“Los niños hablan cuando las gallinas mean” (refrán muy popular en Puerto Rico, hasta principios de los sesenta)
“I am ‘My Majesty Piri Thomas,’ with a high on anything like a stoned king. … I’m a skinny, dark-face, curly-haired, intense Porty-Ree-can—Unsatisfied, hoping, and always reaching.” (Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets, 1967”
When Victor Pellot was approached by a waitress in a small restaurant in Little Rock, Arkansas, and was told succinctly that they “did not serve Negroes,” he calmly answered “That’s okay. I don’t eat Negroes. I want rice and beans.” (Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, El Arte de Bregar, 2000). According to Díaz Quiñones, that “casual” interchange between a Black Puerto Rican professional baseball player and a white American waitress in the middle of the 20th century stands as a symbol of Puerto Ricans’ historical struggle with American racism. Often using humor against the racialized society, during his famed baseball career in the States, Pellot exploited a miscomprehension of American racial norms. He once said that when he went to the USA he knew his skin was black, but it was in the States that he found out he was a Negro.
"Deja que el flow fluya." (Bad Bunny)
After watching a movie about the Puerto Rican upper crust, a CCNY student, María, made a statement about the actors not looking Puerto Rican. The movie presented the issues faced by older, middle/upper middle class Puerto Ricans. They are shown spending weekends in their island countryside homes, in the mountainous region, busy during workweeks, living in apartments in San Juan, talking about vacationing in Europe once a year. These folks are usually called “blanquitos” by the island’s proletariat and sub-proletariat classes. “Blanquitos” are part of the larger Puerto Rican social fabric, with enough of them to make a significant mass. (For a broader discussion, please read the extensive body of literature on the subject.)
The students that majored in Bilingual Education, 1973-1977, were quite different from the type of student that applied and were admitted later on into the School of Education. Like most of the students during the early seventies, María was a Puerto Rican, born and raised in the Bronx, who had never been to Puerto Rico. By becoming aware of the complex social economic and political arena in Puerto Rico, her conceptualization of what is a Puerto Rican was shaken. Suddenly there was a group that, as a sort of coherent set, did not match the mental structures that gave form to her Puerto Rican narrative.
While María was beginning to understand the history and politics of the education she received, as well as her parents’ in Puerto Rico, Luis was more concerned with the class and colonization issues shown in the film, than with a particular stereotype of what a Puerto Rican is or should look like. Luis was born and raised in the multi-ethnic, rather politically notorious and leftist inclined Lower East Side of Manhattan, shaping his views on the world, and what it meant to be “a colonial” in the metropolis (this theme had been explored also by Puerto Ricans who had lived in NYC and Barcelona during the early 20th Century and late 1800’s, beginning with El Gíbaro by Manuel Alonso).
Luis’ activism during his high school years, the influences of the surrounding dynamic Loisaida community, and the yearly family trips to Puerto Rico prepared him for an understanding of the education of Puerto Ricans that transcended the mostly racist, patronizing views that stemmed from “traditional disciplines and academic standards”, set-up by the state professional voices and authorities, mandated to be covered in educational courses. He once shared in class the eye-opener that he experienced in Puerto Rico when he first saw a poster classifying foods where, instead of North American produce, there were “plátanos, yautías, ñames. mafafos. lechuga criolla, gandules, chayotes, etc. replacing the apples, iceberg lettuce, etc., that he was exposed to in the NYC schools. He realized that the island’s was not a poor diet or culture, as he was told in school, but a different one, seeing for himself for the first time, Puerto Rican doctors, lawyers, police, firemen, and well-kept, rich in culture and diversity, island towns and villages.
Luis was not the only student who was also an activist, or who were working in community educational or artistic endeavors. During the early years of the Bilingual Education Program at CCNY, quite a few other students were or had been members of well known leftist and community based organizations: The Young Lords, El Comité, PSP, Los Atrevidos, Los Sures, artists collectives, the very “loose” Newyoricans poets, and related artistic, political and social activism groups (some of these artists were political entities in themselves), Pregones Theater, Teatro Pobre de América, Teatro de Orilla, La Tea. At least, two of those students were imprisoned, accused of assisting underground Puerto Rican political pro-independence organizations.
My own personal and work experiences with some of the art and theater groups, where I had been active since the late sixties, helped me shape the approaches to the course. There was also an extremely important addition to the teaching approaches: the old Workshop Center and Lillian Weber’s support and suggestions. Sadly enough, not only did the course disappear, so did the Center.
Growing up in Long Island, Lisa acquired a rather distant knowledge of what it meant to be a Puerto Rican, indistinguishable from her needs and desires to become part of the more affluent American middle class. Both of her parents were second generation NY Puerto Ricans who spoke English at home. Lisa learned Spanish in school and made one of the biggest mistakes some NY Puerto Rican students make: go to Spain to polish their Spanish. Although she was somewhat fluent in Spanish, with some English influences in her pronunciation and vocabulary, her intonation was rather flat and lacked the “deje” of the Puerto Ricans. At times, she sounded like she was speaking English in Spanish, without the emotional and affective nuances of the language when spoken by a Latin American. Also, by going to Spain she did not learn how to evaluate her Spanish within the contextual and political history of a Puerto Rican person growing up in the USA.
