CUNY

DIGITALHISTORYARCHIVE

A project produced by the Alliance for Puerto Rican Education and Empowerment, APREE.

Interview with Antonio Nadal
Interviewed by Pam Sporn and Tami Gold

October 19, 2019

Brooklyn, NY

[Start of recorded material at 00:00]

Antonio NadalHello, yes. Hi. My name is Antonio Nadal. How are you?

Pam Sporn

I’m good, my name is Pamela. So, yes. Good. Okay. So thank you so much for
participating in this interview project. We're learning so much about the struggle
of college and how important it was. So we want to get your perspective. I’d just
like to know a little bit about your background, your family background, when
your family came from Puerto Rico and where you were living when you grew up
and about your schooling. So just like when, when did your family come from?

Antonio Nadal My family came to the United States, from Puerto Rico as migrants in the year of

1950. I was two and a half years old. And the family migrated with my four older
sisters. I'm the only male in my family. And I'm the youngest. My father's pride
because you always know how it is in Puerto Rican families. The father always
wants to have his su primogenitor, his son. So I was, as you might say, is his last
wish. And when I was born, I had it was a difficult delivery because my mother
was already in her early 40s. So I was in an incubator. I almost didn't make it and
my father was almost heartbroken because he was giving out cigars. And the
doctor said, Not yet. We have to see how your son does. He's a little blue. So I
was in the incubator for a few days, I was born in the town of Arecibo, very close
to Manatf, where my family is from, but there was no hospital in that time,
because most of the births were done by comadronas, midwives. But at a Arecibo
had a hospital, the larger town so my mother was driven to Arecibo, when I was
born there, but really my family's from Manati. So I don't know much about
Arecibo. I know a little bit more about Manati, from... not from living there,
because at the age of two and a half, the whole family transported itself to New


Pam Sporn

York. And we lived in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and what, what was
at that time called Los Sures, because it was south from South Ist to South 10th.
And we were on South 3rd and South 4th. So I was raised in Los Sures of
Williamsburg, the old Williamsburg, not the one that is now very gentrified, and
very expensive. Now, we wouldn't be able to afford to live there, you know, but
there were many Puerto Ricans at that time in the early 50s that migrated to that
particular type, that particular section of Brooklyn.

And what kind of work did your family do when they came here?

Antonio Nadal My mother was a homemaker, word that is used quite often, actually, she did

Pam Sporn

many things, because my mother came from an entrepreneurial family, people
who are merchants, and she always loved business. My father was a professional.
My father was a teacher, raised by a shoemaker, in his hometown. He was, from
all the stories that I've heard from him and other people, who was very bright
student. And actually was plucked even before he graduated from high school. He
got right on, he was able to do that. But he was plcuekd because he was an
outstanding student. And at the time, because Puerto Rico was under American
tule, as you know, still is. The idea was to make all Puerto Ricans fluent in the
English language. So they had to prepare native Puerto Ricans and the English
language because eventually, all of us were supposed to speak English, not
Spanish. So it was a transitional thing. So they plucked people out more
outstanding students from high school, brought them into the University of Puerto
Rico, and which was founded in 1903. My father was there in the 1913, 1914. He
got eventually got his degree from the University of Puerto Rico as an English
grade teacher. So he taught English, but he also taught Spanish because what they
found out is that the kids were not going to learn English, unless you made use of
the native language. So my father was a Spanish and English teacher. And he was
very good. From all indications. He was so good that they even hired him to have
a secondary job later on and teach veterans that were coming back from the
second world war to get to eighth grade, which would be, would call their
Elementary School Diploma at that time to be hired and stuff, needed these eight
grades. So so my father was teaching the veterans he was teaching them English,
Spanish, also social studies because he was like what we would call a common
branch teacher. And he did that in Puerto Rico for 35 years before he retired, and
he came with the family to New York.

[00:05:04]
Was he a teacher here in New York?

Antonio Nadal He tried to this was one of the big ironies he tried to become a member of the

D.O._E., Department of Education, Board of Education. Ironically, from what he
tells me is that they wouldn't license him because he had a spoken accent when
he, in his English, his English was perfect. My father was a perfectionist when it
came to grammar hold. I inherited that from him. But he had an accent. And they
told him that Columbia University had these courses that you could go to, get


Pam Sporn

what's called an American accent. And he was so angered by that. He was a very,
very proud man, that he wouldn't do that. So he stayed home. And what he did
was he dedicated himself to writing letters for people who needed translations he
was good translator. He used to do duelos. I don't know if you guys are familiar
with the word duelos, when someone dies, you have a speaker, somebody who's a
professional who talks about the deceased and talks about what he or she did. So
my father was an expert at being "despir de los Duelos,", which was to go to
Speaker funerals. So he wrote letters, he did translations for people. And of
course, he was at home. So when I went to school, and I didn't do preschool or
anything like that, there was no Headstart or anything like that. I started in the
first grade. But I was a Spanish speaker, because my father was an English
teacher, but we never spoke English at home. So my first language was Spanish
from the very beginning. And Papi told me, taught me, he taught me verb
structure, he taught me accents. When I got into, into middle school, and later on
high school, I was already fluent, fluent in the sense that I had literacy as well as
the speaking background. But my father at home became a bilingual teacher to
me, even before bilingual education, which later on, I specialized in as well as
Milga, my wife, my compafiera, the whole notion was to develop, in Puerto Rico,
to develop your English skills, so that Spanish would be done away with and that
was all I studied that intensively. There was a whole background to how Spanish
became the native language of Puerto Ricans but English is an official second
language and that was a big struggle it was probably the only struggle on the
colonial rule that Puerto Ricans won from the Americans ,that Spanish was
established as the first language. Luis Mufioz Marin, the first governor of the
island had a great deal to do with that and his wife, Muna Lee, I think she was a
big advocate of Spanish as a native language of Puerto Ricans. But English was
established as a second language, and my father was part of that. Actually, he got
a scholarship to become an English graded teacher because the whole idea was
that he would be part of this whole regime of turning over the island to an English
speaking colony of the United States.

So, you’ve been in a really literate... a family imbued with literacy.

Antonio Nadal Yeah.

Pam Sporn

So and you had these skills as a young child.

Antonio Nadal Yeah.

Pam Sporn

Being bilingual when you were in elementary school and middle school in
Williamsburg in New York City.

Antonio Nadal Right.

Pam Sporn

Was your... the fact that your family was also fluent in Spanish? Was that seen as
an asset or a deficit?


Antonio Nadal Depending on my teachers, you know, in elementary school,
Pam Sporn Can we just start again because we were talking at the same time.

Antonio Nadal Yeah. My teachers in elementary school were a mixed bag, right. There were
many who follow the ethic that if you're in the United States, you speak English,
you don't use your native language in the classroom or otherwise. And then there
were others that were more, I would say were more akin to understanding that il
was a bilingual child. I was becoming bilingual. Let's put it that way. In the first
grade, I didn't speak any English whatsoever. So my father had to take over. And
that's when I found out that my father had tremendous skills in English. So he was
tutoring me at home. And by the time I was in the third grade, I was a functional
bilingual. I was above my third grade class, in both languages, and by the sixth
grade, they told my father that I was reading at a ninth grade level. So I was a
functional bilingual, at the end of elementary school. Then of course, when I got
to junior high school, they had a thing called the Rapids, which, if you were very
good in reading and writing and you took a test, you did the seventh grade and
then you were skipped, you didn’t have to do eighth and you would go to the
ninth. And for those classes, they had language teaching.

[00:10:03]

Mind you, they didn't have it for the regular population. But for kids who had
high reading scores and were good in language, you could take a foreign
language, beginning in the seventh grade. So I started Hebrew. Why Hebrew?
Because in the classes that I was taking in junior high school, what they call the
SP classes, were mostly Jewish kids. A few white kids that were not Jewish. But
you had the privilege of being able to take a foreign language. So I took Hebrew
and I want to read, I really want to take French, but the Hebrew class was the SP
class. And my father said, important that you take Hebrew because you will learn
a lot about the Bible. My father was a very religious man. He mistakenly thought
that the Bible could be read in Hebrew actually is Aramaic, and my teacher, my
Hebrew teacher, back in the seventh grade, Mr. Saoirse said, "You're not learning
classical Hebrew, you’re learning modern Hebrew, after the Israeli state was
established in 1947." Wonderful teacher, because he did something that later on I
utilize in my own teaching of language, and that is teach performance before you
teach structure. Don't teach...don't get into grammar and teaching verbs and all
that, because the sad experience of American education is that kids that learn a
foreign language are taught first their taught all this verb structure and, you know,
basically literacy, but they can't speak. And how many times have I had students
say, I took five years or Spanish or so many years of French, whatever, and I can't
speak it. And that's because they put the cart before the horse because they follow
the old grammar translation approach which meant teaching you structure before
they taught you how to perform. Saoirse, my Hebrew teach... I still remember
him. He was a Sephardic Jewish man. And he taught us, he says, "you have to get
to know the language first you have to be able to speak. So we're not going to
learn any grammar. You're not going to learn the Hebrew characters alef, bet. No,


Pam Sporn
you go?

no, we're going to start speaking and situations." So by the end of like, I would
say three months, we was functionally speaking Hebrew. And then he brought in
this is ... The vowel system. So we were already performing before we actually
learned the structure of the language and that...

Fascinating. So, let me transport you to Brooklyn College. What high school did

Antonio NadalEastern District High School in Williamsburg. Right? Eastern District.

Pam Sporn

In in high school. Did you learn anything about Puerto Rican history and culture?
Were there any courses like that?

Antonio NadalNo. Nothing at all except for...

Pam Sporn

Can you just say it in a full sentence?

