Determining Biological Citizenship: Creating and Effacing Difference in Puerto Rico’s Education

• In Event: Settler Colonial Educational Policies and Practices in the U.S. Empire

Abstract

My work analyzes the ways in which institutional practices gave legitimacy to conceptualizations of difference in Puerto Rico’s education under civil colonial rule. These epistemological and ontological reference points shifted under the first years of civil colonial rule, which constructed a state of liminal governmentality in Puerto Rico’s education and society. In Puerto Rico’s case, sustained avoidance became a tactic for governing, which has kept Puerto Rico in a state of suspended sovereignty since the turn of the twentieth century.

Author

• Bethsaida Nieves, University of Connecticut