It's official, Fortuño's administration in Puerto Rico is approaching Rosselló-type decadence and intellectual retardation.
Not only is he an avid statehooder and right-wing member of the U.S. Republican Party (a friend of mine once described him as someone who just happens to have a Spanish suriname, to his own lament, of course), has thrown thousands of people onto the streets and into the unemployment lines, is promoting a military-style police force (to beat-up university students, of course), he now promotes the banning of books! (For more information, click here, here, and here)
In a theater review, I described "la isla del encanto" as "a land in the clouds, bordering the unreal and the fantastic - that to fathom it is to envision a dream dancing with a nightmare." With this most recent occurrence by the Fortuño administration to hinder the political, social, and intellectual development of the island, I believe my description is evermore accurate and relevant.
Any society that begins to censor books, especially under the mantle of "protecting young minds" must prepare itself for the advent of a long, treacherous nightmare.
Books, especially from our Boricua masters Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá and José Luis González, enable humanity to produce a critical eye onto our contemporary and historic realities - to understand the complexities of being human and the urgent issues that affect us. And, hopefully, to find solutions to those problems. "El entierro de Cortijo," by Rodríguez Juliá, for example, is one of my favorite books and actively seeks to portray the sometimes painful intersection between class, race, popular culture, political corruption, and sexism in the colonial urban Puerto Rican context. Just because there is one sex scene (between a Senator and a poor mulata, at that!) in this, one of the most popular pieces of Boricua literature, is, I believe, not the real motive of Fortuño's regime. It is because it deals with all the aforementioned issues.
Any society that begins to censor books, especially under the mantle of "protecting young minds" must prepare itself for the advent of a long, treacherous nightmare.
Books, especially from our Boricua masters Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá and José Luis González, enable humanity to produce a critical eye onto our contemporary and historic realities - to understand the complexities of being human and the urgent issues that affect us. And, hopefully, to find solutions to those problems. "El entierro de Cortijo," by Rodríguez Juliá, for example, is one of my favorite books and actively seeks to portray the sometimes painful intersection between class, race, popular culture, political corruption, and sexism in the colonial urban Puerto Rican context. Just because there is one sex scene (between a Senator and a poor mulata, at that!) in this, one of the most popular pieces of Boricua literature, is, I believe, not the real motive of Fortuño's regime. It is because it deals with all the aforementioned issues.
Censorship has no place in Puerto Rico, Señor Fortuño!
