Transcript
Speaker: I can say that I have heard so many stories about Puerto Ricans that grew up in this system, this educational system, the public system, that they owe their anti-colonial outlook to
Speaker: to a teacher that taught them the history of Puerto Rico.
Speaker: And with that, I think I would have to say that the anti-colonial movement in Puerto Rico owes a great debt to teachers.
Speaker: Teachers were always at the forefront of anti-colonial resistance and making Puerto Rico just a place that's actually sustainable.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to episode 147 of the Human Restoration Project podcast.
Speaker: My name is Nick Covington.
Speaker: Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Corinne Greenblatt, Joelle Ostrich, and Brandon Peters.
Speaker: You can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us anywhere on social media.
Speaker: I'm joined today by Professor Genaro Abraham.
Speaker: Professor Abraham specializes in researching social movements, politics, and insurgencies in Latin America and the Caribbean, alongside analyzing U.S. foreign policy's historical effects on human security, development, and peace.
Speaker: His extensive fieldwork in Colombia informs his ongoing research in Colombia, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela.
Speaker: Additionally, he contributes to studies on social movement integration, labor and social welfare policies, the Venezuelan migration crisis, and mental health policies in the region.
Speaker: Beyond research, Professor Abraham coordinates a Colombian peace-building initiative, collaborates with advocacy groups for Puerto Ricans and immigrants, and serves as vice president of the Puerto Rican Independence Party in the diaspora.
Speaker: In this conversation, we discuss key issues that people in the mainland U.S. may be missing about the historical and current relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, the extent to which Americanization is still a goal of the Puerto Rican education system, what role educators have played in its anti-colonial movements, and what role they may play in determining the possible futures of Puerto Rico as either the 51st U.S. state or as a fully independent nation in its own right.
Speaker: Last year, I spoke with Trinidadian YouTuber Andrewism in part about the colonial history of Trinidad and Tobago in its relationship to the United Kingdom.
Speaker: I was fascinated by how much of the current education system there was still a holdover from the British colonial system that, despite having achieved independence, still operated under essentially a colonized and colonizing educational system.
Speaker: In 2023, we also published a three-part in-depth on-the-ground series on the pedagogy of the Hawaiian Islands, hosted by Noah Ranslind.
Speaker: And I wanted to have a similar conversation with Professor Abraham today about the overall shape of the education system in Puerto Rico.
Speaker: I always learn so much from these conversations, and I hope you do too.
Speaker: Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Anato, for taking the time to talk with me today.
Speaker: No, thank you for having me.
Speaker: It's a pleasure.
Speaker: Could you just describe your background, your work, your research interests for those who aren't familiar with you and the work that you do?
Speaker: My name's Hanado Abraham.
Speaker: I'm an assistant professor of Latin American politics at Gonzaga University in Washington State.
Speaker: It's in the city of Spokane.
Speaker: It's on the eastern side of the state, the border of Idaho.
Speaker: Most of my research focuses on social movements, contentious politics in Latin America, and more particularly anti-colonial struggles in Latin America.
Speaker: I think many of the things that I study come from, I guess, my own personal background in Puerto Rico.
Speaker: Despite the fact that I was born in the United States, like probably two thirds of Puerto Ricans, I grew up from the age of 12 onward in Puerto Rico.
Speaker: And I came to Puerto Rico at a very sobering moment, wide-eyed Puerto Rican that was just discovering my quote-unquote homeland, right?
Speaker: And
Speaker: Coming there, this was in the middle of the struggle of Vieques, Puerto Rico.
Speaker: Vieques is an island off the coast of Puerto Rico.
Speaker: It's 20 by 5 miles.
Speaker: It was a bombing range for the U.S. Navy.
Speaker: And on both sides of the island for about 60 odd years or so, they were being used just as target practice with live uranium.
Speaker: And it brought social movements to...
Speaker: you know, go up in arms and protest the existence of the U.S. Navy there.
Speaker: And it was this island or this nationwide movement to get them out, to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques and to stop the bombing there.
Speaker: Mind you, at one point in time, Puerto Rico or Vieques, Puerto Rico had one of the highest cancer rates in all of the U.S. and its outlying territories.
Speaker: And with that, well, I was 12 years old.
