DiaspoRican Dreams, Ivy Tower Realities: Puerto Rican Students and the Makings of Home in Higher Education in the 1970s.

• In Event: Latinx Student Activism, Institutional Power, and Cultural Resistance v2

Abstract

In a 1973 issue of University of Connecticut’s Puerto Rican student newsletter Hijos de
Borinquen the editorial attempted to appeal to fellow students:
Are you aware of whats' going down on campus? Do you know the
Puerto Rican student movement is confronting the Universtty [sic]
of Connecticut with its institutionalized racism against you as
Puerto Ricans.[1]
Student activists, along with faculty and staff, were questioning what they viewed as a lack of
commitment to Puerto Ricans, despite their longstanding history in the state. Whether aware of it
or not, their counterparts at institutions in Michigan (Wayne State University), Illinois
(Northeastern Illinois University), as well as nearby New York (Brooklyn College), were
similarly pushing for institutionalized changed that would not only increase their numbers at
institutions of higher learning, but challenge long standing beliefs that continued to marginalize
them. In the inaugural issue of the Puerto Rican student newspaper Que Ondee Sola in 1972,
Northeastern students expressed the need for organizations that could highlight Puerto Rican
students’ needs and realities and help them “overcome there [sic] own individualistic attitudes . .
. caused by the brainwashing high school had put them through.”[2] The Union for Puerto Rican Students—the Union for short—was organized in 1971 as a community-based advocacy group
for not only Puerto Rican students but all oppressed groups. Approaching Northeastern Illinois
administrators in 1971 with a list of demands, the Union sought to create a Puerto Rican Studies
Center as well as a more effective recruitment program for Puerto Rican students. Although
separated by hundreds of miles, Puerto Rican students across the Diaspora in the 1970s found
themselves at colleges and universities where their status improved very little from their lives
back home. Making direct connections to Puerto Rico’s ongoing colonial relationship with the
United States, students pushed for change, the creation of programs and spaces reflective of their
identities and dared to hope for more.
This paper utilizes oral histories, print culture, and archival material to capture the stories of
Puerto Rican students in higher education in the 1970s and 1980s. There is no book-length
project on this history, nor a comprehensive historiography on Puerto Rican students in higher
education. Utilizing decolonial theory and Latina feminism, I center the stories and written work
of these students to begin the work of moving this history from the footnotes of history.

Author

• Mirelsie Velázquez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign