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The ProgressivePuerto Rico Profile Interview: Juan Gonzalezby David BarsamianDavid Barsamian is the director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado.July 1, 2000 Juan Gonzalez is an award-winning columnist with the New York Daily News. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico , he grew up in a New York City housing project and studied at Columbia University, where he got involved in the 1968 student strike. "When I was studying at Columbia," he told me, "one of the great halls was named after one of the big sugar barons who owned South Puerto Rico Sugar Company." A founding member of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican activist group, Gonzalez later served as president of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights. Along with his daily newspaper column, he writes regularly for the magazine In These Times. And for the past four years, he has been a twice-weekly co-host on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now. "Juan sees the world through the lens of an insider and outsider," says Amy Goodman, the daily host of the program. "He brings a depth of national and international experience to the program." Gonzalez is the author of Roll Down Your Window: Stories from a Forgotten America (Verso, 1995) and Harvest of Empire. A History of Latinos in America (Viking, 2000). In Harvest of Empire, I was particularly struck by a passage about his public school experience in New York. "Most of us became products of a sink-or-swim public school philosophy," he wrote, "immersed in English-language instruction from our first day in class and actively discouraged from retaining our native tongue. `Your name isn't Juan,' the young teacher told me in first grade at PS. 87 in East Harlem. `In this country it's John. Shall I call you John?' Confused and afraid, but sensing this as some fateful decision, I timidly said no. But most children could not summon the courage, so school officials routinely anglicized their names. Though I had spoken only Spanish before I entered kindergarten, the teachers were amazed at how quickly I mastered English. From then on, each time a new child from Puerto Rico was placed in any of my classes, the teachers would sit him beside me so I could interpret the lessons. Bewildered, terrified, and ashamed, the new kids grappled with my clumsy attempts to decipher the teacher's strange words. Inevitably, when the school year ended, they were forced to repeat the grade, sometimes more than once, all because they hadn't mastered English. Even now, forty years later, the faces of those children are still fresh in my mind. They make today's debates on bilingual education so much more poignant, and the current push toward total English immersion so much more frightening." Gonzalez was named one of the nation's 100 most influential Hispanics by Hispanic Business and has received a lifetime achievement award from the Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences. I caught up with him in Boulder on a sunny Friday morning during his national book tour for Harvest of Empire. He was at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver the previous night, and as soon as we finished, he was off to Breckenridge in the high Rockies for yet another event. Q: Tell me more about the faces of those schoolchildren that are still fresh in your mind. Juan Gonzalez: I never forget the fear that these children had being in a country where they didn't understand anything that was going on in school, and yet somehow they were grappling to learn subject matter. I believe that the whole question of the learning of a new language depends to a great degree on how young you are when you begin the process. Since I was a Spanish speaker when I entered kindergarten, I really began to learn English from the very beginning and was able to dominate the language fairly rapidly. You take children who come in when they've already spent four years in school in the Dominican Republic or Venezuela-or worse, when they come in as teenagers-at that point the mastery of another language becomes a far more difficult and psychologically taxing process. You're not only learning to speak another language; you're learning to think one, too. Q: I grew up on East 87th Street in New York, not too many blocks from your old neighborhood. My parents were immigrants from Armenia. When my mother used to speak to me in Armenian in the street in front of my friends, the American kids, I wanted to crawl into the nearest sewer, feeling this enormous shame. Gonzalez: That is the classic immigrant experience that is repeated over and over in the U.S. My wife, who comes from the Dominican Republic, is a Spanish-language teacher in a New York high school. She finds the kids who most resist learning Spanish are the Latinos. To them, Spanish is a negative-secondclass. It pains her. She says she has to do much more counseling of the Latino children just to get them interested in being able to study Spanish as a foreign language. But Spanish is not a foreign language in the U.S. The annexation of the Mexicans to the Southwest and the Puerto Ricans meant that those groups did not come to the U.S. The U.S. came to them and made them citizens, speaking their own language in their original territories. Q. What do you think of bilingual education? Gonzalez: I think bilingual transitional education is a good idea. I don't think it's the responsibility of the public schools to maintain another language or culture, but I do think it is their responsibility to provide enough transitional education so that people don't fall back in other subjects. The important thing is that in those parts of the U.S. like South Texas or California or New York where you have huge Latino populations everybody should learn