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:
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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.
The human being by default searches for forgiveness when it feels it has done something wrong, indirectly or directly, to someone else; Judith Fein's trip to Vietnam is proof of that. She escapes from America to Europe during the war and goes to Paris where the negotiations are more thriving. But even after the war is over she feels a need to verify that Vietnam is indeed okay.
1) "Do you mean you really have no resentment against us?" I asked again and again.
"No," was the answer. "You are forgiven."
It was an enormous relief to know that Vietnam has survived our war and is thriving. It was reassuring to learn life has moved on, and even when a country is bombed, defoliated, and destroyed, it can come back with great vigor. I was humbled by a people who have suffered so much and have chosen forgiveness over fury.
I feel that this quote embodies both Judith Fein's necessity for forgiveness but also, almost a need to HAVE someone place blame and be angry at American's. She often cannot understand how the Vietnamese can be so forgiving of the people who caused such suffering and pain in a needless war.
2) The fact that the Vietnamese can forgive Americans caused me to look at myself and how I feel about people who have hurt or offended me.
Here we reach the whole point of her trip to Vietnam, finding forgiveness. In this quote we see not only her acceptance of the Forgiveness from the people of Vietnam, but the realization that she herself could learn to forgive. Forgiving is an essential part of human life and not necessarily for the forgiven. It allows the person to move on, not necessarily to forget the grievance but it gives you a sense of peace; of letting go.
3) I understood that I could spend a lifetime harboring anger and resentment, or I could accept what happened to me and move on. It felt good to be in the present. It felt good not to focus on the past. It felt right to unplug from past hurts and bitterness.
What comes in to play here is an example of what I explained in the previous quote. By letting go and forgiving the wrong doings of others against her she was able to move on, to feel at peace with herself and where she was in life. Often the reason we fight against forgiving someone is because we are not ready to accept what has happened to us. Because forgiving someone means accepting that the horrible thing actually did happen, it means learning to live with what happened but to let go of the pain the situation caused.
In class, Professor Pittmann mentioned how we could connect this reading to a song or artist that proteste against the war in Vietnam. Well I chose to do something a little different than that, I am choosing to connect to a whole movie that came out 41 years after the end of the war but is based around the late 1960's. It is titled Across the Universe.
The movie is written around songs from The Beatles albums and it tells the story through the different characters of the story. It covers the last years of the Vietnam War by sending one of the characters to war, he was drafted in contrast to his sisters ex-boyfriend who enlisted. When he is officially shipped out she joins the people in America in their organization of protests against the war. I wont get into too much detail so you can enjoy the movie, which honestly is amazing but when your seeing you wonder if the director and writers were on really bad acid because of the colorful visual and aesthetics.
As always I shall end this on a song, so good bye ladies, gents and celestial beings.
Hunger Games joke aside, I did volunteer to be a part of the staff for the 8th Annual Student Research and Writing Conference. This was simultaneously something new AND not new to me as my junior and senior year of High School consisted of volunteering in a club at my school that organized activities for underprivileged children. And yet it was my first time seeing the other side of one of these conferences and seeing how quickly things can go wrong and how quickly it can be fixed by the creativity of our brilliant professors and their bright volunteers. I couldn't volunteer as much time as I actually wanted because I had a LOT of assignments to finish (and begin) and an exam to study for plus my classes obviously but what little time I was there was awesome. My friend Natalia was volunteering at the same hours I was so I stuck close to her and we got assigned with another girl to the registration table. It was a fun 3 hours between finding metaphors for our grumbling stomachs, singing along to the clarinet players practicing outside and me geeking out when I got a text from amazon saying the book I ordered was arriving a couple of days earlier than I anticipated. Of course my geeking out was mostly because it's the libretto for Hamilton with annotations from Lin Manuel Miranda and the story behind the creation of the musical. It still brings an imaginary tear to my eye when I think about it, it HUGE by the way; no wonder Lin described it as a Tome you can buy it here
if you share my obsession with Hamilton and yes, I am listening to the soundtrack right now.
I mean come on! Look at it! Its gorgeous!
BUT BACK TO THE POINT
We spent our time listening to music while we told people the instructions about the registration and evaluation papers and handed out pamphlets. Before we knew it it was 10:30am and we all had to leave to our respective engagements, but we did come back at 1pm for our classmates presentation.
