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Miranda you might have a point. What I think though, is that you have a perception of NYC public schools that is not shared by many I knew that spoke to me about being Puerto Rican at the time. Yes, there were Jewish educators in some of these public schools. And some hated teaching a bunch of rural blacks from the South and rural Puerto Ricans. Some where commies and dedicated. The Jewish community is not a monolith. There are a lot of different perspectives.
Do I really have to go and upload photos of my father's junior high school class? He went to school with a lot of Black kids and Jewish teachers. Some of those teachers were good and others extremely discriminatory and knew they could get away with it, because the ghetto dwellers did not have control of the upper echelons of NYC public school administration in those times. Education is about politics as well.
Your parents fled the lumpens. Paulo Freire decided to do something about urban poverty in Latin America and the people without opportunities. Some flee from the issue and others stick it out. That is the way of the world.
Puerto Ricans did not have 'anger' precisely for the same reason there is not a social revolution in Mexican society either. The 'escape valve' has been El Norte Miranda. If Puerto Rico had to deal with all that constant and non-stop poverty and lack of opportunities for the majority for years without some kind of release, then that is when 'revolutionary' conditions happen. Mexico sends the unskilled, uneducated and mainly poor or the discontented to the USA. So did Puerto Rico through all those cheap labor exploitation industries that went to the island looking for some profits. Asi es la cosa.
I don't know how you think you can speak for many? You were in some Norweigian American scene in NYC if I can recall? Maybe if you went to some candela school and could not get away from the lumpens and had to survive in the blackboard jungle for a while----you would have a different perspective. Many Puerto Ricans were sold a bill of goods on what life in NYC would be like for them. If some of them would have known what it would really be like, maybe they could have made a better decision and STAY in Puerto Rico! But then again, they will always have fellow Puerto Ricans who should know better than to be discriminatory and class conscious.....but they are not. They keep on being the way the white people are with a lot of minorities---except it is not about being Puerto Rican. It is about being Puerto Rican from the right socioeconomic class. And that my friend Miranda----is the heart of the problem right there.
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