Antonio Nadal At Eastern District High School, there were no courses on let’s say Puerto Rican

Pam Sporn

culture, actually nothing on Latin America really, because we were preparing to
take Regents. If you know anything about New York City, and you're in what
they call the academic program, you have to take three Regents in all the major
subjects, English, Mathematics, Science. And it was only in my senior year that I
had a teacher, Dr. Horowitz, who talked about American history, because we had
to take the American history Regents, right. And of course, he got into eventually
he got into The Spanish American Cuban Filipino War, what I call it, The Spanish
American War. And that's the first time that I heard about how Puerto Rico
became a part of the United States. And he used the phrase that has stayed with
me even today. And he said, "Puerto Rico, according to the Foraker Act, belongs
to, but it's not a part of the United States." Belongs to, and this is verbatim,
belongs to but it's not a part of the United States. I said, Wow, that almost sounds
like 1984 you know, that kind of speak. It didn't make sense to me. So he didn't
do very much on Puerto Rico. He didn't talk about the people. He didn't talk about
the resistance that existed against American colonialism in 1898. But it dropped a
seed that later on was to blossom but that was in my senior year. So when I got to
Brooklyn College, I began to put some of Dr. Horowitz's teaching into studying
about Puerto Rico. And I was mostly you might say, kind of dorky about it. I
wasn't doing anything about it. Other than informing myself. Wasn't really until I
met Milga at Brooklyn College, cause Milga was very active. Her mother had
been an activist, I guess, you know, when you talk to her, her mother was an
activist in community, her father as well been a nationalist in Puerto Rico.

[00:15:04]
Could you maybe just start that again and say, "I met my wife, I met my future
wife Milga at Brooklyn College.”


Antonio Nadal Yeah. When I met when I met my future wife, and lifelong partner at Brooklyn
College, was when I really began to understand the nature of what the Puerto
Rican community was all about, and what was going on as, not from the
intellectual standpoint because I was in college and really, my parents were not
activists. My father was an older man, he was 55 when I was born, so he was at
home. My mother was a homemaker. She would make limber. You know, she
cooked for people who were coming, there were bordantes. So she was running
her own business and all that, but we were not involved in community affairs and
what was going on with the migration with the diaspora, as we now call it. And
when I came to Brooklyn College with Milga, I realized, wow, her parents are
involved with all this, right? And they were involved with PR, PRC, Puerto Rican
Community Development Project ,PRCDP. It was during the whole era of the
War on Poverty under President Johnson. So there's a great deal of activism in the
communities and a reaffirmation of identity. So Milga was the first to get me
involved at Brooklyn College with things that were Puerto Rican because she
said, we should have an exhibition of Puerto Rican culture in the library. And
there are Puerto Rican artists that are not known here. And maybe we can get
them to come and exhibit their paintings. And the first ever exhibition of Puerto
Rican art in the library of Brooklyn College. It was called the Gideons library,
Milga was behind it, and a group that was recently formed called the Puerto Rican
Alliance, P.R.A. celebrated, they celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2018. And
they were the, the motor force behind the creation of the Department.

What will become the Department of Puerto Rican studies initially was the
Institute of Puerto Rican Studies and then the Department. So I was at Brooklyn
College during that time, I graduated '68. But I stayed active with all the students,
even as a teacher. And I was a good resource, I had a car. I was one of the few
people who had a car, so I would take them around, you know, and I would take
Milga around, of course, I was interested in her not just because she was an
activist, but I said, man, she's a real cutie. She's smart, and all that. And
eventually, you know, we got married in 1970. She got, she graduated that same
year, and she went on as well to have a career at Brooklyn College.

My first job was a high school teacher at Eastern District high school for two
years, I taught French, Spanish and ESL. So I taught English, French and Spanish
to a group of kids that was known as the non-English Program, and in my first
year without having any background in education at all a second language
acquisition, or administration, just barely had a BA. I was made director of the
non-English Program at Eastern District. I was there for two years and then an
English teacher from Brooklyn College, wonderful guy, because I really started
out as an English major. He remembered me he knew that I was bilingual. And
they were developing a program of Bilingual Studies at Kingsborough
Community College, under Title VII grant, and he thought about me. He called
me up he said, Tony, I'd like you to work with this program. I said, "Jack, I just
got a BA you know, working in college, I need at least a Master's just to be an
adjunct or whatever." So he said, no, no, it's a funded program. So we're really
outside of the funding system of CUNY. So I was brought in as an instructor of


Spanish, in the bilingual program, and a counselor for how to take counseling
courses to do counseling, I don't know what the hell was, you know, what does a
counselor do? And these were students who came in, that program recruited
students who were Spanish speaking, but already had a high school diploma.
Except they didn't have the English language. And many of them had bachillerato
from Latin America, which is a lot more than, say, the typical high school
diploma in the U.S.

Pam Sporn I just want to pull you back to Brooklyn College for a minute.
Antonio Nadal Yeah
Pam Sporn Cause we're really interested when you, Start again... you were part of the ground

floor of the....

Antonio Nadal Yeah, because I was, again, I was kind of like a resource person to the group.

Pam Sporn

Because

Can you start again say, how you were part of the group how you and others
started the...

Antonio Nadal [00:19:48]

Pam Sporn

Yeah, basically, it was through Milga. Because Milga was one of the original
founders of the Puerto Rican Alliance. Actually, it started out as an ad hoc group
of Puerto Ricans who were looking at what the Black students were doing on the
campus. Not only that, but there were other students, white students who were
talking about the fact that there were no democratic rights for the minorities.
Remember, this was the era of the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement.
And there was a small core of Black students at Brooklyn College, that eventually
called themselves B.L.A.C. ,The Brooklyn League of Afro American Collegians
and they were...probably get to know some of them later on.

I'm sorry. Don't say anything about us interviewing other people. Just be so
seamless.

Antonio Nadal Sorry about that. Yeah. Okay. So we met we, we met up with students that were

active in the Black movement and it was known then right, to B.L.A.C. There
were also many active White students that supported our cause. And they were
many more of them because most of them were middle class Jewish students who
are radicals. And they belong to a group called the Students for a Democratic
Society, S.D.S. But there was also the Young Workers Liberation League, which
was an arm of the Communist Party, that were on campus. I mean, well, I didn't
realize that there was so much activism that was taking place on the campus
because it was an era, it was the era of the war. And young men had a vested
interest of not being recruited into the Vietnam War, because we realized that it
wasn't what we called an imperialistic war. Why did they, the Americans go in


after the French left to take over in Vietnam and then how it grew. And the fact
that we were being recruited into the army, so we had to do well in school. If you
didn't do well in school, you could be plucked out of college, and you were given
the Selective Service letter with the token to report and we, if for nothing else, I
did not want to go to Vietnam War. Right. And people like me, Black Students of
course were struggling also on the question of segregation, and schools that were
not adequately preparing them because many of these Black students needed help
when they were Brooklyn College, academic help, but they were very bright and
enterprising. And they had what I would say, they had a social conscience of what
was going on. So Orlando Pile, Askia Davis and others that we met along the
way, they kind of paved the way for us. So in a sense, we were kind of like
looking at what Black students were doing. And then we came in, because they
invited us to come to the meetings. I wasn't at the initial meeting, when the group
that went in, I think, was four or five... including Milga. They said, "well, who are
you?" Well, you know, we're an ad hoc group of Puerto Ricans and we're
interested in what's going on because we don't have any, we don't have anything
here in the curriculum. We wanted to see that Brooklyn College pays attention to
it. He says, "So why don't you call yourselves the Puerto Rican Alliance?" I think
it was on Orlando Pile, who is now a doctor in California who said, he suggested
that the group call itself the P.R.A., the Puerto Rican Alliance, and it stuck. That
was by '67. All right, and ‘68 the Puerto Rican Alliance, that student group was
instrumental in, with Black students to get together and form the Institute of Afro-
American Studies and the Institute of Puerto Rican Studies. That happened in
1968, the year I graduated. But I was, I stayed active even after my teaching at
Eastern District High School. By that point, I was already dating Milga. She was
just kind of giving me the ropes about everything else. And of course, I had an
apartment so we met at my apartment to have meetings to strategize for the future
of the Institute of Puerto Rican Studies.

Because if you know anything about Institutes, they don't have the power to
develop curriculum, or to come forward and have a major because an institute can
exist and have courses through other departments. So I said, "wait a minute, what
we need to do is turn this into a department, because the department has the power
to hire people to develop a major etc." An enormous enterprise, we were kids,
what the hell did we know about anything about the university structure and how
to develop courses and how you, you know, the protocol and everything. But it
was done because we also got help from people from Puerto Rico. This was a
time when there was tremendous repression against the independence, there still
is, but at that time, more, so they were persecuting independentisas, as they call
them, from the university. Many of them will let go, they were fired, outright.
Because of their political beliefs. So in a sense, that was great boom for us
because there is this group of Puertorriquefios who are PhDs, many with advanced
degrees, that we could tap into if we're going to form a department. So we began
to tap into that and the initial talent that was there. There were some people
already a Master's programs that we were able to hire. So we were able to after


demonstrations and a lot of stuff that happened at Brooklyn College. The
department came about in 1970.

[00:25:22]

So the Institute still existed because CUNY was able to keep Institutes. Institute
basically for specific types of academic agendas that they do in other places. So
we had the institute and we had a department in 1970. So the Institute began first
and was offering courses those courses have been transferred over to the
department and we developed a major in Puerto Rican studies. But we kept the
Institute because a foundational principle of Puerto Rican Studies, from the very
beginning was that we would be stressing the three areas that were important for
us at the university. Number one scholarship, that we would we had to develop a
scholarship around Puerto Rican Studies and as it related to the Caribbean, for
example, and Latin America. So scholarship is important that we get our people to
become to do research when they were hired, which every university has to do
anyway, cause if you're a faculty member, what is it publish or perish and all that?
And you have to develop, right?

The second part of that was teaching, transformational teaching that we would
teach from the standpoint of developing critical thinking about our situation, who
we were, because for most Americans, we were just a minority group. Most
people didn't even know that Puerto Ricans were citizens of the U.S. What
implications did that have for understanding our situation? So good teaching
about who we were in relation to everything else from American society, in
relation to other diasporas and everything.

And the third was to stay active in community. The Department would have a
commitment to our community so that the education that we got to Brooklyn
College wouldn't just stay at the tower. Right, but that we would have an active
participation of the people who came before us and those communities like,
Milga's parents, who are active in community so that we would have basic rights
like voting, right, like good housing, jobs. So the whole idea is that they were the
pioneers. And in fact, that's what they've been called in the literature on Puerto
Ricans the pioneers, that we were not, we're not going to turn our backs because
now we're in the academy, that we have to have that organic connection. So the
Institute's job after 1970, was to do that, and we existed until '75 when all
Institute's were done away with. But we had separate funding, we have funding
for the Institute and funding for the department. The department would take care
of the academic agenda and we would deal with programs that extended to
community, but also bringing this newfound knowledge, as Frank Bonilla called
it. This new research into our community and that involved a number of
programs. So when I came to Brooklyn College, as a faculty member, not as a
student, but as a faculty member because I first worked at Kingsborough in that
Bilingual program that for students who, whose first language is not English.

