Poetic Pragmatism: The Puerto Rican Division of Community Education (DIVEDCO) and the Politics of Cultural Production, 1949-1968.

Abstract

During the late 1940s, the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) led by Luis Muñoz Marín began to articulate a series of educational policies that led to the creation of a popular education campaign known as the Division of Community Education (DIVEDCO). This campaign combined audiovisual materials and community-based initiatives in order to promote civic engagement among the rural poor. Educational investment in the rural poor was central to the modernizing project of economic development and state formation that transformed Puerto Rico’s socio-cultural landscape during the following decades. This research analyzes the particular ways in which the cultural production as well as the community intervention practices associated with this popular education campaign were able to articulate a democratic discourse of universal participation in socioeconomic processes that mediated, effectively, the relationship among the emerging neocolonial state, industrial capital, and the people between 1949 and 1968.

Through the lens of poetic pragmatism, this research references modern forms of cultural processing modeled after democratic ideals but within the confines of a capitalist mode of production, and a neocolonial framework. In so doing, it hints at the contradictions and negotiations at the heart of modernization. The study of DIVEDCO’s cultural production, which included popular books, silkscreen posters, and motion pictures distributed in rural communities by trained fieldworkers, illustrates how art and social intervention techniques worked together to formulate a new political order that would transform illiterate masses, culturally and ideologically, into an advanced modern society. The analysis of this experiment in democracy, through archival research and textual analysis, speaks of a citizenship formation process that proposed to transform rural dwellers into political subjects via the educational apparatus. Furthermore, it describes the passage of coercive modes of control to more democratic forms of integration or, in other words, the use of cultural production as a disciplinary field for state formation.