"Yo Soy Boricua, Pa Que Tu Lo Sepa" - I Am Boricuena, Just So You Know. This is an anthem I grew up cheering to. Every year, I go out to the Puerto Rican Day parade and dance to the music playing, wave a flag that symbolizes such a beautiful country as floats parade on by. Then it’s off to grandma’s house to enjoy one of her home cooked meals. But why do I do this? Why am I so proud of being Puerto Rican? How did this country come to be? How was it formed and why is it still fighting for its independence? For these and many more reasons I have chosen this "country" as the one I have want to research. I don’t exactly understand how these two "countries" have come in contact with each other. I put quotations around the word country because Puerto Rico is considered a common wealth of the United States. What does that mean exactly? “Hey umm yea you can be your country but not exactly ok? You still belong to the United States. Smile!” Politics it cracks me up sometimes. I mean if I had to take an educational guess, I would have to base it on my knowledge of American history. I would said these two countries have come in contact because of immigration, migration, war, cultural exchange, economic exchange and just because there close to each other.
Well that’s what I picked up form reading Wikipedia. Many have complaints about this particular encyclopedia but honestly? It’s not so bad. It sort of like a “data dump” as Professor T called it. It gives you a little bit of everything. Granted some say there sources are not always reliable but sometimes sources which are reliable can be of no good use to a person. (Again a little fun fact I picked up from Professor T.) To research something on Wikipedia you have to have patients. There are lots of links, a lot of external resources, and no transitional sentences. Wikipedia is not going to give you an argument, it’s simple a list of facts.
I tell you one thing though I found a pretty interesting source. I clicked on one of the number’s by the words (yes people they have a purpose, I was amazed to. Lol) and was sent to a document called “Hearing before the Committee on Resources”, presented in the House of Representatives. It was 204 so I obviously didn’t sit and read the whole thing but it basically contained the arguments of different people concerning the independence of Puerto Rico. It seems like a pretty good read. You should check it out. The links down there in red, cool huh? vv
*http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=105_house_hearings&docid=f:40445.pdf*
Hi Celeste - Looks like this is going to be an interesting topic for you. Did the encylopedia article help you get a sense of the basic narrative of the relationship? Do you have a sense of the time period you'd like to look at?
ReplyDeleteActually no it didnt, i just sort of stumble upon the information. It gave me a sense of the topic i want to focus on and that is America's involvement i Puerto Rico's Indepence. Its pretty a pretty interesting topic that really caught my attention.
ReplyDeleteAs we talked about, this is a really interesting issues since among Puerto Rican's there's been a long debate about what the status should be. So in terms of our power analysis and different interest groups, there's a lot going on.
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