Twenty thousand soldiers

Puerto Rico's story in the First World War is not a story of trench combat. It is a regiment raised on the island guarding the Panama Canal, and tens of thousands of newly minted citizens drafted into a war that arrived almost the same month as their citizenship.

The regiment's roots go back to an Army Appropriations Act of 1899, which authorized the first corps of native troops raised in Puerto Rico, barely a year after the American invasion itself. On June 30, 1901, that became the "Porto Rico Provisional Regiment of Infantry," and on July 1, 1908 Congress incorporated it into the Regular Army as the Puerto Rico Regiment of Infantry, US Army, giving it permanent standing.

On May 14, 1917, only months after the Jones Act granted citizenship, the regiment was activated, reinforced with additional men, and sent to guard the Panama Canal Zone for the rest of the war, a vital U.S. possession that needed defense even though the real fighting was across the Atlantic, in Europe.

Separately, once citizenship opened the legal door to conscription, about 20,000 Puerto Rican soldiers were drafted into, or volunteered for, the wider U.S. Army during the war, serving alongside mainland units and not in a single Puerto Rican formation.

The regiment itself was renamed the 65th Infantry on June 4, 1920, the same unit that would later serve in Europe during the Second World War and earn its famous nickname, "Borinqueneers," decades later in the Korean War, a nickname that had nothing yet to do with its earlier service.

What stands out about this chapter is the gap between obligation and representation. Puerto Rican soldiers could be drafted into a war their new citizenship made them legally responsible for. They still could not vote for the commander in chief who sent them there, a contradiction that went unresolved for decades.

Sources: 65th Infantry Regiment (United States); Historia de Puerto Rico. Freeze 2026-08-22.