Spanish-the English population as well as the Spanish-speaking population-and break out of monolingual ghettoes. Then you will have more cultural understanding. Q. There are thirty million Latinos in the U.S., a very fast-growing population. What are the political implications of that? Gonzalez: In another fifty years, one out of every four people in the country will be Latino. By 2100, it could be half the population. If something is not done to raise the economic level of Latin America, everyone is going to keep coming. The implication is that the entire social and cultural fabric of the U.S. is going to go through a transformation. So you have a choice. Either you raise the economic level of Latin America so that more people will want to stay in their own country, or you accept the fact that the U.S. itself, like the old Roman Empire, will be changed from within by the very people it conquered. Q. What are you trying to do in Harvest of Empire? Gonzalez: I talk about the whole process of Americanization or lack of Americanization by Latinos, and what has happened psychologically as well as socially on this assimilation road. Q: You write, "In this country, meanwhile, few children in the public schools, including Puerto Rican children, are taught anything about Puerto Rico except for its geographical location and the fact that it 'belongs' to the U.S." Gonzalez: I am perpetually amazed at the lack of basic knowledge that most Americans have about Puerto Rico . Even to the point of whether Puerto Ricans are foreigners or Americans. I was just asked recently by someone when I was doing a reading in Texas whether Puerto Ricans had to have passports to enter the U.S. Puerto Ricans, without asking for it, were all made American citizens by a declaration of Congress in 1917, the Jones Act. In fact, the House of Delegates of Puerto Rico , the only elected Puerto Rican representatives at the time, unanimously rejected the citizenship and told Congress they didn't want it. Yet Congress imposed it anyway. Since that time, Puerto Ricans travel back and forth without a passport, as if moving from one state of the Union to another. Q: You say Puerto Ricans "are in a different position from Italians or Swedes or Poles. Our homeland is invaded and permanently occupied, its patriots persecuted and jailed by the very country to which we migrated." Gonzalez: There was a recent Congressional hearing over Puerto Rico . Louis Freeh, the head of the FBI, apologized to Congressman Uos6] Serrano, Democrat of New York, for the role the Bureau played in its notorious COINTELPRO activities, which repressed the independence movement by creating divisions and disruptions. Q: Technically speaking, the island is a common wealth. What does that mean? Gonzalez: A commonwealth is a fancy word that doesn't have anything like the implications of the British Commonwealth. The various countries that were formerly colonies of Britain and are part of the British Commonwealth have their own separate national sovereignty, their own representation in international bodies, and their own independent existence. Puerto Rico 's commonwealth is different. Puerto Ricans are able to vote for local officials to run their local government, but the local government is subservient to, and must abide by, the laws that are passed by Congress. Whenever Congress wants to change a Puerto Rican law, it has the right to do so. Whenever Congress wants to ignore a Puerto Rican law, it has the right to do so. There's currently a big battle because the Puerto Rican constitution abolished the death penalty. Federal law has reinstituted the death penalty. That directly conflicts with the Puerto Rico constitution. In all of those conflict areas, federal law supersedes Puerto Rican law That's one way that Puerto Rico remains under the control of Congress. The citizenship of Puerto Ricans is not a citizenship of birth; it is a citizenship of law Congress has granted citizenship to Puerto Ricans, and if Congress decides in the future that everyone born in Puerto Rico from 2001 on is not a U.S. citizen, they can do that. I was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico . I'm a U.S. citizen but I could never be elected President, and neither could anyone else born in Puerto Rico , because the Constitution requires that you must have been born in the U.S. to be President. On the one hand, there is a citizenship. On the other hand, it is a second-class citizenship. Puerto Ricans do not vote for President. They don't elect any voting members to the Senate or the House. Q: I'm interested that you cite Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, which talks about the internalizing of colonial ideas. Gonzalez: I think the Puerto Rican experience is the one which is closest to what Fanon was talking about. This extends not only to language, but to all the things that language is a transmission belt for: the historical memories of a people, and their sense of themselves. Fanon wrote, "Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. . . . The effect consciously sought by colonialism [is] to drive into the natives' heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality." This sense of the psychological effect of colonialism-what many years ago when I was in the Young Lords we used to call the"colonial mentality"exists among Puerto Ricans. Many Puerto Ricans, for instance, throughout the 1950s and 1960s would say, if Puerto Rico were to be an independent country, it would starve. It would not be able to survive without the U.S. Where did this concept come from? It came from the U.S., from those who administered the Puerto Rican colony throughout the early 1900s. For the first fifty years of the century Puerto Ricans did not even have their own governors. There were American governors appointed by the President that administered the colony. All the major figures of the Puerto Rican cabinet were Americans. It was not until 1948 that Puerto Ricans elected their own governor, even though he was still limited in power. But there was always this sense that Puerto Rico was powerless to function as a sovereign or independent country. It didn't have the resources or the capacity to be able to function. Surprisingly, there must be at least a dozen countries in the Caribbean that are far smaller than Puerto Rico and with less population and fewer resources that have managed quite well to survive as independent countries. But the Puerto Rican doesn't believe, for the most part, that the island could function as an independent nation. Q: A lot of the resistance in Puerto Rico since the 1898 U.S. takeover has manifested itself in music and literature. Why is that? Gonzalez: Puerto Rico was a colony of Spain for 400 years. Ever since 1898 it has been a colony of the U.S. So for 500 years Puerto Rican society has been ruled or administered by a foreign nation. That doesn't mean that a Puerto Rican nation doesn't exist. It just has never gotten its own political sovereignty. As a result, what has happened is that culture and language have become the vehicles by which Puerto Ricans express their nationality. The ability of Puerto Ricans to maintain a separate cultural identity-- whether in music, poetry, theater, or art-has been an important part of national consciousness. It's almost as if people compensated in the cultural arena for what they lacked in the political arena. Today, more than one-third of all Puerto Ricans live outside of Puerto Rico , within the U.S. Those Puerto Ricans who moved to the U.S. or who were raised here have a dual identity as both part of the American experience as well as part of the Puerto Rican experience. So you have a whole host of writers, poets, musicians who have developed their art within the U.S. but still see Puerto Rico as the fountainhead of their identity. Q: What is your sense of the independence movement on the island today? And won't Congress be reluctant to integrate a large Spanish-speaking community into the U.S. if Puerto Rico becomes a state? Gonzalez: I happen to be of the belief that Puerto Rico will never become a state of the U.S. Q: Why not? Gonzalez: Because it is a separate nation. Puerto Ricans and Americans know that. Virtually every state that was admitted into the Union had at that time either a majority white settler population or a large plurality white settler population. Puerto Rico has been a territory of the U.S. for 100 years. After 100 years, the number of white Americans living in Puerto Rico doesn't even pass 3 or 4 percent. Because it is an island, because it is not a contiguous territory, and because unlike Hawaii it has a huge population, the island has basically stayed as a Spanish-speaking Latin American population. The admission of Puerto Rico into the U.S. would change the character of the American nation more dramatically than has ever happened in the past. All the Republicans in Congress understand that, and even many of the Democrats. That's why they're saying, before you become a state you've got to agree that the official language will be English. Puerto Ricans are saying, no, we don't want to give up our language. We would like to have co-equal official languages. Another reason I don't think Puerto Rico will become a state is it's so big. Its admission into the Union would instantly raise to a higher point of importance the question of the District of Columbia. African Americans will say, if you're going to admit Puerto Rico as a state, why leave the District of Columbia out? The last things the Republicans want are two states coming in that would have such huge, poor, non-white, and probably Democratic populations. Puerto Rico right now has a greater population than twenty-four states in the Union. Still, as a longtime supporter of independence, I have to recognize certain realities. The bulk of the people in Puerto Rico have been voting in these beauty contest referenda either for statehood or for commonwealth. Independence continues to remain a choice of 4 to 5 percent of the voting public. Q: Whats the answer then? Gonzalez: Acquiring a colony is a lot easier than divesting yourself of it, just as getting married is a lot easier than getting divorced. In the divorce process that must occur between the U.S. and Puerto Rico , both sides must get something. I think that the real solution to the dilemma of the Puerto Rico -U.S. relationship is something that's called free association, which is recognized by the U.N. as a form of decolonization. The U.N. recognizes three forms of decolonization: annexation into the colonial territories, which is statehood ; independence; and free association. Free association is a status where the colonial nation is recognized as a sovereign state and is able to exercise international relations, negotiate its own trade treaties, have a seat in the U.N., and be recognized as a separate nation. However, it chooses to be in a voluntary association with its former colonial master, sometimes having dual citizenship, but maintaining an ongoing relationship. So I think that eventually this will be the solution that will meet the needs of all sides. Puerto Rico will be able to keep its language and its culture, have a relationship with the U.S., continue to have the travel back and forth, but not have the animosity that has existed because of its second-class citizenship. In Congress, they argue that's not in the Constitution. That's what amendments are for. There are twenty-seven amendments to the Constitution. And if it requires an amendment to the Constitution to finally give Puerto Rico a status both Americans and Puerto Ricans can live with, why not do it?
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