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In the 1960s, when students everywhere were coming alive
politically, and when the Latin American student activist in
particular became as archetypal of radicalism as the Latin American
dictator was of repression, Puerto Rican students remained
strangely silent. With the exception of FUPI, a radical student
group with only a small following, student political behavior
conformed to that of Puerto Rican society in general-center to
conservative. Historically, Puerto Rico has been economically and
politically dominated first by Spain and then by the United States.
But unlike other colonial dependencies in Latin America, Puerto
Rico has never rebelled. Puerto Rican politics centers on the
status issue-independence, statehood, or association for the
island. But no legendary victories, no heroic defeats offer a
battle cry for nationalists, leftists, and independistas.
Overwhelming foreign influence in the Church, the schools, the
economy, and eventually the mass media deprived the island of any
strong indigenous institutions that might foster nationalism.
Militancy lies outside the mainstream of Puerto Rican tradition.
Against this historical and cultural backdrop, Arthur Liebman
closely examines the social background and political activity of
students at the Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto
Rico. Based on personal interviews with students, faculty, and
administrators, as well as on a survey of the student body, his
study reveals the strength of political inheritance among
university students in Puerto Rico. The student left is small and
weak largely because the left of the parents' generation is small
and weak. To date, Puerto Rican students have been the children of
their parents and of their society. Within a university that
emphasizes practicality, the nonmilitant majority of the students
study education, business, engineering, and medicine, being trained
to participate in and to reap the rewards of the status quo.
Student leftists, in the minority, generally study history,
economics, sociology, and law-fields that open wider perspectives
on their society and its problems and offer no immediate guarantee
of its benefits. Brighter, less religious, and more dissatisfied
with their role as a student, the student leftists stand apart from
their cohort at the University of Puerto Rico. Like their adult
counterparts, they are an anomaly in an acquisitive, relatively
conservative society.
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