It was amazing.
I mean I thought we had seen everything in class already but I don't know why, seeing a representative of each group collaborating to make this one great presentation made it all come together in a way that made me appreciate Jung's intellect during his travels in a new way. Yes my classmates were nervous but they did and AMAZING job and kudos to them for having the guts to get up on that stage. I commend you for your bravery. I hope to one day have that bravery and not succumb to a panic attack at the thought of it.
With this I bid you adieu ladies, gents and celestial beings and I leave you with a message that goes with the song whose lyrics are pictured in the collage above and I shall link in this post:
If you ever feel like things are not going your way, like everyone is miles ahead of you be it academically, emotionally, mentally or economically: take your time, and Wait for It, your moment will come. It took me two years to come to terms with the fact that I have to leave behind people I love to be able to get what I want, and now while my friends are halfway through their Bachelors Degree I am about to start basically from scratch because I finally found what I was meant to do and that's why this song brings tears to my eyes when I hear it.
Okay for starters its very hard to pretend to be a tourist when you have a hard time sticking to one language for an extended period of time. I went to Old San Juan on Wednesday, taking advantage of the fact that my cousin was visiting from Miami and her son only speaks English so I had all the excuse to not talk in Spanish while in public. But for some reason I found myself slipping between English, Spanish and Italian for pete's sake I'm not even FLUENT in Italian.
We went to San Felipe Castle or as we know it best, El Morro. Believe it or not for a Puerto Rico native (and proud) I had never been to the inside of El Morro ( I apologize to any offended Boricuas) and let me tell you it was not hard at all to be awed at everything, I mean come on LOOK AT THAT:
While taking the tour my cousin and me started having fun with my assignment, I started to pretend to have a british accent and when I accidentally slipped into Scottish we started giggling like idiots but it was so much fun. At one moment I stepped away from my family and went down this really steep staircases and the steps were HUGE I got winded just thinking about going back up them again but the view was worth it.
When we finally left the castle and were walking back to the car so we could go eat we stopped to get a Piragua (snowcone) and when it was my turn to tell the gentleman what syrup flavor I wanted my brain sorta short circuited between Frambuesa and Raspberry and when I did finally speak and say Frambuesa it came out with such an American accent that my cousin paused to look at me in shock and I just burst out laughing when we finally walked back to the family when she just looked at me with a What the heck was that face. After the snowcones we went to Pirolo to eat and the waiters were very welcoming and nice especially when they heard us speaking english.
Overall it was a very pleasant experience, some people were very nice to us while some sneered at us even if we were in one of the most famous tourist spots in Puerto Rico and its not strange to see or hear other people speaking another language. I think it was more because of the fact that occasionally me and my cousin burst into random songs from Broadway Musicals than because we were "tourists". We didn't have any bad experiences (though I suspect the piragua guy charged us more for them because they were $3!) and everyone was nice very nice.
And with this I leave you with my latest obsession (and the cause of more than one weird look when we burst into song in San Juan), its from the Broadway Musical Hamilton: An American Musical written by our very own Puerto Rican, Lin Manuel Miranda (so proud) and its all kinds of amazing and it is very emotionally painful to know that I might never get to see this musical (more importantly with HIM as Hamilton) but I hope the rumors of a Live Recording are true. Please, if you have the time (and motivation) please listen to the soundtrack, its amazing (pls).
ANYWAYS, goodbye ladies, gents, and celestial beings, heres your song:
Also BONUS! Please appreciate actual cinnamon roll (too pure for this world) Lin Manuel Miranda freestyling on Jimmy Fallon:
This has honestly been a surreal experience now that I sit down and think about it. It was strange to methodically sit down for 10 minutes a day to write down the first thoughts that came into my brain. At first I thought it was going to be hard, as it usually happens whenever I am assigned a writing project and its not voluntary my brain just kinda goes blank for the entire time and I have to consciously put an effort to write. But the thing about this project, the structure of it it kinda let me let loose and literally write down the first thing in my brain. The first few times it was very sporadic, you could see how fast my mind went from one thought to the other and then back to a past thought. It was hard to keep track of the writing at times because most of the time my mind went much faster than my hand could and by the time my hand was writing a word I was already 5 words ahead and the sentences got muddled.
