Special Issue: Aquí y allá: Puerto Rican Education across the Archipelago and the Diaspora

Guest Editors: 
Daicy Diaz-Granados, Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO), Nichole Margarita Garcia, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey 

Puerto Rican educator and scholar Juan Osuna (1949) began his seminal account of Puerto Rican educational systems under Spanish and then American colonial rule by warning against the temptation to think of popular education as beginning with governmental policy, provisions, and legislation and neglecting the origins [emphasis added] or the important work and efforts of those whose work is ultimately recognized (or not, as the case may be) by the government. We take inspiration from Juan Osuna’s warning and begin with the expansive view that Puerto Rican knowledge is deeply rooted in cultural practice, which is multi-dimensional and complicated. We also note the impact of Puerto Rico having been colonized for over 500 years—for 400 years under Spanish colonial rule and for 127 years as a colony of the United States. In his lucid critique of the American colonial administration of Puerto Rican schools, Osuna (1949) observed that there was no fundamentally sound philosophy of education guiding the American colonial education system in Puerto Rico and that the well-qualified Puerto Rican people themselves should be the leaders of their own educational system. As we look at education in Puerto Rico today, we not only acknowledge the legacy of colonialism and the chokehold of coloniality, we center the expertise, passion, successes, and impact of Puerto Rican educators, scholars, students, parents, cultural workers, and communities in shaping and fighting for equitable educational experiences.

Taken together, this orientation reflects what Puerto Rican communities have long described as aquí y allá, a phrase grounded in everyday Puerto Rican life that names the reality of living, learning, and sustaining community across the archipelago and the diaspora, and which frames this special issue’s examination of education as inherently relational rather than geographically bounded. In this special issue, we invite authors to examine the educational policies, programs, and experiences of Puerto Ricans in the archipelago and in the diaspora to better understand the current state of education and idiosyncratic nature of Puerto Rican educational experiences and outcomes. Puerto Rican education today sits at the intersection of demographic change, structural constraint, policy turmoil, and community resilience. A central feature of the contemporary landscape is the transnational dispersal of Puerto Ricans: more than 6.1 million individuals of Puerto Rican descent reside in the 50 US states and the District of Columbia, making Puerto Ricans the second largest Latinx origin group in the nation after Mexicans and constituting about 1.8% of the overall US population (U.S. Census Bureau 2023; Pew Research Center 2023). Roughly two-thirds of this population lives outside of the archipelago, with particularly large concentrations in the Northeast and Florida, informing schooling patterns, language negotiations, and policy responses across regional educational systems (Duany 2002, 2017; Pew Research Center 2023). These demographic dynamics are foundational to understanding educational experience, policy engagement, and institutional life for Puerto Rican students and families across contexts.

In the archipelago, Puerto Rico public education has experienced a dramatic contraction in student population over the last two decades, reflecting a combination of out-migration, economic pressures, and demographic aging. National Center for Education Statistics data show that the total number of public elementary and secondary students in Puerto Rico was approximately 250,668 in 2022, down significantly from earlier counts, and continuing a long-term trend of shrinking enrollment (NCES 2024). School systems have simultaneously undergone structural reconfiguration: an unprecedented wave of closures saw approximately 673 schools (about 44% of all facilities) shuttered over an eleven-year period, severely altering educational access and community life (Othering & Belonging Institute n.d.). These trends have unfolded amid a series of compounding crises such as the imposition of a fiscal control board and measures taken leading to economic austerity, the devastating impact of Hurricanes Irma and María, subsequent natural events, and ongoing infrastructure challenges, which have further exacerbated the difficulties of sustained instruction and school continuity.

