Un/mapping Educational Spaces in Puerto Rico

• In Event: Space, Affect and Education: Historicizing the Production of Differences

Proposal

This project is an historical archival examination of colonial maps, map-making, and un/mapping in Puerto Rico. As an historical archival project, I provide an original scholarly interpretation of maps created by the United States colonial government in Puerto Rico between 1898–1904; map-making school lessons created by school children in Puerto Rico between 1900–1904; and I examine how contemporary un/mapping methods aim to deconstruct colonial graphic logics.

Maps are used to connect and hold together the physical, social, and imaginary dimensions of the state (Lefèbvre 2009). In this sense, maps are used to create a type of graphic logic in order to understand historical formations, assemblages, and regulatory acts of governance, politics, and social life (Lefèbvre 2012). Beyond the map as a tool of imperialism, I argue that the gesture of un/mapping aims to unmask and unmake the production of educational and social spaces. Maps as an embodiment of Enlightenment rationalities of scientific progress and state power, provided colonizing forces with ways to measure, sort, catalogue, regulate, and control both spaces and bodies in Puerto Rico at the turn of the twentieth century. Un/mapping, however, challenges the idea that maps are fixed representations of sovereign-states. Instead, un/mapping is a method of spatial and social justice that aims to undo and unlearn colonial constructions of social, political, and economic spaces (Soja, 2010; Goffe, 2020; Capó García, n.d., 2024). Un/mapping, I contend, must also include a discursive analysis of how the idea of space is formulated and deployed within systems of reasoning about education and society.

The key question guiding this project is, “How can we understand the conditions that make it possible to think about maps as sites of creating difference and resistance.” In answering this question, I examine maps of Puerto Rico created by the United States between 1898-1904, and student lessons created by school children in Puerto Rico between 1900-1904 in order to examine how state power is mapped onto populations through literal map-making and through discursive graphic logics that informed how notions of race, hygiene, morality, and intelligence were being constructed about Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican child at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, I discursively analyze contemporary digital cartography projects that aim to (re)think spaces of collective memory and map-making in Puerto Rico.

My project findings demonstrate discursive patterns of inequality, and considers ways that communities, schools, and policy makers can disrupt these patterns in tangible ways across Puerto Rico’s current educational and governmental landscape.

This project aims to “un/map” the complex interplay of colonial and governmental rationalities that have been used by educators and policymakers to construct the “spaces” and “topographies” of education in Puerto Rico. By examining the historical disenfranchisement, current geopolitical shifts, and pseudo-scientific discourses of “race”, my project goes beyond unraveling the “colonial condition” to demonstrate the intellectual and institutional movements towards decolonial futures in education in Puerto Rico.

Author

• Bethsaida Nieves, University of Connecticut