Speaker: My father was an educator and he brought us to the restricted area, which was where they bombed with a bunch of other folks that were connected to the ecumenical communities and
Speaker: the religious communities in Puerto Rico and they built a church in the old bombing range, you know, uh, thwarting authority, like you're not going to bomb a church.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, um, I guess that was my big eyeopening experience, uh, to not only continue to study social movements and the change that they can make in the world, but also to become a teacher.
Speaker: So that's, uh, that's, I guess some of my background.
Speaker: That's incredible.
Speaker: That's worthy of its own story.
Speaker: I think for perhaps another podcast at another time.
Speaker: Let's go ahead and let's just dive into Puerto Rico starting big.
Speaker: When we were trying to arrange this conversation, I mentioned it.
Speaker: I'm approaching it largely from a perspective of ignorance.
Speaker: I don't know what I don't know about Puerto Rico to even ask you about it.
Speaker: It's history, it's relationship to the United States, the education system, and
Speaker: Even before we clicked record, you know, you gave me a little bit more insight that helps that's going to help shape this conversation.
Speaker: And I think despite Puerto Rico being an American territory, which I think is a fact that many Americans don't even know, right?
Speaker: Many, many of the mainland don't even realize this and millions of Puerto Ricans living in the mainland United States.
Speaker: What are the key issues that you think the vast majority of Americans are missing, either in the historical or the current relationship between the United States and and Puerto Rico?
Speaker: Well, I think one of the big things that a lot of Americans miss has a lot to do with, well, its own kind of ideological outlook as a benevolent kind of force in the world, which isn't necessarily wrong in every case, but it is definitely problematic when it comes to what the state actually does to other places, right?
Speaker: And what its policymakers have done for the longest time.
Speaker: Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, not by accident, right?
Speaker: It's not an accident of history.
Speaker: It was a purposeful imperial move on part of the United States when it was, I guess it got drunk off the idea that it could continue to expand from sea to shining sea.
Speaker: And, well, there was a push, an impetus to kind of move by way of the Monroe Doctrine and I guess the hegemonic idea of imperialism.
Speaker: of American exceptionalism and all that fun stuff, to go to the outlying islands and outlying territories that have, I guess, that were easy to take and to take them.
Speaker: And during the Spanish-American War, four places were, I guess, taken from the Spanish imperial rule, right, which was Guam, the Philippines,
Speaker: Puerto Rico and Cuba.
Speaker: And Puerto Rico, given its particularities during the Treaty of Paris of 1898, was ceded to the United States.
Speaker: And after that, every institutional relationship that Puerto Rico suffered from 1898 onward was molded to fit the extractive imperial interests of the United States.
Speaker: And we can see this from the 1930s,
Speaker: during the, like from 1898 to the 1930s relatively, during the sugar industry and how the United States tried to mold the interests of its, mold Puerto Rico to fit the extractive interests of the U.S. sugar industry, given the fact that there was an over-dependence on beet sugar coming from Europe, well, they wanted to turn Puerto Rico into this place where they could just
Speaker: set up shop and get sugar a lot cheaper.
Speaker: And this obviously cemented a lot of social relationships from the past and colonial relationships from the past.
Speaker: It also reformed others, right?
Speaker: It privileged U.S. sugar conglomerates to take away land from others.
Speaker: And with that, there was a negotiation that
Speaker: And even somewhat of a tug of war between Puerto Ricans and like U.S. sugar conglomerates and the very limited spaces that Puerto Ricans had to endeavor politics to stop these extractive industries from taking control.
Speaker: And with that, basically, the education system was also molded to fit the extractive industries of the United States and the extractive interests of them.
Speaker: During this time, there was a belief that governed, I think, every foreign policy interaction that the United States had.
Speaker: And Puerto Rico, despite it not being foreign in that sense, it was incorporated into the United States, it was taken, it was still treated as something foreign because its intention was to keep it that way, to keep it as a colony.
Speaker: And with that, you had the development of institutions that were subservient to the United States, where governors were appointed by Congress directly or appointed by the executive branch directly.
Speaker: And anything that Puerto Ricans would decide in their own political institutions that were created after 1898 also had to deal with the possibility of vetoing.
Speaker: powers coming from the United States that would not let them do the things that they feel they wanted to do with their own nation.
Speaker: Education was not exempt of this.
Speaker: And with this, once the Foraker Law was enacted, which was a law that ended military rule in
Speaker: in Puerto Rico and overturned to like a civilian local government, but you know, but still under the subjugation or by the subjugation of the United States, you had a series of educational institutions that were set up to Americanize.
