With only a few breaks, Carlos Antonio Romero-Barceló served in public office for nearly 40
years. A leading figure in the Partido Nuevo
Progresista (New Progressive Party, or PNP), Romero-Barceló served two terms as Resident Commissioner in the
U.S. House of Representatives, promoting Puerto Rico’s
statehood and working to strengthen the island’s relationship
with the federal government.
Romero-Barceló, who became the most distinguished
member of a prominent political family, was born
September 4, 1932, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His maternal
grandfather, Antonio R. Barceló, was president of the
insular senate, and his mother, Josefina Barceló, was the
last president of the island’s Partido Liberal (Liberal Party)
before it dissolved. As a young man, Romero-Barceló
moved to New Hampshire to attend Phillips Exeter
Academy, from which he graduated in 1949. He earned a
B.A. from Yale University in 1953, with a double major in
political science and economics. Returning to Puerto Rico,
he earned a law degree from the Universidad de Puerto
Rico in 1956, passed the bar, and began working for a
private law firm. He married and had two sons, Carlitos
and Andres. Romero-Barceló and his second wife, Kate
Donelly, also had a son, Juan Carlos.1
Romero-Barceló started his political career as the
director of the pro-statehood group Citizens for State 51.
From 1965 to 1967, he worked his way up to the PNP
leadership. Only 36 years old, but increasingly popular,
he ran for mayor of San Juan in 1968 against elder
statesman Jorge Font Saldaña of the Partido Popular
Democrático (Popular Democratic Party, or PPD).
According to a city newspaper, the election quickly became
“a battle between the generations at a time in which age
probably has a bigger role to play in an island election
than at any time in its history.”2 An enthralling speaker, Romero-Barceló visited San Juan’s housing projects
and schools as he talked about his ambitious economic
program, “Operation Rescue.”3 In “the most interesting,
stimulating, and, at times, gaudiest campaign the city has
had in recent history,” Romero-Barceló, who stumped with
armed security personnel, crushed Font Saldaña in the
general election.4
As mayor, Romero-Barceló modernized the city’s
waste disposal services, and he worked to combat drug
addiction and poor housing in San Juan.5 He advocated for
a stronger tourism bureau and remade the mayor’s office,
transforming it from what one newspaper called “a political
outpost.” Romero-Barceló’s combined initiatives made
him widely popular, and he was re-elected in 1972 by a
comfortable margin.6
Romero-Barceló’s tenure as mayor made him a
household name, and in 1976 the PNP picked him as its
gubernatorial candidate. His opponent was incumbent
Rafael Hernández Colón of the PPD, who earlier had
instituted a handful of controversial financial reforms.
Romero-Barceló emphasized his plan to create jobs and
downplayed the PNP’s position on Puerto Rico’s status.
That fall he rode a wave of anti-incumbent frustration to a
convincing victory in the general election.7
By the late 1970s, Romero-Barceló had become the
consummate politician. “His personality fills the room.
He’s 100 percent political,” admitted one member of the
press. And he acted the part, too. “The brawny governor,
who looks like a silver-haired movie idol,” said the
Washington Post, seemed to captivate an audience the way
few others in Puerto Rico could.8
The new governor inherited an economy in utter
ruin. Even with an annual allowance from the federal
government of more than one billion dollars, Puerto
Rico was still twice as impoverished as the poorest U.S. state.9 There were no immediate solutions to the island’s
unemployment problem, but Romero-Barceló began
putting together a long-term agenda so that Puerto Rico
could “become more self-sufficient.” The plan included
education and vocational training for the rapidly growing
population.10 Romero-Barceló emphasized growing more
and different foodstuffs for domestic markets, and as
part of his push to win greater borrowing privileges from
Washington, he worked to curtail generous tax exemptions
for many of the island’s businesses.11
Romero-Barceló also made statehood a pillar of
his administration. The governor had long viewed the
island’s commonwealth status as a deliberately nebulous
concept that was little more than an outdated “interim
compromise.”12 Statehood, he believed, would finally
generate some stability. It would end Puerto Rico’s
“political inferiority,” he said, and open doors to all sorts of
federal programs.13 However, no amount of lobbying could
withstand the pressure of another recession and a new
oppositional majority in the island’s legislature.14 Though
Romero-Barceló won re-election in 1980 by a razor-thin
0.2 percent, he was never able to muster the popular
support that was needed for a referendum on statehood.15
Four years later he was ousted from the governor’s mansion
by his longtime rival, Hernández Colón of the PPD.16