Postsecondary education in the archipelago and diaspora reflects gains and continued disparities. According to the American Community Survey, approximately 29–30% of Puerto Ricans age 25 and older on the island hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, with high school graduation rates exceeding 80% but still trailing US stateside averages (U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts 2025). In the US context, about 24% of Puerto Ricans ages 25 and older have obtained at least a bachelor’s degree, a rate slightly above the broader Latinx average (20%) but below national rates for the total population; moreover, attainment varies by birthplace, with diasporic-born Puerto Ricans showing higher rates than those born in the archipelago (Pew Research Center 2023). These patterns reflect structural inequities in access and the uneven impact of regional labor markets and educational pathways. Furthermore, Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), defined federally as accredited degree-granting colleges and universities in which at least 25% of full-time equivalent undergraduate students identify as Hispanic or Latino, play an increasingly important role in mediating these pathways, as many Puerto Rican students in the archipelago and diaspora enroll in HSIs that provide culturally responsive programming, transfer pathways, and localized support structures created by the demographic realities of Puerto Rican communities (Garcia 2019; Núñez et al. 2016; U.S. Department of Education 2024).

Across the archipelago and diaspora, Puerto Rican students and communities navigate educational institutions structured by colonial governance, racial capitalism, linguistic stratification, disaster, migration, and contested forms of citizenship. However, these same communities continue to generate intellectual traditions, pedagogical practices, and resistant strategies that challenge deficit renderings of Puerto Rican life and compel scholars to rethink what counts as educational possibility aquí y allá. This special issue centers these tensions and possibilities, inviting scholarship that examines education not as geographically bounded but as relationally produced across interconnected Puerto Rican worlds.

 Guest editors welcome empirical, theoretical, methodological, and policy-oriented manuscripts and short essays, poems, photography, and art that explore and inform about the state of education in the Puerto Rican archipelago and diaspora. Specific topics for this issue may include, but are not limited, to the following areas as they relate to the state of Puerto Rican education in the archipelago and/or the diaspora:

• Evolution and/or current state of educational systems across the Puerto Rican archipelago and diaspora
• Colonialism, coloniality, governance, and educational policy
• Decolonial, abolitionist, antiracist, and/or feminist liberatory praxis, programs, curricula and pedagogies 
• Educational impacts of disaster/disaster capitalism, migration, educational displacement and effects/shifts in Puerto Rican communities in the diaspora and archipelago
• Puerto Rican educational experiences through the lens of Ethnic Studies, Black and Puerto Rican Studies, Diaspora Studies, Disability Studies and/or other fields of study 
• Accounts of how Puerto Rican educational experiences overlap/resonate with other communities 
• Privatization, neoliberal reforms, charter and private schools 
• College access, choice, persistence, and retention
• Puerto Rican educational experiences across varied institutional sectors, including public and private four-year universities, community and two-year colleges, and Minority-Serving Institutions, particularly Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs)
• Community and familial-based knowledge systems
• Afro–Puerto Rican, queer, Indigenous, and intersectional perspectives
• Language, bilingualism, translanguaging, and identity formation
• Teacher preparation and leadership pipelines
• Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method innovations in Puerto Rican education research
• Futures-oriented and liberation-centered educational frameworks

We especially encourage submissions that move beyond critique toward generative, reparative, and future-oriented reimaginings of education that helps us understand not only the conditions Puerto Rican communities navigate, but the educational worlds they are actively creating aquí y allá.

Possible Submission Formats:

To allow for a breadth of approaches and lenses, contributors are invited to submit pieces in one of the following formats (with listed word counts, inclusive of main text, references, and notes):

Articles (12,000 words max)
Short essays/interviews (2,000 words)
Poems (1-3 poems depending on length)
Art/photography (1 piece/representative photograph with a brief written explanation)

Timeline:

Abstract submission deadline: June 4, 2026
Notification of abstract approval: July 8, 2026
Final manuscript submission: Oct 26, 2026

The publication of this special volume (v. 39, n. 3) is scheduled for January 2028.

Abstract Submission Details

Please send a 250-word abstract of your work and a 50-word biography to the following link (https://bit.ly/Centro_Journal_Fall2027_Abstract). We will accept abstracts and manuscripts in English and Spanish. 

For more information: Questions should be addressed to the guest editors of the special issue or to the journal editor:

Daicy Diaz-Granados (daicy.diaz@centropr.app)
Nichole Margarita Garcia (nichole.garcia@gse.rutgers.edu) 
Gustavo Quintero Vera (journal@hunter.cuny.edu)