Speaker: And so a lot of the English instruction was imposed over the Puerto Rican nations.
Speaker: For those of you who don't know, Puerto Rico is a Spanish speaking nation and it's a nation that considers itself by and large Latin American.
Speaker: It does pride itself in more recent years as being more bilingual than other places and whatnot, but still our language is Spanish, rather.
Speaker: And in that context, you see the development of institutions that were geared towards Americanizing Puerto Ricans because there was an underlying idea that Puerto Rico's racial inferiority, like that was the hegemonic idea that was...
Speaker: under which the United States operated, right, to come in and impose its imperial rule.
Speaker: Yeah, Americanization required that Puerto Ricans learn the American ways, and with that, they would be more amenable to the impositions that would come.
Speaker: This didn't last long.
Speaker: It was by and large considered a failure.
Speaker: A lot of local politicians in Puerto Rico actually opposed these measures.
Speaker: A lot of people see this as, in fact, the consolidation of the nation, that there was a sense of resistance against the educational system that tried to impose Americanization.
Speaker: And then I think come the
Speaker: 1940s to the 19, maybe 50s or so, maybe 1930s to 1950s, roughly, Puerto Rico was undergoing a transition, modernizing transition, you know, entering the modern world, industrialization.
Speaker: And with that, educational institutions were kind of geared towards those ends.
Speaker: But with the intersecting variable of Puerto Rico also negotiating or being imposed and having to negotiate their interest in that imposition, under the concept of that imposition, their
Speaker: And with that, the ruling party at the time, the Partido Popular Democrático, created a new constitutional order that was negotiated with the United States to an extent that basically enforced the relationship that we know today in Puerto Rico.
Speaker: That relationship did create some of the greater institutions that we know today, the university system, the one I actually graduated from in Puerto Rico, my bachelor's, my master's degree.
Speaker: And while the first university on the island happened under U.S. rule, the UPR didn't really expand as a public institution until much later.
Speaker: particularly during this industrial period where there was a need to kind of suffice the interests of industrial output.
Speaker: But this happened, though, at the same time when there was the existence of a peasantry that was diminishing in Puerto Rico and that a lot of Puerto Rican authorities and U.S. authorities for that matter thought we had to do away with.
Speaker: And they understood that to do away with this, there was obviously the, you had to, you know, industrialize them and kind of push them into the working class and to the workforce.
Speaker: But those, there was only so much space for Puerto Ricans to actually be able to fit into that, to the cogs of that system.
Speaker: And with that, and in consonance with the United States and farm and all kinds of agricultural conglomerates in the United States, there were migrant labor programs that were geared towards
Speaker: sending the most vulnerable out.
Speaker: And with that, there was a lessening of social pressures that are often thought to kind of bring colonies to, well, to challenge the status quo.
Speaker: This, however, did not necessarily quell all of the
Speaker: the anti-colonial resistance.
Speaker: There was much anti-colonial resistance happening at the time.
Speaker: 1950, there was a revolt against the United States that was squashed by military rule.
Speaker: There was also a, there was a, the Nationalist Party at the time and went to the Blair House and shot up, shot into the air and, uh,
Speaker: in protest of the new constitution that was being imposed because there was no real vote on it except for a yes or no vote, which a lot of independentistas argue that people that challenged colonial rule argue that this kind of obscured real resistance against these things.
Speaker: And the funny thing about this, I think in all of this, this hodgepodge of things that was happening, that were happening at the time, teachers,
Speaker: given the fact that they were at the lower echelons of society and the working class, and that they came from the lower echelons of society, became the bulwark in a lot of senses against this imperial kind of imposition.
Speaker: They were some of the first people to create independent unions in Puerto Rico.
Speaker: that were very, that they challenged not only the local kind of impositions of like salary and all the labor stipulations they felt were unfair, but there were also some of the first kind of, the people that helped mold the organic law of education that we know today, which at the time was one of the most progressive laws, educational laws known to Latin America.
Speaker: And it created all kinds of really cool stipulations about, you know, about tenure there, about, you know, being able to stay there and getting promoted and salary and all kinds of stuff.
Speaker: And a lot of this was also happened because of the fact that a lot of the Puerto Rican teachers unions were very adamant during the 60s and 70s about not being associated with American unions because there was a history in Latin America of American unions coming down.
Speaker: And the teachers unions were not exempt of this.
Speaker: coming down and kind of trying to mold unions and their...