I came from Kingsborough to Brooklyn College in 1972. I just finished a Master's
and I became Assistant Director of the Puerto Rican Studies Institute. So I was in


charge of all the community and social programs, cultural programs of the
Institute and I worked under the director who was Josephine Nieves,
tremendously talented woman who had come from OEO, the Office of Economic
Opportunity. She had a job that not only paid a lot more than her being a
professor at Brooklyn College, but she was recruited to become the first
Chairperson of Puerto Rican Studies in 1970. And she had the idea that just like
the anti-poverty programs, were reaching out into communities to develop talent,
to make sure that people will get out of poverty by strengthening their educational
background. She felt, well, she instituted many of those programs that she learned.
to devise in OEO, the Office of Economic Opportunity ,to Brooklyn College, and
they loaded me with it, you know, because I was her Assistant Director, so she
was really the Chair of the Department. And I was taking orders from her to run
those programs and what were they? Well, one was called "Se Acabo el 'Ay
Bendito'."

[00:29:47]

The cultural program, "Se Acabo el 'Ay Bendito'," was a series of programs were
community students, everybody was invited in and out, and outside of CUNY,
about Puerto Rican culture. We would highlight our history our artists, our singers
are professionals, and also have a message that Puerto Rican culture is alive and
well. So that first year was the only year that I stayed as Director of the Institute
of Puerto Rican studies, but it was a whirlwind year, because we had to organize,
"Se Acabo el 'Ay Bendito'," which is a yearlong program, "Se Acabo el 'Ay
Bendito'," is, you know, "To hell would being so meek," right? Because 'Ay
Bendito', is a phrase that Puerto Ricans used whenever something terrible
happens, you do nothing about it, except to say, 'Ay Bendito'. Or, you know, may
the Lord help you, something like that, right. So the 'Ay Bendito', is supposed to
be a sign of weakness that we just say it, to commiserate with someone but you
know, nothing more behind that.

So, "Se Acabo el 'Ay Bendito'," means do away with that phrase, and let's take
action lets become activists. And in that regard that program, "Se Acabo el 'Ay
Bendito'," was followed with some very concrete programs to help our
community, particularly our students, many who had children. There was a small
group of Puerto Rican students at Brooklyn College when the...didn't number
more than a couple of hundred, but many were parents. So they hadn't, you know,
if they were going to go to Brooklyn College full time or even an evening session,
they needed babysitting, right?

So the idea came up from Josie, a group of planners, to have a daycare center that
we would sponsor through the Institute. And eventually we got it through the
Agency for Child Development, ACD. We got funding for it, and we developed
what was known as La Escuela Infantile Bilingue. Bilingual Preschool for
Children. So it was children, not only the children of our students, but other
children that were in the community with parents who worked. We had about I
think, I'm not quite sure the number but we started with about 30 children. We


opened up at 1448 St. John's Place, money was coming from the Agency for
Child Development.

Then we used our faculty and our students to work in that center because many of
them were educational majors. And they were majoring in another aspect that the
Institute developed with the Department which is the Bilingual Teacher Education
Program, Bilingual Teacher Education, so trained teachers to be elementary
school teachers that would graduate and have two licenses, the extension license
in Bilingual Education and the regular K-6, what we now called childhood...
childhood teachers. So we will get those students were very glad to participate in
the Little Escuelita with the kids because they were doing their practice there. So
it was like doing the student teaching. And in addition to that, we hired other
professionals that would come in. So it was a huge success and one of our faculty
members who went on to become a major scholar in the field of Bilingual and
Multicultural Education, Dr. Sonia Nieto was an instructor in our department and
at that time, she was recruited in 1972, into the department as I was, along with
Maria Sanchez.

So, Marfa Sanchez, myself, Emilio Vargas and Sonia became the core of the
Bilingual Teacher Education program. And what we did was we worked to
develop bilingual teachers for the school system but also gave them the
opportunity to work with our kids through the Escuelita which was being run by
the Institute. There were quite a few programs but the ones that stand out the most
that I was directly in charge of under the leadership of Josephine Nieves, our
chair, was the Centro De Educacion para Adultos, a High School level program
for adults because New York you can take your high school diploma or
equivalency diploma in Spanish. So we developed a core of our students through
work study, particularly Dominican students. Dominicans were a bit more fluent
than the Puerto Ricans in the Spanish because they were more recently arrived.
And they were at Brooklyn College and we used them in the Centro De
Educacion para Adultos to teach the basic courses that you needed to pass through
your GED. So they taught social studies, they taught language, even science,
right. And we ran that Center, not at Brooklyn College, not on this campus, but at
the campus downtown. One time we had to two campuses. So I developed since
my background was in language, I developed a curriculum for teaching Spanish
and English because the whole idea was to use their skills in the Spanish language
to augment what they do in English and I had some already had some background
in TESOL, Teaching English as a Second Language.

[00:35:00]

So they were usually instrumental and of course, they organize themselves a
couple of years after P.R.A. after the Puerto Rican Alliance, the Dominican
students developed a comparable club, if you will, called M.E.D.O., el
Movimento Estudiantil Dominicano. M.E.D.O. and P.R.A. worked together as we
have throughout the years, the Dominican students in the college and Puerto
Rican students. Those are the two major organizations. They participated with us


Pam Sporn

in the struggle at 1974 when the arrests came and everything else, which is a
separate story. So M.E.D.O. students and students from the Puerto Rican Alliance
were instructors in the Centro De Educacion para Adultos, the Adult Education
Center for GED. We sponsored lecture series at the college. We also put out a
journal called La Revista, which was a kind of an academic journal, but would
also take, get students to write, so that they would kind of like be able to get into
the academic scene with scholars from Puerto Rico who had come. Josie was able
to recruit two particular scholars as visiting professors, because mind you, none of
us were tenured. But these were people who were kind of outcasts in Puerto Rico
because they were independentistas, but very prominent historians and one of
them was a sociologist, Luis Nieves Falcon. He came as a visiting professor and
so did Loida Figueroa, a famous historian who wrote interestingly, she wrote a
book called "Breve Historia de Puerto Rico," which was huge. So it wasn't so
brief, you know. So those folks helped a great deal and others that we recruited
and being able to run the programs at the Institute and at least for those years in
which these institute existed, and we also worked hand in hand with the academic
agenda of the Department because I said it was a three pronged approach,
community service, good teaching and scholarship.

What was the curriculum? What courses were you giving?

Antonio Nadal Well, the department was an outgrowth of the Institute. The institute came first, in

1968. We had an enormous and difficult agenda. If we wanted a Department
because we realized that the real power in academia, if you want to be able to
develop courses, if you want to develop people, right, that could stay and give it
the strength. Academic strength is that you have to be in a department. Institutes
only exist as adjuncts you might say, to establish departments. So we were
offering courses, basically Puerto Rican history, Puerto Rican culture. It was a
course on music, which I inherited when I became a faculty member. Basic
courses that were about identity about history, that later on could blossom into
working with other departments and developing not only a major but co-majors,
or even what they call concentrations. So we have to learn about that whole lingo
as to how a major is put together. And we had some help from people in Puerto
Rico who had vast experience there. And we had Josie Nieves, who understood
the university structure. And we just had a whole bunch of atrevidos, which is
what we were. We had to learn all this, right? At the same time we were also
going through getting our academic credentials, you know, Milga finished a
Masters and then eventually, she got into a doctoral program with a scholarship at
Yeshiva University, where she got her doctorate. I enrolled at the...at the Graduate
Center to do a doctorate in...it was literature, Latin American literature, with a
concentration on translation that was part of the doctoral program. And I was
enormously happy to have had a guy like Gregory Rabassa. The translator of the
famous translator of Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His exclusive
translator was Gregory Rabassa. So when I enrolled at the Doctoral program at
the Graduate Center, CUNY, because everything was free, that’s another thing I
should say, you know, my whole education, which is something that I always tell


my students. We, we could afford it then, but we can't afford it now supposedly,
we got an education we got to break through CUNY because we were poor
people, you know, we couldn't afford the tuition of an Ivy League or whatever.
But CUNY was free. All we had to pay was an enrollment fee of $18, I think and
books were very cheap because there were a number of bookstores and all that. So
anyway, I took a course in translation with Gregory Rabassa and he just opened
up, it was another tremendous moment in my, you might say, my consciousness.
Because Rabassa was a very sensitive man. He was a professor at Queens
College, but he taught at the Graduate Center as many people do, because the
Graduate Center is really an extension of the professoriate, particularly the full
professors.

[00:40:17]

So anyway, we had those. We were developing our own resources and we had
some from Puerto Rico and people in community that had a lot of experience that
came in to tell us how to kind of bring this all together. Because it was Institute
and Department, as I said before. So gradually the major began to develop, that
we need people to become social workers, to go out there and work with our
community, but social workers that aren't just there to like, we might say,
accommodate you in terms of food stamps, or whatever. But that would work
with our communities to develop our communities, which is really the philosophy
of the war on poverty. And Josephine Nieves understood that.

So we began to develop our major with a strong background in social welfare.
And then, of course, we had to know about the politics of Puerto Rico. So we
hired adjuncts, and we hired people from Puerto Rico and our own, to teach the
politics of Puerto Rico. The whole question of what happened before 1898 and
what happened afterwards. Most of that was done by historians, Loida Figueroa
and Professor Nieves Falcon. So then we had two courses in particular that would
deal with the history of Puerto Rico again, from the idea 03 that we are a colonial
outpost of the United States in the Caribbean.

