Tuesday, July 07, 2009

the diaspora strikes back...


A couple of weeks ago I wrote a critical entry concerning the Puerto Rican Day Parade to which I received a substantial amount of praise and criticism that has both reinforced and reconsider my original opinion. (The original entry can be found here).

Most definitely, I appreciate the feedback about the Puerto Rican condition. While I may have made some overarching generalizations the fact remains that Puerto Ricans in NYC and many other parts of the country have the lowest educational achievement levels in high school and college. Many Puerto Ricans I know point to the benefits of U.S. domination, but with a GDP per year about 1/3 of Mississippi and the inability as a whole for us to make substantial socioeconomic and political progress I always wondered why there has never been, since 1493, a determined and coherent drive for political autonomy. If you think that Michael Jackson had an inferiority complex than imagine what 500 years of colonialism does to a psyche of a people collectively (re: Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon)?

Thats all am saying. It is true some of us have made strides and there is much to be proud of but parades do not translate into effective power that can be channelled to get us out of our condition and into actually building up the social capital that matters in sociopolitical terms. I am trying to educate one canvas at a time...

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