Speaker: and their resistance to any imposition in the workforce, in their taigir, in their workshop, right, which is the classroom, to try to mold them away from radical politics and to kind of make them more amenable to things that, you know, patrons would accept.
Speaker: This is all part of the Alliance for Progress kind of outlook.
Speaker: Puerto Rican unions in this context started creating their own centrals, their own unions, and with that became like some of the
Speaker: not only challengers of the status quo when it came to anti-colonial politics, but they also became the first challengers to neoliberalism.
Speaker: You know, they were out on the streets all the time, the strikers.
Speaker: They were also, as of today, the lowest paid teachers in all of the United States and its outlying territories.
Speaker: The places where a lot of independent school districts go down there to poach
Speaker: bilingual teachers and send them out.
Speaker: And we do have an unfortunate problem of teacher brain drain, if you will, because our best and brightest are often taken out of there.
Speaker: But I can say that I have heard so many stories about Puerto Ricans that grew up in this system, in this educational system, the public system, that they owe their anti-colonial outlook to
Speaker: to a teacher that taught them the history of Puerto Rico.
Speaker: And with that, I think I would have to say that the anti-colonial movement in Puerto Rico owes a great debt to teachers.
Speaker: Teachers were always at the forefront of anti-colonial resistance and making Puerto Rico just a place that's actually sustainable.
Speaker: And I guess that after that, you know, to conclude, I guess what
Speaker: Americans should know about the situation, about this extractive situation that kind of molds institutions and teach institutions.
Speaker: Come the neoliberal era, the 73 crisis afterwards, the big oil crisis that kind of created a lot of fissures, economic fissures and political fissures that we knew in the world at the time, that brought your Reagans to power, that brought your Thatchers to power, that liberalized China and that created the situation where
Speaker: economies were in fact much more liquid and also susceptible to the logics of the market.
Speaker: We saw Puerto Rico also kind of fall to these problems, right, where education became something that you put a price tag over.
Speaker: And with that, the purpose of these educational institutions for the status quo was different, right?
Speaker: It was one that would prioritize education.
Speaker: David O' Money and and you know money coming from certain interests to fund education and the state of absolving itself of its responsibility of actually having to take on the burden.
Speaker: David O' That is education and it's and yeah and everything entails and we see this particularly in the last few years.
Speaker: by way of the appointing of people like Julia Kelleher, who was an American.
Speaker: She was a secretary of education.
Speaker: She was from, I think she's from Pennsylvania.
Speaker: Oh, she's from U Penn.
Speaker: She's from Pennsylvania.
Speaker: But she was sent down.
Speaker: She was hired by the Puerto Rican government to reorganize and revamp the educational system and kind of implement these policies that they've been throwing out there in the government.
Speaker: to try to create education vouchers and to try to make her education system more, to privatize it completely.
Speaker: And with that, they brought in the language of community-oriented things or whatever and say, let's make these school districts autonomous and let's like them, and which essentially means get your own money elsewhere, right?
Speaker: And when she tried to revamp that, she also got caught up in the colonial corruption here and was charged and
Speaker: He was indicted and was arrested.
Speaker: And yeah, unfortunately, the colonial education system has also been sensible to the fact that while many people have taken it as a political bastion in Puerto Rico, people that are promoted to the position of being secretary of education are connected to one of the two main colonial parties.
Speaker: And with that, they implement a series of policies that are amenable to the
Speaker: Well, extractive interest of the United States.
Speaker: This does not mean necessarily the United States is acting like the education system is acting at the behest of American interests, but definitely on behalf of them.
Speaker: So it's like in the same sense that there were these extractive economic practices, you're saying that there were some similar extractive educational practices as well.
Speaker: And I wonder in what sense then today is that Americanization, which I can imagine as being at some point an explicit policy goal of the education system in Puerto Rico,
Speaker: Is there a sense today that that is still a goal of the system, either implicit or explicit in some facets of it, either with the appointment of these officials to participate in the formal government in particular ways or whatever?
Speaker: And then I wonder, too, just about that on-the-ground resistance you had mentioned of the role of teachers and their independent unions playing in an anti-colonial movement.
Speaker: To what extent is that anti-colonialism?
Speaker: It almost feels anachronistic to refer to it as that in 2024, right?
Speaker: But really, that's what it is.
Speaker: So to what extent is the Americanization still an explicit or implicit part?
Speaker: And then, again, to what extent are teachers forming the resistance backbone to those anti-colonial movements?
