My Fellow Americans...


Although described by Huffington Post as squashing the question, author and NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten is gracious in his conversation with a C-SPAN listener who called in to suggest "vetting" migrants from Puerto Rico. Gjelten ignores the racist undertones of a call that begins by praising migrants from Norway and then goes on to suggest that migrants from Puerto Rico need extra screening. Rather, Gjelten patiently explains the difference between migration and immigration -- people from Puerto Rico cannot immigrate to the United States because they are already here.

Gjelten takes it easy on the caller for two reasons. One is that his style is naturally inclusive, and he is used to conversations with people of many different ideological persuasions -- so he glides past the "good" immigrant memories in order to get to the teachable moment.. The other reason might be that he knows the breadth of geographic ignorance in the United States, even regarding our own country.

The status of the Commonwealth is unusual, and even as a geographer I sometimes need reminding of the details. It is a semi-colonial place that has partial representation, full citizenship, limited taxation, and almost no autonomy. It is a complex relationship that is explored in cogent detail by actress and comedian Rosie Perez in her film ¡Yo soy Boricua, pa'que tu lo sepas! (available on Netflix DVD and elsewhere).

For more on Puerto Rico, see our 2010 Celebrating the States entry (from our year of marking the entrance of each state or state-like entity into the United States) and our posts about a Puerto Rico-related film and book. For comparison, I also suggest our post about my home town, which also has a semi-colonial relationship to the United States.

Finally, feel free to enjoy some of the photos we took during our first visit to Puerto Rico, in May 2016. We had won a stay in a villa near San Juan at a school auction over a year earlier, and were glad to be able to enjoy several parts of the island as a family. Of course we included a coffee farm! And we did not need our passports.
Photo from my first visit to the island. See the full collection of
Hayes-Boh photos from Puerto Rico 2016 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Balún: Sleep While Dancing

Image
Photo by way of PopGun I had not heard of the Puerto Rico-Brooklyn band until yesterday, when I caught this interview on the NPR program Studio 360 (which gave credit to Latino USA for the original story). The interview centers on the construction of the band's signature "dreambow" rhythms, particularly in the band's new song El Espanta . Angélica Negrón describes what she sees as the therapeutic value of this approach. I found it both enjoyable and instructive to listened to that song a few times before returning to the interview. The video of Balún's La Nueva Ciudad is an example of what the artists mean by dreambow, and is a perfect example of Negrón's expression "sleep while dancing." The lyrics describe a progressively more complicated metaphorical connection between the narrator and the stars, as her head, throat, and legs represent a telescope. The chorus laments a growing distance from a human subject. The longer video "Full Episode&q
Read more

Shanay-timpishka

Image
I started my Sunday with this discussion between journalist Guy Raz and volcanologist Andrés Ruzo, whose childhood conversations at home led him to an amazing discovery in the Amazon Basin of Peru. (Because it contains have of the basin, Brazil is the best-known of the Amazon countries, but several upstream neighbors also have vast tracts of the basin and its forests.) I recommend listening to the audio and then watching Dr. Ruzo's full TED Talk , given in 2014 in Rio de Janeiro. His story begins with curiosity, legend, and history. It provides insight into indigenous knowledge, geothermal science, ecology, and the concept of ecotourism. It even touches on coffee! And from the TED Radio summary, I learn of Dr. Ruzo's coffee connection. In addition to growing up in Peru, part of his childhood was near volcanoes in Nicaragua, which means he is not far removed from coffeelands. Andrés Ruzo has written his story in The Boiling River
Read more

Before the Flood

Image
I really did not want to see Before the Flood , even though I teach several courses that relate directly to it. I pictured myself viewing it like a kid (or me) at a scary movie, watching through little gaps between my fingers as I try to shield my eyes from the screen. I have watched An Inconvenient Truth  and its sequel a few times, and even with Al Gore's dry presentation, I found it nervous-making, at least. Melting Arctic ice. Some parts of the film actually are pretty frightening. So when I heard that a real film-maker had produced something very convincing about climate change, I knew that I had to see it and would want to avoid it, at the same time. Given the dramatic potential of climate change, I feared being sucked into an experience that would manipulate audience emotions with dramatic music and images of peril. Thankfully, this film does none of that, and I managed to watch it three times in a ten-day period, without being scarred. DiCaprio documents his travels as the
Read more