HOMAGE TO MESSRS. ALBIZU CAMPOS AND SELLES SOLA
SPEECH BY ALBIZU CAMPOS When Mr. Albizu Campos was to take the floor, the audience standing paid him a thunderous ovation that lasted for several minutes. “In answering the letter-invitation addressed to me by the President of the Cultural Society, I put in my words what I understood to be the meaning of this act. I interpret this act, and I repeat here those words, as an oath that patriots demand of each other. It seems incredible that patriots should ever have to demand of each other the fulfillment of an oath, but there are moments in the history of the Homeland in which the constructive elements are postponed because high treason dominates the most vital interests of the country. Such, my friends, is the historical moment our Homeland is going through. High treason prevails among us, I repeat; they are the men and women who, alongside the dominator, are demolishing the most sacred of the Homeland, from its material interests to its dearest spiritual interests. They are the ones who unfortunately dominate in our country. And we patriots are in frank adversity at this moment of collective work. That is why I interpret the invitation of the Cultural Society as the peremptory demand, as the imperative mandate that we all here demand of each other the fulfillment of patriotic duty. “Everyone is surprised that it is the youth who come to consecrate adult men. It is true that we are not as old as we seem, but we are already adults. Men who have suffered much in our few years. I understand that my companion was born in ‘86. I was born in ‘93. Since childhood, I have fixed in my spirit an idea that every man and woman born in a slave country should have: to sacrifice their life to free it from all exotic power that seeks to subjugate it. And faithful to that norm, faithful to that promise before my own conscience, I have always been humble, and as a humble man, eager to acquire all possible knowledge to prepare myself physically and mentally with the purpose of carrying out a work of patriotism and dignity. To be a patriot, it is not enough to carry the words on your lips and the feeling in your heart. It requires having a physical strength, it requires an intellectual strength, it requires a moral strength, it also requires a vision of the transcendental purposes for which man is placed in creation. That is why I say to the youth that you cannot waste your energies, that the Homeland needs your bodies, that your physical organisms must be strong and healthy. The life of the colony has always led to the physical degeneration of the dominated people because it is a regime of exploitation. It conspires against the work of true patriotism, men and women of superior mentality are denied the exercise of superior faculties. In the colony, elements without character are brought to the surface, who are often of great intelligence: they are the high traitors of the Homeland. Thus, in the colony, all superior activities are restricted, from the exercise of public law to the exercise of power in the government; the only activity that is not restricted is that of servility, that of acting as instruments of the dominator in his work of demolition of the dominated country. When that state is reached, the people are denied even the right to educate themselves according to their own criteria. This is the only people, on earth, gentlemen, where by express provision of the law, or rather the empire of the United States, a man is appointed who has the absolute power to determine what is to be taught to the children of Puerto Rico. Neither Tsarist Russia nor Imperial Germany dared to impose such a tyranny on Poland. “I have said, gentlemen, that the most serious aggression that has been perpetrated against Puerto Rican nationality has been the creation of this systematic tyranny over the native intellect. I repeat that in no people of the world has a man erected himself as arbiter of the wisdom and culture of a people as in Puerto Rico. I say this before the university youth so that they are aware of the true situation in which the Puerto Rican youth find themselves. “In other countries, study programs and texts are established in schools by agreements of boards and commissions and after a comparative analysis of the educational systems of various nationalities.” The speaker then attacked the intervention of the United States in the education of the country. “A few vital questions must be formulated to the educational system: ‘Of what are we citizens? What are we educating the Puerto Rican children for? To be men of free consciences or colonial henchmen? It is not enough to sow schools everywhere. The school can serve to build as well as to destroy. We must seek the purpose that is pursued with teaching. Education cannot be an instrument of domination; education must form men informed of a patriotic criterion and not servants of the prevailing regime.’” The speaker then recounted his experiences in the United States and said that there “education is a system that creates the predominance of a class
Albizu Campos places a floral offering before the tomb of one of the heroes of the Grito de Lares.