Speaker: Or have they been successful in what ways?
Speaker: Well, I think that's a very good question, right?
Speaker: Because I think Americanization probably meant a lot of different things as time passed, right?
Speaker: As the interest of the United States changed, the American model, I guess, also changed, right?
Speaker: So I could mention some big trends, right?
Speaker: One of the big ones is that, well, during the first 30 years of Puerto Rican history, most education systems were, much of the education system was molded for decades.
Speaker: was molded in a way that it resembled like naked coercion.
Speaker: It was an out-and-out Americanization.
Speaker: During the industrial era, there was a kind of pulling back of that, right?
Speaker: And there was an acceptance of the fact that we were a nation, but we were a nation that was effectively excluded from the rights and responsibilities of the United States.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: with the fact that we were subservient to these interests that came from afar.
Speaker: And with that, we had to play to the tunes of the United States and we had to kind of bow down to these interests that were there in our educational system, then had to mimic the United States in ways that were amenable to the industrial interests that were taking place in Puerto Rico.
Speaker: That did make it a little different than the United States, of course.
Speaker: because of the fact that, well, Puerto Rico was a tax haven.
Speaker: So the industries that would come down were obviously very different.
Speaker: There was all kinds of patent laws that were...
Speaker: There was a lot of exemptions for intellectual property that allowed for pharmaceutical companies to set up shop in Puerto Rico or all kinds of like different industries that were high tech to set up shop in Puerto Rico.
Speaker: And with that, you had the development of, well, institutions that were geared towards creating engineers or creating like well-paid workers, right?
Speaker: However, when these things started,
Speaker: kind of when these tax exemptions timed out, they became poached by the United States and they just kind of left.
Speaker: So there was like a brain drain.
Speaker: So I wouldn't say necessarily there was an Americanization in that sense.
Speaker: There was a...
Speaker: I guess there was an Americanization in the sense that we were taking advantage of.
Speaker: And we had to, we were kind of pushed and shoehorned into the logics of a market that wasn't ours and that did nothing for our economy.
Speaker: And given the fact that we were a tax haven, funds for education were always lacking, right?
Speaker: And we were always dependent on like the United States to kind of send funds for education.
Speaker: And it creates this kind of stranglehold relationship that's really hard to get out of.
Speaker: And I would say that if there is an aspect of Americanization that continues to persist in our education system now, right, it's the fact that most of the schools themselves are being thought of as these centers for simply getting employed elsewhere.
Speaker: The university systems themselves are now molding themselves to this trend of people leaving Puerto Rico.
Speaker: You want to get a job that makes you hireable in the United States?
Speaker: You know, come to our university.
Speaker: You want to get a job that actually, you know, sends you out and sends our best and brightest so far.
Speaker: I can testify to that, right?
Speaker: Most of my friends that studied with me education and that studied even master's and doctorate degrees or whatever are now here in the United States where you didn't stay.
Speaker: There was no, a lot of teachers feel like there's no place for them.
Speaker: When I left, teachers would make $1,700 a month.
Speaker: And mind you, in an island where, an archipelago where we have our burden by a shipping monopoly.
Speaker: So with that, you could imagine the prices going up, just like Hawaii, just like Guam, you know, our shipping costs bring prices, food prices through the roof.
Speaker: The only thing that kind of allows for people to kind of survive, I think, is the fact that Puerto Ricans do have local community-based economies.
Speaker: We do depend on each other.
Speaker: You know, there is a very different moral economy that's at the community level and whatnot.
Speaker: And I think that allows for Puerto Ricans to kind of subsist.
Speaker: And I mean, don't get me wrong.
Speaker: The beach is a great,
Speaker: It's a wonderful thing to not think about the horrors of capitalist exploitation, but at the same time, the beach won't pay your bills.
Speaker: So at one time or another, I think Americanization in a lot of senses has less to do with the cultural aspects that they want to impose now and more to do with what they want to take from us and how those logics are seen as natural and that we have to accept those logics as natural.
Speaker: And to your second question about the role of teachers in this,
Speaker: Oh, my goodness.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I don't even know where to start.
Speaker: Like I said before, I feel like the teachers, we owe a debt to teachers.
Speaker: Teachers have been, I mean, I think that if you go to Dallas ISD or you go to places like Winston-Salem, North Carolina, or like any of these big ISDs that had now had an influx of Latino students that required bilingual teachers can testify to the quality of education.
