Monday, August 27, 2012
"¡Por favor. El amor y el interés fueron al campo un día y pudo más el interés que el amor que te tenía. Además, no todos los boricuas sonríen todo el tiempo!”
Memorias de un Gay Sesenton: the City College and 'la isla de la ... - Monday, August 27, 2012
lunes, 27 de agosto de 2012
the City College and ‘la isla de la simpatía”
Juan Ramón Jiménez was so impressed by a particular Puerto Rican quality, the smiles, that the Nobel laureate wrote a book, Isla de la Simpatía, dedicated to this marvelous and soothing quality. Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico smile when greeting you; and they do so whenever they encounter each other, unless they are in some kind of struggle, but other than that they smile. Though, most Puerto Ricans in New York have not lost this quality, not all have kept smiling when encoutering each other.
When I started to work at the College, there
were seven Puerto Ricans working at the School of Education. By the end of the
seventies, most of them were either not given tenure, or, for obvious reasons
others decided to leave. It was the seventies and all of these faculty members
integrated the political situation of these unique colonials with the content
and process of educational programs. The very progressive school did not seem to
be very interested in identifying and hiring members of this ethnic group. It is
easier to discuss and study Dewey and Piaget without having to face issues of
colonialism in your backyard, linguistic and political
oppression.
Not until the late eighties and nineties, when
it was convenient for the School to bring Puerto Ricans into the faculty, my own
sense of loneliness and defensiveness began to fade away. Other than two or
three colleagues, the rest was simply a bunch of dishonest characters dressed up
as progressives; pleasant but “hipócritas a la máxima potencia.” Thus, when
Puerto Ricans were brought to work in a place where my accent and educational
ideas were continuously under criticism, it was great once more to be surrounded
by people I thought would understand where I was coming from and support me. And
to some extent they did, until the Puerto Rican “sonrisa” showed me how naïve I
was.
When coming across one of the new employees, I
gave her a big smile. She looked at me and continued walking as if I did not
exist. I shared my bewilderment with another colleague who most probably told
the “seriota” (this is the term PRs use to refer to people who do not smile);
and suddenly, whenever I went into the office of the “seriota” everyone in the
office where the “seriota” worked was smiling at me and sarcastically saying,
“Hello, Gerardo”. I went from cultural
solidario to a payaso.
It was very naïve on my part to think that
simply because someone was a PR I was going to be greeted with courtesy and
cultural understanding. Luckily I had my friends with whom I shared everything
that happened at the very progressive school, and while smiling they answered,
“¡Por favor. El amor y el interés fueron al campo un día y pudo más el interés
que el amor que te tenía. Además, no todos los boricuas sonríen todo el tiempo!”
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