We got into a lot of flack from that, because there were a lot of conservatism in
the university as well. And people began to say, this is a department that is
moving radically, right? And they've even hired ex-communists or people who
have a background in, in the struggle for independence, and many of them were
indeed socialists and communists and, or nationalist, like, Albizu Campos. But the
people who taught our courses included all that. So we gave our students kind of
background that even students in Puerto Rico didn't have in their... at UPR or
Sagrado Corazon and the other universities there. So it was a gradual process. It
was, it was difficult, because we had to learn how to write curriculum, how to
write a blurb, how to write a Bibliography for a course, right? And then the whole
process of getting it through faculty council at Brooklyn College, the different
committees that existed, because all departments have to have representation in
those bodies. But we were small department, so many of us had more than one
job. But we were learning, and we were learning on the run, you might say. So


that's basically what happened in developing the major that later on extended to
other departments because we became an interdisciplinary major. So students
could take courses with us, and by what they call cross listing, they could take a
course in Sociology that would be accredited to PRS and vice versa. We call that
"plugging and playing." So those concepts, academic concepts together with very,
very good and progressive faculty in those departments. I mean, we have to give
credit for the fact that we've got a lot of help from people in those departments
that believed in what we were doing. I mean, I could name quite a few. But...

Pam Sporn But, so you said you'd have to struggle to win it and then maintain it.
Antonio Nadal Yeah.
Pam Sporn Was there any incident in those, the faculty committee, council that you could

describe that was...

Antonio Nadal Well, we ran into a lot of flack, particularly in the '74 struggle. I mean, we've

Pam Sporn

always been struggling '66 and '68 in 1970. And actually, a lot had to do with
what White students were doing on the issue of civil rights on the whole issue of
getting out of the war. And we participated in all that because we're learning from
them. They had some tremendous organizers among the students, you know, I
remember the name Mark Rudd, was at Columbia, he came to visit Brooklyn
College

and S.D.S. was enormously talented in terms of doing political organizing. So we
have to learn from those folks. We learned a lot from those White students. We
learned a lot from Black students who had been involved in the civil rights
movement. So it was a perfect storm, you might say. And it was also the
overarching issues that were taking place. You know, it was the war. It was the
civil rights movement. It was these assassinations that took place of major people,
Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, John F. Kennedy. It all came together to us
and understanding not only who we were but understanding American society. So
through the linking with other departments, many times I sat, I sat as just as an
auditor, in courses with progressive faculty just to learn a lot more. The stuff that
really wasn't taught that was now coming...coming forward through their
scholarship. So it was a tremendously great period. It was hard work, very hard
work because I was in graduate school, Milga was in grad school as well, while
we were active on campus. And we weren’t doing a lot of publishing because to
publish, you have to sit down you have to write an academic article (laughter) is a
the thing in itself sometimes it takes a whole semester. Well, you have to take
time off, you know, you have to go on sabbatical to do that kind of thing. So we
were doing everything, we were firing on all pistons, you might say

[00:45:40]
So what was the BC 44? And what was your role in that?


Antonio NadalOh, boy. Yeah, that's, that was the culmination, I think. The culmination of our
struggle, and I think that...

Pam Sporn _ I'm sorry, could you just start again, just rather than saying "that" was, could you
say like the BC 44 was the...

Antonio Nadal Yeah, the, the struggle of the BC 44, the Brooklyn College 44. You might say it
was a culmination in what this department was going to be about, and its impact
on the academic community at Brooklyn College. And it began with again the
intransigence of the Brooklyn College Administration, because the issue that
defined the BC 44 movement had to do with selecting a Chairperson for our
Department. Because the person who had worked so hard to put us together, you
might say, it was a tremendous push was Josephine Nieves. I have to mention her
because she was just a tremendously gifted woman, an administrator, but she left
and she left in the year, she left in 1973. And we had an interim chair that came
in, who was from Puerto Rico, Juan Rodriguez Cruz, a historian, and he was
going to go back to Puerto Rico anyway, so he stayed as an interim chair for one
year.

So in early ‘74, we were Chairless, we didn't have a Chairperson. And the
Department felt that even though we were not tenured, we're all young instructors.
Maybe assistant Prof here and there, that we had the right to select our own chair,
as every Department had. The administration's position was, none of you were
tenured. Right. So your search committee, your appointments committee, cannot
appoint a chair since you don't have tenured faculty. So we're going to take over
that process, but we'll let you participate in the process of getting a Chair. And we
went along with that. So the process was to develop a recruitment committee,
composed of administration and department, two members of the administration,
two members from the department, two faculty members, that were Richie Perez,
who was very active as you know, in our struggle, and Sonia Nieto, who was our
expert on bilingual education. Those are the two representatives of the
Department in that search committee. They had the Associate, I think he was the
Associate Dean of Administration, fellow named Muchiello, and who's the other
person, oh, and the dean, himself, Dean Birkenhead. The fifth person in the
committee, because it was supposed to be a committee of five, because this way
you could get a majority vote. Finally, when you made the final selection, so the
fifth member of the committee was Carmen Dinos, who is still alive. She's 96
years old, now. She lives in California. Carmen was a, first professor in our
Department and then in the School of Education, and she's an expert on bilingual
education. She's one of the, you might say the shining stars of bilingual education
movement and scholarship, and the programs that existed. She basically came
from the New York City School System and became a professor in our
Department and the School of Education. And she put together with our help and
the Department but she was the architect of the teacher education program, the
Bilingual Teacher Education Program. Now Carmen was up for tenure that year,
it was her tenure year. And the administration knew that. So, it was our belief that


she was going to side whatever the administration wanted, because it was perilous
for her to go against the administration, if her department and the Dean of her
school because the School of Education had a Dean and the administration,
ultimately the President, Kneller, who did not want us to select our own Chair.
Kneller is the chief academic officer, he signs off on all tenure. So, they figured
that they had Carmen, you might say on a cliff, so to speak. And when the final
vote came in, we supported the Chairperson, the senior member of our
Department, was Maria Sanchez, right. Maria did not have a doctorate, she had an
advanced certificate in Educational Administration, beyond her Master's. She had
been an administrator in the Superintendent's Office in District 14, was well
known as an activist in bilingual education and she was a consultant for the
D.O.E. So Maria was a tremendous administrator who knew education which was
really the major program of our department, at the time. So we wanted Maria,
who was also in age and also in experienced the person that we wanted to be our
next chair.

[00:50:47]

So we put Maria Sanchez as a candidate and the committee ultimately voted after
a long process and a lot of discussion. We voted for her to be, by vote of three to
two. The two administrators backed to a woman from Puerto Rico, who had who
had a doctorate, she had she was on leave. And this is crucial. She was on leave
from Sagrado Corazén, La Universidad del Sagrado Corazén. Which is a private
Catholic University in Puerto Rico, but she had put in her resume that she was at
the...she was a leave from the University of Puerto Rico. In other words, she lied.
And it was in the resume that she reconstructed that later on, we found out not
only that, but even in terms of publications and her experience and everything
else, some of that stuff was bogus.

But guess what, in spite of the fact that we didn't put out all the stuff that we
knew, we said, she's not the person that we want. She doesn't have the kind of
credentials that we need to head our Department. Professor Sanchez is very
knowledgeable of what we do. She has a tremendous background in
administration and education. And this is why we want her, we know she's not
tenured. Right. But, you know, surely if she comes into that position she will
develop because she could even come in as an interim Chair, not necessarily in
property as they say, but as an interim Chair, and then later on, you know, you
guys can decide to make her permanent Chair so even we proposed that. The
administration went forward against the search committee because the Kneller
administration, the President, we found this out, any search committee is really an
advisory committee to the President, it cannot make the final decision, it can
recommend. So the President says I can make the decision. And he did. He
selected a woman named Dr. Elba Lugo, which became part of our slogan later on
in the struggle. He named her Chair of the Puerto Rican Studies Department, and
that set off of you know, that opened up the furies opened up the Pandora's box,
because our faculty, our students, and we had extensive work with our
community, who wrote letters and said, you have to give them the right to select


their own chair. The Committee voted three to two and you are basically taking
away their, you know, their selection. She was approved by the...then it was
called to BHE, the Board of Higher Education, now it's called the Board of
Trustees. She was approved by the Board of Trustees. And she was installed as
the Chair of Puerto Rican Studies, except that we developed a whole movement. I
mean, that's I mean, we had students participating almost daily in demonstrations.

Outside of Boylan Hall, inside of Boylan Hall. And because the administration
would not budge,

and we took the position that we were not going to allow her. I don't know how
we got away with that. We wouldn't even allow her to come into the chair’s office
of the Department ,which is 1205 Boylan Hall, right across the street from here.
And students were on guard, we got the support of the Veterans Affairs students
in the college. Most of them were Vietnam era veterans. And I don't have to tell
you, it was a great deal of fear of these veterans because many of them really have
serious problems coming from the war and everything else. They were coming in
and we were working with them. Many of them were taking our courses. Many of
them were Puerto Ricans and the Director of the Veterans Program threw his
support of the veterans behind the Puerto Rican studies struggle, as they call it at
the time, right?

And the slogan for the entire college and for our community was "Sanchez, Si,
Lugo, No." "Sanchez, Si, Lugo, No." And because of Kneller's decision to go
against the community, students, the faculty and the fact that he had received the
information that this woman had a bogus resume, she had a doctorate, but she lied
about even when she had taken her leave, her sabbatical. The reason for her
sabbatical, by the way, was that her husband was a doctor. And he was doing a
residency at St. Vincent's Hospital. We did all this research. So she was coming
basically because he was doing that one year, at St. Vincent's Hospital to get his
residency and she came along and she applied for the position at Brooklyn
College, she had no, really no intentions of staying. This was going to be a gig
while she was also on leave from Sagrado Corazon and getting her sabbatical pay,
in addition to what she would make as the Chair, as a full professor, she was
going full professor rank, right.

[00:55:42]

So, yeah, so we told we, what we told the administration is you hired someone
who's bogus, she's not, she doesn't have the proper credentials. We found this out,
you have this evidence, we actually put it, we send Sonia Nieto to Puerto Rico, to
check out what she put in the resume. And over there, you know, they have an old
saying in Puerto Rico with people, okay, you know, [slap], "Una galleta para que
hablen, y diez para que se callen." So, all you have to do is prompt them with one
slap to talk about this woman. And then you have to slap them 10 times to stop
talking and they put everything out. And we documented all that, anyway because
Kneller named her and we felt that he did not take into account all that we had
given him, the President.