Speaker: of Puerto Rican teachers.
Speaker: They're amazing teachers.
Speaker: There are people that have a really critical outlook and that a lot of anti-colonial movements saw this and also invested in ordentance amounts of resources and trying to, well, to bolster unions, right?
Speaker: And some of the best labor leaders on the island, on the archipelago, were teachers, you know?
Speaker: And there was an understanding that, you know, one of the few places that you can actually
Speaker: reach Puerto Ricans, every Puerto Rican family, and speak to them directly about the ills of their exploitation and come
Speaker: And meet them where they are, what their economic needs and everything and hear them out.
Speaker: The teachers had a very special and a very privileged role in that sense that they had, they were able to reach every family in Puerto Rico where, you know, the impending effects of industrialization were compartmentalizing, separating us.
Speaker: And with that, I think teachers were the glue that kept a lot of the anti-neoliberal kind of movements in Puerto Rico together.
Speaker: If it weren't for teachers, I don't think we'd have as much anti-neoliberal resistance.
Speaker: And I think that the role that they play at large has always been one that attempts to uplift Puerto Ricans in the most horrid of situations.
Speaker: If you look at the test scores,
Speaker: Puerto Ricans from the lower echelons of society receive or they get.
Speaker: I mean, at one point or another, we have to accept that they're receiving a condition, so they receive a bad test score, right?
Speaker: Well, they're very low.
Speaker: Some of the lowest in all the United States.
Speaker: It's created this two-tiered educational system that reflects the economics of Puerto Rico, where if you're part of the quote-unquote middle class, you send your kids to private school.
Speaker: And you send them to the private school, and you expect them to get a little bit better education.
Speaker: And then usually the kids in private school don't see Puerto Rico as an option for staying there necessarily.
Speaker: They leave.
Speaker: And then you see another second tier kind of system where a lot of universities, private universities have set up shop to kind of suffice the needs of local economic interests.
Speaker: And with this, you do see universities kind of impart instruction in certain trades that have to do with like baking or accounting or things that you can get a job immediately afterwards, things that are much more technical.
Speaker: And you see that there is this kind of two tiered class system that exists when it comes that is reinforced by the education system.
Speaker: You don't trust the education system in Puerto Rico.
Speaker: You don't trust the fact that, well, a lot of Puerto Rican teachers end up having to leave and that there's an absence of teachers.
Speaker: There's not enough teachers to give class to the nation's most vulnerable.
Speaker: And despite that, there's been a recent closing of like almost 300 schools.
Speaker: in the last 10 years because of the demographic brain drain to the United States.
Speaker: It's created this problem where it's just hard.
Speaker: It's a self-perpetuating problem that never allows the education system to be meaningful for Puerto Ricans, right?
Speaker: It can get them a job.
Speaker: It can, it can help them.
Speaker: It could function as a trampoline to leave the island, but, uh,
Speaker: The resistance of teachers has been always to make, to help build the world anew for Puerto Rican youth, one that they can use to stay.
Speaker: Does that make sense?
Speaker: It does.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It seems like all of the...
Speaker: Basically, the system is designed to send as sort of a recruiting ground for, as you said, the best and brightest not to stay and enrich the land or the archipelago, as you've been calling it itself, but to contribute their gifts to the mainland in this disproportionate social, political, economic relationship.
Speaker: We're turning our attention a little bit, perhaps, to the future of Puerto Rico, its relationship to the United States.
Speaker: You know, I've learned a lot very recently from our mutual friend, Gilberto, about the historical contemporary discourses about statehood versus self-determination and independence.
Speaker: So how do you imagine the pros and cons of either path, be that statehood, independence, or just the status quo?
Speaker: And what do you imagine the impact of change on that extractive education system that you've outlined here?
Speaker: perhaps going from one that is a trampoline into, you know, the mainland United States, the successful extraction there, or, you know, one that can be more aligned towards the self-determinant goals, perhaps with the people and of Puerto Rico themselves.
Speaker: So concerning the issue of the Puerto Rican status, right, it's often used, and I appreciate the question because it's the thing that I think burdens most Puerto Rican political conversations, right?
Speaker: It's the one thing that you don't talk about at the dinner table.
Speaker: It's the one thing that divides us all.
Speaker: And it is one thing that is very contentious for sure.
Speaker: It's...
Speaker: Most Puerto Rican politics at one time or another, probably a little less so now than maybe a few decades before.
