Negotiating Empire

The Cultural Politics of Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898-1952

Bibliographic Data

ID2818802
AuthorsJ Davila (0000-0002-5534-8317, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume94
Issue4
Pages717-719
Publication date2014-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2802906
OpenAlexW2316949536
LanguageEN
Citations received18

In 2012, Puerto Rico held the fourth plebiscite since 1967 on its status relative to the United States. Though the plebiscite resulted in the first majority vote for US statehood, it took place alongside an election in which the pro-statehood governor, Luis Fortuño, lost to the candidate of the party that favored continuing the current status as an unincorporated territory of the United States. A point of contention amid the plebiscite was a proposal by Fortuño to change the island's educational system from a language instruction model in which Spanish is primary and English secondary to bilingual education, retraining teachers and introducing bilingual instruction across the curriculum in order to produce what Fortuño called “Generación Bilingüe.” The debate over language and education cuts to the heart of negotiations of Puerto Rican identity, culture, economic opportunity, and political status.Solsiree del Moral helps us understand the relationship between language and identity by examining the responses of teachers, educational associations, and parents to the educational project imposed by US officials after the United States took possession of the island in 1898. Del Moral sets up a dialectic between the tutelary US educational project and reactions on the island. US officials sought assimilation of the island's population, but the paternalistic and racist project produced a backlash among teachers who fell back upon a Hispanic identity defined as distinct from an Anglo-Saxon US one. This is a fascinating paradox: del Moral shows that the very push for assimilation fueled the autonomist response that shaped generations of public and private education as well as enduring attitudes about education and language.Before the Second World War, the island was administered by officials appointed from the mainland United States. Del Moral examines one of the central projects of these administrators: reconstituting the island's educational system, with the aim of Americanizing the population. As del Moral shows, Americanization entailed replacing the entire educational system, from normal to elementary schools, with new institutions. Initially, it also entailed making English the language of public education.Americanization was guided by the turn-of-the-century colonial and racist notions of white supremacy. Educational ideas and practices were drawn from the tutelary experiences gained from boarding schools for the acculturation of Native American children and initiatives in segregated vocational training for African Americans. This was a positivist project in which progressive aims were suffused with racist bias. Del Moral argues that teachers limited the impact of this project in Puerto Rico. Teachers were both an obstacle to Americanization and a source of autonomist thinking based on the articulation of the idea of a patria or fatherland distinct from the United States.Del Moral argues that Puerto Rican educators and educational constituencies challenged the US colonial project by responding to US ideas of race with a competing conception of raza. This is not only an apt description, but it is also a powerful analytical opening that gets at the peculiar role of Puerto Rico as a place where the different US and Latin American constructions of race and national identity meet. Puerto Rican teachers in particular responded to the racially supremacist tendencies of US policy and pedagogy by falling back on the concept of raza, broadly defined as a people. In doing so, they counterposed to racism the notion that Puerto Ricans were part of a Latin civilization distinct from Anglo-Saxon civilization.Among these distinctions, Puerto Ricans adopted a discourse of racial democracy, romanticizing the dedication of a mythical nineteenth-century Afro–Puerto Rican teacher as the foundation of a community tradition of education distinct from the US project. Teachers also resisted English education, cementing Spanish not just as a language but as the cornerstone of a distinct and autonomous identity. As del Moral explains, “English-language instruction provoked fears of cultural genocide. The US intention to impose English-language instruction generated resistance from teachers, parents, politicians, intellectuals, and others. ... [and as a result] defiant resistance to English, a glorification of Spanish, and a rejection of ‘Spanglish’ are important national performances” (p. 16).Finally, the distinction between race and raza undergirds a reading of the intersection of racial thought and science at the meeting point between Latin America and the United States. Where early twentieth-century US ideas about race were bound up with notions of biological difference and hierarchy, Puerto Rican educators turned to the current of Lamarckian genetics and eugenics favored in Latin America. Both were paternalistic visions that defined the overwhelming majority of poor, uneducated Puerto Ricans as degenerate. But whereas the US vision saw this condition of degeneracy as a permanent state of nature, Puerto Rican educators saw it as a remediable condition. In doing to, they embraced a turn from biological readings of race to cultural readings of difference based on not biology but populations. Negotiating Empire plays a welcome role in bringing into dialogue recent scholarship on race, culture, and identity across the Americas

Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Demography · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

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