Visions of Citizenship on the "Frontier of the Americas": Bilingual-Bicultural Education in Puerto Rico and New York City, 1948–1975

• In Event: 47.035 - Crossing Borders: Ideas and Policies in Comparative Settings

Abstract

This paper follows the intertwined trajectory of school language policy in Puerto Rico and New York City, from the American takeover in 1898 to passage of the Aspira Consent Decree, a 1974 legal agreement enshrining the right to bilingual-bicultural education in New York public schools. While historians often place the origins of a right to bilingual education in the United States in the 1960s, firmly within a domestic civil rights narrative, I argue that these policies in part grew from long-standing colonial ties and hemispheric encounters, particularly during the Cold War. In doing so, they engaged in a long-standing hemispheric debate about the very meaning of citizenship within the liberal republican tradition in the Americas.

Author

• Lauren Lefty, New York University