Speaker: But the issue of status divides us between three big trends, right?
Speaker: People that believe in statehood as a solution to the woes that I'm describing.
Speaker: People that believe in independence to the woes that I'm describing as a solution to these things.
Speaker: And people that believe that the status quo should stay, but it should be maybe...
Speaker: bettered or tweaked a little, more and more people are realizing that the status quo was not an option, right?
Speaker: It seemed like an option when there were great industrial gains, like post-World War II to the 70s.
Speaker: It seemed like an option when
Speaker: Well, there were gains for very high paying jobs, right?
Speaker: Like engineers and chemists working in the pharmaceutical industries for the sake of like a data point.
Speaker: At one time or another, Puerto Rico produced 60% of the over-the-counter medicine that you buy in Walgreens or CVS or any of these.
Speaker: It became this place that would export so much drugs and medical technology to the United States that it was a very lucrative industry, but none of that money actually stayed there apart from the salaries of employees.
Speaker: which were by and large much smaller than the ones you'd get in the United States anyway.
Speaker: So it was also cheap labor for basically all of the medical technology and stuff you get in the United States.
Speaker: So it worked then, right?
Speaker: It worked for a very brief moment, but it could never really mitigate the terrible inequalities that existed in Puerto Rico.
Speaker: And it can never really create a sustainable safety net for the most vulnerable Puerto Ricans.
Speaker: And with that, Puerto Ricans receive inordinate amounts of federal money.
Speaker: They're dependent on federal money, whether it be food stamps, whether it be, you know, Pell grants, whether it be all kinds of things that have to do with sustaining their livelihood, right?
Speaker: You know, come the 80s and come the 90s, when a lot of these tax exemptions timed out, we saw that the status quo was not working.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And there was this kind of there was a slow polar movement to the different options that weren't the status quo.
Speaker: The folks on the statehood camp have been the ones that have won the most elections, I think, in recent years.
Speaker: And because of that, they have managed to create this hegemonic discourse that you hear in the United States about Puerto Ricans wanting statehood.
Speaker: And they win the elections of our only representative in Congress, our what you call the resident commissioner, that that person was, it's not a voting member of Congress, but does get to voice opinions about Puerto Rico and can vote on like local committees or whatever.
Speaker: But yeah, it's a really kind of pathetic position because you don't really, you can't really do anything, right?
Speaker: You're just kind of voicing the opinion of the ruling party.
Speaker: And mind you, the ruling party won the executive branch this year.
Speaker: past electoral cycle with 33% of the vote, like it was nothing.
Speaker: So it's not a very popular party either because it's always associated with some of the same ills that were implemented for the greater part of these last five decades.
Speaker: What I want to get at with their hegemonic discourse and their outlook about how things would change for Puerto Rico.
Speaker: Well, they argue and have argued to the American people that Puerto Rico is a civil rights issue, that we are simply afforded differential rights because of our status.
Speaker: And that colonialism is defined by that legal status, that in-between legal status that we have, not by the extractive interests that, you know, that kind of governed Puerto Rico.
Speaker: Folks that are on the independent side say, obviously, it's the legal relationship, but it's also the relationship that has to do with what's always been taken from us, right?
Speaker: It's extractive in nature.
Speaker: So I guess what I want to say with this is that folks that want independence and the folks that want statehood have two different definitions of what colonialism means.
Speaker: Colonialism for the pro-statehood people is just a tweaking of the system to continue the status quo.
Speaker: But with maybe some more rights and benefits in their mind.
Speaker: And they see the United States and their existence in Puerto Rico and their dominance in Puerto Rico as something that was inherently good but could be better.
Speaker: And then the people that believe in independence, such as myself, I happen to be part of the Puerto Rican Independence Party here in the diaspora.
Speaker: We believe that it's defined almost exclusively by its extractive interest, almost exclusively by this kind of ingrained understanding of racial inferiority of Puerto Ricans.
Speaker: And it is one that has always governed politically.
Speaker: the right for the United States to extract, right, from us.
Speaker: And we believe that the education system, by and large, could be something much more meaningful where Puerto Ricans can actually take charge of their future, right?
Speaker: And that sounds lofty.
Speaker: It might sound like up in the air, pie in the sky kind of thing, but it is something that Puerto Rican teachers have always fought for.
Speaker: And they fought for in meaningful ways.
Speaker: And they've been able to resist the onslaught of neoliberal education cuts by continuing to challenge the status quo by right of just simply existing.
