Mirelsie Velázquez, Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City, 1940-1977

Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano coined the term “coloniality of power” to describe the way colonial forms of domination live on in postcolonial nations and metropoles. While his theory grew from the Latin American context, this framework also offers a useful lens for analyzing racialized inequality as it manifests in the United States, particularly in an age when the task of decolonizing education has assumed new prominence. While Americans don’t often like to admit it, the US was and is an empire. Mirelsie Velázquez’s Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City, 1940–1977 reminds us of this fact, arguing that the form of schooling that Puerto Rican children recieved on the continent served as a continuation of colonial policies that began in the Caribbean in 1898. That was the year the United States assumed control of the island (more precisely, the archipelago) following the Spanish-American War and began imposing an English-language and Americanization curriculum on residents. Yet “coloniality,” Velázquez asserts, “including the experience of being subjugated to the will of an oppressive power—does not end when immigrants leave the colonized land and arrive in the colonizers’ territory” (p. 2). Those logics and practices often transfer to the belly of the beast, including its classrooms. Velázquez’s important monograph offers a detailed account of these dynamics and “the centrality of schools and schooling in the life of the [Puerto Rican] diaspora” (p. 4), as a source of both oppression and liberation. Although Puerto Ricans, unlike other immigrants, arrived in the Windy City with US citizenship, that status did “not always offer the benefits of agency, access to resources, or a better way of life” (p. 5). To some city officials they were still seen as deportable and “perpetual foreigners.” As Velázquez argues, Puerto Ricans consequently turned to educational institutions to build their community, claim space, and assert their rights in a place where their racial, linguistic, and colonial identities marked them as second-class citizens, similar to and yet distinct from their Black and Mexican American neighbors. Puerto Rican Chicago follows a chronological path, beginning with the early years of migration in the 1940s and ending in 1977, when a confrontation with the police erupted at the Puerto Rican Day Parade. The introduction provides a helpful overview