NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- It has been fifty years since the Puerto Rican and Latino Studies Department became a part of CUNY’s Brooklyn College curriculum.
What started out as just a group of students wanting more diversity within the college student body became a new department teaching about the many different cultural backgrounds that reflected the growing population of New York City.
"In a way, it was demanded by students at Brooklyn College. I was one of them." This is how Professor Antonio Nadal describes the beginning of the activism by Black and Puerto Rican students that brought about the Puerto Rican and Latino Studies department.
According to Nadal, it took groups of students with different backgrounds — Blacks, Latinos, white progressives — coming together to have demonstrations on campus to apply pressure on the administration.
While Nadal describes being a part of this movement as “exhilarating," it was not an easy road. He uses a quote by Chilean folk singer, Victor Jara, “se hace camino al andar (you make the road as you walk)” to express what they went through. During the demonstrations arrests were made. For those who became a part of the department, Nadal says, the arrests and letters of insubordination stayed within their files.
There were many challenges, like how to create a curriculum. Where would they get the instructors to teach a curriculum? Who would they recruit? Scholars who had come from Puerto Rico to New York, activists within the community, such as Luis Reyes and Cesar Perales and social scientists among others.
For Nadal, the department he was a part of for 45 years allowed their students to learn about a history they could be proud of, a struggle their people went through that so many others did, including Dominicans, Cubans and others.