Disrupting Money: Puerto Rican Community Currency Project Makes Its Way to New York for the 2019 Loisaida Festival

Following a successful launch earlier this year, Puerto Rican artists will begin circulating Puerto Rican ‘pesos’ at the Lower Manhattan Festival ahead of one-month residency in the city.

NEW YORK, NY - On May 26, Valor y Cambio, an interactive community currency project that seeks to challenge austerity policies in Puerto Rico and beyond, will have its New York City premiere at the 2019 Loisaida Festival, followed by a one-month residency that will include collaborations with local businesses and other venues. The project is part of Pasado y Presente: Art After the Young Lords 1969-2019, an exhibition produced by Loisaida Inc. in partnership with Nathan Cummings Foundation, that will open on May 31.

At the core of Valor y Cambio (#ValorYCambio) is a community currency, the peso of Puerto Rico, inspired by Puerto Rican figures recognized both locally and internationally for their contributions to social justice. Building on the research of Unpayable Debt, a working group at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference, artists Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Sarabel Santos Negrón first launched the project in Puerto Rico in February 2019. The pesos were available at partner businesses and organizations, through an ATM machine, which dispensed the bills in return for participants recording a short video about what they value. Over a thousand people shared their thoughts and stories during the project’s first week.

By combining art, storytelling, and solidarity economy principles, Valor y Cambio started a broad conversation about what is a just economy and how to foster collective empowerment in the face of austerity policies. “Through engaging with local communities and businesses that are willing to use the currency for a specific period of time, the project provides "an experience about how the economy can better respond to the needs of most people,”  explains Frances Negrón- Muntaner. “It also allows participants to create a different conception of wealth based not on extraction and profit, but full access to education, environmental protection, and racial and gender equity, among other fundamentals."

Community currencies are increasingly used around the world to value the skills, stories, and talents of communities with limited access to the official currency. These currencies do not substitute the official one, but they enable communities to exchange work, time, and resources to meet their needs. There are thousands of community currencies circulating in the world, including in the United States.

The Puerto Rican peso has six denominations, each featuring a figure or community selected for their commitment to the project’s four core values: solidarity, equity, justice, and creativity. They are: the siblings Gregoria, Celestina, and Rafael Cordero, pioneers of Puerto Rico’s modern public education system; the abolitionist physician Ramón Emeterio Betances; feminist and labor organizer Luisa Capetillo; poet Julia de Burgos; human rights advocate and MLB Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente; and the eight communities of the Martín Peña channel in San Juan.

"Each bill tells a story and invites a conversation about the contributions that these figures and communities made toward a more equitable world, and what is needed to continue the work that they started,” says Negrón-Muntaner.

While Valor y Cambio emerged in response to Puerto Rico’s current debt crisis, many of the economic challenges facing Puerto Ricans there have been, and continue to be, present in the Puerto Rican diaspora and other New York communities. Moreover, mass migration itself is a result of economic and political crisis. Not surprisingly, all of the iconic figures that appear on the Puerto Rican pesos experienced the impact of forced migrations in their lifetimes, and several, such as Betances, de Burgos and Capetillo, share a deep connection to New York City.

Valor y Cambio will be present at the 2019 Loisaida Festival, which each year celebrates the diasporic heritage of this historic Puerto Rican neighborhood characterized by a strong sense of community pride, creativity, and innovative resilience. The Puerto Rican pesos will be available through a refurbished ATM called VyC, for Valor y Cambio. "Participants just have to record their responses about what they value. The machine records the video and offers the pesos, which businesses will accept in exchange for some items,” explains Santos Negrón. These recordings will be part of a documentary about the project.

"In both Puerto Rico and New York, many assume that the talents of people without access to dollars have no economic, cultural, or social value. Our project questions that idea and suggests that crisis moments offer an opportunity to rethink an unjust economic system, and to explore creative community-centered initiatives,” concludes Negrón-Muntaner.

For details about the historical figures featured on the bills and more information on social currencies around the world, visit www.valorycambio.org.

