I propose a rich theoretical understanding on Afro-Latino student development based on critical race theory, culturally responsive pedagogy and practice. Addressing racial disparities is about engaging students thereby making their lives better. I believe that creating Afro-Latino pedagogy will create a community of practice in which inquiry is a cornerstone of continuous student self-redefinition through improvement in culturally responsive systems.
We need educators to get involved with Afro-Latino students, our history and the way we occupy space in the Americas in order to address this gap in education.

I revisit Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “tidalectics” just weeks after the largest triple hurricane system on record has pummeled the Caribbean. It is an awful reminder of the permeability between land and sea, particularly in small islands. In this unholy trinity of Irma, José, and Maria, these mergers are violent and deadly. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres declared that Barbuda, thought to have been 90% destroyed (like Anguilla) by Hurricane Irma, became a "paradise transformed to hell." The category 5 Hurricane Maria, which destroyed the fresh water supply and infrastructure in Dominica and Puerto Rico, was thought to be the strongest Atlantic storm on record. Hurricane Irma flooded seawater as far as a third of a mile inland in Cuba. Beach sand covered the region’s major arteries, which are still unpassable in many places, weeks after the storm. Twenty-five foot waves pounded the shores, while coastal surges were measured at over six feet in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. Due to the record-breaking levels of rain, an 11-billion gallon dam in Puerto Rico began to fail. Irma’s winds were so strong they literally pulled water out of the ocean and dried out beaches in the Bahamas and created watery bulges elsewhere.  In report after eyewitness report the language to encapsulate these unprecedented violent weather events fails. Instead the language of apocalypse prevails to describe what is “catrastrophic,” “precarious,” “total devastation,” and “hell.”

If, according to turn-of-the-twentieth-century observers, black Puerto Ricans were destined to become racially white in a few generations, how did 12.4 per cent of the population manage to remain black in 2010? And how did they survive in the face of both national and everyday forms of racism? How is the persistence and even increase in black identity in Puerto Rico supported? This article argues that there is a covert and largely unexplored social current at work in regard to how black Puerto Ricans live and reproduce their blackness. This is the desire to maintain and celebrate blackness. Using ethnographic data gathered during nearly two decades, the article illustrate that many Puerto Ricans have chosen not to engage in blanqueamiento, instead affirming their blackness, marrying within their communities, and valuing their own cultural practices and beliefs.

El Puerto Rico de Operación Manos a la Obra, el de “lo mejor de los dos mundos”, colapsó. La institucionalidad del Estado Libre Asociado fue abolida de dos plumazos: el caso ELA versus Sánchez Valle y la ley PROMESA. El cuadro de colapso se completa con la depresión económica más larga de la historia, “la gran depresión de los 2000”, y la devastación causada por los huracanes Irma y María. En julio de 2019, luego de catorce días de protesta continua y creciente, el gobernador más corrupto de la historia renunció. La pérdida de toda legitimidad de la kakistocracia presagia el colapso de la partidocracia. Puerto Rico está en ruinas y al garete; no hay otro modo de describir el cómo y el dónde nos encontramos en este momento histórico.

For Puerto Ricans, World War I provided the opportunity to test and challenge the linkages between military service, manhood, citizenship and decolonization.  During the war Puerto Rican political leaders, elected officials, and opinion makers sought to advance the socio-economic and political standing of their communities by demanding access to, and encouraging participation in the U.S. military.  In particular, Puerto Rican elites were interested in mobilizing the Puerto Rican peasantry thinking that training would transform them into modern men worthy of self-determination in the eyes of the metropolis.

Selección de los escritos de Luisa Capetillo, anarquista y feminista puertorriqueña (Arecibo 1878-San Juan 1922).  Edición y estudio introductorio por Julio Ramos. la introducción explora la relación entre la literatura radical de Capetillo y la cultura obrera de comienzos de siglo XX, con atención particular en su labor como lectora en las fábricas de cigarros en Puerto Rico, Nueva York y Tampa-Ybor City.
Selected writings by anarchist and feminist intellectual/activist, Luisa Capetillo (b. Arecibo, PR 1878-d. San Juan PR 1922).  Edition and critical introduction by Julio Ramos.  The introduction explores Capetillo´s anarcho-feminist thinking, her radical uses of literary writing, and her work as a aloud-reader in cigar factories in Puerto Rico, New York, and Tampa-Ybor City.

