Publications about
Paseo Boricua and the PRCC
"Paseo Boricua: Claiming a Puerto Rican space in Chicago"
Dr. Nilda Flores-González
CENTRO JOURNAL, FALL 2001
ABSTRACT: Paseo Boricua, a mile long segment of Division Street in Chicago's Humboldt Park community, came as a response to encroaching gentrification and displacement in the communities of West Town and Humboldt Park. This essay examines the creation of an economic, political and cultural space for Puerto Ricans in Chicago, and its effect on the community.
Download PDF format essay here.
"SPACE OF RESISTANCE: The Puerto Rican Cultural Center and Humboldt Park"
Rachel Rinaldi
CULTURAL CRITIQUE, WINTER 2002
ABSTRACT: West of the lofts and rehabbed townhouses of Chicago’s Wicker Park lies the country’s second largest Puerto Rican community, Humboldt Park. Politics here are fierce, and at the core of several stormy controversies in the neighborhood is the Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC). The twenty-five-year-old institution is a bastion of support for Puerto Rican independence and barrio autonomy. Nationalist ideology permeates the Center’s practices of cultural resistance and community building. Download PDF format essay here.
"THIS SCHOOL IS MY SANCTUARY: The Pedro Albizu Campos Alternative High School"
Dr. Rene Antrop-González
CENTRO JOURNAL, FALL 2003
ABSTRACT: This article describes the history and curriculum of the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Alternative High School and explores the student-based notion called the school as sanctuary concept. Students suggest that a school is a sanctuary when there are caring student-teacher relations, students’ cultural and linguistic realities are valued, when a safe community school connection is present, and when high academic expectations are held for students. Teachers suggest that maintaining a school as a sanctuary is important and yet problematic because of the high turnover rates and personal tolls on personal relationships that they experience. The implications of these experiences will enable scholars, teachers, community activists, and teacher trainers to develop and critique pedagogical projects that attempt to put forth a critical pedagogy that addresses the social realities of urban students of color in the United States. Download PDF format essay here.
RACIALIZING THE PUERTO RICAN DAY PARADE:
RECENT MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF
U.S. PUERTO RICANS IN THE PUBLIC SPACE
Dr. Frances R. Aparicio
University of Illinois at Chicago, APRIL 2001
ABSTRACT: …Yet, after almost half a century of such collective efforts, the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York has been the object of a racializing discourse in the media, particularly on television. In the last three years, this major cultural event has been used as the background for two television shows, Seinfeld and Law and Order. In the next to the last episode of the Seinfeld series, aired in May, 1998, Puerto Ricans are represented as a mob when they respond to Kramer, who accidentally burns the Puerto Rican flag and stomps on it to put out the fire. In June 11, 2000, after the successful completion of the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York, a group of men sexually attacked more than fifty women passerbys in what has been now named the Central Park wildings.
Download PDF format essay here.