Albizu Campos next to Lcdo. Obdulio Bauzá, Reverend Father Martínez Girau and the Mayor, José Auretio Bernal.
In the City Hall.
THE NATIONALIST MEETING HELD IN MAYAGUEZ
STATEMENTS BY THE CHIEF OF THE PARTY, MR. ALBIZU CAMPOS
When Mr. Albizu Campos was announced, the band played “La Borinqueña” and a long ovation occurred. Such was the anxiety that everyone manifested to hear the word of the illustrious leader of nationalism. He analyzed the system by which the prevailing regime carries out the demolition of Puerto Rican society with the fomenting of deep divisions; first: The promotion of women’s work in competition with men to cheapen labor and bring about the splitting of families, making women rivals of men in the economic field and therefore disconnecting the home. He said that in itself the independence of women was laudable if it was stimulated in good faith, but not if, as in the current circumstances, it is imposed as a means to demoralize a society. He explained how the United States and England are the only countries in which militant feminism exists as a safeguard of the rights of women who are launched into economic activity. Already in Puerto Rico there are many families where it is the women who provide the sustenance of the home, an inversion of roles that is a certain indication of the definitive ruin of a people. Second Division in financial matters, which exists in the United States but which has been deepened here by the misnamed Socialist Party. In the United States a small group or ruling class exploits almost the entire country; there does not exist there a society or a nation in the proper sense of the word but a large conglomerate that suffers the oppression of the meager oligarchic class who are not concerned about the fate or much less the common aggrandizement of the mass of the country. In Puerto Rico there was on the contrary a homogeneity between all the components and a great social sense interested in the reciprocal help for the perpetuity and conservation of the nation, this is a deep-rooted and unanimous feeling of Homeland. Therefore, juxtaposing in a class struggle the man who owns nothing against the one who has two pesetas was
imposing a strange element of discord that was comfortable in our midst. Third: The division fostered between the white and African race that is evident comparing the systems used by the invader in Cuba and Puerto Rico respectively at the termination of the Spanish-American War. In our country, where there was a majority of whites, they imposed the colored class as leader with the triumph of the Republican Party, whose chief was Dr. Barbosa. In Cuba, where the element of color predominated, they raised in the shadow of power a political leadership of individuals of European race and discharged the liberating army composed mostly of men of color. Fourth: To the above is added the division in the spiritual field tending to counteract the undoubted hegemony of Catholicism by raising to power individuals of all Protestant sects, and although nationalism extends its arms to the proselytes of all creeds, it cannot fail to point out the historical fact and the intention and the political meaning that in itself embodies the stimulus given to the forces contrary to the religious unity of the country.
By way of prologue and epilogue, he expanded on brilliant considerations on all the political and economic problems of Puerto Rico. He referred, for example, to the exchange of currency demonstrating how ab initio property had been devalued by forty percent through the exchange of the peso for the dollar at the rate of sixty percent when in reality both currencies had equal purchasing power. This collective and rapid depreciation of property together with the San Ciriaco hurricane opened the door to large estates in the hands of foreigners, a plague so voracious that not even Muñoz Rivera’s effort to create a front against the native landowner was able to contain it, since the latter, as soon as he prospered somewhat, was also entangled in the horrible jaws of monetary combinations.
He then attacked the large corporations as the cause of the general decline and even the ruin of the treasury; the organization of public health expressing his opinion that “the increase in diseases in the last three decades is due in large part to the poor quality of the articles offered for consumption, especially canned foods”; public instruction, committed to educating hungry toddlers who would be better supported physically with the luxurious budget allocated to the branch; and finally to the projects of industrialization of the country, impossible in a colony without tariff protection.
Mr. Albizu Campos ended his pithy and eloquent dissertation, exuberant in a multitude of resounding data said with astonishing precision and opportunity and difficult to reconstruct, urging the people of Mayagüez to investigate coldly the capital problems of their Homeland, so that the healthy reaction would operate within them that would vindicate for the Sultana of the West its hallmark of honor and its place of honor that it always occupied in the past in the vanguard of our civilizing and liberating struggles. Thunderous applause and expressions of general approval externalized the feelings of the public who
with deep attention listened for more than two hours to the only political leader who dissects before the people, turning the tribune into a chair, the most intricate national problems to fundamentally study the roots of our prostration.
THE CONFERENCE OF ALBIZU CAMPOS AT THE UNIVERSITY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION IN PUERTO RICO. THESIS THAT WAS DEVELOPED
The conference of Mr. Albizu Campos, dictated on Monday, March 30 under the auspices of the “Cultural Society” of the College of Law on the pulsating theme of Public Instruction in Puerto Rico, resulted in an act of great cultural transcendence and lasting spiritual resonances among the thousands of listeners who heard him at the University or by radio on the island. The large assembly hall was materially occupied by a very select audience; so great was the public that people had to group in the corridors or locate themselves in the windows of the venue. After brief words introduced by the student José C. Aponte, President of the “Cultural Society,” the speaker advanced to the proscenium while the audience burst into a clamorous ovation that lasted for several minutes. On the face of the speaker, the emotional effect of those warm and spontaneous applause was evident. “I who have faced hostile audiences so many times,” began Mr. Albizu Campos, “I can say that this greeting so generous and spontaneous is to move the most hardened man. “With instruction, as the young Aponte has said, a people is raised or buried; everything depends on the orientation that is imprinted on the educational system. Education is the direct way that the State has to educate its citizens, but in Puerto Rico the State does not exist because it is intervened by the military occupation of the United States. “Education in the religious state is inspired by the religious principles that inform that country, education in monarchies is inspired by monarchical principles, and education in republics is inspired by republican principles. The conservation of past values is conditioned by the perspective of posterity. In Puerto Rico education is not inspired by any defined principle nor does it have a determined orientation because the State does not exist, which is the determining and guiding factor of the educational system.” The speaker then analyzed education during Spanish rule. Education for that time was Catholic and monarchical,
because such were the religion and the regime in force in Spain, although there were prominent personalities in the country who were of anti-Catholic and republican ideology. That education was inspired by the Greco-Latin sources transmuted by the genius of Spain; therefore, we are direct heirs of the only culture that exists in the West. Our revolutionaries aspired to constitute a republican state with a heterodox education, but “in my opinion in this particular they were wrong because every nationality must be founded on the religious spirit that animates its inhabitants.” The partisans of republican ideas in Puerto Rico and in Spain to combat the regime and education in force in the Mother Homeland presented the United States as the model nation where institutions had reached their legal perfection. That false concept disoriented the opinion of our directors and gave the United States a personality that it did not have, to the extreme that the invasion of its troops was received as a blessing for our nationality. The invasion disregarded the State and the personality that Puerto Rico already had in the year 1898.” The first thing that the government of the United States did was to seize the educational system, because “education is the easiest instrument to destroy a people,” and converted the Commissioner of Instruction, who is a mandatory of the Department of War, into “arbiter of the cultural destinies of this people.” “The current Commissioner of Instruction has omnimodous faculties to make the courses of studies and determine what is to be taught to the children. In France instruction is regulated by legislation to that effect.” “The education in force in Puerto Rico,” said the speaker, “is informed by a materialistic criterion, is divorced from the Greco-Latin sources and above all educates our youth for submission to an empire and to abide by what that empire does in our Homeland.” The speaker harshly attacked bilingual education affirming that it caused “a waste of mental energies and a ignorance of their own language and of the invading language. No one can penetrate into the idiomatic secret of a foreign language until they know their vernacular language thoroughly.” The speaker then entered into a meticulous analysis of North American education stating the following thesis: in the United States there is an education for the dominant class and another education for the class that is to be dominated. The education for the dominant class is imparted as is required in the vernacular language of the nation, is informed by a religious criterion and the strictest moral disciplines are imposed on the student. The teaching of the Greco-Latin sources is rigorous: Latin and Greek begin to be taught from the fifth grade. There is separation of the sexes in these schools destined to educate the future directors of the nation. “They intensify classical studies because they know that if they disassociate themselves from the original sources of Western culture, they run the risk of reverting to barbarism in a few generations.”
When referring to the bisexual school, the speaker declared himself refractory to it, stating that its establishment obeyed economic and not pedagogical reasons. He said that although women and men can come to know the superior notions of wisdom and scientific knowledge they needed a different methodology that was in consort with the specific mentality of each. There are subjects that women assimilate more easily and there are other subjects that men assimilate more easily; therefore the separation of the sexes and the differentiation of the methods is rigorous. Most of the current texts are written by men for male mentalities and it is necessary that the texts for the female sex be written by women who know how to provoke the desired reaction in the female mentality. “In addition, women should be educated in the isolation of their sex, divorced from any unhealthy suggestion that may disturb their mentality.” This pedagogical theory sustained by Mr. Albizu Campos was the most brilliant and original of his learned conference. In this type of education for the class that will rule the national destinies an intense patriotism is sown in the spirit of the student and the criterion is inculcated that his people is the superior of the planet. The teaching is transmitted entirely by male professors.
The education for the masses destined for exploitation “is the package of culture.” The bisexual school is used for economy, teaching is disengaged from the classical Greco-Latin sources to keep the people in ignorance and its purpose is to create micro specialization or a cheap professional pseudo-intellectual insensitive to all those values alien to his profession. “This package of education is what has been implanted in Puerto Rico. Why have the partisans of submission not imported the superior education that exists there on the continent for the ruling classes?
The speaker alluded directly to some statements of the Commissioner of Education, Dr. Padín, before the “Union Church” of this capital. Dr. Padín admits that the educational system does not know where it is going, that in it politics is placed before pedagogy and that it is the Congress of the United States that is authorized to determine the orientation to follow. Dr. Padín delegates the orientation of a people to the invading power and in that he is mistaken. That initiative is exclusively the patrimony of the Puerto Rican nation that is called to determine what its political and cultural destiny should be. And I want to repeat here to save my historical responsibility that a teaching staff, a cloister and a regime that inculcates submission to children is rotten.”
“Some time ago I was talking with a pedagogue from this University and I asked him his opinion on the educational problem of Puerto Rico. He told me that pedagogues had no formed opinion on this problem and that as for bilingual teaching it would be necessary to experiment for some more years. And I reply: who gives anyone the right to experiment with the spiritual life of a people? “A people can resist the physical dispossession of its lands because the land is not destroyed and these pass intact to posterity, but a people cannot resist the moral dispossession perpetrated through the school without being reduced to a herd of slaves that deny even their own personality. “If this educational system continues we will end in ignorance, which is the worst asylum to which a people can be condemned.”
The speaker underlined the absence of civics in the school where on the contrary “the child learns to love a Homeland that is not his and to deny his origins.” “According to the ‘History of Puerto Rico’ that is taught in the schools, civilization began in 1898 when the American troops arrived.”
The speaker then referred to the University and stated that its directors had an immense privilege and it was to make that teaching institution the true University of Puerto Rico, where teaching was carried out in the vernacular language and classical studies were implanted.
He formulated bitter criticisms against the College of Laws in the sense that jurisprudence was taught on the basis of the opinions of the judges of the United States and not on the basis of our codes, which are the crystallization of a long experience and wisdom. “The United States is sixteen centuries behind us in legal matters,” affirmed the speaker, and made an extensive analysis on this topic to verify his thesis with North American authorities.
He also recommended that professors should be hired by opposition, as the students had recommended in a memorial presented to the new Rector.
He refuted the thesis that education is democratic in Puerto Rico because those on whom the tax burden of the country falls cannot send their children to school.
The speaker closed his conference addressing the religious institutions of the country, “I accuse the religious institutions of the country of crossing their arms before the serious crisis that overwhelms the Homeland and for not establishing schools that neutralize the demolishing work of the current educational system,” he said.
Mr. Albizu Campos received clamorous ovations in the course of his conference. The act ended around eleven o’clock at night within the greatest enthusiasm.
Manuel Rivera Matos