[PDF incluye los primeros dos capítulos]

De la contraportada: A una década de la publicación de su primer libro de crónicas, Rima Brusi-Gil de Lamadrid celebra su ópera prima con Chulos de la pobreza y otras crónicas, secuela indiscutible y testimonio de todo lo acontecido en Puerto Rico y en el mundo por los pasados años. La picaresca institucional siniestra e irredenta, la pandemia del COVID 19 como colofón a una sucesión de desgracias en Puerto Rico, la vida en riesgo en un planeta cada vez más asediado por el antropoceno, parecen imponerse en estas crónicas-notas-cuentos-ensayos, magistralmente ilustrados por Zuleira Soto Román.

Pero Rima nos recuerda, como en Mi tecato favorito…, que la humanidad es capaz de resistir y crear una mejor existencia. En esta entrega, orquestada en tríptico –Gente, Calle y Vagones– las personas se tiran a la calle y gestan otros países que disipan la rabia y los duelos que evocan los vagones. Chulos de la pobreza y otras crónicas es una oda a todas las manos que nos preñan y paren la utopía aquí y ahora. Es una canción esperanzada en la lucha de cada día. Es la vida misma que nace pese a todo y no cesa.

The Philippine-American War (c.1899 – 1913), which led to the colonial subjugation of the Philippines by the United States for over forty years and the suppression of the first independent republic in South-East Asia, is one of America’s forgotten wars. The historical amnesia surrounding this conflict is no accident. It is an enduring legacy of US government and military propaganda, widely disseminated by a largely supportive corporate press, which contributed in no small way to the American victory both at home and abroad. Propaganda is understood here as the deliberate falsification, distortion or tendentious portrayal of events to justify a political cause to the wider public. What I want to argue about this case, is that successful propaganda does not occur in the context of an otherwise rational and empirically verifiable public discourse. Successful war propaganda has to be reconciled with the self-respecting, symbolic self-interpretations of a national community. In the case of the United States, founded in part on a revolutionary republican imaginary but also a racialised and expansionist missionary vision of “Manifest Destiny”, this was not a simple or uncontested matter back in 1899.

This article provides a brief account of the American conquest of the Philippines and the attendant atrocities that accompanied the invasion. It will also explain how these brutal events were justified to the American public as hard but necessary acts of “Benevolent Assimilation”, for the benign tutelage of the Filipino. In particular, attention is paid to how propaganda was used to justify a colonial war, dehumanize the Filipino “other”, rationalize atrocities and erase alternative interpretations of events from the official record.

El objetivo de esta nota investigativa es examinar los cambios en los patrones de consumo de los puertorriqueños y puertorriqueñas desde el 2006, año que usualmente se denomina como el comienzo de la crisis, hasta el 2015. Las estadísticas discutidas apuntan a que la sustitución de importaciones debe ser particularmente enfatizada en cualquier proyecto de desarrollo económico que se plantee para Puerto Rico u otros países en vías de desarrollo en contextos similares, como también se ha enfatizado en otras investigaciones dentro y fuera de la isla.

The role of military service in spreading the Puerto Rican diaspora is an understudied phenomenon of relevance for understanding the Puerto Rican migration and its settlement patterns in the U.S. Active duty military personnel, veterans, and their families have dispersed the Puerto Rican population beyond what has been considered as traditional centers of Puerto Rican migration.

El terrorismo de estado ha transmutado su aplicabilidad y utilidad por el gobierno de turno en Puerto Rico. En décadas anteriores se refería a la represión por las fuerzas del estado o la utilización de la policía o el policía federal el (FBI); en este momento histórico tiene su utilidad en los medios económicos estatales (Hacienda) y los sistemas judiciales federal y estatal de la isla.

