A possible starting point to consider how emptying is constitutive of Puerto Rico’s colonial modernities is to map the ways this logic has stood at the heart of Spanish and American colonialisms as they turned the island into a “sacrifice zone for empire-building” (de Onís 2018) and capitalist accumulation. In both cases, the scales, modes, and goals of the various emptying logics have differed over time and these differences are significant and signifying: for instance, the first group to be removed were the native Taínos, not the creolized Puerto Ricans. Yet, a brief survey of this recurrence suggests that colonial emptying, rather than “normal” population growth, has been the most common experience in Puerto Rico over the last 525 years, with complex consequences.