[News] Puerto Rico: Students Making the Pieces of a Different Society
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Sat May 22 23:50:41 EDT 2010
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen>Saskia<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen>
Sassen
Author, "Territory, Authority, Rights"
Posted: May 22, 2010 05:37 PM
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/beyond-protests-students_b_586138.html>Beyond<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/beyond-protests-students_b_586138.html>
Protests: Students Making the Pieces of a Different Society
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/beyond-protests-students_b_586138.html
Students in Iran, in Greece, in Puerto Rico --
all have shown a noticeable endurance to fight on
for weeks against governments which are
threatening their basic rights. Even more
important, in this struggle they are not only
protesting but developing the elements for
alternative politics and social settings. The
Puerto Rican students who have occupied the
campus of the Unviersidad de Puerto Rico for
weeks, surrounded by armed forces, are doing
urban agriculture, collective cooking,
environmentally sustainable practices, art,
music... in brief, they are striving to build the
elements of a different society.
Here below is the account of one of the
professors who has joined the students in the strike.
Politics of a New Generation: The Student Strike
at the University of Puerto Rico
Mareia Quintero-Rivera
They wake up early for a long and unpredictable
day: practice yoga, separate garbage for
recycling, and turn on their own radio station
Radio Huelga "to get in tune with resistance," as
the slogan goes. Ten out of eleven campuses of
the University of Puerto Rico, which encompasses
65,000 students, are on strike. Their fight is
not new: the vindication of public education. But
their modes of struggle speak of untraditional
ways of thinking and making politics.
In the midst of a profound economic crisis, and
facing a government that is enforcing an
aggressive program to shrink the public sector,
students have taken a stand for a social
dialogue. They demand participation and
transparency in the decisions concerning how to
deal with budget cuts. The University of Puerto
Rico confronts a deficit of nearly $170 million
for the next academic year 2010-2011, due to a
reduction on the base of State's incomes from
which the allocation of its funds is determined.
This is a consequence of a special law that
declared a state of fiscal emergency on the
island (Law 7), approved in March 2009.
Moving away from the violent images of the first
morning at the Río Piedras Campus' gates, which
were quickly disseminated and repeated by the
media, the student movement has succeeded in
gaining respect and admiration for their
organized and creative means of leading the
strike. They have been consistent in their call
for a politics of dialogue and mediation. Time
has been one of their allies. Living on Campus
together, for more than three weeks now, has
allowed them a space to put into practice and
strengthen new ways of understanding and undertaking political action.
Organized in committees, they have been emphatic
in using participatory and horizontal processes
of decision-making. They speak through different
voices, and have displayed an extraordinary
command of diverse registers of discourse: from
assuming with success their own defense in the
courts (where the administration tried to
displace the conflict), to developing an
alternative network of communications (blogs,
radio stations, youtube channels), and a wide
range of artistic interventions. This plurality
of actors and actions has overshadowed
traditional political organizations, with their
confrontational styles and rhetoric.
The student movement has shown a deep
understanding of the challenges faced by public
education in our days. But their commitment goes
beyond a restricted catalogue of demands, or the
defense of a fixed ideal. Their struggle arises
as an ongoing search for a different order of
things. As they declared on the first emission of
Radio Huelga after ten days of strike: "We are
not the same. This process is part of our aims.
We are being transformed day by day, and we have
started seeing things in another way. This strike
contains the desire of another world, which is
possible if we construct it in the process.
Making it from within." While developing
strategies to enable a negotiation with the
administration, an active calendar of academic
and cultural activities has been organized with
the support and solidarity of professors,
artists, farmers, and many others. This includes:
daily lectures on a wide variety of topics,
poetry readings, film screenings, traditional
bomba dance workshops, and even a communal garden
with lettuce, tomatoes, plantains, basil, and
other crops which they plan to maintain after the
strike is over. Five major concerts have taken
placed at the campuses of Río Piedras, Humacao,
Cayey, Arecibo, and Mayagüez, with the
participation of some of the most recognized
Puerto Rican musicians of different styles and
generations. They celebrated Mother's Day cooking
together and inviting their families to the University's gateways.
In the academic community, and in the Puerto
Rican society in general, there is a growing
consensus that the crisis cannot be faced blindly
following what the "committees of fiscal
efficiency" decide, as the University's
administration and the Government have tried to
make us believe. The student movement has
vindicated the University as a place for critical
thinking, for an informed debate of ideas, for
the development of alternatives, and for
democratic participation. They have done it with
contagious enthusiasm, firmly but beautifully,
throwing flowers to the policemen who surround campus.
After a massive ratification of the strike by a
student's general assembly held last Thursday,
May 13th, the administration has responded with
the astonishing decision of closing the Río
Piedras Campus until July 31, and calling on the
Police to surround and take control of the
University grounds. The closure of our
institution is a devastating act that compromises
too many substantial elements of academic life.
It means the paralysis of important scientific
research done at the campus laboratories- which
researchers have been able to maintain during the
strike-, the silencing of the University's radio
station, the risk of loosing the semester and
punishing mainly those who are candidates for a
degree, the cancelling of the summer session, the
ceasing of legal, psychological, social work, and
other clinics that provide services to the
community, the uncertainty of hundreds of
professors that work for hire and whose contracts
end this month, the interruption of international
agreements and collaborative efforts, the
suspension of funding proposals for research,
among others. Most important, it conveys the
message that there is no place for a social
dialogue, and that dissidence will be ignored.
Professor at Columbia University. www.saskiasassen.com. Twitter @SaskiaSassen
Author of Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton 2008).
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