Gigi Fernandez, an Olympic gold medalist and the first Puerto-Rican to be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, has created a website to support statehood for Puerto Rico.
EqualityforPuertoRico.com encourages visitors to write to their representatives to demand equality for Puerto Rico through statehood. Fernandez also asks visitors to support statehood in their social media, and to share their contact information to “lend support” to the statehood movement.
“More than any other time in my life, the events in Puerto Rico have definitely given me pause and caused me to ponder what I want to do with my future,” Fernandez wrote at her blog. “All my life, I have felt that Puerto Ricans are second class citizens. Yes, we hold US Passports but, beyond that, our privileges in Puerto Rico are much different than the vast majority of those that hold the same passport.”
She goes on to say, “Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory and, as such, we are not able to vote for the President and have no votes in Congress. Puerto Rican men and women have served proudly in the US Armed Forces since WWI but do not have the right to elect their Commander in Chief. To summarize the current status of Puerto Rico, we are ‘a separate and unequal territory that belongs to, but is not a part of, the United States’.”
Fernandez plans to dedicate her voice to supporting statehood for Puerto Rico. You can tweet your thanks to her by clicking below.
@gigifernandez Thank you for supporting statehood for Puerto Rico! Your voice will make a difference. Share on XYour voice will also make a difference! Contact your legislators and let them know that statehood is the permanent solution for the challenges Puerto Rico is facing.
One response
Puerto Rico 🇵🇷 needs to be State now we deserve equal Rights that the rest of the rest of the 50 states of the Union there are 3.2 millions American citizens living in our Island