Puerto Rico and St. Croix Community Collaborations

by Eva de Lourdes Edward

Cualidad chula, a quality that allows a subject to be approached from multiple perspectives, best describes the research partnership of University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus Communications Professor Mirerza González Vélez and English Professor Nadjah Ríos Villarini. “Sharing a research experience also generates a capacity to support our professional growth within our respective fields of interest. This cualidad chula makes us enjoy our work together, and also makes us learn from one another about the research experience,” says González-Vélez. The two researchers commenced a multidisciplinary investigation of the community of Puerto Ricans and those of Puerto Rican descent living in St. Croix (Puerto-Crucians) during a 2005 St. Croix field research course taught by a UPR-RP linguistics professor. Their preliminary research—searching archives and interviewing community members for the course—of the migration and linguistic history of this community intrigued them so much that they envisioned a long-term research project that would link intercultural communication, social imagination, and multimedia presentations with linguistics and bilingual education.

“I became interested in learning how this diasporic community was able to keep after two, three, four generations some sort of connection with Spanish but also with the other languages that are spoken in the islands—English and Crucian. Nadjah became interested in how issues of language were impacting the learning of Puerto Rican students who are part of the public education system,” González Vélez says.

The researchers began the investigation in earnest in 2006 with surveys and more interviews after the Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research (DEGI) funded them to develop a profile of the Puerto-Crucian community. They also were granted funding from the Puerto Rico Diaspora Research Fund of El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College to collect the oral histories of Puerto-Crucian bilingual education teachers.
González Vélez and Ríos Villarini discovered what they call “a discourse of lackness” in their analysis of the Puerto-Crucian bilingual education teachers’ projections. “They perceive their students as lacking, specifically the Puerto Rican students. They will say there is a difference between Puerto Rican students and Dominican students. For example, they say that Dominican students are more willing and open to learning things, whereas Puerto Rican students are reckless and lazy. And many teachers will say that the real problem with Puerto Rican students is that they are special education students. We felt that we needed to delve more deeply into this formation of attitudes and the discourse of lackness.”

The researchers also found that the Puerto-Crucian bilingual teachers held double standards for linguistic competence. For example, while the teachers do not allow students to do so, they themselves routinely use code switching, a bilingual linguistic system of switching back and forth from one language to another.

Because González Vélez and Ríos Villarini practice participatory action research methodology, they are using their research findings to improve conditions for the community under study. For example, one of their goals is to enhance St. Croix bilingual teachers’ performance in the classroom and their Puerto-Crucian students’ performance on standardized examinations. The researchers apply the concept of Funds of Knowledge, which values the community’s ideas, experiences, memories, rituals and practices because they facilitate an individual’s ability to function within that community. “The theory of Funds of Knowledge departs from the idea that there is a disconnection between the school discourse and community practices. By integrating these daily practices in the school curriculum, education can be more relevant. In other words, the model advocates a participatory and democratic approach to learning,” says Ríos Villarini. In order to implement their ideas, the researchers aim to develop the trust and support of St. Croix education officials. They are doing this via several avenues. For example, they created a CD-ROM and guidebook for public education teachers to teach a thematic unit of migration in the Caribbean and how it is tied to communication competence. La Fundación Puertorriqueña de la Humanidades sponsored them to present the unit, based on their DEGI-funded research, to about 80 local Puerto Rican public school teachers at a workshop held at UPR-RP in October. The coordinator of the English Language Acquisition Program of St. Croix also attended the workshop.

Another way they are creating trust and ties is via involvement in St. Croix community activities. Although the use of capias, keepsakes that are pinned to the lapel like a brooch, has generally been abandoned and forgotten in Puerto Rico, the tradition has been preserved in the Puerto Rican diasporic community living in St. Croix. The researchers volunteered to make the capias for the Puerto Rico-USVI Friendship Week as part of the October 2008 Hispanic Heritage month celebrations. They also solicited donations for Spanish books from local publishers and journals produced by UPR-RP to share with St. Croix teachers and schools.

To disseminate their findings and share their teaching materials, González Vélez and Ríos Villarini created a bilingual Web site: http://www.thediasporaproject.org/project/index.php. A blog will help them stay in contact with teachers. They also have a full agenda of continuing Puerto-Crucian research.