The University of Puerto Rico: Dust off that beret
diamondbackonline.com | Mar 1st 2011 11:03 PM
Two weeks ago, I re-leased my apartment in South Campus Commons Building 5.
Rent had gone up $23.
I was a little upset.
Some months ago, students at the University of Puerto Rico were required to
pay an extra $800, increasing their university costs by more than 50
percent.
They were really upset.
In a series of protests over the last year, students of that behemoth,
11-campus institution rallied against administrative indifference, budget
cuts and police brutality. According to a Feb. 17 piece in The New York
Times, several of the university's programs, including Hispanic studies,
have been put "on pause."
Graphic instances of violence against students have been aired on networks
such as Univision and can be found on YouTube. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.),
citing an editorial by The Puerto Rico Daily Sun, said the actions of riot
police against students were a "gross violation of their rights and an act
comparable only to the acts of dictatorships we all denounce and reject"
(and also fund and help put in power, but that's another story).
With the attack against ethnic studies courses in Arizona, a resolution in
the U.S. House of Representatives that would deny children of undocumented
immigrants birthright citizenship, continued racial profiling, exclusion
from institutions of higher education and civil rights violations on
campuses all over Puerto Rico, Latinos/as are standing on shaky ground.
Historically, Latino/a groups have been "a class apart," too dark to
assimilate into the American mainstream and generally too white to face the
same oppression as black people in the United States. Our histories have
been either overlooked or put to the side in a painfully negligent manner.
Not only that, when a program in the Tucson Unified School District aimed to
teach students about Latino/a histories was instituted, it was attacked for
being dangerous to students and the country. The give and take is simply too
imbalanced, and Latinos/as are the ones who have to bear the brunt of the
taking.
In spite of that, in the past, we have been a community force to be
reckoned with. The Mexican American Youth Organization and the Brown Berets
were key figures in diversifying high school curricula during the 1960s and
'70s. The Young Lords was an activist group keenly aware of the injustices
facing Puerto Ricans during the '70s that led strong community movements,
particularly in the Bronx and Chicago.
Organizations like these simply do not exist anymore, and if they do, they
have become woefully irrelevant. For substantial change to occur, we have to
think critically about the factors allowing these injustices to continue and
avoid being complacent because the problems and root causes are not
blatantly apparent.
I encourage everybody who reads this to treat the issue as if it were
happening in Delaware or New York, or even at this university. Too often
people forget Puerto Rico has been a part of this country in some capacity
or another for 113 years. As fellow members of a large state institution
facing extreme budget cuts and administrative aloofness, we all have an
entryway into the issue.
Michael Casiano is a junior American studies and English major. He can be
reached at casiano at umdbk dot com.
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http://www.diamondbackonline.com/opinion/the-university-of-puerto-rico-dust-o
ff-that-beret-1.2041779
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