After the election Romero-Barceló returned to private law
practice, but he was not away from politics for long.17 He
was elected to the Puerto Rican senate and served from 1986
to 1989, having lost the gubernatorial primary election in
1987 to San Juan mayor and future Resident Commissioner
Baltasar Corrada-del Río. After his senate term, a brief hiatus
from public office helped him regain control of the party,
and he was re-elected PNP president from 1989 to 1992
(he had served earlier from 1974 to 1985).18
In 1992 Romero-Barceló became the New Progressives’
candidate to challenge Antonio J. Colorado, the
incumbent Resident Commissioner in the U.S. House
of Representatives. After fighting a smear campaign by
the insular legislature, Romero-Barceló began positioning
himself more as a populist than as a party stalwart:
“As resident commissioner,” he said, “I would not be representing the government of Puerto Rico. I would be
representing the people of Puerto Rico.”19 Opponents
criticized his rather gruff political style, but the former
governor was a seasoned fundraiser.20 He sought to reform
the island’s tax code and promised to bolster Medicare and
Medicaid, establish a minimum wage, and secure Pell grants
for the island’s schools. On Election Day, Romero-Barceló
captured 48.5 percent of the vote, besting Colorado by less
than 1 percent.21 In 1993, when Romero-Barceló took his
seat in the U.S. House, he became the first former Puerto
Rican governor to serve as Resident Commissioner.
Though the federal-insular relationship was downplayed
during the election, securing statehood for Puerto Rico
moved to the top of Romero-Barceló’s agenda after he
arrived in Washington. He framed the island’s political
status, and his own unique position in the House, as
part of a larger civil rights narrative, caucusing with the
Democratic Party because he had “no doubt that it is
easier to work with Democrats than Republicans on civil
rights.”22 In addition to the constitutional limits placed on
the Resident Commissioner’s ability to vote, another part
of the problem, especially as Romero-Barceló saw it, had to
do with taxes. Since the territories and the commonwealth
of Puerto Rico paid no federal income taxes, their
representatives in the House—the Territorial Delegates and
the Resident Commissioner—had been denied the right to
vote on pending legislation, preventing them from raising
taxes, which their constituents did not pay. Romero-Barceló found the pay-to-play mentality unfair, noting that
he had “never heard of such a thing as no representation
without taxation.” The final version of the House Rules
adopted in 1993 gave Romero-Barceló and the other
Delegates a vote in the Committee of the Whole as long
as they did not determine the outcome of any particular
measure. While Romero-Barceló appreciated the modest
amount of leverage he had acquired, he said it was “not
really a vote, just an opportunity to participate.”23
In his first four-year term, Romero-Barceló was
placed on the Committee on Natural Resources and the
Committee on Education and Labor, where he focused
most of his legislative energy on improving Puerto Rico’s school system.24 He sat on multiple conference committees
but struggled to increase funding for the island. In early
March 1994, as the House debated the specifics of the
Improving America’s Schools Act (H.R. 6), Romero-Barceló introduced an amendment to lift the cap on the
island’s funding. Federal policy, he said, had created a
“second-class, underfunded educational system” in Puerto
Rico, but though Romero-Barceló won support from moreprogressive
House Members, his amendment was voted
down, 358 to 70.25 The next day a similar amendment
failed to pass by a similar margin.26 For years, Romero-Barceló had also wanted to replace the island’s corporate tax
breaks with wage-based credits, but he opposed the Small
Business Job Protection Act of 1996 because it promised
to upend Puerto Rico’s revenue program.27
Though Romero-Barceló’s legislative record was modest
during his first few years in the House, he often pursued
policy that was outside Puerto Rico’s immediate interests.
An active member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus
(CHC), Romero-Barceló was elected vice chairman at the
start the 104th Congress (1995–1997). At a time when
Hispanic voters were growing increasingly powerful—every
Hispanic Member who ran for re-election in 1994 had
won—Romero-Barceló and the CHC worked to shape
national policy.28 He readily backed William J. (Bill)
Clinton’s presidency, hoping his plans to stimulate the
economy and reform health care would improve living
conditions in the poorest areas of the United States.29 He
pushed to limit occupational hazards, spoke passionately
about protecting Medicare benefits, and argued to raise
the minimum wage.30 In spring 1996, Romero-Barceló
attacked the English Language Empowerment Act of
1996 (H.R. 123), which would have required all federal
documents to be printed only in English. He called the
measure “absurd” and questioned its constitutionality.