To take part in Valor y Cambio NYC, visit the Loisaida Festival and seek participating businesses and organizations that will accept pesos. These include:

Booths at the Loisaida Center, on May 26.

City-wide, from May 26 to June 30

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About the Artists

Frances Negrón-Muntaner is a filmmaker, writer, curator and a professor at Columbia University (New York), where she founded the Latino Arts and Activism Archive. Some of her publications are: Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004), The Latino Media Gap (2014), and Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism in Native Nations and Latin America (2017). Some of her films: Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994), Small City, Big Change (2013), and War for Guam (2015). She has been recognized as a scholar and filmmaker with fellowships by Ford, Truman, Rockefeller and Pew foundations. She is also the recipient of the Lenfest Award, one of Columbia University's most prestigious recognitions for excellence in teaching and scholarship (2012), an inaugural OZY Educator Award (2017), and the Frank Bonilla Public Intellectual Award, presented by the Latin American Studies Association (2019). She currently directs the Media and Idea Lab at Columbia University and co-directs Unpayable Debt, a working group on the global debt crisis, supported by the Center for the Study of Social Difference.

Sarabel Santos Negrón is a multidisciplinary artist, an educator and a professional in museology. Her work focuses on the experience and the memories of nature and landscapes of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. She has curated several projects in the United States and is the current director of the Bayamón Museum of Art in Puerto Rico. Some of her projects: Entre Reinos (2016), Casa Roig, Humacao; Portraits of Nature (2013), Pierced Gallery, New Jersey; and Encuentro (2012), Pontificia Universidad Católica, Ponce. She has also had exhibitions at: Steps Peace Museum, New York; Anytime Department Gallery, Cincinnati; Espacio Tres50, Chiapas, Mexico; Rigss & Leidy Gallery, Maryland; Saatchi Gallery, London; and Arsenal Museum of the Spanish Navy, among other spaces. In 2016, the Maryland Institute College of Art awarded her a merit scholarship for graduate studies.

About Loisaida Inc: Founded in 1978, the mission of Loisaida Inc. is to address the serious economic and social disenfranchisement of Latinx residents while offering multi-generational programming that appeals to the social and cultural sensibilities of the Lower East Side.

About Acacia Network: The Acacia Network, the parent company of Loisaida Inc., is an integrated care organization with offices in New York City, Buffalo and Albany, Orlando and Puerto Rico. It is the 2nd largest Hispanic nonprofit organization in the country. Their mission is realized through three main service delivery systems; Primary Health Care, Behavioral Health Care, and Housing.

#LoisaidaFest2019 #LoisaidaFest #LESHistoryMonth

Loisaidafest.org​ | ​Facebook.com/LoisaidaFest​ | @loisaidafest

Valorycambio.org |Facebook.com/valorycambiopr/

For media inquiries, contact: n.davidpastor@gmail.com or vb2239@columbia.edu

Unpayable Debt: A Student’s Reflections on the Launch of Max Haiven’s Art After Money, Money After Art and Caribbean Debt Syllabus, Second Edition

On October 10, 2018, the Center for the Study of Social Difference working group Unpayable Debt held an event to launch scholar Max Haiven’s book, Art After Money, Money After Art, and the second edition of Caribbean Debt Syllabus, the only digital resource available to study the significant impact of debt in Caribbean’s past and present.

I found many elements of Max Haiven’s discussion about the increasingly blurred line between artists and activists fascinating. I heard him make parallels to surrealism, expressing that our potential is beyond the scope of our imaginations and that we can use various conceptual tools to reflect on this sublime potential. Financialization, hedge funds and big investment banks dominating a capitalistic economy hinder us from discovering the full breadth of our imagination, and Haiven calls upon artists/activists to combat this.

Haiven explains money as a force that has so much power over our lives--but it can be a medium of oppression and exploitation or a medium of creativity. It can be used as a medium to disrupt capitalism, telling stories and carrying certain values that transcend an exploitative, oppressive system, he contends.

