By Mariely Rivera-Hernández
According to a report by UNESCO (2020), the social landscape with regards to education worldwide poses a challenge for cultural expressions in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially after the pandemic. On the one hand, school closures due to COVID-19 has led to new analyses on online education and its effects on academic achievement. On the other, schools have been closing down since before the pandemic as a result of political decisions made in response to the 2008 economic recession. Every country has its own set of sociopolitical events, and, in Puerto Rico, community education, as well as school and higher education, have been based on colonial practices. Because of this, education has become a reference point by which to highlight sociocultural modalities that have emerged in reply to the school closures happening on the island. The Othering & Belonging Institute and the Centro para la Reconstrucción del Hábitat (2020) found that approximately half of Puerto Rican public schools have closed since 2007. In a period of 11 years, a record number of 673 educational institutions have been shuttered, accounting for 44% of all schools. Additionally, in an article published in Primera Hora, Bauzá (2024) points out that, according to the Puerto Rican Demographic Registry, the birth rate on the island is dwindling. At the end of 2023, a total of 17,772 births were reported, which is 1,391 less births than in 2022 and accounts for a 7.3% decline. Public information shows that the government plans to close more schools.
However, what happens inside these closed public schools? After hurricane Maria ravaged the island in 2017, Puerto Rican community collectives have emerged stronger than ever. Several groups have been working and implementing community strategies to rescue public spaces abandoned by new administrations, designing and setting in motion new regional cultural interactions that protect the wellbeing of the community.
Rescued Public Spaces
Our desire to get to know some of these spaces, an activity of musical recreation through social media, focused on endeavors from self-managed communities—a system of organization by which a collective or enterprise participates in the decision-making process—led us to various cultural events centered on the musical-dancing genres of bomba and plena. Rivera and Vélez Peña (2019) state that these musical genres are the product of African and Iberian migrations and of intercultural and inter-Caribbean interactions at a time in which slavery prevailed and shackled the lives of Black people, cimarrones, and mulatos. The genres, however, emerged in different time periods. While bomba originated in the sixteenth century as a pan-American genre, plena arose in the twentieth century out of the working class. Online interactions helped us discover the spaces in which these musical-dancing events take place, as well as other initiatives intended for community learning, media alphabetization, environmental strategies, health and personal care, the preservation of customs and traditions, food security, agroecology, and education on local gastronomy. We observed two rescued schools. Thanks to community efforts, these are now public spaces that offer recreation activities, services, and support to the community. We conducted an ethnographic and netnographic observation of bomba and plena events organized in rescued schools on the north and south sides of the island. The first space was the Taller Comunidad La Goyco—originally known as the Pedro G. Goyco Elementary School, which closed in 2015—located in Calle Loíza at the heart of the Machuchal neighborhood in Santurce, Puerto Rico. For the second school, we traveled to the south of the island to José de Choudens Middle School, which ceased operations in 2017. Both institutions closed before hurricane Maria, meaning that their closures were not due to emergencies produced by natural or sanitary disasters. The shutting down of these learning institutions responds to political orders which have lacked a participative and democratic dialogue with the surrounding communities. However, faced with this scenario, communities have taken on the responsibility of rehabilitating and occupying the spaces. Today, they are used for recreational purposes and offer services that bring help and support to the community. Taller Comunidad La Goyco is a non-profit organization which has adapted its space to accommodate diverse projects, for example, of plastics arts, handicrafts, the creation of products from reusable materials, a community garden, outdoor showings of films and documentaries, jazz concerts, a community library, and bomba and plena classes. In this particular case, plena music is integral to the organization since it houses La Casa de la Plena Tito Matos. This space for plena has a vibrant agenda each month filled with classes, percussion events, concerts, and community tours emblematic of a cultural and communicational practice known as plenazos callejeros. Meanwhile, José de Choudens Middle School is home to Taller Bomba Conciencia, which offers varied bomba and percussion classes and organizes monthly plays and community gatherings centered on bomba. In both occasions, the presence of young people was significant. These individuals play a key role—children and young people account for 40% of the participating audience—and preserve cultural activity for and within the community through their leadership, participation, and motivation. We observed that children and young individuals mingle with older people, establishing a mediation of important communication practices in order to achieve their community goals. For these purposes, musical-dancing activities are the most popular for those who visit these spaces and foster a collaborative environment. In the case of Taller Comunidad La Goyco, the organization receives private donations to help manage the enterprise as well as financial support for cultural projects based on the pandemic experience. In Taller Bomba Conciencia, self-managed actions manifest themselves through the mobilization of food resources, the preparation of meals, and the sale of hand-crafted items, allowing for a local socioeconomical mobilization.