By the middle of the project, around week four, is when I finally sorta got the hang of it. I still skipped words and occasionally my mind veered off of subject completely and I forgot about writing for a few seconds. But the thing is that what made it easier to do was that my mind is almost constantly running in an internal monologue reminding me of things I have to do, characters I have yet to develop, stories I haven't finished writing, etc. Some times they happen one at a time, sometimes they happen in twos and three's and sometimes they are all screaming at me at the same time to the point where I have to stop whatever I'm doing, take a deep breath and organize my mind before continuing. And while it was just basically writing down the never ending monologue in my brain it helped me organize my thoughts, whether I did it before school or before I sat down to do homework writing down the whirlwind in my mind before either of these gave me a kind of peace of mind, a freedom from the erratic thoughts that course through my mind like fire. So maybe I might continue doing this even if the project is finished, but not limiting myself to ten minutes because then it feels pressured and that wont help at all.
Life Compass
The life compasses on the other hand reflect how my personality and bodily functions are affected by my weekly occurrences. Everything ran smoothly and stable for the most part, the exceptions to this are the Spiritual & Physical factors. Right of the bat you can tell I started of low in both physical and spiritual factors, considering when we began doing the life compasses I was recovering from a cold and my friendships were falling apart around me, in the next week everything took a bump after I rested and spent time with my best friends and family but the next week they took another plunge because I walked everywhere because the car was in the shop. The reason week 4 is high in all the factors is because I did 4 compasses instead of my usual three but still it was an overall amazing week because despite all the University stuff I had to do, my aunt from New York came to visit and I got to see her.
Week 5 on the other hand was very draining, I had a very long week which included, 2 tests, 3 presentations and a lab report and after finally finishing everything I got a throat infection. Week 6 took another bump up mostly because I had finished everything earlier in the week, plus I had the literary contest which was both exhilarating and terrifying and the only think I had left to do was study for my history test the next week and two of my best friends were coming over to have an X-Men/Marvel marathon with me from Thursday to Sunday. Week 7 stayed pretty steady despite the punch in the face that was the geography exam, which was cushioned by the fact that I got a freaking A in my CIBI test which I was not expecting AT ALL. And so we conclude with week 8, as you can see in the graph it took another small plunge, understandable considering the hell that was the Assembly and the fact that I got stick from spending 7 and half hours in a dust infused amphitheater which caused ANOTHER throat infection, this time extending all the way to my ears and sinuses.
All in all this was a very enlightening experience, and it helps me organize myself so I might actually continue doing it if only for the benefit of clearing my mind.
Goodbye ladies, gents and celestial beings, goodbye.
Wait no you know what, it feels kinda wrong to leave this without a song since the last three posts have ended with one, so here you go:
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:
Today our class attended the Award Ceremony for the 49th Annual Literary Contest of the English Department in our University. It was a very surreal experience for me considering I didn't even expect them to give my essay a second glance. Well apparently it warranted enough of a glance to award me an Honorable Mention in the Ceremony along with 2 other students in my class, one in my same category (essay) and another in Poetry. I was very surprised when I received the email last week about being a winner in the contest, though I am kind of happy I brought my topic to light considering it's not that well known.
The Award Ceremony was very lively, there was no quiet moment. At the beginning wee were interrupted by Tuna from our University which was 20 different kinds of amazing. But my favorite part was the readings of the first place winners, seeing them display the fruits of their labors on stage was a special moment. The Poetry Winner was awesome and I agreed wholeheartedly with her poem. We women (and also men) are all too often told what we should and shouldn't do, and are forced to partake in hobbies in which we hold no real passion or wear stuff to appease other people. The Short Story entry was great too, the excerpt read gave me a curiosity to know more about the story and that is very important thing in creative writing, to be able to capture your audience with just one paragraph. More over, the Essay winner was beyond words, her take on words and their importance not just on paper but on how we define ourselves was incredibly moving and inspiring.
The most important thing I grasped from this experience was to not be ashamed of who we are and I saw that in the people that stood on that stage today. How they bared their hearts in their work and were not the least bit ashamed of it and stood proudly to receive their recognition.
With this I leave you with a song once again to tell you to never be ashamed of who you are because there are people out there who love you just the way you are and its more important that YOU love yourself.