Pam Sporn

We developed a slogan "Kneller you liar, we'll set your ass on fire." And it was
kind of like, I know, I know it sounds very, you know, you might say it's not very
tasteful to use that kind of slogan, but it's stuck throughout the campus, you know,
with the students and everybody else. And, and we picketed Kneller's house.
Because, remember, this was a year and a half of struggle in which we were
running a renegade Department with the support of people in the Registrar’s
Office, people in the Business Office, people in the committee's and faculty
council who are progressives who are supporting us, so we were we were not
allowing her to even come into the Chair Lugo, to come into the office. So the
Dean, at that time, the Dean of Social Sciences, Thomas Bruce Birkenhead, put
her in his office and had her send Directors to us about what she wanted for the
Department from his office, on Glenwood Road. But she could not enter the
1205...

How did you physically keep her from going in?

Antonio Nadal We had guards, we had all around, from morning all the way into the evening.

Pam Sporn
or

And the veterans participated in that...of course, they were professionals, they
knew how to do security, they even went up on the roof of Boylan Hall because at
one point they had police coming in. And eventually they brought in the...I mean,
we did get arrested and everything else. The movement developed that it was so
massive that we decided we're going to get arrested, but I think the arrest has to be
something that has to be widely known, because at that time, we had made many
contacts with the press, not only the press in the college, we had some student
editors that were writing for us, Richard Styewho later became a professional
journalist was writing our narrative of what was going on. But the New York
Times picked up on it, the Daily News was saying, you know, "Ruckus at
Brooklyn College, Puerto Ricans." I mean, we developed a tremendously bad
reputation among many people, because Puerto Ricans were stopping this august
institution from, you know, doing its bidding. So it became a thing that we had to
deal, with athletes, many of them what we call the jocks and hardhats, because
they would come out, and they were opposed to the fact, they were using the word
that is very derogatory, you know, that we were just a bunch of "spics" doing this.
No.

So the racism came out everything else, the animus. You know, because what the
hell this, a small Department like this, who shouldn't even be here, in the
academic world is standing up, you know, the mouse roaring against the lion. So
it became such a mess for them. And the fact that we would not give in because
we then had letters of insubordination after the arrest, there's one...

A brief step by step. So you decided at one point you had to get arrested tactically

Antonio Nadal Right.


Pam Sporn

Just tell me that...

Antonio Nadal [00:59:34]

Pam Sporn

Yeah, the arrest, the arrest at Brooklyn College of the what we would then call the
BC 44. That came after the takeover of the Registrar’s Office. The Registrar’s
Office, we knew was probably the most important place in that whole college
because at that time, it had, not on computers, but on paper. It had the records of
about 35,000 students, that were enrolled, at the college. So taking over the
Registrar’s Office was enormously important. We had the help of the veterans,
and we had helped from people who know about security. And we stayed there
for, oh goodness, two days, more than week before the arrest came. The
administration said we can't have any negotiation whatsoever with your
Department unless you vacate the Registrar’s Office. Right. And, of course, what
the students were saying the student delegation at one point, I was part of that
delegation that was negotiating with Kneller, President Kneller. He said, well, the
only thing we have is the Registrar’s Office. That's our bargaining chip to
negotiate with you. You have the faculty behind you, most of the faculty, you
have the administration, you have the police department, you have the FBI, you
have the Justice Department, that is all. So you have all the chips on your side and
what do we have, the Registrar’s Office.

So you want us to give up the Registrar’s Office? No, not gonna happen. So then,
of course, they threatened, that they were going to bring in and they were going to
arrest us, right, because we were breaking all sorts of laws, you know, at that
point they started writing letters of insubordination for all of the faculty. I'm kind
of proud of the fact that that letter is in my personal file, even though I'm retired
now. So that was, what eventually led to the fact that we accepted that we're going
to be arrested, right. I mean, the college itself, the infrastructure of the college was
for vacating the Registrar’s Office because we stopped the functioning of the
college when you take over the Registrar’s Office. And at one point, if I
remember correctly once Kneller mentioned that the TPF, tactical police force
was gonna come in and one student actually...

Can you start that again?...

Antonio Nadal Yeah, what he mentioned that the tactical police force would come.

Pam Sporn

When Kneller, President Kneller....

Antonio Nadal Yeah. Right. He said that if they had to

Pam Sporn

Start again, say, I'm sorry. Say, when President Kneller said that...

Antonio Nadal Yeah, President Kneller, let it be known that we were going to be arrested and

they would bring the tactical police force if necessary, which they which they did.
At that point, one student, I don't remember who he was in the group, in the


negotiating group said, you do that he says and he lit a match. And he said 35,000
records will go up, and Kneller who had astigmatism, his eye actually crossed.
Almost like, wow, these people are willing to burn 35,000 records in the
Registrar’s Office. So he said, okay, so let's let's see what it is that you're asking
for. Right, mind you all along he was going to send the TPF, anyway. And that
was just a bluff. You know, we weren’t going to burn 35... But remember, all the
records at that time were not computerized. There was no data protection that
could have happened. So anyway, we did come to the realization. We had a
steering committee by the way, I should say that the department was being run,
Maria was our leader, our renegade Chair, but the Department was being run
really by a steering committee composed of the faculty, students, members of the
community, that have come in that were prominent in our community. It was a
huge committee it was like 20 people, use to meet and all the political tendencies.
We even had participation of White faculty, Professor of History, Hobart
Spalding, very prominent with NACLA, who's a Latin Americanist, was part of
our steering committee. Right, so the steering committee decided, listen, they're
going, they're going to go in and we're going to have to vacate the Registrar’s
Office because after all, we are seriously hampering the work of the college can't
hold the Registrar forever. So we decided that we would get arrested but we
alerted that the arrests were coming and everybody knew that these arrests were
coming. You know, all of our contacts and communities and newspapers at that
time, Geraldo Rivera became our lawyer. He volunteered to be a lawyer, I don't
know if you know that Geraldo was first a community activist before he worked
with channel seven and all that. And he was, as he said, he was tight with the
Young Lords who was still very active. So Geraldo volunteered to become our
lawyer, when the arrest came and everything else. And they arrested us at three
o'clock in the morning, brisk morning in November and we were taken to court,
you know, arraigned and everything else. And we were released on our own
recognizance and we decided who was going to be arrested and who was going to
stay back to maintain the struggle.

[01:05:02]

Because we were still doing demonstrations, we were still doing meetings with
administration. So the 41 students were selected out of a very, very large group
that included all the student organizations of the time, M.E.D.O., P.R.A.,
B.L.A.C.,S.D.S. people, there were White students involved. So 41 students were
selected and three faculty members. The three faculty members that were there
were Herminio Vargas, who passed away this past year, and he was like a
bilingual and also a theater, a theater person. So he developed a theater group that
was doing, you might say, revolutionary theater. So Herminio Vargas, myself and
Sonia Nieto were the three faculty members that were arrested as part of the BC
44. So it's 41 plus three. And we developed the slogan, which actually came from
one of the demonstrators, one of the students that I think Indio mentioned because
we came back onto the campus after the arrest and we walked up that walkway
that leads toward Boylan Hall and Whitehead and the library in a little walkway
coming in from the Junction, Nostrand and Flatbush and we were shouting BC44,


BC44, and one of the students added, "we've come back to give you more, we've
come back to give you more." So that became part of the slogan, "BC44. We
come back to give you more," "Sanchez si, Lugo no," "Kneller, you liar, we'll set
your ass on fire", those are the three slogans that defined the movement. It got out
of hand for them and they realized that all the bad publicity that Brooklyn College
was getting, right because members of the Jewish community in the you might
say the business sector saying this is affecting us, you know, you're getting a bad
reputation the colony is like, you might say the focal point of this community. So
you got to do something about those Puerto Ricans, right.

So what they finally did in order to and this was after the arrest that, we had
threatened to retake the Registrar if necessary, we would have to do it again, we
would do it, right. So Kneller and Thomas Bruce Birkenhead, they spoke to a
professor in the Poli-Sci department, fellow named Abrams, I believe, who was
active in the creation of what was to become the Institute of Mediation and
Conflict Resolution, IMCR. Actually, all mediation in the city really began with
the creation of that Institute. I don't know if you know this, but in the courts
today, because they're so jammed in their calendars with stuff that, you know, that
judges can't deal with, they use mediation. And what they do is they train a core
of people that deal with particular issues that once resolved by the parties
involved, it could go to court if you have an agreement, and it keeps it out of the
courts, in other words, right. And it's a way, it's a way it's a way to mediate, right?
So it's mediation but remember the other part of that mediation and conflict
resolution you have to resolve the conflict. If not, then you can't get the parties to
sign a mutual agreement.

And after a long process, they came in with a fellow named Al Rivera, who was
in charge of the team. He met with us, he met with the administration a number of
times. By that time, everything about Elba Lugo and the whole process of the
search committee, the three-two vote and how we had reacted in community, they
decided that the best thing to do was to give Professor Sanchez the chance to
become the interim Chair of the department, she would be put on probation for a
year. And what would they do with Elba Lugo, who had been named by the BHE.
She was in possession of that title. They moved her to the Graduate Center, to
teach over and they maintained her rank and everything else. But she would teach
at the Graduate Center, which is very interesting because Kneller a year later after
that, he left, I don't know if he was kicked out or he left on his own accord. And
he wound up at the Graduate Center.

[01:09:23]

And I could tell you a story that so ironic, oh my goodness, I was a student at the
Graduate Center in a doctoral program at the time and it was in 42nd Street. I
think it was, it the Grace building and most of my classes were on the 17th and
18th floor. So one time, this was after everything was resolved that Maria became
the Chair, that Department went back to some kind of normalcy. Right. And I, of
course, I resumed my courses at the Graduate Center, I became the Deputy


Pam Sporn

Chairman, under Maria Sanchez because I had, I had led the Institute as you
know, so I had some administrative experience and I was like a second, her left or
right hand man, you might say.

