Students Learn Community Organizing in the Caribbean

Over seven days in June, the 16 students and their professors — Monisha Bajaj from USF and Anita Yudkin from the University of Puerto Rico — met with teachers, artists, and activists, all working to lift Puerto Rico.

In San Juan, the class visited La Goyco community center and met the people who founded it, said Miguel Martinez EdD ’27. “The community center is a former school. It was abandoned, with chains on the doors. People in the neighborhood cut the chains, cleaned up the building, and turned it into a community center with art classes, music classes, job counseling, and a mental health clinic.”

Jazmin Richardson MA ’26 added that while it’s inspiring to meet people who bring education to underserved communities, “Professor Eduardo Lugo-Hernandez from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, told us that resilience shouldn’t be romanticized. When we romanticize resilience, we let the government off the hook. The government has a responsibility to provide for the people.”

Richardson said that being in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, enabled the students to immerse themselves in a different culture while still remaining under United States visa jurisdiction. “With the current political climate and the risks of travel, this allowed us safer re-entry into the mainland,” she said.

For his final project in the class, Martinez designed a Puerto Rico immersion for the students at Cristo Rey De La Salle, the high school in Oakland where he is assistant principal. “On the first day, the students visit an organization in Puerto Rico and learn about its history, the theory behind it, and about the work it does,” he said. “And then on the second day, they go back and actually do the work."