Ernesto Laclau (2006) En razón populista plantea que “Las multitudes
tienen el efecto de disminuir la inteligencia promedio de sus miembros, como resultado de las mentes inferiores que establecen el nivel al cual todos deben someterse, y también de la mayor sugestabilidad de los
miembros de la multitud”. En el Verano del 19 no hubo organización revolucionaria que cambiara las relaciones de poder coloniales que mantienen las condiciones de desigualdad económica y política al
pueblo puertorriqueño, solo se manifestó una multitud que se demostró reformista y se conformó con el remedio burocrático que proveyó el Estado Libre Asociado.

Link to review: https://www.latinorebels.com/2019/12/11/ordinarygirlsreview/

“I come from poverty, from El Caserío Padre Rivera… It was a world of men, of violence, a place too often not safe for women and girls,” Jaquira Díaz writes in the introduction of her memoir Ordinary Girls. A story about a Diasporican growing up between two worlds, this book dives into issues of gender, racial and social inequality that exist in our community, while telling a compelling story—one that many of us can relate to.

As a child, Díaz lived with her family in Humacao, spending her formative years playing and conspiring with Eggy, a boy neighbor who “knew everybody’s business” on the grounds of the housing project.

Early on, Díaz detected the gender asymmetries embedded in growing up girl versus boy in Puerto Rico. Her brother Anthony, only a few years older than Díaz, “was never banned from any place, always got what he wanted because he was a boy,” his life completely unburdened by the confines of girlhood. When she complained about Anthony’s freedom, her mother, who “didn’t take no shit,” would “pull me by the arm…”, “her sharp fingernails biting into my skin, and shut me right up,” Díaz writes. Yet, looking for the kind of freedom granted to boys, Díaz spent her childhood as a “tomboy” preferring to hang out with the boys playing outdoor games, running around wild, bike riding, climbing trees, and shooting hoops.

Resumen

En los Estados Unidos, el psicoanálisis se considera un lujo solo al alcance de quienes pueden permitírselo. Cuestionando esta suposición, la autora comparte su experiencia haciendo psicoanálisis con pacientes latinx en el “barrio” de Filadelfia para abordar problemáticas de clase y raza en la clínica. Este artículo sostiene que vale la pena disputar los supuestos comunes sobre el psicoanálisis, que a menudo es presentado como un tratamiento que solo se puede practicar exitosamente con pacientes de clase media y media alta. Con esta presunción, el psicoanálisis en los Estados Unidos se ha encerrado en un gueto. La desigualdad en el acceso al tratamiento psicoanalítico tiene implicaciones ideológicas y políticas. Examinando de cerca en una viñeta clínica las fuerzas psíquicas que subyacen al racismo, este ensayo busca reabrir una discusión para romper las fronteras invisibles que rodean los guetos en los que se encuentra el psicoanálisis. Contrariamente a la creencia común de que los pobres están tan consumidos por las presiones de la vida cotidiana que solo pueden beneficiarse de intervenciones concretas y centradas en los síntomas, este artículo demuestra que el psicoanálisis facilita la exploración de la dimensión inconsciente que sustenta comportamientos sintomáticos cruciales como el racismo, desatando un potencial emancipatorio

Abstract

In the United States, psychoanalysis is considered a luxury only available to those who can afford it. Challenging this assumption, the author shares her experience doing psychoanalysis with Latinx patients in Philadelphia’s “barrio” in order to address issues of class and race in the clinical practice. This essay argues that it is worth disputing common assumptions about psychoanalysis, often presented as a treatment that can only be successfully practiced with middle and upper-middle class patients. With this supposition, psychoanalysis in the United States has itself been ghettoized. The current inequality in access to psychoanalytic treatment has ideological and political implications. Examining closely in a clinical vignette the psychic forces underlying racism, this essay seeks to reopen a discussion so as to break the invisible borders surrounding the ghettos in which psychoanalysis finds itself. Contrary to the common belief that poor people are so consumed with the pressures of everyday life that they can only benefit from symptom-focused and concrete interventions, this paper demonstrates that psychoanalysis facilitates the exploration of the unconscious realm that underpins crucial symptomatic behavior such as racism unleashing an emancipatory potential.

