Learning to Resist, Resisting to Learn: Puerto Rican Students, the University of Illinois Circle Campus, and 1970s Chicago

• In Event: 63.029 - Whose University? Constructing Identities and Narratives of Resistance in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper examines the role Puerto Rican students played in calling on administrators at the University of Illinois Circle Campus, later known as University of Illinois at Chicago, to not ignore their responsibility to the local community, and increase not only the number of students at both schools but to similarly initiate the type of institutionalize change that would guarantee their success. As students at UICC proclaimed in March of 1974, “The University, whose mission it is to serve the people of Chicago has since its opening denied entrance to our people.”

Author

• Mirelsie Velazquez, University of Oklahoma