I am left wondering, however, how much this conception of currency really translates into the Caribbean landscape. I used to live in Jamaica, where my dad is from, and my mom is from Guyana--thinking about these two countries I grew up between, I really don’t know how much people would care about the appearance of currency as a form of protest against capitalism. I’m thinking of someone in a long line to get two beef patties in Kingston, perhaps the most accessible and cheapest meal there--would they pay attention to the aesthetic of the currency? This would be a great experiment, though.

In terms of the additions to the Caribbean Debt Syllabus, I was especially moved by the presenters on indenture and law. The topic of indenture is particularly interesting to me since my mother’s ancestors were East Indian indentured laborers in Guyana. I grew up hearing my family members refer to themselves as “coolie.” Although the presenter’s area of focus was mainly in Suriname, her depiction of different ethnic groups in that society as separate yet respected in theory resonated with me. Yes, everyone is separate--my family’s home there in Berbice is literally flanked by East Indian homes on one side of the street, across from only black homes on the other. The indentured society is certainly separate--but how can each group even have the opportunity to respect the other with such little interaction between them? Respecting another group cannot take the form of complete isolation from them. I plan on writing my final paper for Jose Moya’s class, World Migration, on indentured labor in Guyana, so I actually wrote down some of the presenter’s sources that will definitely be useful for that.

I plan on going to law school after I graduate, so I found the law addition to the syllabus very compelling. The presenter posed the question of how the law is affecting us in ways we don’t recognize. This is precisely the question I am trying to ask myself, since I do not have a typical pre-law major here at Columbia (Latin American and Caribbean Studies). I want to see how the law affects the communities I am from--for my International Law seminar, I am writing about the Caribbean Court of Justice (which, unfortunately like most people, I did not even know existed). The creation of this Court was one step toward the region’s agency in the legacy of law and empire, of imperial debt relationships. However, only four Caribbean countries thus far have ended the appellate jurisdiction of the Privy Council in Great Britain and handed it over to the Caribbean Court of Justice. The other CARICOM member states still use a British court as their appellate court of last resort. The law creates--or at least permits--debt, which ensnares the Caribbean. A movie called Life and Debt that I watched in a course last semester called The Modern Caribbean ends with a quote that has stuck with me since: “most natives are too poor to escape their lives; but they are too poor to live their own properly.”

Contributed by Arianna Faria Scott, Columbia College major in Political Science

CSSD Working Group Unpayable Debt launch of Caribbean Syllabus: Second Edition and Max Haiven’s "Art After Money, Money After Art"

On October 10, 2018, the working group, Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence and the New Global Economy, led by professors Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Sarah Muir, hosted a launch event for the Second Edition of the #NoMoreDebt: Caribbean Syllabus. The group also launched the book Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization by Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media, and Social Justice at Lakehead University.

The Unpayable Debt working group at the Center for the Study for Social Difference (CSSD) explores the role of debt in capitalist societies, and how indebtedness is mutually informed by histories of colonization. In May of 2018, the CSSD working group published the first ever resource to study debt and the Caribbean with the release of Caribbean Syllabus: Life and Debt in the Caribbean. The syllabus has been used internationally among scholars, artists, activists, and others, to stimulate conversation about the complex colonial and capitalist contexts that generate debt. The second edition contains three new sections that raise critical questions about indenture, law, and education. The syllabus has also been translated into French, Spanish, and Dutch, as a means of furthering expanding the conversation. The launch event provided a venue for artists, academics, and activists, to think through cycles of indebtedness and the question of “who owes what to whom”.

It was thus fitting that the event began with Max Haiven’s workshop “Rebel Currencies.” He spoke about artists and activists coalescing to challenge the current moment of financialization, in which everything has market value and our imaginative scope is oriented toward the production of more money. Professor Haiven discussed the commodification of art, but also, the potential for art to decrypt money. He explored several projects in which artists used money as a form of activism. One instance of this is Zachary Gough’s project, Bourdieux: A Social Currency. Gough brought his own crafted currency to academic and art conferences, which he distributed to all the participants. Whenever an act of social exchange occurs, participants are encouraged to exchange the currency. It’s a funny – and admittedly uncomfortable – process that reveals the economy of social capital, and the generation of power in exchanging things of value.

Next, we heard from the most recent contributors to the Caribbean Syllabus about their contributions. Tao Goffe, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, contributed a unit entitled, “Intimate Bonds and Bonded Labor: Indenture and Debt Peonage in the Caribbean.” This section explores Chinese indenture in the Caribbean, specifically thinking through intimacy, the afterlife, and media. Monica Jimenez, Assistant Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin, provided unit eight of the syllabus, “The Role of Law in the Production of Debt.” This unit brings forth questions of the legacy of law and empire, and specifically, how the United States created an imperial debt relationship. Lastly, Jason Wozniak, Lecturer in Philosophy at San Jose State University, focused on education and debt. He argues that debt projects students into a non-democratic future that channels education into a “return investment paradigm.” In this addition to the syllabus, “Caribbean Education Debt”,  he explores how debt impacts formal and informal experiences of education in the Caribbean.

With these new additions, the Caribbean Syllabus: Second Edition now encompasses 18 units through which educators, activists, students, and artists can think through the colonial and capitalist lineages of debt in the Caribbean. It was wonderful seeing students and scholars alike exchanging ideas on the politics of debt.

Contributed by Laura Marissa Charney

Frances Negrón-Muntaner Profiled on Univision

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, director of CSSD's working group on Unpayable Debt and award-winning filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, was profiled on Univision.

Professor Negrón-Muntaner's books and publications include: Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004), The Latino Media Gap (2014), and Sovereign Acts (forthcoming). Her most recent films include "Small City, Big Change" (2013), "War for Guam" (2015) and "Life Outside" (2016).

Watch the Univision profile here.

Narratives of Debt Conference Surveys Puerto Rican Debt and Beyond

On April 21st 2017, CSSD's Unpayable Debt working group and the Oikos working group at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge hosted the “Narratives of Debt” conference. Organized by project co-directors Sarah Muir and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, the day-long event focused on the case of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and explored debt’s relation to intimacy, kinship, sovereignty, and history in other contexts.

The morning session featured scholar and artist panelists that focused on Puerto Rico’s debt crisis from multiple perspectives and media. In her presentation on “Puerto Rico’s American Dream,” Associate Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Anthropology at Rutgers University Yarimar Bonilla discussed how the statehood movement has transformed in light of Puerto Rico’s debt and economic crises. Bonilla drew on her ethnographic work to detail the complexities of statehood claims in terms of race, citizenship, and sovereignty., arguing that the notion of statehood as the “pragmatic” status option relates to a broader relinquishment of the idea of postcolonial sovereignty.

Journalist and documentary photographer Huascar Robles presented a captivating series of photographs that are part of his project “Los Silencios de Santurce.” The photographs document the local and palpable effects of the debt crisis and a controversial “urban revitalization” project (Law 212) that began in Santurce in 2002. The photographs reflect a rapidly changing urban environment and residents’ daily lives amid increasingly unequal urban spaces.

Sarah Molinari, a doctoral student in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, discussed three circulating narratives of debt and Puerto Rico’s debt crisis: the scapegoating narrative of Puerto Rico’s fiscal irresponsibility; the narrative of debt incredulity; and the narrative of debt protest. Molinari argued that Puerto Rico’s debt is a key site of struggle and open to multiple interpretations with consequences for how debt politics unfold.

Drawing from the recent BRIC exhibit “Ride or Die,” independent artist Miguel Luciano presented photographs of the exhibit’s vintage Schwinn bicycles, which are meant to invoke questions about the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the U.S. at the centennial mark of U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans. Luciano displayed different bikes, including the notable “Se Acabaron las Promesas” bike with the black Puerto Rican flag in the backdrop. This bike reflects a key question: how might PROMESA have provided a rupture with a long-held imagined stability of the ELA (Estado Libre Asociado)?