To truly comprehend the Statehood Movement in Puerto Rico (1967-present), we must examine a complicated timeline from Spanish colonization (1493-1898) through American occupation (1898-present) and modern Puerto Rican Nationalist/ Socialist Party (1922-present) ideologies. This analysis includes focusing on the difficulties of cultural reclamation and

Office Location and Hours: Carman 398, Thursday 2-3 or by appointment Course Location: Carman Hall 301 Thursdays 12:30-1:45 + online Description: This course will be a survey of writers from the last half of the 20 th Century to the present focusing on those whose work conveys the urban experience through various genres --novels, poetry, autobiography -and in some cases pushes the boundaries of what we consider writing. The focus will be on New York experience viewed in a diasporic sense: as the landing place of immigrants and migrants from the south, Puerto Rico, and Dominican Republic. A key question we will consider is how the process of adapting to city life, particularly the changes in the time periods covered is conveyed in the works of these writers. We will also ask basic questions such as who lives in the city? What voices are heard and how do various writers articulate their unique experiences? The goal of this course is to become familiar with a few key writers from the New York literary scene from the 1960s to the present and how they relate to the Black Arts, Nuyorican, and hip hop cultural movements.

The University of Puerto Rico, the island's sole public university, faces what is probably the most critical juncture in its history. The draconian budget cuts that have already almost tripled tuition and will slash the institution's budget in half by the fall of 2021 threaten to drastically shrink or even dismember the system in ways that could make its academic and social missions nearly impossible. This article argues that the damage to the university has serious implications for academic freedom and threatens Puerto Rico's recovery and well-being. We also describe resistance efforts, focusing on the work of a commission including student and faculty representatives that produced a bill currently under consideration by Puerto Rico's Senate. The authors thank members of the APPU, PROTESTAmos, and the CMRU for sharing information that contributed to the preparation of this article and for everything they do to defend Puerto Rico's public university.

To truly comprehend the Statehood Movement in Puerto Rico (1967-present), we must examine a complicated timeline from Spanish colonization (1493-1898) through American occupation (1898-present) and modern Puerto Rican Nationalist/ Socialist Party (1922-present) ideologies. This analysis includes focusing on the difficulties of cultural reclamation and political independence after centuries of cultural appropriation and indoctrination through political imagery and actions. The modern Borikén faces monumental roadblocks when attempting to grasp a concrete independence plan after centuries of subjugation. The argument is that this hesitancy is built on a complex foundation of generational trauma and desensitization. With cultural reclamation is at the forefront of American political discourse, the goal is to examine if it is responsible to pursue an anti-colonial movement without quantifiable accountability from the American government. Furthermore, should this reckoning be under the guide of an independent Puerto Rico, focused on reclaiming its cultural and political identities, or under the eye of a government that has fostered their subjugation for centuries.

The author reviews the 3rd edition of Sonia Nieto's Language, Culture, and Teaching, a collection of articles and essays compiling the "author’s most
current thoughts on the teaching profession" (Nuruddin, 2018, p. 2). Suggestions are offered throughout the review for use of this book in bilingual, multicultural, TESoL, and world/foreign language pre-service education courses; and considers topics for discussion in the classroom and action beyond it, inspired by Nieto's dedicated service to school and community.

Desde el título aparece levantada la experiencia que singulariza el relato: Lost in the Museum of Natural History es un texto sobre la pérdida. 2 Se trata de un texto donde tanto la falta de dirección como la ruina de una preceptiva comparten el cuerpo. El cuento del escritor puertorriqueño Pedro Pietri trabaja con la perdición y desde ella traza sus efectos. La condición de lo perdido, más bien, la perdición es el pivote de un discurso del otro, sobre el otro que, en este texto, tanteará desde los sentidos del rechazo cruel ("piérdete/get lost"), el arrebato sensorial (la nota, la saturación etílica o narcótica), la desorientación de algún paseante hasta la caída de esos discursos autorizados para la formación ciudadana. El viaje aquí, por lo tanto, será, en más de un sentido, el relato de una pérdida textual. Más todavía, la lectura como actividad perdida, dilapidada, como derroche de sentidos, como la propia escritura, tomada ahora como imposible puesta en orden de lo percibido, encuentran en esta historia constantes signos equívocos, saltos y exige sus desarreglos. El relato de Pietri efectúa la pérdida sobre su textualidad.

