Autonomy "entre comillas": Teachers state, and empire in neoliberal education reform in Puerto Rico

This dissertation examines the impact of everyday relations and activities of public school teachers in Puerto Rico on Puerto Rican state formation. I bring both historic attention to public school teachers and Puerto Rican state formation across the twentieth century and particular ethnographic attention to the neoliberal reconfigurations of schooling and state in Puerto Rico in the 1990s. I look historically at state use of race, gender and class ideologies to construct claims and expectations toward teachers under both official U.S. colonialism and by the current Commonwealth government under pressures from the U.S. Department of Education. I trace the diversity of teachers' historically constructed social relations and examine how different teachers have used these, collectively and individually, to both confound and confirm state-based mandates for school reform. My analysis is based on seventeen months of fieldwork in Puerto Rican public schools in 1999 and 2000, as well as primary research in the Puerto Rican state archives and the Puerto Rican Department of Education. My fieldwork included eight months of participant observation in schools, teacher surveys in four schools, two focus group interviews with teachers and one with mothers, and fifty-seven individual interviews with teachers, administrators, state officials, and parents and community members. Through cycles of "crisis" and reform that have historically marked shifts in Puerto Rican state formation and corresponding public education policies, public school teachers in Puerto Rico have been charged with the responsibility of forming the particular kind of person needed to facilitate each of these dominant modes of Puerto Rican state relations. Viewed from the lives and experiences of public school teachers in Puerto Rico, these historical processes of Puerto Rican state formation point to ongoing tensions in teachers' daily lives between autonomy and control and coercion and consent. Such tensions have also marked the historical relations between the U.S. and Puerto Rican states. As teachers oppose, appropriate, and accommodate state directives concerning policies, structures, and curricula, their actions and inactions leave their mark on Puerto Rican state formation and U.S.-Puerto Rican state relations.