The rich discussion following the morning session centered around the variety of resistance projects in Puerto Rico and the ambiguous new vocabularies that activists are conjuring, including among proponents of Puerto Rico’s citizen debt audit and art activism. Building on the intensive focus on the Puerto Rican debt crisis in the morning session, the afternoon panel titled “Debt and Intimacy” brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars exploring narrations of debt across a range of time periods and cases.

In his presentation titled “Commercial Affiliations” Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU Michael Ralph made an intervention into current debates over race and the carceral state through a historical reflection on debt as an instrument for incarceration. In his talk, Ralph presented a fascinating history of how banking crisis in the erstwhile debtors’ haven of antebellum Kentucky (debtors from neighboring Virginia whose whereabouts were unknown were presumed “gone to Kentucky,” the audience learned) shifted investor attention from manufacturing to incarceration. As Ralph detailed, this banking crisis, coupled with legislative and court reforms, made incarceration of Kentucky’s white population a template for the 13th amendment in the postbellum era.

In his presentation titled “Debtors’ Sanctuaries and the Sovereign Exception,” Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New School Gustav Peebles likewise animated current debates over deregulated tax havens and offshore finance by illuminating their historical roots in debtors’ sanctuaries. Cultivated by English sovereigns as a “popular exception” to their power, London was dotted with such sanctuaries between 1600 and 1850. As Peebles detailed, however, it was the increasing democratization of access to these exceptional spaces that eventually scared the capitalist class into moving them into what are now postcolonial territories such as the British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar. Far from “aberrant,” Peebles suggested that, then and now, these spaces of sovereign exception have structured the entire system of modern capitalism, but from the margins.

Liv Yarrow, Professor of Classics at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, in her presentation titled “Private Debt and Public Foreign Policy, 51-50 BCE” took the audience back to the times of the Roman Empire to detail how two different kingdoms, one in Cyprus, and the other in what is now the Cappadocia region of Turkey, sought to negotiate their debts to private Romans. The affair was documented in the letters of the Roman Cicero, who was sent out from the capital to become a provincial governor. Initially intent on curbing the debt extraction practices in the area under his purview, Yarrow detailed how Cicero’s own entanglement in the web of debt relations that was the Roman Empire ultimately allowed him to reproduce its predatory logic. The story thus offered lessons on the perils of constituting society on the model of debt.

In her presentation titled “Dreamworlds of Debt” Assistant Professor of English at CUNY’s Baruch College Amina El-Annan explored literary representations of debt in Confessions of a Shopaholic. Building on a quip, attributed to Ernst Bloch, that “the bourgeoisie dreams only of money,” El-Annan sought to (1) interrogate the relation between dreams and debt, and (2) probe the ways in which debt is imagined (i.e. in fiction). Exploring the paradox that the main character writes a column on responsible saving while falling into debt via her own uncontrolled consumption, El-Annan highlighted how the slippage between reality and fantasy occasioned by debt offers fertile ground for literary representations of contemporary society as imagined from a particular (bourgeois) vantage point.

The panel was followed by a lively Q&A session that covered topics including the possibilities and limits of regulating offshore finance and interdisciplinary approaches to developing languages and methodologies for effectively theorizing and researching debt. These conversations will continue next academic year in events coordinated by the Unpayable Debt working group.

--Contributed by Charles Dolph and Sarah Molinari

CSSD's Unpayable Debt Working Group Releases Digital Syllabus Explaining Puerto Rican Debt Crisis

On May Day, 2017, CSSD's Unpayable Debt working group launched its PRSyllabus, a resource to study Puerto Rico's $70 billion debt crisis in the context of over one hundred years of colonial governance by the United States.

"The syllabus comes at a critical time," says working group co-director Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University. Her point was confirmed when the syllabus attracted nearly 7,000 views on its first day.