Speaker: Imagine teaching for $1,700, $2,000.
Speaker: It's a little higher now because of federal funds that were allocated to Puerto Ricans that are not going to be there necessarily after a certain amount of years.
Speaker: They are...
Speaker: They're roughing it out.
Speaker: I mean, they're doing everything that they can and basically in a voluntary sense, right?
Speaker: They do much more than what they're ever paid for.
Speaker: I mean, the same thing can be said about any teacher, right?
Speaker: But I think in places where colonial rule still exists, it's so much more accentuated, right?
Speaker: It's so much, yeah, the relationship is so much in your face, right?
Speaker: It's right there.
Speaker: You can see it.
Speaker: It's latent.
Speaker: And I think that moving away from the understanding that education has to be simply for profit, for emboldening the industries of people that make money from very far lands, rather than kind of using it, leveraging it, instrumentalizing it to making a Puerto Rico that's actually sustainable, will have gains.
Speaker: gains that are, some will be quantifiable.
Speaker: A lot of them will be, however, much more meaningful than what the numbers will ever portray.
Speaker: You know, they will allow us a real sense of sovereignty, right?
Speaker: A real sense of
Speaker: thinking and feeling that we have the ability to change the world around us, which is something that has been denied to us, right?
Speaker: I think Puerto Ricans suffer, like many colonial people, right?
Speaker: Colonial subjects suffer from this idea that they could not be anything without their colonists, that they are nothing without them.
Speaker: that they could never imagine, or they could never even, that they could only imagine, right?
Speaker: That's the only thing they're allowed to do.
Speaker: Imagine a world without the United States, that they are only going to be afforded the hell that's been imposed over them.
Speaker: And that in itself is natural.
Speaker: And I think that independence itself will have a really rejuvenating feeling and spirit over the educational system, and that it can allow Puerto Ricans to feel that, well, they're in control of their destiny.
Speaker: We are only going to barely scratch the surface of the surface of the surface of any of this.
Speaker: I imagine if people want to continue to learn more and kind of carry on this conversation in their own right after this, what should they read?
Speaker: What thinkers, writers should they turn to?
Speaker: What should they listen to?
Speaker: What should they watch?
Speaker: What's kind of on your CliffsNotes kind of 101 or where would you...
Speaker: point people in the direction of if they wanted to learn more following this conversation up?
Speaker: There's a really wonderful book by two great academics.
Speaker: One's name is Cesar Ayala, who's from UCLA, and Rafael Bernabe, who's actually running for the Senate in Puerto Rico, and who also was a labor leader and professor at the University of Puerto Rico.
Speaker: The book is called Puerto Rico in the American Century.
Speaker: And it's a history of Puerto Rico from 1898 onward.
Speaker: It's out of North Carolina University Press, UNC, UNC Press.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that one's probably the best kind of general overview of Puerto Rico's colonial situation with all of its caveats, right?
Speaker: Like not everything in an empire is ever imposed completely.
Speaker: There are negotiations.
Speaker: And I think that that book also kind of touches on those nuances in very meaningful ways.
Speaker: It talks about the labor movement.
Speaker: It talks about the independence movements.
Speaker: And it also talks about the anti-neo-labor movements.
Speaker: It does need a little updating because it's about 10 years old, but it is, it's a wonderful start.
Speaker: I would also pay very close attention to some of the scholarship that's coming out of Centro.
Speaker: They also have some things that are actually much more accessible to folk that want to learn more about Puerto Rico's colonial situation in the present, the post-disaster, post-Maria, post-Hurricane Irma.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I would also just pay attention to, and I, I, I hate to be this, like this self, what do you call it?
Speaker: These, these people that, that advocate for themselves and self-promoting self-promoting.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So I hate to be this like self-promoting kind of a figure here, but I will say that the Puerto Rican independence party does have a podcast.
Speaker: There's also a really good podcast called, um, uh,
Speaker: Yeah, Viasporica, that's in Spanish.
Speaker: But there's a podcast in English and in Spanish that we're endeavoring with the Puerto Rican Independence Party that kind of talks about the colonial woes and how the diaspora and people that are not in the diaspora can get involved and trying to build Puerto Rico anew.
Speaker: Genaro, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.
Speaker: No, thank you for having me.
Speaker: It's been a pleasure.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
Speaker: If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
Speaker: Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
Speaker: Thank you.
