“Puerto Rico Can Teach So Much”: The Hemispheric and Imperial Origins of the Educational War on Poverty

Abstract

Through a focus on liberal academic and policy networks, this article considers how ideas and practices central to an educational “war on poverty” grew through connections between postwar Puerto Rico, Latin America, and New York. In particular, it analyzes how social scientific ideas about education's role in economic development found ample ground in the colonial Commonwealth of Puerto Rico as the island assumed the role of “laboratory” of democracy and development after the Second World War. The narrative then considers how this Cold War programming came to influence education initiatives in both U.S. foreign aid programs in Latin America and New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly as the number of Puerto Rican students grew amid the Puerto Rican Great Migration. Ultimately, the article suggests a broader hemispheric and imperial framework in narrating the evolution of postwar education policy in the nation's largest city.

“Puerto Rico can teach so much,” American diplomat and future undersecretary of state Chester Bowles proclaimed in the preface of Earl Parker Hanson's 1955 Transformation: The Story of Modern Puerto Rico. “The words of Puerto Rico's governor could speak so eloquently if they were made available to Asia today. That is why the United States should take special pride in its own recent and enlightened cooperation with Puerto Rico's ‘Operation Bootstrap.’”¹ After the Second World War, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico became a strategic site of Cold War diplomacy. As a self-proclaimed laboratory of American-style capitalist development, its economic program Operation Bootstrap served as a much-advertised prototype for the Third World.² Notably, education served as Bootstrap's “cornerstone of development.”³ The island consequently became an influential site for the production of educational thought and policy as the US embarked on its most ambitious foreign aid projects to date, through the Point Four program, USAID, the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and other public and private initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s.⁴

Yet for many American liberals, the lessons Puerto Rico could offer did not apply to the Third World alone. Almost a decade later, at a 1964 Ford Foundation Community Development Conference held in San Juan, Operation Bootstrap was again held up as a model—this time to fight poverty at home. “Holding the conference in Puerto Rico,” the press release explained, “will enable the participants to consult with Puerto Rican leaders on the kinds of programs they have developed and on the directions of planned Puerto Rican participation in the community action programs of the Economic Opportunity Act.”⁵ Puerto Rican governor Luís Muñoz Marín gave the keynote himself, followed by Joseph Monserrat, head of the Commonwealth's New York-based Migration Division and eventual president of the New York City Board of Education; the Ford Foundation's Paul Ylvisaker, co-creator of Ford's Gray Areas program; and Mitchell Sviridoff, also of Ford's Gray Areas, who would later sit on the Mayor's Advisory Panel for School Decentralization in New York in 1969. The names on the conference's guest list, and their respective travelogues and résumés, reveal the tangible connections between colonial, foreign, and domestic education and social policy in the postwar years.

This article agrees with Chester Bowles, though for very different reasons, that “Puerto Rico can teach so much.” Through a focus on liberal academic and policy networks between New York, Puerto Rico, and Latin America, it shows how Cold War development projects in colonial and foreign territories came to shape educational programming in the nation's largest metropolis in the 1950s and 1960s.⁶ In doing so, it suggests that imperial and hemispheric entanglements proved crucial to the evolution of postwar education policy in New York, the nation's largest city and an influential policy incubator for the rest of the nation. Puerto Rico, as a colonial Commonwealth whose leaders strategically embraced the role of “laboratory” in the fight against global communism, and a leading source of Latinx migration to New York, was central to that story.

The article is organized into four sections to illustrate these border-crossing dynamics. The first section reviews the key role education played within the postwar body of scholarship known as modernization theory, which came to influence US foreign aid after the Second World War. Within that intellectual milieu, I show how Puerto Rico served as an important site to produce research on education, human capital theory, and economic development. The second section discusses how these ideas came to concretely shape the island's postwar economic program Operation Bootstrap, which placed education at its center. The third section then analyzes how the Bootstrap model functioned as a prototype for Cold War US foreign aid programs, particularly in Latin America, through the Alliance for Progress. And the final section presents examples of how educational ideas and policies formulated in the colonial Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and across Latin America influenced education in postwar New York. In doing so, this case study highlights the importance of American empire in the formation of postwar educational thought and practice, and invites further research that explores these dynamics in New York, in other cities, and at a national level.

While a growing body of scholarship has altered the dominant narratives of Progressive Era education to consider how schooling in the continental US dialogued with colonial education, a similar lens stands to alter the foundational histories we tell about the postwar years. Historians Alfred McCoy, Francisco Scarano, and Courtney Johnson, for example, note how imperial governance practices at the turn of the twentieth century “percolated homeward through the invisible ‘capillaries of empire,’ shaping the metropolitan American state and society in subtle yet profound ways.”⁷ Clif Stratton and Sarah Manekin likewise argue that domestic education and colonial education during the Progressive Era must be understood as deeply connected projects; education geared toward European immigrants and BIPOC Americans must be viewed in light of the colonial policies and racial ideologies the US implemented in the Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico.⁸ Moreover, scholarship has convincingly shown how Cold War development and counterinsurgency efforts in the Global South shaped higher education, domestic welfare policy, neoliberal economic policy, and the carceral state.⁹ This article suggests the value of a similar framework in considering P-12 and community-based educational programs after the Second World War, as the US assumed the role of global superpower and retained colonial territories, like Puerto Rico, while also actively engaging in interventionist foreign policy—in short, remaining an empire.¹⁰

Theorizing the Postwar Bootstrap: Education's Role in Cold War Development Thinking

“Countries are underdeveloped because most of their people are underdeveloped,” Frederick Harbison and Charles Myers stated in their 1962 Education, Manpower, and Economic Growth: Strategies of Human Resource Development.¹¹ Theodore Schultz offered a similar premise in his 1960 article “Capital Formation by Education,” which argued that investment in education was the most effective means of spurring national economic growth.¹² These ideas about education—and particularly human capital theory—grew over the course of the 1950s and played a starring role in postwar modernization theory, a strain of American social science that attempted to pinpoint the factors that allowed a nation to transition from a “traditional, pre-modern” society into an advanced, “modern” one.

Modernization theory greatly influenced American development discourse and programming during the Cold War.¹³ According to its tenets, not only did developing nations need an educated citizenry for economic growth, but the idea took hold that individual minds needed to be modernized before a country could itself become modern and “take off” along the path of development, in line with Walt Rostow's 1958 The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto.¹⁴ In order for investments in technology and industry to work, and for the temptation of communism or fascism to be avoided, individuals needed to adopt “modern” predispositions such as “secularism, futurism, preference for industrial work, optimism, and national identification,” a list of traits theorists termed the Overall Modernity, or OM, scale.¹⁵ As scholars have long argued, this list of “modern predispositions” smacked of ethnocentric and White supremacist notions of the Anglo-Protestant work ethic.¹⁶

Influenced by the theories of Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, modernization theorists built on these ideas and made their case that schools and early childhood educational experiences were one, if not the, most important institutions for bringing about the modernization of minds. David Lerner's 1958 The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, David McClelland's 1961 The Achieving Society, and Donald Holsinger and Alex Inkeles's 1974 Education and Individual Modernity in Developing Countries are just some of the many works that advanced these claims, built on research conducted over the course of the postwar decades.¹⁷ Through a study of men in Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Nigeria, and Bangladesh, Inkeles and Smith concluded that early childhood was the most critical time in an individual's psychological development. “In all six countries,” they noted, “education emerged as unmistakably the most powerful force. Indeed, judged by the number of points on the OM scale a man gained for each additional year of schooling, education was generally two or even three times as powerful as any other single input. In this, our conclusions are not new but rather confirm findings in several other studies of modernity.”¹⁸

These ideas about education and modernization became embedded in the US foreign aid regime, beginning with President Harry Truman's Point Four program and taking on greater influence in John F. Kennedy's USAID, Peace Corps, and Alliance for Progress.¹⁹ American philanthropies also bankrolled this body of research and the programs they inspired, working in tandem with the US government to meet the same end goal: non-communist economic development in the Third World. As the Ford Foundation stated in its 1955 annual report, “Only through education and training at all levels of society can [poor nations] develop the latent talents for realizing their political, economic and cultural aspirations in harmony with the development of the democratic world.”²⁰ A decade later, the philanthropic behemoth—known for its profound policy footprint—spent well over a majority of its $352.2 million budget on education-related initiatives, geared toward international and domestic audiences alike.²¹

The belief in the overriding power of education to lift individuals and nations from poverty held deep roots in liberal American political culture. And education served as a favored tool in US imperial projects at the turn of the twentieth century, under the guise of “benevolent empire.”²² Yet the belief in education as an investment in macro-level economic growth received unprecedented federal backing in the postwar era, fueled by social scientific research that came to profoundly influence the policy landscape of US foreign relations.

One particularly important site to advance those theories was Puerto Rico, an island in the Caribbean that precariously remained “foreign in a domestic sense” during the age of global decolonization.²³ A US colony since the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, Puerto Rico gained only partial sovereignty through the Commonwealth Constitution of 1952, rendering it a territory that reflected many characteristics of the developing world but still fell within the U.S.'s jurisdiction. Identifying a unique opportunity, American academics flocked to postwar Puerto Rico as island leaders embraced the role of “laboratory” of democracy and development. As early as 1945, a group of influential Puerto Rican liberals founded the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales (CIS) at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras (UPR-RP). The department became, according to historian Michael Lapp, the “chief purveyor of the ideology of modernization and the primary training ground of functionaries of the new order.”²⁴ Scholars from the University of Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, and other mainland universities frequented the department, conducting research projects and teaching courses. John Kenneth Galbraith, Gordon K. Lewis, C. Wright Mills, Earl Parker Hanson, Wassily Leontief, Walter Isard, Oscar Lewis, and Carl Friedrich are just some of the many prominent liberal scholars who spent time in Puerto Rico and produced work there. In 1953, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science devoted an entire issue to research from CIS, hailing Puerto Rico's democratic development as a beacon for the developing and postcolonial world.²⁵ Gordon K. Lewis reflected in Puerto Rico: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean, “In spite of its small size, no ‘underdeveloped’ society in the modern world has been so thoroughly examined by the professional academic mind as this one.”²⁶

This North American fascination with Puerto Rico extended to education researchers as well. Lewis pointed to the prevalence of one such academic type: “the educationist who passionately subscribes to the articles of faith of the Columbia University Teachers College.”²⁷ Influential publications on modernization and schooling came from North American researchers partnering with CIS, such as Ineke Cunningham's Modernity and Academic Performance: A Study of Students in a Puerto Rican High School.²⁸ Puerto Rican scholars working from both CIS and mainland universities also contributed to thinking about education's link to economic development in the postwar decades. Notably, many pushed back on the more degrading conclusions of mainland scholars who cited Puerto Rican culture as a source of underdevelopment, offering helpful critiques of modernization theory.²⁹ Yet what most liberals at the time could agree on was the central role of education on the path to “takeoff.”

Education: The “Cornerstone of Development” in Puerto Rico's Operation Bootstrap

“Our most abundant natural resource is human beings. From there stems the great importance of what is done to educate and equip them for economic productivity,” the Puerto Rican Department of Public Instruction (DIP) explained in its 1952 annual report—though the sentiment appeared often in Commonwealth literature of the era. It also proved a leading premise of Harvey Perloff's 1950 modernization treatise, Puerto Rico's Economic Future: A Study in Planned Development, which argued that education was the “foundation stone of all progress.”³⁰ Puerto Rican governor Luís Muñoz Marín often referred to people as the island's “gran riqueza oculta” (great hidden wealth), and education the key that “unlocked the treasure.”³¹ From the 1940s through the 1960s, education became one of the island's leading tools of economic growth, a premise embraced by the Puerto Rican architects of the Commonwealth's development program and its North American backers.

In name and contents, Operation Bootstrap embodied the ideals of American postwar development thinking. Launched in 1947, Bootstrap called for state-managed industrialization financed largely by private capital, and a complete social, cultural, and political overhaul. The underlying logic of Bootstrap built on strains of New Deal thinking and Latin American mid-century developmentalism. Yet unlike other Latin American Import Substitution Industrialization programs that promoted domestic industry in the spirit of economic sovereignty, Bootstrap incentivized American companies to build factories on the island with the prospect of cheap labor and a 100 percent tax exemption.³²

Known as “Manos a la Obra” in Spanish, Operation Bootstrap transformed island society dramatically from the late 1940s through the 1960s. The Compañia de Fomento Industrial (referred to simply as “Fomento”) became the main vehicle for that top-down planning, led by Bootstrap's chief engineer, Teodoro Moscoso. Fomento prescribed the building of factories, the modernization of agricultural techniques, and the building of American-style infrastructure, complete with suburbs, highways, a Caribe Hilton Hotel, shopping malls, and, of course, modern schoolhouses. A mini-Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) sprung up in the city of Caonillas, while a Levittown appeared on the outskirts of San Juan. As a pamphlet published by the Commonwealth described the program in 1956 during “Fomento Week,” a celebration honoring the opening of the island's four hundredth factory:

Looking at Puerto Rico today, it is hard to realize that only seventeen years ago the island was an underdeveloped area typical of many underdeveloped areas throughout the world. . . . But 1940 marked the turning point in Puerto Rico's history and the beginning of the Island's dramatic uphill struggle for progress, it was then that the plan for Operation Bootstrap began to take shape.³³

Echoing the language of modernization theorists, the Commonwealth could point to these dramatic changes in Puerto Rican life to signal progress toward modernity. In reality, the island's social and political life was still marked by significant levels of poverty and racialized inequality—not to mention coloniality.³⁴ Muñoz Marín and his pro-American, anti-communist, though culturally nationalist Partido Popular Democrático (Popular Democratic Party/PPD, also known as the “Populares”) nevertheless enjoyed high levels of public support, as many island residents benefited from the era's social programs and the regime suppressed an island-wide nationalist movement.³⁵

Amid this “reformist revolution,” education stood at the heart of Bootstrap's approach to social reform. Mirroring both the United States’ proclivity to turn to schools to solve all social ills, and modernization theory's emphasis on the modernizing capacities of schools, education became what one official deemed “the island's cornerstone of development.”³⁶ In the 1950s, Puerto Rico's school-age population doubled, literacy and community education projects proliferated, and education received the greatest allocation within the island's budget and employed more people than any other public sector. As Auxiliary Secretary of Education Osvaldo Rodríguez Pacheco described the situation, “Education is almost the entire answer to the problem of the Island.”³⁷

Quoting Perloff's modernization theory-inspired book directly, the DIP explained how the massive effort to expand education was directly linked to what it termed the “batalla de la producción” (battle of production), or drive toward industrialization. To this end, the island needed to produce skilled and trained workers, technicians, engineers, and capable managers with disciplined work ethics able to operate new machinery and run the factories of tomorrow: “Our industrial destiny depends almost exclusively on the quality of our workforce.”³⁸ In 1951 the Puerto Rican Planning Board outlined a list of priorities to be supported by government expenditures. Education made the “first priority group,” along with industrial and agricultural development. The report stated: “Puerto Rico cannot hope to make success of its industrial and agricultural improvement programs unless there can be provided a substantial pool of well-trained skilled workers with a firm grasp of modern industrial and agricultural techniques. Thus the provision of basic primary education for all children, extending into specialized vocational education for many of them, is one of prime necessity for any economic development program.”³⁹

Owing to this belief in education's link to industrial development, the DIP was tasked with preparing a modern workforce.⁴⁰ Schooling for basic literacy and in traditional subjects helped fulfill this mission, as did the vast vocational education programs developed by the Populares. The 1917 Smith-Hughes Act, which allocated federal funds for vocational education on the mainland, had been extended to Puerto Rico in 1931 during the Great Depression, and the George-Barden Act had allocated even more funds for the same purpose during World War II.⁴¹ Postwar reforms not only built on these earlier efforts, but sent them into overdrive. After the war, a vocational school serving three thousand students opened in San Juan, the Metropolitan Vocational School, preparing pupils for work in over fifty trades. Later, the DIP decentralized the school, and outposts opened across the island training both children and adults in numerous occupational fields believed to befit a modern capitalist economy such as bookkeeping, file clerking, sales, stenography, and electrical work.⁴² While around 5,700 pupils engaged in some sort of vocational education in 1932, that number reached a staggering 110,000 by 1957, the year in which Muñoz Marín declared March “Vocational Education Month” islandwide.⁴³

This emphasis on vocational education aimed to prepare Puerto Rican students for work in new Bootstrap factories, and to create both the managerial and disciplined working classes the island was believed to lack.⁴⁴ “When you think we live at the precise moment, the critical moment in which we are to diversify industrially our way of life; that we are leaving a rural culture to enter into another urban universal culture . . . the exceptional mission of these vocational schools is understood,” Enrique Laguerre, Puerto Rican novelist and director of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the Catholic University of Ponce, reflected in a 1954 article.⁴⁵ All of these programs helped produce what was termed a “clima industrial” (industrial climate), the necessary precondition for mainland capital investment and industrialization.

Yet ultimately, in order for these investments in human capital to succeed, minds needed to be modernized and not just trained. The Commonwealth government therefore initiated a number of education reforms specifically targeted at spurring individual psychological modernity in Puerto Rican citizens. After all, Anglo-American modernizers believed that Puerto Rican society contained many of the habits of traditional societies as defined by modernization theorists, particularly in rural communities. Henry Wells, who wrote The Modernization of Puerto Rico, cited a number of sociological studies that contrasted the value system of traditional Hispanic societies with modern Anglo-American ones, citing such characteristics as “fatalism” that led one to accept their lot in life to describe Puerto Rican and Hispanic culture, while noting its contrast to the optimism and belief in upward mobility of Anglo-American go-getters.⁴⁶ Other continental scholars saw Puerto Rican culture as an example of the “mañana spirit,” along with similar traits long associated with the “Black Legend”—an anti-Spanish idea positing that Latin America had developed negatively in comparison with the United States because of its Iberian Catholic heritage, as opposed to a British Protestant one.⁴⁷

While Puerto Ricans rejected the more offensive of these characterizations and supported a program of cultural nationalism called Operation Serenidad to complement Bootstrap, a number of Commonwealth education reforms nevertheless adopted these ideas.⁴⁸ Island education programs attempted to combat the supposedly traditional values of the working classes and replace them with modern dispositions that the Euro-descended elite were already believed to possess. This paternalistic and demeaning attitude directed toward the working class—a population with greater African and indigenous ancestry—was certainly not new in the Puerto Rican context and had influenced education on the island since the American takeover in 1898.⁴⁹ Yet it continued apace in the postwar world, reflecting new social science discourses and elite forms of negotiation with American empire.

The Division of Community Education (DIVEDCO), for example, played a key role in teaching adult learners how to be modern. Launched in 1949 and modeled on the community education programs of the TVA, and the Spanish and Mexican misiones pedagógicas from the 1930s—state-led programs that brought books, films, and literacy education to rural areas—DIVEDCO functioned to instill values on the OM scale to everyday Puerto Ricans through educational films and community-led “discussion circles.”⁵⁰ In practice, this meant program officials would travel around the island selecting community members for leadership training over the course of a few weeks in the capital. These men would then return to their villages or urban neighborhoods and liaise with DIVEDCO employees to hold community meetings and show educational films related to topics such as health, hygiene, and democratic citizenship.⁵¹ By the mid- ’50s, the program already included more than four hundred community leaders trained for work at the neighborhood level in rural and urban areas, and had “no fewer than 105 projects of community action” underway.⁵²

If the late 1940s and 1950s were a time of rapid educational expansion, the 1960s continued the embrace of education for economic growth. In a speech before the legislature in 1960, Governor Muñoz Marín declared:

Education should preoccupy us profoundly. I reclaim for it the highest priority before the thought of all Puerto Ricans. And I reclaim it not only for its spiritual meaning . . . but also because our goal of giving a grand and wide economic base to our people's culture will tragically perish if we do not intensify and improve greatly and deeply the educational effort.⁵³

Heeding this call, the Commonwealth spent a greater percentage of its GDP on education than any state in the Union and, according to its own account, more than any other nation in the world.⁵⁴ Rafael Pico, serving as president of Fomento, captured the role of education in postwar Puerto Rico perfectly in a 1960 speech to the island's teachers union: “Obviously, these two manifestations of progress, the economic and the scholastic, are intimately intertwined and the school is the cornerstone of general development.”⁵⁵ By 1969, Ivan Illich—who began his career as a parish priest on the island before rising to fame in left-leaning education circles in Mexico and around the world—noted that in regard to education, “in no other social activity is so large a proportion of the total population of Puerto Rico involved.”⁵⁶

The Bootstrap in Latin America: Education in the Alliance for Progress

Owing to its initial success, Operation Bootstrap quickly became a development darling in the early years of the Cold War. Capitalizing on Truman's Point Four announcement in 1949, which launched American foreign aid, Governor Muñoz Marín and his political cohort attempted to position the island as a Point Four showcase in the Caribbean.⁵⁷ Muñoz Marín and his allies invited hundreds of government officials and technical advisors from the “underdeveloped world” to the island throughout the next decade and shared their successes at UN conferences and various international gatherings. Between 1950 and 1956, for example, over three thousand doctors, nurses, agronomists, civil engineers, planners, and educators visited the island. Thousands more would spend time in Puerto Rico throughout the course of the next decade from nations around the globe. The US government, UNESCO, and private foundations such as Ford provided funds for these trips to the “island of how-to-do-it.”⁵⁸ Programs like DIVEDCO and the island's vocational, home economics, and rural education programs were held up as exemplars in the growing field of international development.⁵⁹

While Governor Muñoz Marín and the PPD were adept public relations experts themselves, skilled in the art of colonial negotiation, they also cultivated a cadre of Bootstrap boosters to publicize the “miracle in the Caribbean.” An array of liberal American academics and journalists traveled to Puerto Rico and wrote complimentary books and articles about the island's development program.⁶⁰ Bootstrap graced the cover of Life magazine in 1949, and Muñoz Marín appeared on the cover of Time in June of 1958. Puerto Rico is a “microcosm of modern world trends,” Earl Parker Hanson, one such intermediary, proclaimed in his Transformation: The Story of Modern Puerto Rico, the four-hundred-page tome referenced at the beginning of this article. Extolling the virtues of Operation Bootstrap and Muñoz Marín's leadership, Hanson gushed, “Puerto Rico remains a working advertisement of American democracy. . . . With the world torn between two fundamentally basic philosophies, thousands of visitors to the island, from all parts of the world, see what Puerto Rico has done and is doing, and go home again saying, ‘This is America's answer to communism.’”⁶¹

The Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie Foundations, along with the US State Department, also aided in Puerto Rico's influence in the region. Ford's Paul Harrison, for example, noted in the 1950s that the Ford Fund for the Advancement of Education was interested in “the idea that some things done in Puerto Rico would have applicability in other Latin America areas.”⁶² Chester Bowles, writing as a congressman serving on the Committee for Foreign Affairs before being promoted to undersecretary of state by Kennedy, wrote to his Puerto Rican counterpart, Arturo Morales Carrión, stating, “In the years ahead, it seems to me, Puerto Rico can make a very real contribution to American foreign policy. . . . I wonder if it might not be possible to encourage a group of able young Puerto Ricans each year to enter the foreign service on a career basis. In the meantime, I would like to see the appointment of outstanding Puerto Ricans at all levels in the State Department, from assistant secretary of Latin American affairs on down.”⁶³ Indeed, Puerto Rican statesmen did travel widely across the hemisphere and world in the postwar decades. Speaking as a US Representative to the United Nations in March of 1961, Bootstrap architect Teodoro Moscoso discussed the “factors of highest priority” to the underdeveloped nations of the world: the first being a sound governmental structure with adequate budgeting, personnel and auditing, and second, “Education. Industrialization . . . requires brain power and the first step in its development is literacy.”⁶⁴

By the 1960s, Puerto Rico became even more strategic in hemispheric affairs. After the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro's fiery United Nations speech denouncing Yankee imperialism, Kennedy and his team turned their attention more purposefully southward. At a formal dinner in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in August 1961, Kennedy announced the launch of the Alliance for Progress, an aid program designed specifically for Latin America. Part Marshall Plan, part Truman Doctrine, the program attempted to use development aid to both promote goodwill and protect against the spread of communism.⁶⁵

Agreeing with the Puerto Rican governor's identification of his island as a “meeting place of both Latin American and North American cultures” that could do much toward “reconciling the two,” Kennedy appointed Puerto Rico's Moscoso to help lead the way.⁶⁶ By that time, Moscoso was already a well-known figure in the State Department. He made a name for himself as the mastermind behind Bootstrap and gained a positive reputation as a proactive “bumblebee” of an economist who likewise maintained a “charming, flexible, and modest” personality, according to a New York Times profile.⁶⁷ Kennedy had appointed him ambassador of Venezuela, and then as regional administrator for Latin America in the new USAID program, also launched in 1961. Soon after, JFK called on Moscoso and Puerto Rican undersecretary of state Arturo Morales Carrión (who Bowles had written to in the letter referenced above) to join the initial Task Force for Latin America that eventually produced the plan for the Alliance. Later, Moscoso would serve as a leading Alliance coordinator. Historian and Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted, “The Puerto Rican experience, indeed, was an important source of ideas behind the Alliance.”⁶⁸ Though Moscoso and Kennedy would later lock horns, and Puerto Rico was by no means the only influence, Operation Bootstrap's DNA became embedded in the Alliance.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given Bootstrap's influence and the reigning social science of the day, education figured prominently in the new development program. In every Alliance recipient country, education programs received a significant allocation of the aid budget, funding community education programs, teacher training, vocational education, home economics courses, and literacy projects. Kennedy was careful to stress that the Alliance included all sectors of society, but “above all, the young people of the Americas.” One of the five leading goals of the Alliance was to achieve universal literacy by 1970, and the very first resolution of the original 1961 planning document was a Ten-Year Education Program. “The low educational levels in Latin American countries are at the same time the result and the cause of their economic and social situation,” the resolution read. “Under proper conditions, investments in education have the highest cultural, social and economic multiplier effect on national development; [i]t is essential to integrate educational development plans into the national development programs, in order to ensure the success of the Alliance for Progress and the maximum yield from the resources allocated to education.”⁶⁹ The US therefore called upon the participating nations to develop education reform plans, which suggested at least six years of compulsory elementary education, systemic adult and rural education campaigns, and the expansion of vocational education, among other policies, in line with the education reforms underway in Puerto Rico.⁷⁰

As modernization theorist Lucian Pye noted in 1965, “one of every five American dollars in technical aid is now being channeled into assisting education, and in a majority of the developing countries education receives a higher proportion of the national budget than is common in Europe.”⁷¹ During this era, Latin America experienced the highest rates of educational growth in the world. These Alliance funds, supplemented by technical assistance loans from the Organization of American States and UNESCO, bankrolled youth, community, and adult education programs from Mexico to Argentina. Paulo Freire's famous adult literacy initiatives in northeastern Brazil became an early Alliance for Progress grantee, though the program's turn leftward also rendered it a key Cold War battleground and target of the US-backed right-wing dictatorship, foreshadowing the U.S.'s general turn in its interventionist approach from “development to dictatorship” in the region.⁷² In this context, DIP officials, DIVEDCO employees, and the University of Puerto Rico's Education Faculty continued its laboratory and technical assistance role it began under Point Four. In 1963, for example, 340 Dominican teachers participated in a teacher training seminar through UPR's College of Pedagogy, while the following year brought teachers from Peru to share “modern” teaching techniques, all with Alliance funds.⁷³

The Kennedy administration likewise launched USAID and the Peace Corps in 1961 as part of its broader foreign aid and anti-communist project. Just as with Point Four and the Alliance for Progress, Puerto Rican leaders were poised to serve. Muñoz Marín invited Peace Corps head Sargent Shriver to train volunteers on the island before they headed off to other sites in Latin America. In addition to taking up residence with Puerto Rican families in the countryside, training at camps near Arecibo and Río Abajo, corpsmen and women would take the obligatory Bootstrap tours of the island's industrial and educational showcase projects and were encouraged to duplicate similar efforts abroad.⁷⁴ They also took courses at UPR, such as home economics and English as a Second Language (ESL) before serving in countries across Latin America.⁷⁵ In fact, faculty members at the university helped develop the curriculum for Peace Corps teachers teaching English abroad, having much experience with ESL and bilingual pedagogy in the context of colonial language policies. As Shriver noted upon his return from a 1961 visit, “We selected this site because Puerto Rico has a very fine record of advances in rural community development and because it has a number of experts who are good at teaching this sort of thing.”⁷⁶ Yet those working in the Third World were not the only ones interested in what Puerto Rico was doing. Community development would also become a helpful skillset as the US embarked on its own War on Poverty at home, led by Shriver himself.

The Bootstrap Comes Home in the War on Poverty: Education for Self-Help and Takeoff in New York

Writing in 1959, New York City-based education activist Ellen Lurie wrote to DIVEDCO director Fred Wale, hoping she could gain some insight from the Puerto Rican community education program for her work in East Harlem. “We are very interested in your community leaders training program,” she explained. “We are planning to initiate a series of lay leadership training courses in East Harlem and I would be delighted to receive from you any material your office might have either in Spanish or English which would give us help in setting up our program.”⁷⁷ She then cc'd the principal of East Harlem's Benjamin Franklin High School, Leonard Covello, an influential school leader who became well known for his work in intercultural community education. Covello maintained close ties with island leadership in the 1940s and ’50s as his school population became increasingly Puerto Rican, and eventually worked directly for the Commonwealth after retiring from Franklin High School. Lurie knew he would be traveling to Puerto Rico to meet with island officials and hoped he could pick up materials to bring back to New York. What was happening on the island, in the context of Bootstrap, seemed particularly useful to the work being done in El Barrio.

As ideas about education's role in economic development were being written into the architecture of Operation Bootstrap and various foreign aid programs, domestic poverty was also surfacing in the analysis of liberal policymakers as a recognized problem for the first time since the Great Depression. As recent research has highlighted, when the Kennedy and Johnson administrations sought expertise on dealing with these matters as part of their New Frontier and Great Society initiatives, they turned to those who could claim the most significant poverty-fighting expertise: Cold Warriors who had been working with development aid in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.⁷⁸ As historian Daniel Immerwhar explains, “Many of the architects of the War on Poverty had direct experience with community projects abroad. The reason was simple. Having spent so much time busying itself with the economics of prosperity, the US government lacked domestic expertise in the area of persistent poverty. The people in government with poverty-fighting on their résumés tended to have accrued that experience in foreign lands.”⁷⁹ Figures like Shriver, who headed both the Peace Corps and the Office of Economic Opportunity, or David Bell, who worked for USAID before taking a lead role with the Ford Foundation as it became heavily involved with urban community development, are just two of the many figures who evidence the global nature of postwar anti-poverty work. Amy Offner confirms this argument but places a more pronounced emphasis on the Alliance for Progress, arguing that “one way to trace the route from the New Deal to the Great Society is by traveling through Latin America.”⁸⁰ As I argue in this article, Puerto Rico became a crucial stop along that journey.

Domestic P-12 education policy should not be divorced from this broader global context. Starting tepidly and on the local and state level in the 1950s and picking up full steam in the 1960s with the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the education programs of the War on Poverty, and the myriad initiatives enacted at the state and district levels, education became one of the key levers to combat poverty and racialized inequality in the United States. President Johnson famously declared upon the signing of the ESEA from a Texas schoolhouse in 1965, “education is the only valid passport from poverty,” and emphasized in the early planning stages of the War on Poverty, “We are going to eliminate poverty through education. . . . This is not going to be a handout, this is going to be something where people are going to learn their way out of poverty.”⁸¹ True to his word, Johnson poured unprecedented billions of dollars of federal aid per year into early childhood, K-12, and community-based education projects. Programs such as the ESEA's Title I, Head Start, the Teacher Corps, bilingual education, and Community Action Programs (CAPs) became hallmarks of the era's social policy.

Yet in many ways this sentiment—that people are going to learn their way out of poverty—had been honed most acutely in the colonial Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and across Latin America for the past decade. Education for poverty relief and human capital development in the nation's poorest and racialized communities—neighborhoods racked by upheaval and potentially “un-American sympathies”—also became recipients of similar programming. “From the time of the Point Four program, the American government has been sponsoring programs of community development in backwards nations throughout the world,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the key architects of the War on Poverty and author of the infamous Moynihan Report, wrote in 1966. “The program was and is a great popular success, and the idea of doing something of the sort through Community Action Programs with the ‘underdeveloped peoples of the United States’ came as a direct and obvious carryover.”⁸² As Puerto Rican secretary of education Ángel Quintero Alfaro noted in the early ’70s, reflecting the sentiment of the preceding decade, “In many places in the United States, especially in its centers of leadership, they are looking toward Puerto Rico with a new interest. The idea is growing of Puerto Rico as a possible ‘model’ to facilitate innovation and social change, in Spanish-origin societies and communities that speak Spanish.”⁸³ This was particularly true in New York—the nation's largest city, an influential policy incubator for the rest of the country, and a city with a large and growing Black and Puerto Rican population.

Already beginning in the 1950s, New York City's educational landscape became tightly bound through transnational colonial connections to the island of Puerto Rico, through its liberal establishment and the Diaspora.⁸⁴ Crucial to Operation Bootstrap's success was the outmigration of thousands of Puerto Rican citizens to the mainland, a solution encouraged by the Commonwealth government.⁸⁵ This meant that while Puerto Rico served as a “showcase” and “laboratory” in the Caribbean, the Puerto Rican Great Migration brought over five hundred thousand migrants (around one-third of the island's population) to the mainland—mostly to New York City—between 1948 and 1970. By the early 1960s, Puerto Rican children made up around a quarter of the New York City student population.⁸⁶ Puerto Rican citizens, mainland-based Puerto Rican government officials, and mainland liberals interested in Puerto Rico and its Diaspora became key nodes linking education and anti-poverty projects in the Caribbean and Latin America to their domestic counterparts in the US.

Embracing Bootstrap wisdom, the Commonwealth government's work in New York emphasized education as a preferred ladder of social mobility for the stateside community, which was quickly labeled a “problem” by the media and faced high levels of poverty. The Migration Division, the mainland branch of the Commonwealth, aided migrants in securing jobs and finding housing, but threw significant weight into the realm of education, partnering with and lobbying the NYC Board of Education to better meet the needs of Puerto Rican students.⁸⁷ The Migration Division held numerous workshops and published countless informational pamphlets for New York educators in the 1950s, and worked with the NYC BOE to disseminate resources like “Phrases with Spanish Equivalents for Use in Schools: An Aid for Teachers of Puerto Rican Background,” in addition to The Puerto Rican Study, a multi-year project completed in 1958 that brought island and mainland researchers and policymakers together to produce a massive report on the state of Puerto Rican education in the Big Apple.⁸⁸

Notably, Puerto Rican officials in New York benefited from heightened political leverage, unlike representatives of some other (im)migrant communities. This owed to Puerto Ricans’ status as US citizens, the island's strategic role in the Caribbean, and the capital-friendly nature of Bootstrap favored by New York's business and political elites, including longtime New York governor and eventual vice president Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller, who served as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs from 1940 to 1958 before assuming the governorship of the Empire State from 1959 to 1973, maintained close and amicable ties with Governor Muñoz Marín and PPD leaders, and visited the island frequently.

The Migration Division's advocacy responded to the in-time challenges faced by Puerto Rican students in New York, but was also significantly informed by the Commonwealth's experience with education reform under Bootstrap. DIVEDCO films and Commonwealth curricular materials were sometimes used directly in New York City classrooms. Consequently, much of the early education advocacy by the Migration Division and their New York allies embraced the discourses of human capital theory and self-help that permeated the island. Quoting Governor Muñoz Marín directly in a speech on Puerto Rican attitudes toward school integration in New York, Migration Division director Joseph Monserrat—a key figure linking island and mainland education politics—stated, “The greatest resource which must be tapped . . . is people. The great task is to unlock their creative energies, and the great first step is reached when they join together to work with enthusiasm and purpose, armed with adequate technical tools to achieve their own salvation.”⁸⁹ These ideas about people as the community's great hidden wealth clearly echoed the human capital theory and community education discourses that Muñoz Marín and the DIP propagated on the island.

The self-help ethos that became a feature of postwar New York Puerto Rican education advocacy also closely mirrored the spirit and language of DIVEDCO and the Alliance for Progress. After all, Puerto Rico was an important node (though certainly not the only source of influence) for the early development and dissemination of the “community action” paradigm, which came to influence domestic postwar anti-poverty and education policy. The law that created DIVEDCO in 1949 described its goal as “giving the communities, and the Puerto Rican community as a whole, the desire, the tendency and the means to use its aptitudes for solving many of its own problems in the areas of health, education, cooperation, and social life, through the action of the community itself.”⁹⁰ Other island-wide community action programs developed in the 1950s, like those for housing and rural affairs, also relied explicitly on the “Christian principle of self-help and mutual aid.”⁹¹ Puerto Rican officials also proved influential in warning American statespeople in the crafting of the Alliance for Progress that “if the masses do not feel that they are participating in the advance of the economy, they will not support a development program indefinitely.”⁹² UPR chancellor Jaime Benítez exhorted his US compatriots to remember that “people are not saved, they save themselves.”⁹³ By the time the Ford Foundation's community action conference was held in San Juan in 1964, Puerto Ricans and Latin Americans had already been putting the idea of participation by the poor into practice—on the island, mainland, and across the hemisphere. In fact, Muñoz Marín's efforts under Bootstrap were described as early as 1953 in the New York Times as a “war on poverty.”⁹⁴

The rhetoric of self-help occupied a particularly prominent role in liberal Puerto Rican education advocacy in New York. One Migration Division publication characterized its work as “Helping Puerto Ricans Help Themselves: Ten Years of Service,” which struck many of the same chords as DIVEDCO publications.⁹⁵ Grassroots organizations of the 1950s also embraced the self-help mantra, as migrants brought experiences from the island and recognized the strategic potential of bootstrap rhetoric in an ardently anti-communist postwar America.⁹⁶ In 1958, for example, the Council of Spanish-American Organizations entitled their sixth annual conference “We Help Ourselves.”⁹⁷ The Fuerza Unida Puertorriqueña claimed as one of its objectives: “to get them [the Puerto Rican community] to work as a community, and recognize and solve their own problems.”⁹⁸ The Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs also held a number of youth conferences with self-help as a centerpiece.⁹⁹ Antonia Pantoja, founder and director of the Puerto Rican youth development organization Aspira, adopted similar rhetoric, though she noted that it was also important for the New York Puerto Rican community to help themselves away from the controlling supervision of the Commonwealth's Migration Division.¹⁰⁰ While Puerto Rico and its Diaspora were not the sole source of these self-help or community action ideas, which claim a long and multi-rooted history (especially in colonial contexts and Black political thought), it is important to note that they had been deployed on the island since the late 1940s and brought to local education politics in New York via transnational colonial networks.

In fact, while these programs and materials brought the spirit of Bootstrap to New York, the Commonwealth also brought New Yorkers directly to Bootstrap. Goodwill exchange trips served as a favorite Commonwealth public relations tool.¹⁰¹ Puerto Rican education commissioner Mariano Villaronga spearheaded the program Operation Understanding, a teacher exchange program meant to educate mainland teachers and administrators as well as their island counterparts on how to improve the academic achievement of Puerto Rican students in New York.¹⁰² Around twelve New York-based teachers were flown to Puerto Rico every year to learn more about the island and its culture, in hopes of taking these lessons back to New York City schools. Around the same number of island-based educators were then brought to New York to serve as Substitute Auxiliary Teachers, Spanish-speaking liaisons that Puerto Rican leaders had successfully advocated the NYC BOE to hire.¹⁰³

UPR's dean of education, Pedro Cebollero, also made a trip to New York in the late 1940s to establish contacts with mainland educators and policymakers, resulting in the “New York University Workshop-Field Study in Puerto Rican Education and Culture,” led by NYU early childhood education professor Robert Speer.¹⁰⁴ The Commonwealth sponsored over $50,000 worth in scholarships connected to the workshop, which brought hundreds of New York-based educators to Puerto Rico for six weeks over the summer for roughly two decades, from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, hoping to give “teachers, administrators, community and social workers in areas of New York City in which Puerto Ricans are numerous a deep-seated understanding of the circumstances under which the Puerto Rican children grow up to the end that they may more intelligently deal with the problems of adaptation and adjustment.”¹⁰⁵ Participants stayed in Puerto Rican homes, met with Puerto Rican statesmen, and took the Bootstrap tours of industry, community development projects, and education programs on the “island of how-to-do-it.” The movement of educators and academics between New York and Puerto Rico proved constant, and significant in shaping the educational landscape in the city from the late 1940s through the 1960s.

When the Johnson administration officially launched the War on Poverty in 1964, it included as one of its hallmarks the effort to include the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in its programming. The Office of Economic Opportunity, which administered funds through local Community Action Programs (CAPs), was headed by Sargent Shriver, who had been managing the Peace Corps since his appointment by Kennedy in 1961. Shriver, along with other influential liberals, brought their experience in both education and global community development to the task of eliminating poverty in the poorest communities of the United States. With regard to the War on Poverty in the historically Black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Michael Woodsworth argues that the new CAPs allowed community members who had already been actively organizing at the neighborhood level in the context of the civil rights movement to build on earlier projects and funnel policy ideas upward to the federal level.¹⁰⁶ For Puerto Ricans, this dynamic also rings true, yet they built on experiences with education reform on the island, Cold War development aid abroad, and anti-poverty programs geared toward migrants in the Diaspora. Global and colonial entanglements therefore shaped community action from multiple channels.

Compensatory education also became a hallmark of War on Poverty-era educational programming. Yet the ideas that served as the intellectual backbone of these programs, including Oscar Lewis's work on the “culture of poverty,” grew directly from his anthropological ethnographies in Mexico and Puerto Rico, published in Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959) and La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty, New York and San Juan (1966). La Vida, which won the National Book Award in 1967, followed the “Ríos” family (a pseudonym) from “the most infamous slum in San Juan” to the tenement houses of East Harlem and the South Bronx.¹⁰⁷ In a salacious and offensive portrait of the family's matriarch and extended family, he developed his thesis about a cross-national culture of pathology supposedly inherent to all peoples living in poverty. Building on ideas he had circulated earlier, Lewis concluded in La Vida, “By the time slum children are age six or seven they have usually absorbed the basic values and attitudes of their subculture and are not psychologically geared to take full advantage of changing conditions or increased opportunities which may occur in their lifetime.”¹⁰⁸ The culture of poverty idea therefore squared with the premises of modernization theory that were being applied in the Third World, which also emphasized culture and the unique role of early childhood education in making men “modern.” While garnering much critique, especially from Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Black Americans who became the targets of such rhetoric and the policies it engendered, the culture of poverty proved crucial in shaping educational programming in racialized communities. Lewis became an influential figure in crafting the War on Poverty, serving directly on Johnson's Task Force for Early Childhood Education.¹⁰⁹

Countless other education reforms and ideas of this era also reveal threads winding back to Puerto Rico or international development programs or both. Although this article does not attempt to analyze all of these links and limits its focus on New York City, it is fair to say that a number of policies could and should be studied using a hemispheric and imperial framework. The Teachers Corps, for example, was inspired by the Peace Corps, and many Teacher Corps candidates who worked with Spanish-speaking children in the US received training from University of Puerto Rico faculty, and many returned Peace Corps volunteers taught in urban schools.¹¹⁰ Some Puerto Ricans also point to San Juan mayor Felisa Rincón de Gautier's escuelas maternales (early childhood schools) as an early inspiration for Head Start.¹¹¹ Bilingual-bicultural education was heavily influenced by colonial language policy in Puerto Rico and the advocacy of Puerto Rican officials and activists, evidenced through their testimonies in favor of the Federal Bilingual Education Act and their influence on bilingual education in New York City and State as well as other cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Miami.¹¹² Experts experimented with Spanish-language educational testing in Puerto Rico, under the aegis of the College Board (interestingly, overseen by Chester Bowles's brother, Frank Bowles), before it was exported to Latin America with Alliance for Progress funds.¹¹³ Educational television and radio, used in Puerto Rico and other modernization sites in Latin America, also came to prominence in poor urban and rural settings domestically.¹¹⁴ And educational contracting to private companies—what would become a hallmark of neoliberal education reforms of the 1970s and 1980s—had origins in Puerto Rico's Bootstrap programs and the Alliance for Progress.¹¹⁵

Though not the focus of this article, grassroots activists also recognized these links between the foreign, colonial, and domestic. The United Bronx Parents, a Puerto Rican-led organization, in its application for CAP funds used an international frame to make its case for community-trained teachers instead of university-trained ones. “Peace Corpsmen are only considered partially trained when they leave our country's supervision; the essence of their training lies in the experience of being supervised by the country they are assigned to serve. Why not here too?” asked parent activist Evelina López Antonetty, who also understood Puerto Ricans’ second-class status in New York as inherently linked to the colonial status of the island.¹¹⁶ Critics of the War on Poverty like F. Nunes, writing in the Black freedom struggle journal Freedomways, remarked, “The Anti-Poverty Program made its appearance in the same era as the Alliance for Progress. The Scheme is merely a domestic version of that larger plot,” noting that “residents of Bedford Stuyvesant do not control their ghetto any more than Venezuelans do theirs.”¹¹⁷ A young Puerto Rican high school student, writing in his Aspira club newsletter, wrote a similar critique in an article entitled “Foreign Aid,” in which he explained how “American Imperialism takes over a country with money,” using Puerto Rico and other Third World nations as examples.¹¹⁸

Navajo tribal leader Paul Jones even appealed to the Ford Foundation for a grant to study development programs abroad and in other colonized territories, including India, the Philippines, and specifically Puerto Rico's Operation Bootstrap. Seeing the Navajo's problems as “rather common to underdeveloped people in other parts of the world,” he wrote to Horace Holmes, the Ford Foundation's community development consultant, noting, “The mission [to these areas] would come at a time when Navajos are aware of the necessity of involving the people in local communities in all programs of tribal social and economic progress,” strategically embracing the embrace of maximum feasible participation common to that period. “The fact that the Ford Foundation is interested and involved in community development, and that foreign governments have undertaken projects will certainly underscore the importance of the method and arouse greater interest in its application by the Navajo Tribe.”¹¹⁹ From policymakers to parent activists, connections between foreign, colonial, and domestic community development programs were obvious to those on the ground in the 1950s and 1960s.

The eventual decline of the War on Poverty by the mid-1970s and the declension of foreign aid also occurred in tandem. The roots of neoliberalism had been sown. And as scholars have well documented, that too was a global story, with direct links to Latin America.¹²⁰ As an illustration of this phenomenon in the realm of education, just one year before James S. Coleman published his infamous “Coleman Report” of 1966, which concluded that education spending did not equate to improved outcomes, he reached a similar conclusion in the context of international development in the Third World.¹²¹ And just one year before that, he served on a team of scholars employed by the US Army to participate in a research program entitled Project Camelot, a controversial counterinsurgency effort focused on employing social scientists to predict political upheaval in Latin America—a program Latin Americans decried as classic Yankee imperialism.¹²² Coleman's conclusions regarding US education, like so many other scholars’ findings of the era, cannot be divorced from their relationship to international research and policy networks within the context of Cold War American empire.

Conclusion

Histories of postwar education often operate in a strictly national frame. When the Cold War or foreign policy come into consideration, the standoff with Soviet Communism often takes center stage, as in the case of the reasoning behind Eisenhower's National Defense Education Act or the rise of anti-communist teacher purges. Yet American postwar education policy was also deeply entangled with Cold War development programs and foreign policy in the Global South, as this article illustrates through the case of Puerto Rico and its connections to Latin America and New York. Owing to its position as a colonial territory, a Cold War laboratory of capitalist development, and a leading source of Latinx migration to the nation's largest and most influential city, Puerto Rico served as a particularly important crossroads linking education and social policy across the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, Puerto Rico's long-standing categorization as “foreign in a domestic sense” made that role all the more possible.¹²³ As historian Laura Briggs notes, “One of the things that allows and perpetuates the scholarly neglect of Puerto Rico is the belief that it is only important to Puerto Ricans, or North Americans visiting the island. On the contrary, colonialism has a profound effect on culture and policy on the mainland.”¹²⁴ By tracing the circulation of educational ideas and practices between the island of Puerto Rico, Latin America, and New York, this article affirms the importance of hemispheric and imperial lenses in understanding the full contours of postwar American education.