Maria was a wonderful Chair because she had all this administrative experience.
She basically brought together the curriculum of the Department. She recruited
people that moved to expand the major, not only in bilingual education but with
sociology so we could train our students to work in community. We started a
small business program, right, and she was already looking at the fact that the
population at the college was beginning to change. It wasn't...the Latino students
weren’t mostly Puerto Rican, now, Dominicans were coming in, Peruvians,
Colombians, right, the demographics of the city began to change. And Maria, as a
leader understood that so she began to already project how our curriculum could
change and eventually it wasn't under her. But eventually, it became the Puerto
Rican Latino Studies Department, which is what it is now after 1990 and that
happened with Professor Sanchez-Korrol, Virginia SAnchez-Korrol, a historian.
But Virginia was a Professor toward the end of Professor Sanchez's career. She
passed away in 1999. Maria retired but she kind of trained Virginia. So where this
department could be going, she had that vision. Anyway, I am I seriously got back
into my translation studies and Latin American literature, Caribbean literature at
the Graduate Center. And I'm going into the elevator one day coming in. I was
almost late for my class, it was 6:00 and it was like 6:05, and the elevator was
jammed. And I came in, and I couldn't even stand looking at, toward the doors of
the elevator. So I had to like shift and when I shifted this tall man, much taller
than I, by the way, is there and I'm almost face to face with him and who is it?
John Kneller.

The President, the ex-President, the former President, maybe I should say, ex, of
Brooklyn College and he looked at me, looked down on me literally, he says, Hi,
Tony. He knew me well from all the negotiations in his office and all that and I
say, I never did what the students were doing to disrespect them because I felt,
you know, there's no reason why we respect this man, so they will say, they
would call him John or Jack, "listen Jack!" His name is John Kneller. I always
and I always followed Maria Sanchez advice, always refer to these people with
their title, as respect. So I said, "How are you President Kneller?" I'm looking up
at him. He says, "oh so you're here." I said, "Yeah, I'm a doctoral student in
literature." He said, "Well, I'm here teaching one of my favorite languages. I'm
teaching French." So they had sent him also, so they packed him off to the
Graduate Center. And it was the most uncomfortable three minutes that I've ever
had in my life being jammed and facing John Kneller at the Graduate Center.

Ihave a question about, you guys were holding this Registrar’s Office for almost
a week or all these days and 24 hours. How did you keep the spirit up and I
imagined music was a part of that.

Antonio Nadal Oh, yeah. Yeah...well, as you know, I'm also a, or was a practicing musician, I

had my own band I sing, I play keyboard. And the spirit was always there was


enormous amount of spirit, there was no problem for those students saying you
know, I'm missing my classes, or my parents don't want me to be here. None of
that existed, right. In fact, it was just an ebullience. It was a spirit, that we were
there for a cause and that we were right. We were not going to give up. So yes,
music was a part of it, because of course, there were many of us that were also
involved in the Puerto Rican movement, and the movement on the island toward
independence, right. And the independentistas had their own songs and poems
and we knew them right ,because many of us had gone there. And I remember one
in particular...was I'll sing it to you and I'll give you a quick translation.

[not audible; talking in background]
Antonio Nadal What do you want me to start from?
TamiGold Tell us about the music of the independence movement.

Antonio Nadal Yeah, so well, while we were in the Registrar’s Office, that we occupied, I think,
was roughly a week or so. There was a tremendous spirit of militancy in what we
were doing. And music played a huge role because we would have drums right.
We'd have people who would come in and join us. And we sang songs and, in
Spanish, that were part of a Puerto Rican movement on the island, and one of
them it was very famous because I remember going and marching in Puerto Rico
with the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and other groups and it was the famous,
"Mira La, Mira La."

[01:15:23]

"Mirala que linda viene, Mirala que linda va. La revolucion Boricua, que no da ni
un paso atras. Si tu pasas por mi casa y tu ves a mi mama, tu le dices que hoy no
me espere, que este movimento no da ni un paso atras, tu le dices que hoy no me
espere, que este movimento no da ni un paso atras," and then the chorus comes,
"Mirala, la...." etc. So, "Mirala que linda viene," it started with the chorus and
then you had the lyrics come in, right?

So it was basically saying this movement cannot be stopped, and we had the
translation for students whose Spanish was not that tough and sometimes we have
sheets that they sang along with us right. So it was that kind of effervescence,
right because there were many students that were aligned with political groups on
the campus. At that time, it was not only the Puerto Rican Socialist Party which
had a nucleus there, which I presided by the way, which had faculty and students,
so the PSP was there. The Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers organization led
by Richie Perez, who was a faculty member and they had their own songs almost
in doo-wop style that they would they would sing, right. Ah, do I remember? Oh,
my goodness, I forgot the one that was most... He only had one song. And it was
pretty long and it was a doo wop song. Oh my god, I can't be, I’m sorry, I can't
recall the melody right now.


But his particular group of students, the ones that worked with him, and...
Tami Gold Can you use the word, Richie Perez?

Antonio Nadal Yes, that's Richie, it was Richie Perez's group, actually, Richie was not the leader
of PRRWO, it was a broader organization, but he was the organizer of PRRWO
on the campus, and he had his own group of people, and included Charlie
Alejandro "Indio", Jose Ojeda and others. And we had serious struggles with them
because they were a Maoist group and the Maoist philosophy in the American left
at that time was making a huge impact against the parties that favored let's say,
Soviet socialism. The Maoist called the Soviet, Social Imperialists that was, they
had the own terminology. And some of those things came to the point of fights
between students and even faculty. But we also knew that although we had our
internal struggles with the whole question of Marxism, Leninism vs. Marxism,
Leninism Mao, Tse Tung Thought, even though we had those differences. We
kept alive the fact that we were here for a purpose. This is a Departmental
struggle about our right to select a Chair. So that's what brought us together. So
we could talk to each other, even though we serious political differences
internally.

So that's another aspect of it, that it was an internal struggle for the leadership of
the movement and then there was the external struggle against the administration
and all the powers that be, but we managed to bring it together and even years
later of course, because Indio and I, Charlie and I had, he was my student initially,
and he said he learned a great deal from me. But later on, he began to disagree
with me because he was, he was part of the other bando, as we call it, the other
group. But most of them, most of those folks over the years have come together
and said, ‘well, kind of foolish that we were fighting each other while we were
also fighting a common enemy’ you know. We should've stressed what was
common to us as opposed to what was not common, you know, our differences
versus our affinities. So yeah, that was that was an interesting period of time as
well because we were, in many ways, we were political department. In fact, we
were red-baited by the administration. At one of the faculty meetings, a professor
from the history department a Lincoln scholar got up and says, ‘this Department
has declared itself a communist lead Department," said, ‘they're preaching
Marxism Leninism.’ He says, ‘they are totally against the values...’ and he just got
gave a speech. And Richie Perez got up ‘cause Richie was our representative to
faculty Council and he said, ‘You are red-baiting. That's what you're doing.
You're attacking us for defending our rights,’ and he got up and, in fact, it got so
heated that the President dismissed the faculty council meetings, he says we can't
keep because it was, got hot and heavy you know.

[01:20:19]

So...that was a process that I said, it was life defining because we learned so much
about each other. We learned so much about the structure of the university and
how it was lined up against us. We learned that in many struggles, you have to


Pam Sporn

sometimes give, you can't be intransigent that you can negotiate which many, by
the way, the agreement that we reached with IMCR, the Institute for Mediation
Conflict Resolution, was not in full agreement with the people in our movement,
because they felt we had given in to the administration and to getting Maria as an
interim chair, while this woman was still packed off to the Graduate Center with
all her privileges and everything else, and that we should have kept that struggle
to get exactly what we wanted. Not that the kind of agreement that we came up
with.

It's very interesting because quite a few students and even some staff were
recruited to become mediators by Al Rivera, because it was just starting the whole
concept of mediation, was just starting, and they wanted people to come in
because they would pay you like $15, you know, for an hour, because it was
supposed to resolve the conflict in an hour. So you were trained as a mediator,
and they will give you a number of cases, pay you $15 a piece, at that time. And
then the decision was given to the court, if you had agreement. So later on, even I
took the mediation course because part of my resume is that I was active in the
Long Beach community, Milga and I still have a home in, a house that's not, this
is the home, in Long Beach, and I became active in the Latino community there,
which numbered about 1,000 people out of 35,000 in the whole town of Long
Beach, and eventually I became a Commissioner of the Human Rights
Commission. I think there were 10 commissioners that represent all of Long
Island. So I represented Long Beach, Island Park and Oceanside and what we did,
was to implement the law in terms of human rights, that you can't discriminate
against people in their employment, or in education or issues of language, or even
at that time, it was very important that the issue of LGBTQ, it wasn't called that at
the time, but you couldn't discriminate against someone because of his gender
preference, whatever, right. And so then I had to take the mediation training that
years before had been implemented at Brooklyn College to resolve the BC 44. So
I was trained as a as a mediator. And we have some very interesting courses over
there in, cases in Long Beach of...one in particular of a restaurant owner, an
Italian man would just come over he opened up a restaurant and two men came in
and held hands in his restaurant and he threw them out. And there were two, one
was an architect, I forget what the other one and they went to the Human Rights
Commission. They lived in Long Beach and they gave us the case. There were
three commissioners that would hear a case, right, and would render a decision.
Boy, that was that man shocked when he was subpoenaed to come, before the
commission. And he says, ‘I don't realize in my country, this is not, does not
happen in my country,’ you know, this kind of thing. And he says, ‘well, you're
not in your country now, you're here. This is the law.’ So they sued him and they
got a monetary reward for it.

So just going back to the Department and reflecting back on this amazing fact that
it's here, 50 years later.

Antonio Nadal Yeah.


Pam Sporn

What do you, what are your feelings about the staying power, the impact of this
Department over these 50 years what's been its, major accomplishment. What is
this major dent in the history of CUNY and broader education...and it's any
connections to Open Admissions and who should have access to public education.