"Today unions have declared a national strike. Students at the University of Puerto Rico are also on strike to protest extreme budget cuts and support demands for an independent audit while an unelected board with ties to the lending industry supports extreme austerity measures that have been unsuccessful elsewhere in the world. To guide more effective policy, we need to reorient our thinking and become better informed about the roots and consequences of the crisis. Our work suggests that participatory and transparent governance, economic revitalization, and full investment in fundamental human needs like education and health are better ways forward.”

Created by working group members and collaborators Yarimar Bonilla, Marisol Lebrón, and Sarah Molinari, the syllabus provides a list of resources for teaching and learning. The syllabus’s goal is to contribute to the ongoing public dialogue and rising social activism regarding the debt crisis by providing historical and sociological tools with which to assess the crisis’s context and repercussions.

"With this syllabus we tried to highlight how the contemporary debt crisis emerged from a history of extractive colonial practices that continue to produce intense insecurity in the lives of millions across Puerto Rico and its diaspora,” adds Lebrón. “We also sought to emphasize the inspiring and creative ways that Puerto Ricans are coming together to fight against austerity, since these efforts are often invisible in mainstream news coverage of the debt crisis."

PRSyllabus is the first in a series of three syllabi that the working group will release over the next year in relation to the damaging effects of debt on various locations around the world, including Detroit, Greece, and the Caribbean. The Puerto Rico syllabus can be accessed here.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner on CBS Sunday Morning Discussing "Latinos and the Vote"

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and director of the CSSD project on Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy, appeared on a CBS Sunday Morning program about "Latinos and the Vote."

In discussing the current presidential election and the debates over immigration, Negrón-Muntaner said that there is a sense that Latinos have come to the United States mainly as recent immigrants but in fact, “Latinos began their life as part of the United States, when the United States crossed over to Latin America in search of territory."

Watch the whole interview and program here.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner Appears on HBO's "Habla y Vota"

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and Project Director for CSSD's project on  "Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy" recently appeared on an episode of HBO Latino's "Habla y Vota" discussing Latinos' influence on U.S. politics.

Negrón-Muntaner said that while voting is important, Latinos also influence American politics with their imagination and creativity, two things necessary for affecting change.

Watch the full episode here.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner Directs Video Series on Aging Former Inmates Reentering Society

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and co-director of the CSSD project "Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy," recently directed the video “Life Outside: Rosalie Comes Home,” the first in a series documenting formerly incarcerated people over the age of 60 who are released from prison after having served lengthy sentences.

The film and the series are a collaboration between the Center for Justice and the Media and Idea Lab at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. "Life Outside" tells the story of Rosalie Cutting, who at 71 rejoins society after being incarcerated for 27 years.

Rosalie Cutting, from “Life Outside: Rosalie Comes Home”

Negrón-Muntaner, director of the Lab and of the series, said that “Through these stories, we aim to amplify the voices of formerly incarcerated people as part of a larger dialogue about the necessity of shifting from a punitive to a transformative paradigm of justice."

Read the full story and watch the video.

CSSD Funds New Working Group Addressing the Politics of Unpayable Debt and Its Effect on Social Mobilization

CSSD has awarded a two-year grant for $35,000 to an interdisciplinary faculty group that is developing a comparative research and public engagement project examining the emergence and impact of massive debt on vulnerable polities and populations.

Convening in the fall of 2016, Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy raises critical questions about the role of debt in contemporary capitalism; the relationship between debt, migration, and violence; and the emergence of new political and cultural identities, particularly among subordinated groups. The project's members, which include scholars, filmmakers, and journalists, examine the politics of information asymmetry—a lack of data and conceptual tools—and how this might undermine social mobilization in impoverished communities, peoples, and countries.

The interdisciplinary group will compare recent and landmark cases such as Puerto Rico, Argentina, Greece, Spain, and U.S. cities like Detroit as well as other spaces that have been historically affected by debt. The project will also develop a web platform to disseminate existing information, facilitate public engagement, and increase discussion about the politics of debt.

The project’s directors are Christina Duffy Ponsa, George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History, Columbia Law School and Frances Negrón Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University.