House Rules prevented him from voting against it,
however, and the bill passed but died in the Senate
Judiciary Committee.31
Romero-Barceló won re-election in 1996 with 50
percent of the vote and returned to Washington on the eve of the 100th anniversary of America's sovereignty over Puerto Rico.32 The timing intensified the federal
government’s effort to permanently define America’s insular
policy, and in late February 1997, the 105th Congress
began considering the United States-Puerto Rico Political
Status Act (H.R. 856).33 Co-sponsored by Romero-Barceló,
the bill would “provide the first Congressionally-sponsored
process leading to full self-government for Puerto Rico,”
a later committee report argued.34 Months of horse
trading in Congress and heated discussions in Puerto Rico
preceded a contentious debate on the House Floor that
lasted nearly 12 hours. Romero-Barceló helped manage the
bill, which passed the House 209 to 208, but died in the
Senate. “What is regrettable in the saga of Puerto Rico’s
century-old colonial relationship with the United States is
not the recent one-vote majority in the House to permit
Puerto Rico to begin a process of self-determination,”
Romero-Barceló said, “but rather Congress’s long history
of indifference to and inaction on the political status of
Puerto Rico.”35
Romero-Barceló continued to sit on the Education and
Resources Committees in the 105th and 106th Congresses
(1997–2001) and became the Ranking Minority Member
of Resources’ Subcommittee on National Parks and
National Lands. In addition to statehood, Romero-Barceló devoted his attention to health policy, resource
conservation, and education. His bill to remove the caps
on funding for veterans’ Medicaid programs in Puerto Rico
faltered from the start, and he found “it unconscionable
that the Federal Government would uphold a policy
where the health and lives of the people of Puerto Rico
are considered to be of less value than the lives of other
citizens.”36 Neither of his bills to conserve and protect
Puerto Rico’s sensitive ecosystems passed committee review.
Romero-Barceló adamantly opposed the English Language
Fluency Act, which required non-native speakers of English
to master the language in just two years. The bill, he said,
amounted to outright discrimination and threatened to
overturn nearly 30 years of more progressive policy.37
At the end of his House career, Romero-Barceló was
still fighting the same battles he had fought at the start.
“Puerto Ricans are first-class citizens in times of war,” he said, observing that the island’s residents had fought
and died in U.S. conflicts, but “second-class citizens in
times of peace.”38 He called the island’s unequal privileges
with regard to federal health programs an “abomination,”
questioning how America could “stand as a model for
the world when it maintains a policy of discrimination, a
policy of economic and political apartheid.”39 When the
U.S. Navy accidentally killed a Puerto Rican civilian during
a training mission on the island of Vieques, debates about
the island’s self-governance began anew. Romero-Barceló
supported moving naval operations elsewhere, calling the
Vieques question “a defining moment in Puerto Rico’s
relationship” with the federal government.40 Despite a
tenuous agreement with the Clinton administration that
would allow the U.S. Navy to continue using the island,
Puerto Rico’s new pro-commonwealth administration
began calling for the navy to leave.41
Romero-Barceló was one of the many New
Progressives who were swept out of office in 2000; he
lost the election to Aníbal Acevedo-Vilá of the PPD by
about 4 percent.42 Though Romero-Barceló received
endorsements from President Clinton and a handful of
sitting Members and raised significantly more money
than his opponent, accusations of corruption against
the PNP’s entire roster cost him the race. “Theirs was a
campaign of insults and defamation,” he said of the PPD
before vowing to support the New Progressive agenda
in the coming years. “We are going to fight to bring
statehood to the island because we want equality.”43 After
the election, he returned home to Puerto Rico, becoming
president of the Puerto Rican delegation to the League of
United Latin American Citizens.44 In 2003 he was passed
over for the New Progressive nomination to his former
post as Resident Commissioner, but he remained active in
the party’s leadership.45 Carlos Romero-Barceló died on May 2, 2021, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.46
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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