Nobel Prizes for 2025 have been awarded. Four of the winners were U.S. citizens (one born in Jordan and naturalized in the U.S.) and one was from Venezuela, still representing the Americas. All in all, more than 400 U.S. citizens have received Nobel Prize honors. None have been born in Puerto Rico. However, that doesn’t mean there is no connection between Puerto Rico and the Nobel Prize.
Enrique A. Laguerre
Laguerre was a celebrated writer from Puerto Rico. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1999. He is best known for his 1935 novel, La llamarada, which showed the lives of sugar plantation workers. This work is commonly included in college courses on Puerto Rican literature. He wrote further novels as well as stage plays, one of which was adapted and filmed for television. Laguerre taught literature at the University of Puerto Rico, and was a columnist for El Vocero. Laguerre was also known as an environmentalist and a crusader against the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico.
His nomination in 1999 was the result of a campaign organized by fellow writers, who wanted recognition of Laguerre as the most important Puerto Rican novelist of the 20th century. The prize that year went to German writer Günter Grass.
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Jiminez was not born in Puerto Rico, but he lived, worked, and died in San Juan, where he moved in 1946. He was born in Andalusia, Spain. He was a poet and novelist and a Republican or Loyalist, which meant that he opposed General Franco, a fascist dictator who maintained power in Spain from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 until 1975. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Laguerre fled to the Americas, where he lived in Cuba and then in the United States before settling in Puerto Rico. His wife was of Puerto Rican heritage, which may have been a factor in their decision to live permanently on the Island.
Jiminez won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1956.
Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor
Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor were not Puerto Rican, but they received their 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for work they conducted at the Arecibo observatory. The two were from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and they were conducting research in Puerto Rico, studying pulsars. At Arecibo, they observed the first binary pulsar, now known as the Hulse-Taylor pulsar.
A pulsar is a spinning star that shoots out two narrow beams of radio waves, like a lighthouse with two beams of light. The radio waves create pulses at very regular intervals, so they are very measurable from earth.
A binary pulsar has a companion star — also a neutron star, but one that does not spin or pulse. The pulsar orbits its companion star much as the moon orbits the earth. Because the pulsar moves around its star, it moves closer to the earth and then farther away. For many years, Hulse and Taylor measured the pulses, and at last they noticed changes that provided the first practical evidence for Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves.
Hulse and Taylor are U.S. citizens, like people born in Puerto Rico, and they could not have conducted their research without the Arecibo Observatory. Hulse lived in Puerto Rico as a visiting scholar in 1974, when he made the discovery, while Taylor, his supervisor at Amherst, visited to support him. We can’t say that they are Puerto Rican, but there is certainly an important connection.
Would statehood change things for Puerto Rico and the Nobel Prize?
More than half of the current U.S. states have been the birthplace of a Nobel Prize winner — but quite a few have not yet had that honor. Since Americans move freely from one state to another, it is much harder to determine whether every state has been home to a Nobel Prize winner at some time. However, we can safely say that statehood is not a guarantee of becoming a Nobel Prize winner.
Some things — like being the home of a Nobel Prize winner, a beauty pageant queen, or an Olympic medal winner, are exciting and fun honors to receive. Some things, like equal rights, an equal voice in the democratic process in the country where we live, permanent citizenship, full coverage under the Constitution, and the right to vote, are more important. Statehood guarantees these things. Tell your representatives that you want to ensure these rights for Puerto Rico.
No responses yet