"They have rejectd Statehood and Independence, while choosing to remain as they are."
I assume you refer to the locally sponsored status plebiscites held in 1993 and 1998. I think you would benefit from an explanation of how those two plebiscites came about and what the voting revealed.
In 1993, the pro-statehood Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Rosselló and the Island's legislature (more than 2/3 of which was composed of members of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which had won in a landslide in the 1992 elections), convened a political status plebiscite. The three items on the ballot were statehood, independence and "commonwealth," with the three local political parties that each espouse a political status writing the definition for their preferred status. The definitions of statehood and independence were rather uncontroversial, but the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party defined the current commonwealth status as being a fantastic, mythical status that could not be revoked by Congress without Puerto Rico''s consent, and that *guaranteed* (i) permanent union with the U.S., (ii) irrevocable U.S. citizenship, (iii) "fical autonomy" (which the "Populares" explained meant that Congress was not allowed to levy federal taxes on Puerto Rico or its residents, and (iv) membership in the International Olympic Committee and participation in international sports competitions. Now, anyone that knows anything about the U.S. Constitution knows that all of those things were bald-faced lies, but they are the types of lies that the Populares have been feeding to the Puerto Rican people for decades, and with the Populares hitting the tax issue hard down the stretch, commonwealth beat out statehood by 48.6% to 46.3% in relatively low turnout by Puerto Rico standards (73.5% of registered voters went to the polls; in the general election held the prior year, 85.5% of registered voters turned out).
Obviously, the problem was that Puerto Rico voters were not presented with the truth about their current political status, so in the mid-1990s the New Progressive Party sought a congressionally approved mechanism to solve the status problem. The original bill sponsored by Congressman Don Young (R-AK) would have called for a federally sponsored referendum in which the options were sovereignty and statehood, and in the (almost certain) case that statehood won, would mandate Congress to approve an "enabling act" (the law that sets the rules for entry of a new state) that would then need to be approved by Puerto Rico voters in a second referendum. The Young Bill (as it was called) was strongly opposed by the Populares in Puerto Rico because they claimed that it was "biased in favor of statehood" (which was belied by the fact that the Puerto Rico Independence Party endorsed the Young Bill), and anti-Puerto-Rico-statehood groups in the U.S. mainland opposed it as well. The Populares insisted that the bill allow "commonwealth" to be included as an option, and Congressman Young and the other Republicans in the Resources Committee agreed, thus changing it from a bill to decolonize Puerto Rico to one that included a colonial formula among the options. The four options would thus be statehood, "commonwealth" (correctly defined as a territory subject to the plenary powers of Congress), "free association" (which is an independent republic that has entered into a treaty with the U.S. regarding defense and some other issues; the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Palau and the Republic of the Marshall Islands have all entered into covenants of free association with the U.S.) and independence. However, the Populares still lobbied to defeat the bill, and so did companies that benefited from the federal tax exemption afforded by commonwealth status. As the vote neared reports started coming out about how Puerto Rico would have 6 Representatives if it became a state (which is true) and that it would thus decrease the number of representatives from other states (which is false, since current federal law would increase the number of Reps from 435 to 441 until the next Census, and Congress could vote to keep the number at 441 even after the next Census); this led to Congressmen from states that were slated to lose a Representative after the 2000 Census to vote against the Young Bill even though their loss of a House seat had nothing to do with Puerto Rico, as was proven when they lost House seats in 2000 while Puerto Rico was still a territory. So the vote ended up being closer than people originally thought, and the Young Bill was approved by the House by just a single vote. Senator Frank Murkowski (R-AK) had introduced similar legislation in the Senate (Alaska Republicans still remember when Alaskans could not vote for President or members of Congress), but it soon became apparent that it would not be approved by the Senate.
So Governor Rosselló (who had been reelected in 1996 by the largest margin of any Puerto Rico Governor since 1964) pushed through the state legislature a status plebiscite that included the definitions of the four options that had been provided in the Young Bill. The Populares again cried foul, since they didn't like the realistic definition of "commonwealth" that had been approved by the U.S. House of Representatives (and, more importantly, had been based on U.S. Supreme Court rulings). However, in order to avoid having the plebiscite struck down by the Popular-controlled Supreme Court of Puerto Rico, the legislature had included a fifth column entitled "None of the Above" so that nobody could claim that their preferred status option had not been included (in 1993, a former Popular governor claimed that his preferred option was free association, and that his rights were being infringed because it wasn't on the ballot; the PR Supreme Court absurdly agreed, ruling that he could leave the ballot blank to show his displeasure with the 3 options given, but warned the legislature to include a better mecahnism to show displeasure in the future). So the Populares announced that they would ask their members to vote under the Fifth Column (whose name proved to be prescient). Now, in October, Hurricane Georges went striaght through the middle of Puerto Rico, doing more damage than any hurricane since at least 1956, and many voters (including many statehooders) called on the plebiscite to be postponed so that the government focused on the clean-up and rebuilding and not on a political campaign. Others objected to the December date for the plebiscite, since they didn't want politics to get in the way of the traditional month-long Christmas celebrations on the Island. And some statehooders were upset with Governor Rosselló because of the things that inevitably crop up when a governor has been in power for 6 years, and decided to "punish" him at the polls. Thus, the Fifth Column went from a curious technicality to an agglomeration of anyone and everyone with a bone to pick with Governor Rosselló, including all Populares and many statehooders and "independentistas." The coup de grace for the Populares was when former three-term Governor Rafael Hernández-Colón gave a televised message in which he warned that Congress was not bound to grant statehood should the voters choose it and that a vote for statehood was instead a vote for becoming an "incorporated territory" in which federal taxes would be imposed but in which Puerto Rico still would not have voting representation in Congress; nobody likes paying more taxes, especially if they do not believe it is a respnsibility that will yield benefits as well. The momentum turned against statehood just a few days before the plebiscite (polls had shown statehood ahead until the day before the vote), and the Fifth Column ("None of the Above" ended up with 50.3% to 46.5% for statehood. Turnout was just 71.3%, even lower than in the 1993 plebiscite, and it was clear that many statehooders stayed home or voted for the Fifth Column.
So that's the unvarnished truth of the 1993 and 1998 status plebiscites in Puerto Rico. You can believe if you wish that Puerto Ricans "rejected" statehood, but I think it's apparent that the truth is more complicated than that.