Abstract
In April 2018, somebody painted over a mural in the Julia de Burgos public school’s cafeteria, turning the wall into a blank, off-white slate. The mural’s erasure symbolically encapsulates a combination of forces that are behind the radical transformation of public schools and colleges in Puerto Rico: the colonial relationship the island has with the United States after the latter took possession of it in 1898; Puerto Rico’s unpayable debt, partly triggered and exacerbated precisely by its colonial condition; and the takeover of the island by disaster capitalism in the wake of the debt default and hurricanes Irma and Maria.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 “Rio Grande de Loiza!… Great river. Great flood of tears.
The greatest of all our island’s tears…” reads this portion of the poem, as translated by Jack Agüeros.
2 We discuss this series of events, and their impact on the public educational system, in Brusi and Godreau (Citation2019).
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Rima Brusi
Rima Brusi is an anthropologist, essayist, advocate and educator. Formerly a faculty member at the University of Puerto Rico and an applied anthropologist at The Education Trust, she is currently a Distinguished Lecturer in Anthropology and a Scholar-In-Residence at the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies at CUNY-Lehman College.