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There are many goals that one could have for organizing viewpoint-diverse events. To my mind, one set of goals is pedagogical. Are we capturing viewpoint diversity? Are we hosting scholars who represent three to four distinct viewpoints on the topic in question? And are we allowing an opportunity for those scholars to clarify sites of both diverging and converging interpretations of the topic?

Our institutional goals are also significant. We have found that, ideally, these events are successful if faculty across subject departments incentivize their students to attend the event, whether by encouraging them, offering them extra credit, or even requiring them to attend and perhaps designing an assignment around it, and we find that this is more likely to happen if the events that we design align with our faculty members’ curricular aims.

For this particular event,^[1] we chose the topic in close collaboration with our intrepid graduate student research assistant, Crystalynn Ortiz, who is the event moderator. She’s moderated a number of our viewpoint diverse panel discussions over the past years. Her own particular research has focused in part on Puerto Rican history and she brought a strong interest in this question.

In terms of thinking about a viewpoint-diverse approach to this question, we wanted at minimum to capture some of these key viewpoints that have been expressed via plebiscite on the island over the past years and decades when the question of the political status has come up: Puerto Rico should become a state; Puerto Rico should remain a commonwealth or unincorporated territory of the U.S.; Puerto Rico should become an independent country; and then one option that we did end up capturing, one answer to the status question that we were not very initially familiar with, is sovereign free association. So we pose the following questions to our panelists:

• Should Puerto Rico remain a territory, become a U.S. state, or become an independent country?
• Which of these alternatives would most benefit Puerto Ricans?
• How much or how little will the island’s political status specifically determine its fate overall?

We envision this event as relevant to our HSI [Hispanic-Serving Institution] campus because our campus has historic and ongoing ties to Chicago’s Puerto Rican population. In Chicago and on our campus there are a number of Puerto Rican cultural nationalist organizations that tend to favor independence. Our campus also has some historic and ongoing ties to politicians who have emerged out of Puerto Rican nationalist organizations in Chicago.

Related to this, we did anticipate some potential pushback for approaching this topic in a viewpoint-diverse manner. For example, one faculty member, upon learning that we intended to host scholar speakers with diverging viewpoints on this question, advised that perhaps we should take a different approach, and the implication was that we should take an approach more in line with activism and advocacy for Puerto Rican independence.

I won’t get into the complex process of recruiting speakers and how that went, but I’ll tell you about our lineup. Representing the pro-independence position was Jenaro Abraham, a political scientist at Gonzaga University. His forthcoming book is Challenging Neoliberalism and Colonialism of Puerto Rico, and that gives you a sense of where he was coming from. He gave a detailed presentation of the history of economic extraction in Puerto Rico culminating in recent decades, and debt restructuring, debt crisis, capital flight, job loss, the decreased tax base, and this culminated, he argued, in 2016 when the U.S. Congress imposed a fiscal control board—unelected fiscal control board, PROMESA, that has further resulted in what he would characterize as kind of neoliberal austerity policies on the island. He argued that independence should be supported because it would allow Puerto Rico to combat this neoliberal austerity agenda and align with other Latin American countries in trade and international relations that may be taking a more anti-colonial approach.

Second speaker, Harry Franqui-Rivera, represented the pro-statehood position. Now he did in sort of very liberal spirit because he actually said that this is not his own personal viewpoint, but he really felt compelled or obliged to give voice to it. I suppose you could say he’s anti-anti-statehood. He thinks many of the critiques of pro-statehood as a position are very wrong headed. He’s a historian of Bloomfield College. He has in his history sort of rehabilitated the legacy and spirit of Soldiers of the Nation,^[2] the Puerto Ricans who served in the U.S. military. Among his arguments was that they have been falsely characterized as colonial occupiers and he thinks that this is completely wrong. Puerto Rico is not occupied. Soldiers are not sell-outs. He argues that in fact statehood is very popular on the island. It would defeat independence in a one-on-one referendum in a landslide. He argues that the positive case for it is that it would provide greater access to federal antipoverty funding. It would also allow the island to influence U.S. politics and thus world politics, and end the status game, as he called it, where all the politics on the island becomes sort of captured in this question, in the status question rather than other questions that affect Puerto Ricans.

Our third speaker, Jorge Duany, advocated for sovereign free association. He’s an anthropologist at Florida International University and the author of Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know.^[3] One of the things that attracted us to him as a panelist is that in this book he describes some of the ways in which Puerto Ricans, you might say, somewhat successfully navigate the current Commonwealth territory status quo situation with the United States, especially Puerto Ricans in the diaspora. Nevertheless, he did say in his comments that he thinks the Commonwealth status is no longer tenable post-PROMESA, post 2016 unelected fiscal control board. He argues that sovereign free association, in which the island would be treaty-bound to the US, would give it greater options in terms of trade, ending the U.S. shipping monopoly. The island would maintain some of its cultural traditions, it’s language, but it would lose access to some federal programs.

Fourth and final speaker was Ian Seda-Irizarry, an economist at City University of New York. He argues that the question of political economy on the island is distinct from, and arguably more fundamental than, the question of its political status.^[4] He’s pointed out, for example, that what he described as capitalist candidates have supported multiple status options, and been supported by an elite super PAC on the island. He argued that there’s both a long history and future potential for PROMESA-type state-led upward economic redistribution to persist regardless of the status of the island politically, or regardless of the status preference of the political party administering the island.

During the Q&A, Harry Franqui-Rivera stated that there’s effectively a blacklist of pro-statehood scholars. This was challenged by Jenaro Abraham. Also, Jorge Duany questioned whether there’s really evidence among experts that independence is economically viable for Puerto Rico. Here again, Jenaro Abraham argued that that there is such evidence. There were, however, converging interpretations. All seem to agree that the current Commonwealth status is untenable or undesirable, though for somewhat different reasons. I would say that all shared broadly an anticolonial framework, or at least no one came out in favor of the current status or colonialism per se.

There were some missing interpretations in this event. It’s always good to take stock of these when curating viewpoint diverse events. No one argued the Puerto Rico needs PROMESA to regain access to foreign credit markets. No one argued that the Commonwealth status remains tenable. No speaker came from a libertarian, conservative, or right wing viewpoint. Nevertheless, I do think we satisfied our pedagogical goal of capturing three to four distinct viewpoints.

Institutionally, this was very successful. Attendance was promoted by thirteen faculty members across four subject departments. To our surprise, one faculty member even designed a new assignment around this event after we advertised it, and we received only positive feedback, including from the faculty member who was skeptical that we should take a viewpoint diverse approach to this event. We had an audience of 68, I think in part because we held the event during the second week of the semester, which is good for students. We had 30 survey respondent with very positive results.

The upshot of all of this is that I would invite you to consider that library-organized viewpoint diverse events can support the curricular aims of our faculty on campus, and thereby build and strengthen relationships between academic libraries and subject faculty and subject departments.

Curating a Viewpoint Diverse Panel Discussion of the Political Status of Puerto Rico at a Hispanic-Serving Institution by Edward Remus

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