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ValeriaFloresFirstEssay 5 - 22 May 2021 - Main.EbenMoglen
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< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | Why not statehood? | | | But the reality, one that I have tried to avoid and is finally time to recognized, is that becoming a U.S. state would benefit and decolonize Puerto Rico, even if not in the way I am looking for. It will not erase the past, but Puerto Ricans struggle with real issues that will be solved by statehood, whereas they could be exacerbated if we were to become independent. The change I am looking for does not necessarily rest on Puerto Rico’s status, but on a social change that is much deeper than that. | |
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History is not only a discipline about the past. The social scientist component of the discipline tends to see it foremost in that way, but the humanist component knows that history is also about our relationship with the past. | | | | |
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> | The thoughts you are having in these drafts show the importance of that relationship. How we understand our history can define not only what we understand about our present, but what we want for our future. This is the source of the intense argument about US history at the moment. No one is actually arguing about what happened in the American past, or the Texas past even. They are arguing about whether it's allowed to teach what this history means to us now, because our relationship to our past will condition what we want for our future. You are asking the same question in another permutation of the history of the US empire. How the Puerto Rican people should structure their relationship to the US depends not only on "the history," but also on their relationship to it. Not only what has happened, but how they conceive justice about what has happened: what's about memory, what's about memorialization, what's about identity recognition, what's about getting paid back from the future wealth of the US for what was done. | | | | |
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> | Whether statehood is a betrayal, or the best route to the justice you want for a past that cannot be changed but can only be better understood, depends. Not on what the history was, but on what it means now. That is what you and your generation of Puerto Rican people, no matter where they live, are now in charge of figuring out. | | |
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