La política educativa española en Puerto Rico a finales del siglo XIX: un factor más de contención en las aspiraciones independentistas

Abstract

Although the 1876 Spanish restorative Constitution left the concept of national sovereignty behind and in its place proposed a specific statute for the overseas colonies by which they were to be governed through special laws6, the truth is that this singularity did nothing but maintain the tight corset of Hispanic colonialism, imposed since the Conquest and during its commercial and territorial expansion. Neither the profound social and economic transformations experienced through the centuries, nor the balance, highly demanded by native population in the fields of production and commerce (which granted the metropolis great power), nor the claims for freedom of speech and participation in the political issues that so directly affected them (the Real Decreto dated November 22nd 1897, which set universal male suffrage equivalent to that in the Iberian Peninsula, was not only not credible, but also arrived late), nor respect for the indigenous condition that inhabitants desired in order to obtain their own marks of identity, were ever taken into consideration.

On the contrary, defense of large states, of interventionism, of inquisitional practices in social and cultural spheres and of slavery in the economic sphere, of the acceptance of caste rules with a clear racist bias and, in the end, of the preservation of a system of production that was anachronistic and more than criticized in most of Europe and America at the end of the 19th century, would remain as policies of control and appeasement of territories that were considered property of Spain and of inhabitants who were considered inherently evil and bellicose, devoid of any skill for social or cultural life, incapable of participating in economic affairs and lacking in power to influence, much less to make decisions in, political affairs. The euphemistically labeled "Social Question", which referred only to the excessive exploitation built on slavery and indigenous servitude, could no longer favor the accumulative and extractive economic model of immeasurable wealth, only efficient in terms of the fiscal policy and the needs of the real hacienda española, which highlighted the existing differences between homo europeus and homo americanus, with its corresponding range of economic, social and racial nuances. And, as Eduardo Galeano has masterfully put it, "the resurrection of Greco-Roman slavery in the New World had miraculous aspects".