Este trabajo aborda las políticas públicas (2006-2015) que han intentado implementar la perspectiva de género en los currículos de estudios del Departamento de Educación de Puerto Rico (DE). Estas políticas públicas han generado diversas reacciones. Aquí traigo a consideración las reacciones de los sectores fundamentalistas religiosos, ya que resultan los más activos y mayores opositores de las mismas. La idea de este trabajo es leer esta oposición como algo más que una respuesta común de estos sectores fundamentalistas religiosos y a la vez dar cuenta de qué dicen y proponen las políticas públicas a las que se oponen. Con esto, busco mostrar cómo a través de las políticas públicas entorno a la perspectiva de género y las reacciones a las mismas, se utiliza la retórica de ciudadanía para articular discursos específicos sobre la sexualidad a través de la producción de la niñez. Para mostrar esto, las críticas feministas sobre el Estado, las políticas públicas y la ciudadanía son centrales. Específicamente las aportaciones que desmontan los universalismos del sujeto abstracto que el Estado defiende y sus referentes como hombre-blanco-heterosexual-trabajador.

Las memorias de su gobernación de Puerto Rico del almirante William D. Leahy durante los años de 1939-1940. Incluye dos versiones del manuscrito inéditos hasta esta edición y otros documentos del período incluidos informes de inteligencia sobre las cruciales elecciones de 1940. También un análisis del editor de los textos y el significado histórico de la gobernación en el momento en que comenzaba la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Monografía sobre las aportacciones del doctor David M. Helfeld en Puerto Rico, como destacado e importante constitucionalista, profesor de Derecho de la Escuela de Derecho de la Universidad de Puerto Rico y Decano desde 1958 hasta 1974. Estudioso y defensor de los Derechos Civiles y Hunmanos, es autor de un amplísimo estudio sobre las persecusiones de los nacionalistas, independentistas y otros disidentes del régimen colonial del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, durante, los 195-1953, cuando regía la "Ley de la Mordaza"".

2015 RD Hobbs, Ed.D. book review of:

Spring, Joel (2013). Deculturalization and the struggle for equality; A brief history of the education of dominated cultures in the United States (7th Ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

This review covers monograph content for the purpose of sharing historical information on legislation and court decisions on racism and education. The text reflects current concerns in sociolinguistics on preserving minority languages. The support of minority language learning in dominant language contexts offers benefits to individual brain development as well as the improvement of social communicativeness and learning benefits. Preserving mother tongues offers cultural preservation benefits as well as self-esteem and motivation connected to appreciation of self-identity. University administrators selected this text as one of the alternative resources for graduate courses focusing on multicultural leadership.

Chapters:

1. Deculturalization and the Claim of Racial and Cultural Superiority by Anglo-Americans
2. Native Americans: Deculturalization, Schooling, Globalization, and Inequality
3. African American: Globalization and the African Diaspora
4. Asian Americans: Exclusion and Segregation
5. Hispanic/Latino Americans: Exclusion and Segregation
6. The Great Civil Rights Movement and the New Culture Wars
7. Resegregation of American Schools in a “Post-Racial” Society

The implication is that sociolinguists must increase their influence on educational leaders to support the growing populations of immigrants and protect their linguistic human rights.

BEST SMALL FICTIONS reprint (Sonder Press 2020). This flash-fiction is the opening of "A Terrible Racket," a novel-in-progress. The action takes place on a hill-top street, Caiseas, looking west over the Caribbean, where an invalid, Gabriel, and his wife Marta, make the best of what is left to them from the Glory Days. The sexual undercurrents and post-apocalyptic backdrop which run throughout the novel are introduced here.