Years later, the students who gradually replaced the Newyoricans were mostly Latinos who were more concerned with climbing the economic and social ladder, than with particular political issues, outside of racism and multiculturalism themes. To create a match made in heaven, the new faculty (the Department of Elementary Education had gotten rid of the Puerto Ricans) was less interested in the education of the colonials, than in becoming part of the American mainstream, bilingually, to climb the academic ladder. Among many changes, given the “politics” that guided the discussion and practices, there were no more anti-colonialist discourses as a central topic in the content of some of the courses. And thus the course was eliminated from the list of requirements, though it continued to be offered by the Puerto Rican Studies Department, later on renamed, Latin American Studies.
The idea that for Puerto Ricans the study of culture, history and the Spanish language is not simply a study of selected disciplines, or a bridge to becoming an English speaking “americano”, was not discarded for pragmatic reasons. The new faculty knew nothing about the rearing practices, literature on the the Puerto Rican child and its related educational practices, which included issues that are quite unique to our experience with the language, and how we have dealt with the impositions of narratives that can lead to distorted views of history (read Abelardo Alfaro’s Peyo Merced or explore why “el jíbaro dijo: ‘unjú’” by Luis Lloréns Torres. There is a long list of Puerto Rican authors that have explored the subject).
I do not believe that the changes that began to take place from the 80’s on in the CCNY Bilingual Education Program were simply curricular trends; a trend that “strangely enough”, a decade later also involved the Workshop Center for Open Education. It was quite disturbing to see that a certain pattern also became part of the focus: to view Puerto Rican students as in need of compensatory education. I almost fell off a chair when listening to a Cuban colleague referring to Puerto Ricans as “docile”, and comparing us against other Latino groups, by claiming how much better the “others” were doing academically (a poorly studied theme since over all, Puerto Ricans were doing as well or better than any other Latin American group in its totality; and a daring thing to say, given the distrust there was at the time between Puerto Ricans in New York, Miami, New Jersey and the mostly self identified as "white" Cuban immigrants). Clearly, the Cuban educator had not read the work of intellectuals dismantling such a “racist” idea and how it was formulated historically (there is plenty of literature on this word "docile" and how it was created and promoted to justify racist views and colonial politics).
Then, there was the Colombian educator asking the faculty to study Puerto Rican kids “learning failures”. In her very progressive school, the failure had nothing to do with the school itself, of course, she claimed, not realizing that very poor kids in mostly middle class schools will usually do worse than the average ones, and had nothing to do with ethnicity. (How Latinos were and are often hired to replace Puerto Ricans, and how Bilingual Education has been used to discriminate against Puerto Ricans, by the “White Leaders” in control, are topics for later essay.)
What came later on was racism dressed-up as “caring for the other”, and a little later, It included some form of “fascism”. It is a well known fact that some professors work for the security apparatus of the State. I heard of two of them at CCNY, and in Puerto Rico, around that same time, when two university students had been entrapped and killed by undercover police working within the campus of the UPR— state-sponsored murders. It was neither the first time, nor would it be the last, when the USA-security apparatus killed Puerto Rican independence supporters.
Years later, a new Puerto Rican faculty member was denied tenure. From my perspective, she was the best professor the Program had had in terms of her own professional and political history, and her excellent well-founded pedagogical and mentoring practices. The reason (no doubt): to get rid of the “leftist”. This shameless act took place while some faculty members (including another assimilationist Puerto Rican) provided support to a white woman, who could not meet at any level the Puerto Rican female professor. It was back to the fifties in some different but equally patronizing approach: to educate the poor and other non mainstream populations by focusing on predetermined "oppositional" and "control" ideas about the group "bajo fuego"; except this time, a Puerto Rican and other Latinos served to promote the ideological and controlling plan.
María would continue to live and work in the Bronx as a bilingual teacher, completely integrated into her residential and professional community; Luis went on to become a lawyer, and gradually entered into the world of political activism, with an emphasis on civil rights and making Puerto Rico an independent country; Lisa would become what the literature on colonialism calls an “assimilationist”. Her interest on Puerto Ricans were shaped by the desire and goal, politically and in terms of socio-economic class, to help them become a part of the American middle class.
The film previously mentioned was a resource used to cover part of the content studied for the course, The Puerto Rican Child in the Urban Setting, a requirement for all the Bilingual Education Majors at the time. The content of the course covered —not exclusively—data and studies on academic achievement, educational practices, historical and social dynamics, and to further understand the education of the Puerto Rican child, ideas on how children are defined in different contexts and historical moments, and its related rearing and educational practices were also studied (“A “mozo” could have been the same age of a teenager, but a “mozo” was not the same as what a teenager, supposedly, is all about. Phillipe Aries explores “con lujo de detalles” this subject in his book Centuries of Childhood. I also explored and wrote about the subject, published in this blog).
The course had been in the books for a few years, offered by the Puerto Rican Studies Department, and taken by students from different faculties and programs. During the Fall 1973 semester, it became a required subject of the new Bilingual Education major. At the time, the Urban Teacher Corps sponsored the designing and implementation of the teacher training project, providing funds to pay for the new non-tenured faculty and tuition for the students. A review of the syllabus, with its focus on anthropological and sociological content, led the faculty designing the new major to conclude that readings and classroom activities had to include material on rearing practices, history of education of Puerto Ricans on the island and the metropolis, and fiction, narratives/literature, that recreated the experiences of Puerto Rican children. The team of educators considered that the ideas regarding how Puerto Ricans decide their political status and history had to be based on what they know about themselves, and how the content is presented to them/us, be it in Puerto Rico or in the USA. (to be continued)
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