09-4-0405

Nieto, Sonia, ed. Puerto Rican Students in U.S. Schools. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. 354 pp. ISBN 0-8058-2764-1, $79.95 (cl); 0-8058-2765-X, $34.50 (pb).

This is another anthology describing the failure of the U.S. educational system to educate adequately a minority group. In this case the focus is on Puerto Ricans, but the overall tone and the specific subjects of the dozen essays will be familiar to any scholar of multicultural education.

The three contributions to Part I stress the problems associated with frequent movement within the United States and back and forth between Puerto Rico and the mainland. Apart from the obvious problems these processes pose to schooling, they create significant dislocation in many students. Part II has four essays on the problems of developing a "Puerto Rican identity" in terms of language, gender, and family structures. Parts III and IV describe successful initiatives that empower students and their communities through school-focused activism. Janice Petrovich Beiso’s afterword, calling for Puerto Ricans to cooperate with other "marginalized" and "nondominant" groups to "decolonialize" the American school system, sums up the sense of the book.

Whether those recommendations meet the needs of Puerto Rican students, as opposed to activist educators, is at least a subject for debate. A case can be made that the same levels of energy directed toward developing cultures of learning, as opposed to cultures of identity, offer a surer path to empowerment in an open, capitalist economy than do the politicizing shortcuts advocated in these pages.

—Dennis E. Showalter
Colorado College