Friends:
I encourage everyone to read this excellent and clarifying piece by Dr. Julian Vasquez-Heilig. It is essential reading in this moment. He reminds us that when scholars write about colonialism—including the ongoing colonial condition of Puerto Rico—they are not speaking metaphorically. Colonialism is not rhetorical flourish. It is a material history of conquest, land dispossession, racial hierarchy, economic extraction, political subordination, and epistemic control. It structures governance, shapes citizenship, and defines whose knowledge is legitimized and whose is subordinated.
When Mexican American and Latina/o Studies scholars analyze colonialism in Texas, the Southwest, or Puerto Rico, they are not engaging in abstraction. They are naming concrete histories of annexation, treaty violations, segregation, linguistic suppression, and policy regimes that continue to shape lived experience. To dismiss or sideline that scholarship is not an academic disagreement—it is a refusal to confront the structural foundations of the present.
Colonialism is not a metaphor. It is a living architecture of power, and scholarship that names it performs a public service that universities should defend—not suppress. Unless, of course, the university itself is operating within the very colonial logic Dr. Vasquez-Heilig describes: disciplining knowledge, privileging Eurocentric canons, and policing which histories are allowed institutional authority. At that point, the silencing—as we are evidencing right now with respect to our Ethnic Studies Departments at UT Austin—is no longer ironic. It is confirmation.
-Angela Valenzuela
by Julian Vasquez-Heilig | December 2, 2025
Most people in the continental United States do not understand why coloniality remains an urgent issue in Puerto Rico. They recognize the island through images of beaches and Bad Bunny, but they rarely understand its political reality. What is colonially? Puerto Rico remains an unincorporated territory of the United States, a status created by early twentieth century Supreme Court decisions. These decisions placed Puerto Rico in a category that allowed federal control without granting full rights to the people who live there.
People born in Puerto Rico are United States citizens, yet they cannot vote for the president unless they leave the island. They also have no voting representation in Congress, although Congress has unilateral power over Puerto Rico’s laws, economy, and governance. Federal agencies and congressional bodies can impose decisions that reshape every public institution on the island. This includes education, where policy decisions frequently arrive without local electoral accountability.
This political structure reveals why coloniality is not a metaphor in Puerto Rico. It defines the island’s daily reality. The absence of democratic representation means that Puerto Rican communities do not have full control over their island. Decisions are often dictated rather than deliberated, which purposefully places enormous strain on its residents. These realities formed the foundation of Patricia Virella’s 2025 Mistifer Lecture and shaped the urgency of her message.
Opening the Conversation
The 2025 Mistifer Lecture, delivered in San Juan by Dr. Patricia Virella of Montclair State University, was one of the most historically grounded and future oriented presentations I have heard in many years. The lecture insisted that education cannot be understood apart from the political structures that control it. Virella opened by reminding the audience that schools are not isolated from systems of power. They reflect the ideologies and histories that surround them.
She asked a set of questions that framed the emotional and intellectual trajectory of her talk. She asked the audience what they would have done if they lived during historical periods of explicit colonial brutality. She asked whether they would have resisted or remained silent. Virella drew the audience in by refusing to allow distance between past and present. She invited everyone to consider courage not as an abstract concept but as something that reveals itself through daily decisions. The questions created a moral framework that guided the rest of the lecture. They reminded the audience that historical analysis is incomplete without present day context.
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| Julian Vasquez Heilig and Patricia Virella after her lecture Puerto Rico as Case and Mirror |
Virella emphasized that Puerto Rico is both a case study and a mirror. She explained that Puerto Rico’s educational history is inseparable from the broader history of colonial administration in the United States. The island’s schools were used to impose cultural, linguistic, and political assimilation beginning in the early twentieth century. These practices were not accidental or misguided. They were intentional efforts to restructure identity and align communities with external American authority.
She challenged the audience to see Puerto Rico not as an exception but as a site where the true nature of American governance becomes visible. The island reveals how the United States has historically exercised power over populations without granting full democratic rights. This reality creates a mirror that reflects patterns still present in the mainland. It forces educators to confront the possibility that colonial logic appears everywhere in the democratic project.
Her framing made the room eerily quiet because it revealed the stakes of education. She explained that schools do not merely reproduce knowledge. They reproduce systems of power unless leaders make intentional choices to disrupt that cycle. Puerto Rico became a lens for understanding how power shapes schooling in ways that are both explicit and subtle.
Education as Freedom Work
Virella opened her slides with Monique Morris’s declaration that “Education is freedom work.” She explained that this statement carries significant weight in Puerto Rico because public schooling has long been used to shape political identity. She reminded the audience that when schooling is used to impose identity, it becomes an instrument of control rather than liberation. That tension has defined Puerto Rican education for more than one hundred years.
She displayed a 1902 Puerto Rico Herald headline that described the U.S. Commissioner of Education as the “absolute king” of the island’s schools. The article listed practices designed to break cultural continuity, including military style marching and forced recitation of patriotic songs. The policy also encouraged teachers to degrade the Spanish language in order to elevate English. These practices were not hidden or subtle. They were publicly declared objectives of the colonial administration.
The room grew tense as Virella explained that these policies were part of a larger strategy to reshape Puerto Rican identity through schooling. The audience confronted evidence that coloniality within education has always been deliberate in the United States. Virella’s point became unmistakably clear. Education may be freedom work, but only when communities have authority over their own stories.
Coloniality as a Living Structure
Virella repeated that coloniality is not an artifact. It is a living structure that continues to shape schools today. She described coloniality as a system of governance that creates dependence on external authorities while undermining local capacity. She showed how this structure appears in curriculum mandates, school closures, teacher evaluation systems, and policy reforms imposed from outside of communities. These patterns reveal how control operates through institutions rather than only through overt political statements.
She explained that contemporary reforms in Puerto Rico must be understood within this historical context. Policies framed as modernization often reproduce long standing beliefs about Puerto Rican incapacity. These policies assume that communities cannot govern themselves and therefore require external intervention. Virella made clear that such assumptions are rooted in colonial logic that treats Puerto Ricans as subjects rather than citizens.
