rico’s and Cuba’s flags side by side

They have the same layout with the colours swapped. Cuba’s flag has blue stripes and a red triangle; Puerto Rico’s has red stripes and a blue triangle, with the same white star. The swap was deliberate. Puerto Rico’s government quotes the minutes of the meeting in New York on 22 December 1895 where the flag was presented: a new flag “of the same form as the Cuban one”, with the colours inverted, white stripes and a blue triangle instead of red, and the same lone white star. Miguel Rodríguez, director of the Centro de Estudios Avanzados y del Caribe, told Primera Hora the idea was that the two flags together would stand for a single fight for independence.

Who designed it

Puerto Rico’s government gives the competing accounts. The meeting of 22 December 1895, at Chimney Hall, founded the Puerto Rico section of the Cuban Revolutionary Party; 59 Puerto Ricans attended, and J. M. Terreforte, a survivor of the Lares uprising, presented the flag. Terreforte credited Francisco “Pachín” González Marín, who wrote from Jamaica suggesting the reversed colours. Antonio Vélez Alvarado said he had the idea on 11 June 1890 or 1891. Roberto H. Todd credited Manuel Besosa. The first flag was sewn by Mima Besosa, by Todd’s account, or Micaela Dalmau, by Vélez Alvarado’s. It was first used in the Yauco uprising of 24 March 1897. The legislature tried to make it official in 1916, 1922, 1927 and 1932 without success, and it became the official flag in 1952. Luis Muñoz Marín said on 25 July 1952 that the flag was not one of narrow nationalism and belonged to all Puerto Ricans.

Light blue or dark blue?

The law says only “blue”, and the shade is argued over. Miguel Rodríguez told Primera Hora that historians gathered at the Ateneo Puertorriqueño had concluded the triangle should be sky blue, the blue of the Lares flag, and suggested the dark blue came in after 1952 because flags for schools and offices were made in the United States in the blue of the US flag. The historian Joseph Harrison Flores argues the opposite in a book, La historia de la bandera de Puerto Rico: Del conflicto a la certeza; El Nuevo Día reported that he takes the original colour to be dark blue, citing a bond issued by the Club Betances in Haiti. El Nuevo Día also noted that each side in the debate tends to adopt the blue that fits its own politics.

What does the black and white Puerto Rican flag mean?

It is a flag of protest, first painted in 2016. On the night of 4 July that year a collective of artists who signed themselves Solidarixs repainted a well-known flag mural on a door in Calle San José in Old San Juan in black and white, after the US Congress passed PROMESA, which put Puerto Rico’s finances under a fiscal control board. In their open letter, published by Metro Puerto Rico, they read the triangle as the three branches of government and the red stripes as the blood that gives them life; black, the absence of light, stood for the death of those powers as they knew them, and the white stripes for hope and individual liberty. They called it a proposal of resistance, not of pessimism.