Mediatization and Self-Managed Endeavors
Mass media are essential in order to consolidate endeavors organized and managed by communities. Aiming to demonstrate the connection between in-person and virtual activities, we participated in two in-person events and observed that the musical-dancing encounters were broadcasted on social media and later shared on digital platforms. Both events were community gatherings in which the leaders present acted as prosumers—those who produce as well as consume—while online users, most hailing from the Puerto Rican diaspora, interacted with the content by commenting. Some of their messages stated, “Thanks for streaming,” “We are also dancing here,” and “May our cultural traditions live.” In both instances, young people and older adults had connectivity through their mobile devices. A collaboration between social collectives has taken root, stemming from in-person activities with virtual support. These collaborations provide an opportunity by which to observe a process of mediatization. Hjarvard (2016) associates mediatization with the role that mass media play in the transformation of culture and society, although they also explain that the concept goes hand in hand with mediation due to the communication practices.
The relationship between mediation and mediatization is mutual since the communicational integration of mobile devices produced images, home videos, texts, voice messages, and replies to comments. Mediatization incorporates a structural change in sociocultural contexts, just as is the case we witnessed regarding the access and use of mobile devices. We argue that it is complementary and does not substitute the in-person event in accordance with conversations with the audience. However, it is an accumulative change that requires attention to sustain the heart of rescued spaces and extend mediatic alphabetization among individuals.
References
Bauzá, N., 2024. Baja histórica en la natalidad: siguen naciendo menos puertorriqueños en la Isla. Primera Hora [online]. Accessed 30 Jul. 2024. Available on: https://www.primerahora.com/noticias/gobierno-politica/notas/baja-historica-en-la-natalidad-siguen-naciendo-menos-puertorriquenos-en-la-isla/.
Global Education Monitoring Report Team, 2020. Inclusion and Education: All Means All.
Global Education Monitoring Report [online]. UNESCO. Accessed 30 Jul. 2024. IBSN 978-92-3-300143-5. Available on: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000373718.
Gorenflo, N., 2018. Gobierno comunitario (o Gobierno de los comunes, gestión comunitaria o colaborativa) como medio y como fin. Comunes: Economías de la Colaboración [online], pp. 31-34. Available on: https://bajoradar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Comunes-Economi%CC%81as-de-la-colabroacio%CC%81n-Argentina-2018.pdf.
Hjarvard, S., 2016. Mediatización: La lógica mediática de las dinámicas cambiantes de la interacción social. La trama de la comunicación [online], vol. 20, no. 1. Accessed 30 Jul. 2024. ISSN 1668-5628. Available on: https://www.scielo.org.ar/scielo.php?script=sci_abstract&pid=S1668-56282016000100013&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng.
Othering & Belonging Institute and Centro para la Reconstrucción del Hábitat, 2020. Puerto Rico’s Public School Closures: Community Effects and Future Paths [online]. Available on: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/puerto_ricos_public_school_closures.pdf
Rivera, P.L. and Vélez Peña, J.J., 2019. Bomba y plena, música afropuertorriqueña y rebeldía social y estética. Forum for Inter-American Research [online], vol. 12.2. Available on: https://interamerica.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/riveravelez.pdf.
The author is currently finishing her doctoral thesis on the political economy of communications, cultural consumption, mediatization, and virtual communities.
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