Join us for an in-person reading, conversation and book-signing with author Mirelsie Velázquez  in celebration of Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City, 1940-1977. For this event, Velázquez will be in conversation with David Stovall.

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The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children’s classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago’s Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican identities. Education also offered women the only venue to exercise power, and they parlayed their positions to take lead roles in activist and political circles. In time, a politicized Puerto Rican community gave voice to a previously silenced group–and highlighted that colonialism does not end when immigrants live among their colonizers.

A perceptive look at big-city community building, Puerto Rican Chicago reveals the links between justice in education and a people’s claim to space in their new home.

Mirelsie Velázquez is an associate professor of education at the University of Oklahoma.

David Stovall works with community organizations and schools to address issues of equity, justice and abolishing the school/prison nexus. His work led him to become a member of the design team for the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice (SOJO), which opened in the Fall of 2005. Furthering his work with communities, students, and teachers, his work manifests itself in his involvement with the Peoples Education Movement, a collection of classroom teachers, community members, students and university professors in Chicago, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area who engage in collaborative community projects centered in creating relevant curriculum. In addition to being a professor at UIC in the department of Black Studies and the department of Criminology, Law and Justice, he also served as a volunteer social studies teacher at the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice from 2005-2018.

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Tags: Chicago, David Stovall, Edgewater, Mirelsie Velázquez, Women & Children First Bookstore