Antonio Nadal [01:24:45]

We were involved in all the struggles as a Department that had to do with the
rights of students, the rights of access, the help that they would need, through
remediation, which became a major issue with the most conservative faculty.
They didn't see why Brooklyn College would have to have a remediation program
for students coming in that didn't have the skills. And we fought all those battles,
sometimes internally in meetings, at a point when I was already a member of the
faculty council, this was already into the late ‘80s I would say, the Department is
already pretty well established. We were moving into Latino Studies and I
remember the then Chair of the Psychology Department, who got up at faculty
Council, speaking against giving students any kind of remedial help. Which, by
the way, many, many students, not necessarily the minority students, now have
because they have to learn how to write a paper, you know, just like we had to, a
lot of them don't know how to do research, a lot of them don't know how to take
notes. They have to learn to become students, but they're bright. They have
potential, you know, we always knew that, especially with our own. So that
particular member of faculty, was the Chair got up and he says, ‘Do you realize
that our title here is that we're professors, we're not teachers. We're here to
profess. Teachers use what we profess.’ In other words, we're the ones who create
knowledge. We're not here to become teachers that they should get elsewhere. If
they don't have that then they don't belong here. So that drew the line, we knew
exactly. And he represented many people, because Brooklyn College always had
a reputation of, I don't know if you know this, but it was called the poor man's
Harvard, right, or Harvard in Flatbush. And the whole idea was that many alums
were against what we were about because the alums felt that if the college was in
any way belittled by having students came in who weren't prepared, then that
means that their diplomas, as alums didn't mean anything. So they wanted to keep
you know, when Brooklyn College was admitting soon before Open Admissions,
which came in the middle '70s.

Before Open Admissions to get into Brooklyn College, you needed a 92 average
from high school and you had to do very well. You had to do like 12, 1300 in
your boards, SATs. So that it was very difficult for students coming from schools
that ill prepared you and mine was considered, my high school was considered at
the bottom of the... even though we had an academic program, but it was mostly
to prepare kids for commercial careers, you know, we weren't a vocational school,
but that's what vocational schools and the lower level high schools were for. We
were not at any level like Stuyvesant, or Tech, or Bronx High, or even the
specialized schools that prepare students much, very well. So the students at
Brooklyn College that came from those schools resented the fact that we were the


barbarians at the gate. So we had to struggle with that kind of reality as well, and
who we were, and we had to reassert ourselves.

I think the major accomplishment of this Department over 50 years is that we
have gained the respect of the faculty at Brooklyn College, that to our work with
other faculty members and administration. I mean, Milga is a perfect example.
My, mi compafiera, because Milga became the first ever Latina to become a Dean
and then later on a Vice President. And she took over a position that when we
were in the struggle of the BC 44, we were picketing the Office of the Vice
President of Student Affairs, who was Kneller (acolyte). So I remember Indio
once telling her, ‘oh, so now you're the man.’ And I cracked up at that, oh so now
you're sitting in the man's chair. Milga said ‘Yeah, but I'm not a man.’

And so, the idea of us having to, you might say, gain credibility in that college
came with our work with the faculty. The present Chair actually, she just stepped
down, we are now the Chair of the department is a great Cuban guy named Alan
Aja, very progressive scholar, he's a sociologist. But just before him this past
year, the Chair of the Department was Maria Perez y Gonzalez, Maria Perez y
Gonzalez, also a sociologist, became the first Latina to become the Chair of
faculty council at Brooklyn College. And, like most of you know, if you're in a
position like that, you can't be as good, you have to be better than whoever you
succeed. And Maria is brilliant in that position. She served for three years as the
Chairperson of the faculty council, which means all the committee's and
everything had to report to her, in addition to her being the Chair of our
Department.

[01:30:04]

So it was our scholarship its also the reputation that we got as teachers because,
you know when you believe in something, and your formed in that, it's very hard
for you to like, just let it go and say, I'm just another professional now, or as many
departments that were ethnic studies departments or Puerto Rican Studies, Black
Studies, they went more the academic route. The whole idea is that I got to
establish myself as a scholar, or I can use this as a steppingstone to another
institution, where I can shine and I came in through the back door, but now I’m a
front door scholar. So we've had those people too. The ones who were thinking
more about who they were, and what they wanted to accomplish as scholars and
not because they believed in the fundamental principles that came with forming
the Institute and then the Department. So that was sotto voce as they say, that was
in the background, you know. But yes, I think that when we recruit people, now,
we're recruiting people that pretty much adhere to those principles of
transformational teaching, good scholarship, community being open, to
community service we just recruited although I'm not, no longer a member of the
faculty ‘cause I retired. But I was instrumental in bringing someone who had been
an adjunct, then went up the ranks to be a substitute instructor and now she has
come on a tenure bearing line. She went to Boston for a while now she's back.
She's wonderful, and she embodies everything that we're about. So this is the kind


of people that the Department it seems to attract that we have the reputation of
being an activist department from '68 all the way ‘till now, you know.

The impact of the department transforming itself but not dropping the Puerto
Rican Studies agenda. The title is still there and some departments actually not
only changed their, you might say their nomenclature, they dropped the Puerto
Rican Studies part because makes a lot of sense that Latino Studies is more
inclusive than Puerto Rican studies, or Latin American Studies or even Caribbean
Studies. And many colleges, quite a few, changed their nomenclature, they started
with the Puerto Rican Studies label, and that no longer appears. So, at least in
terms of who we are, we retain the importance of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans
in the United States. And as one scholar, once told me a guy from the history of
department, he said, ‘Look, nobody looks askance at the fact that Columbia has
Chinese studies, Sino Soviet studies, and they have specialized people that they
bring in. So why, Puerto Ricans any different’, why because we're a dot on the
map? You know, we're not a huge extension of language. It's, our experience in
the United States, what we mean, you know, as Latinos who came as citizens, and
yet we're treated as second class citizens. And then had to forge an identity, and
then also forge communities that will prepare students to understand who they
were, as opposed to losing their identity and kind of melding in to the good old
melting pot, right. So the movement toward Latino Studies is very interesting,
because we not only are retaining our original label, you might say, working with
Puerto Rican students, but now we have students that are going through pretty
much the same thing that we did early on.

Dominicans and Peruvians and Colombia's were not citizens. So in a sense, they
have a lot more to struggle, to reassert themselves, right. And they find that in our
Department, because we're now teaching courses on the Mexican American
experience, right, teaching courses on Latin America. They're developing an
identity in the diaspora that they can't have, that they could have had in their
home countries. But here they are realizing they're like fish out of water. So our
Department is filling that gap, you might say, it's giving them a sense of
belonging and they're learning from the Puerto Rican experience because in many
ways, one of the big struggles in our community, and I'm talking about the
community outside the university, has been that Puerto Ricans were pioneers in
breaking through and getting the social services and the agencies and Puerto
Ricans in positions in which they can implement policy. And that now is being
watered down by many conservatives in our community are saying, we started it
all and now it's the Mexicans taking over. And now it's the Dominicans taking
over up in you know, Washington Heights, right. And this resentment, that Puerto
Ricans are being set aside, and that these groups are now coming, are coming up
and they're claiming their own.

[01:34:54]
And my position has always been no, we should not, listen, we have to create
alliances. We have to come and go with this flow but maintain what we're about.


Tami Gold

So what if did they learned from us? So what if did they, in a sense, took over
some of the agencies that we created, going back to the war on poverty and OEO
and everything else? The fact is that, they're going through many of the struggles
that we went through, right. And I think if we collaborate and unite and bring
together political forces, which we didn't even do ourselves in the struggle with
BC 44, because we had our differences with other groups. Charlie, yesterday ,
Indio said, ‘Imagine if we had put together all our common agendas, if we had
thought about what made us come together as opposed to what divided us, what
we could have done. We could have done a lot more.’ I said, yeah, more is always
better than less, you know. So yes, that that's also an issue that has come to the
forefront. But I think the Department has been enriched by that because we have
an experience with that we have an experience with dealing with difference and
dealing with opposition, right. And we can't make our natural brothers and sisters
who come in and they're poor and they want an education. I mean, I hear this a lot
from my former Colombian, Peruvian and non-Puerto Rican students say, we've
learned so much from you, so much from this Department of who we were. We’re
very grateful for that, but it takes, I think it takes all that coagulated experience
that we had and what we went through to get to that point, and not go the route of
discarding who we are, in order to join the broader Latin American Studies
family, let's say and developing the scholars who then have no connections to
community. So we have to maintain that tripod of scholarship, teaching and
community activism, which we have. So there's no contradiction.

When you were arrested, were you scared because I've been in situations close.

Antonio Nadal Yeah, personally, I was not scared for myself. I was scared for what could

happen. Because we were involving students. In many ways we felt that they were
our charges, and that we were putting them through something that maybe their
parents didn't want them to be involved in. Of course, they were very enthusiastic
because they had found themselves and they felt, ‘hey, I'm with this agenda.’ But
I was, I was mostly scared that something could happen to them, right, or even to
fellow faculty members that they be clobbered, they would wind up in a hospital
or even dead. That's always the fear because we know that the forces of repression
can be very, you know, serious in terms of what could happen to us, right.

So we didn't put up any resistance whatsoever when the arrest came. In fact, we
were, we left the Registrar’s Office and one of the secretaries that actually made
that comment she said, ‘It looks better than when we had it, they cleaned
everything up.’ We had food and everything else but everything was clean
because we knew, in advance that the arrest were coming. So no, I was not I was
not scared. In fact, I think I was more emboldened, because after that I knew that
that struggle was going to continue. But we had to see it through we went through
the mats. And were very proud of the fact that the 44 and the generation of
students before that had put something together that had meaning for this
institution because we have transformed Brooklyn College. It's not the college
that I attended, which I hated, by the way, because my father said, we got to go


Pam Sporn

there because it's free, and you know, you could probably go to a high-price
private school because you have the grades and everything else, but you have to
pay but Brooklyn College was an excellent school. I said, I know...I also knew
that...I1 would be alienated because you know that they had the frats at that time,
big time and they even owned their own buildings. You know, on Glenwood
Road, the frats were, you know, that powerful. Then they had the house plans.
And it was a whole environment that was so alien to who I was. So what I did is I
hung out a lot, in my free periods, I hung out a lot in the Student Center and I got
together with some White radical students who were chess players. And I learned
to play chess pretty well and I would spend my time, my free time playing chess,
or in the library, right. So I graduated from Brooklyn College as a language
major, and I did very well academically, because I had no real friends there except
the ones when I got together in the Student Center. Right. And I saw the struggle
that was going on, the college was a hotbed. And I don't know if you know that
Brooklyn College was named by a former president, who was very conservative.
They named the library after him Gideons, Harvey Gideons.

