Despite how much we like to fool ourselves the educational differences between US Public Schools and Puerto Rican public schools is stark. The only way I've seen that you can get an education similar to that of a good US Public School is by enrolling your kid in a Private School which not a lot people are able to do. I was one of those students that started out in private school when my dad had a good paying job and after was transferred to public school for fourth grade. Apparently the difference was so present that the first time I took the PPAA ( Pruebas puertorriqueñas) when they got my results at the beginning of 5th grade they wanted to bump me up to 6th Grade, 7th if I did well in another test they wanted me to take. But for some godforsaken reason I said no, sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I'd said yes but I don't regret it because if I had said yes I wouldn't have met the amazing best friends I have right now.
For me, during this reading, the quote that most stood out to me amidst the disaster that is the Department of Education in the 50's was this:
"I think I did teach my students a little English, but probably anything they learned was just from having been in contact with a native speaker of the language for a few hours a week."
This statement that Jim Cooper plants is a very important point as it is the most common way that some Puerto Ricans learn English, the majority of my learning English did not occur in course through private school, nor do I credit it to the English classes in Public School thought they were an important part in spelling and grammar. The majority of my English came from spending every summer since I was a kid with my aunt in Miami where she made me speak English if I ever had a question about something at a store or whenever it was needed in social interactions. It goes without question that at first I was petrified, and my aunt did help me in those occasions. And of course she didn't send me out unprepared, the moments of social interaction came after a grueling month of English Class during the summer and her speaking to me in Spanish and me answering in English. It became a survival tool and it got to the point that one summer after I had been transferred to Public School, I came back from Miami speaking better English than some of the teachers at school. I, horrifically, became a model student in my English classes which caused some animosity from my fellow classmates but I took it in stride and helped them out when they did ask for help.
And as always I close with a song, which has been meticulously chosen from the bottomless pit that is my music collection. This one was actually chosen because of an essay I was writing in which I touched the subject about how experiences and mistakes change a person, sometimes not for the best but what matters is that you realize your going down a path that is not the right one for you and you choose to take (or forge) a better path:
\
As you can probably tell from the past 8-ish posts I have thing for Musicals(I am not sorry), anyways here are the lyrics in case you want to follow along.
As I sat on my couch reading A Simple Life by Jamaica Kincaid, I couldn't help but feel almost a Kinship towards her. Her views on the British colonization and subsequent abandonment are very similar to how Puerto Ricans view the United States, as are her views on how tourists view the places they visit and how the natives of this place view the tourists.
1)
"That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. [...] They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself."
This part in the reading is almost reflective of some aspects of how Puerto Ricans view tourists. Most of the time we are very opening and welcoming to tourist, but sometime you see the underlying bitterness in some people, how they treat them or call them "gringos" in a degrading way as they are literally serving you to be able to make a living. Its very rare to see that but it is understandable, people find our Island as exotic or quaint and rustic; And much like Kincaid describes at the beginning of her description of a tourists day in their Holiday many of the things that tourist find cozy and tolerable is mostly because they only have to deal with it for a short amount of time while for the natives of the place this is their day to day life filled with potholes, passable healthcare and a crumbling infrastructures.
2)
"And so everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned English. But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that."
This is very reflective of life in Puerto Rico during 1898 and onward with the US, one citizenship was granted (I'm assuming it was so that our citizens could participate in whatever war came up) the past society saw many changes in the years to come. Schools were established where they could only speak English and were punished when they didn't. An effort was made to actually make English the official language in Puerto Rico, and seeing as how Spanish is still the official language we can see that didn't bode over well in the 20th century. Our lands were used to the point of erosion to produce sugar and coffee without giving it the proper time to recuperate and military bases were established in several places throughout our island; which included the nuclear testing that has affected Vieques to this day.
3)
"Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants? You will have to accept that this is mostly your fault. Let me just show you how you looked to us. You came. You took things that were not yours, and you did not even, for appearances' sake, ask first.[...] You murdered people. You imprisoned people. You robbed people. [...] But still, when you think about it, you must be a little sad. The people like me, finally, after years and years of agitation, made deeply moving and eloquent speeches against the wrongness of your domination over us, [...] you had understood the meaning of the Age of Enlightenment (though, as far as I can see, it had done you very little good); you loved knowledge, and wherever you went you made sure to build a school, a library (yes, and in both of these places you distorted or erased my history and glorified your own)."
This quote is also very similarity to how Puerto Ricans view our current
status as a US Commonwealth and how similar some past occurrences are. The most prominent of these being the Ponce Massacre & the Rio Piedras Massacre in which both instances the peaceful protest of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party or their supporters were shot at and in some instances killed by police officers. And as previously established the US attempted to establish English as the official language but yes, they did also help our society to educate the population and try to give them a better life. There is no denying that, but as Kincaid herself said, they could have gone about it in a better way. But she is also correct in the sense that when They came, and they built schools and libraries they were hoping to make a better life for us but when the moment came to write the history books about how these changes came to be the suffering and unwillingness of the Puerto Rican people was erased and the "bravery" and "kindness" of their colonizers was exalted and glorified.
In the end, all I could think about while reading these selections from Kincaid's work was the visit Rafael Cancel Miranda (a past political prisoner in the US) gave to our Puerto Rican Society & Culture class last year, which led me to a book I heard about in class which from what little I've read of it is very interesting:
And once again, I leave you with a well meaning song:
