Photo: Sampling from the Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico Portal
Fired up with anger when he heard that his school was scheduled for closing, 9-year-old third grader Asean Johnson became the first of our proletarian collective protestors to voice demands when he told members of the Chicago Public Schools’ Board: “Let the community speak, let the teachers speak, let the students speak, let the parents speak, let them control this Board, don’t let the bankers control this board.” Shortly after, at a mass meeting in his school our young and fiery orator lifted his arm and spread the word and reminded: “We are not toys…. We are not leaving, not without a fight.” And like a chorus leader he chanted: “Education is a right, that is why we have to fight.”
Meanwhile, in the Humboldt Park area, Rosemary Vega, a young Puerto Rican mother, led a picket line of Mexican Americans and Anglo parents and teachers protesting the announced closing of their neighborhood elementary school, one more of the 48 schools scheduled for a permanent shut down.
Further southeast of the border, in the colonial territory of Puerto Rico, there are many young mothers like Rosemary Vega and many children fired up with anger, perhaps ready to become an Asean. But there are also the bankers, the real estate agents and the corporations for whom education is just a commodity, a piece of merchandise to be sold to the highest bidder.
While in Chicago our children face massive school shutdowns and teachers’ layoffs, in Puerto Rico the political servants of the capitalist class also threaten to shut down schools and lay off teachers. To the tune of the “fiscal crisis” chant, the ruling class insists that workers must feed the profit hungry bankers while working class students and teachers are shut down and left in the midst of increasing uncertainty and social decay.
However, in Chicago as in Puerto Rico, an increasing number of parents, students and teachers are becoming aware, struggling against the depredatory effect of a social and economic system that breeds wealth for the ruling class and their corporate bosses and impoverishes a growing army of dispossessed throughout the United States of North America and its south east colonial Caribbean territories like Puerto Rico.
To face a single powerful enemy such as the corporate capitalist state of the United States of North America, the unity of diverse trenches of struggling dispossessed Latinos, African Americans, and Anglos to insure our collective survival, is not simply a good idea — it is our only way out. To achieve this unity, new methods of struggle are a must. But we will not win unless we destroy the false barriers of national and ethnic differences that this tiny financial parasitical class imposes amongst us, so that they can continue to live off our collective sweat
