De la Isla a Chicago: Historicizing Puerto Rican Education

• In Event: 56.028 - Our Bodies, Our Diction: Educational Equality Articulated Through the Activism of Youth After Brown

Abstract

As Sonia Nieto reminds us, Puerto Ricans have been attending U.S. schools for over a century. In 2017 we celebrate one hundred years of the implementation of the Jones Act of 1917, which imposed U.S. citizenship on all Puerto Ricans born on the island. From language politics, labor, education and housing inequalities, life across U.S. cities would mirror the social, political, and economic milieu the islanders left behind. This paper seeks to provide a historical analysis of the role of schools and schooling in the lives of these newly “acquired” people, both on the island and in cities such as Chicago, and the ways in which the population, especially youth, responded to both the availability for some and the lack of opportunities for others in terms of schooling. From Americanization projects on and off the island, battles for secondary schools (Tuley and Clemente High School), and mobilizing within institutions of higher learning (Northeastern Illinois University), Puerto Ricans have historically and persistently utilized schools and education to lay claim to space and confront their marginal status. Through archival research (institutional and organizational records, newspaper accounts, government documents), I examine how beginning in 1917 with the imposition of citizenship on Puerto Rican’s through their migratory history to Chicago, schools and education have been both sites of liberation and oppression for the population. On the island, schools offered opportunity for islanders to expand their educational opportunities, however, not under their own terms, as schools engaged in Americanization projects mirroring the political and military agenda of American leaders. James D. Anderson’s pivotal work on Black education in the South speaks to this desire for a population of people to seek access to education in order to transform them and move them from their marginal status, under their own terms. Access to citizenship offered Puerto Rican elites an opportunity to study at U.S. institutions of higher learning, such as the University of Chicago, where Puerto Rican women set the foundation for the community based activism that came to define the community. Schools in the 1960s and 1970s Chicago, became sites of contention as the Puerto Rican population, in particular youth, came to challenge their limited status within the city, despite their status as U.S. citizens. Chicago schools for many parents and students became an extension of the socializing agents (and agenda) that became schools on the island, which sought to transform the population as “fellow Americans,” albeit Americans who would now face a different reality across continental U.S. cities.

Author

• Mirelsie Velazquez, University of Oklahoma