[01:39:57]

He named Brooklyn College when he came, a real conservative of the time, you
know a real. He would be "Trump-er" today, and he named the college, "The
Little Red Schoolhouse." And at the time when I first heard I said, ‘why, why the
Little Red Schoolhouse? What does he mean by that?’ And what he meant was,
I'm coming here to clean up and he did, fired many people. Because our student
newspaper. I wrote a couple of articles one time on literature for the Brooklyn
College publication was called, "The Brooklyn College Vanguard." And I got to
learn later on at the word Vanguard has all kinds of connotations for radicalism,
right. That it's a Leninist term, ‘prepare the Vanguard.’ He changed completely,
he just completely fired the board of the students put them on, you might say,
close to kicking them out of school, and they changed the name in the early '60s
to "The King's Men."

"The "King's Men," Now we renamed as of last year, "The Brooklyn College
Vanguard." It went back to its original name, but just to give you a small example
of how he saw the college, and how he went after conservative faculty, you know,
because there were people there.

He went after...

Antonio NadalHe went after radical students, particularly S.D.S. types, you know, at that time,

there were actually students in the ‘50s, who were the student arm of the
Communist Party, USA. There were student radicals on the campus. And I'll tell
you something, I learned as much from those students and meeting with them and
finding out about how American society works ,with reference to civil rights and
human rights and everything else, than what I was getting in my classroom
because I was a language major, I had to take Latin, because if you were a
language major, you had to have your specialization in Spanish or French,


Portuguese, Chinese, but you had to take Latin, because that was like the
foundational language and I had a wonderful professor for that course. And in
1967, there was the arrest at Brooklyn College, of students that oppose, mostly
White students, that opposed recruitment of the military on campus, they would
bring in people to come in and sit in Boylan Hall and were giving out information
about how to travel and all the stuff that the military could do for you. And S.D.S.
students opposed it and they demonstrated against them. And one young woman
got so rowdy, and she ticked off one of the recruiters so much that he got up and
he pulled her hair and knocked down. And that started, I mean, because there was
so much activity on the campus, they emptied out the student center. I remember
Professor Myers in the Psychology Department, dear friend of mine who passed
away a couple of years ago. He was an activist with the students, Psychology
Professor, a tremendous person. He went and got the students out...He said,
“Look, they're about to arrest students in Boylan Hall because of the
recruiters’...You know, that was a single moment in my life because I have it
engraved in my head that students just poured into the quadrangle, the Brooklyn
College quadrangle, they poured, and they filled it up in front of Boylan Hall and
they had speakers already, ready to talk about what was going on and the
repression and everything else and all the issues of the moment and how Brooklyn
College was now recruiting the military to come in to make us a school that was
taken over by the American military. Point is that the Dean, Milga knows that, the
Dean of Student Affairs at the time called in the police to have the students
arrested. And they brought in the paddy wagons as they call them another racist
term, by the way, they brought in the police wagons to arrest those students.

So they got to the front of Boylan Hall, two trucks, you know, to arrest the student
demonstrators, the ones that were inside, because then there was the (hood
paloy?) outside and the students inside. And I saw White students actually put
their bodies under the tires of those two police wagons to prevent them from
moving, going out and taking the students. So I'm saying, man, that takes a lot,
because I told myself, I wouldn't do that. Damn, imagine if these people said, ‘to
hell with them, you know, let's just run them over.’ Right under the ties. I’ll never
forget that it was so you know. Of course that led to have quite a few days of
demonstrations. And this was shortly before I graduated, so I saw that happening
when I came into my Latin class. You know I love languages. I would never miss
classes. One thing I never did at Brooklyn College was cut. I always went to my
class, no matter what I was about, I always went to my class.

[01:44:57]

This time I got up and I saw what was happening. I was already involved with
P.R.A. and Milga, I was already, you might say nominally brought into the
struggle and I got up and Professor Ronest says, ‘Where are you going?’...‘I'm
going out there.’ So she says, ‘Why are you going out there?’ she says, ‘you
know, you're missing class.’ I said, “Yes, I know. But I have to be out there.’ So
she said, ‘Well, you should know what the consequences of that are.’ So she was
a wonderful professor, but very conservative, imagine, she taught the classics, you


know, she was into the western canon all the way. And she just didn't understand
like many professors, I had at Brooklyn, they didn't understand the whole student
movement of the late 60s and early 70s. What they saw was barbarians at the gate.
These kids are complete, they completely want to subvert what we're about. And,
our view we were adding, we were making this institution a lot more democratic.
You know, so it was it was a very interesting period, and at least in terms of my
personal journey. As a student, as a scholar, you know, as an activist, that I still
retain, you know, along with many compafieros and compaferas of the time.

Antonio Nadal We developed the first Puerto Rican Studies Institute in '68. They developed the
Department in ‘69. And then we followed the Institute, Department in '70. It's was
the 50th anniversary, they are celebrating their 50th, we already got word that
they're doing something big deal with their scholars and everything else.
Hopefully, I can make a couple of those, you know, and then there was City
College, because we always looked at City College. I said, Wow, that's the hotbed
of everything else. But then we saw that many of the privates also developed
Puerto Rican Studies programs, you know, and then we, Connecticut, we saw that
in Chicago, you know, Chicago has a very, very thriving activist community. And
I was talking to one of the organizers over there in Humboldt, what they call the
Puerto Rican section, you know, because they have this and, and I said, so how
did the Puerto Rican community develop here? I mean, you guys are 1000 miles
away from New York. How is it that it’s so active and so Puerto Rican and so
nationalist. He said, “you know, what? They gave us the lemons, they segregated
us and we made lemonade. So we developed our own.” Segregation can
sometimes bring people together, to realize why it's being done. So it is because
of the fact that we were treated, in such a fashion that we developed a resistance
to that. So that was an interesting... I said, Yeah, I suppose that's true. Because
Indio was saying, ‘you know, Tony,’ he was telling me yesterday. ‘You know,
Tony,’ he says, ‘when you're oppressed, and when you're kicked around and all
that, the thing that happens to people who have any conscience is they lose fear.
You lose fear. The fear and the oppression is what gives you the wherewithal to
come out and to be brave.’ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.

Because many of those things we wouldn't say and all that because we were, we
didn't want to be labeled, you know. And because we weren't going with the
mainstream, you know. So that is the struggle of academia today, we still have
that struggle and many Puerto Rican scholars that come and feel that this is the
steppingstone to other careers. And you know, it's totally an athame to what we're
about, you know, I never wanted to go anywhere else but to stay at Brooklyn
College and I stayed there 43 years, you know, first as a student and then as an
activist student and then as a faculty member. And let me tell you something, if I
had to do it all over again. I would gladly do it over again. Arrest and all.

Antonio NadalProbably the most progressive President, and probably the best in my, and we saw
like maybe seven, seven or eight of them in our tenure Brooklyn College. But
probably the best in terms of my view and others, was a man named Robert L.


Hess. Who happens to be the nephew, one of the nephews of Leon Hess, who
owns the gas stations and all, the billionaire. And the story that I want to tell you
about that which involved our department is that we always gave a reception to
whatever new President came to Brooklyn College. The department always gave
that person a reception with music. Right and by the way, "que bonita bandera."

wu Ta)

"que bonita bandera." "que bonita bandera." "que bonita bandera es la bandera
Puertorriquefia" and that's a chorus right? And then you come in, "Esa es mi
bandera, no puedo vivir sin ella. Que bonita compay, es la bandera
Puertorriquefia. Coro! Que bonita bandera."

[01:49:58]

And we will have our tambourines. You know, I would bring my keyboard and
accompany it with the chords. And when Robert Hess was made President of
Brooklyn College in 1980, he came in the beginning of 1980. He had been at
Chicago Circle, he had been the Provost, at Chicago Circle, and I had the
enormous privilege of being part of a caucus. What they called, The Latino Black
Caucus, that was part of the committee, the faculty committee that would
interview the candidates for the Presidency. So we wound up at 10, and from 10,
it was whittled to three and from the three included Robert L. Hess. And he was
by far the one that most people wanted. Because why? First of all, he was an
African scholar, who spoke several languages, spoke Spanish, pretty well French,
and he spoke the Ethiopian dialect because he was an expert on Ethiopia. That
was how he did his dissertation. Especially on the Haile Selassie, an enormously
intellectually gifted man but also one hell of a politician, one hell of a strategist,
you know, and we saw that this guy knew academia, and he knew how to handle
adversity if need be and of course, at that time 1980, the people who ran the
faculty Council, were the older Jewish faculty, very powerful group and Hess is
Jewish. Was he passed away a few years ago. But he was not, he didn't observe
any of the, you know, any any of the protocols of Judaism. Right. In fact, I think
he was non-religious altogether. And that irked a lot of people, that he didn't have
any complete identification with the Jewish community at Brooklyn College with
Hillel, etc. But they want to bring him in because he had access, in their view, he
had access to money. And the college was really in terrible disrepair into the '70s.
I mean, the Lily Pond, the buildings, the maintenance, everything was falling
apart, you know, and of course, here we are, you know, we were in the middle of
all that we all struggle in the 70s and Hess said, ‘I'm going to make Brooklyn the
showcase of CUNY.’ He said that he says and he even developed a few slogans.
You know, if you ‘If you go to Brooklyn, you're among the best’ something, stuff
like that, that he put around. And he reconstructed the Lily Pond. He made it a
place where people could go and study with running water and fish and beautiful
vegetation. He had the idea to reconstruct the tower, LaGuardia. And the library,
was really his doing the library, which is one of the probably the best library of
the CUNY system is the one in Brooklyn College. And he beautified the campus
he says, if you want to be proud of a campus, which is which is bucolic in the
middle of Brooklyn, then you have to give it that ambience. He went all out for


that right. And because of his connections through Yale, he was a ‘Yale-y’, B.A.,
M.A., Ph.D., Yale. The fact that he stood the storm and that he was approved, we
gave him a reception. As he came in with his wife, Fran who was a real...liberal,
Fran, she is still alive, Fran Hess. And we sang "que bonita bandera," and I led the
chorus by the way. And his wife, whenever I see her, over the years after her
husband passed away and everything she says, "you know Bob will never forget
how you received them and that you sang "que bonita banderah," she says, "que
bonita banderah." (laughter).

[End of recorded material at 01:53:46]