CUNY

DIGITALHISTORYARCHIVE

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

Interview with Crecensio “Joey” Morales
Interviewed by Pam Sporn and Tami Gold

October 19, 2019
Brooklyn, NY

[Start of recorded material at 00:00]

Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

What years did you arrive at Brooklyn College?

Well, I actually had two episodes at Brooklyn College. My first one was
back in 1967 I just graduated from high school, Boys High School, here in
Brooklyn. It was all boys and was considered one of the worst schools
academically throughout the whole city. And I had a lot of difficulty
getting into a college and I finally got into SEEK program. My mother
was a community activist and she found out about the SEEK program
which was having its first class enter Brooklyn College at the time. So I
came in at '67. Just at the beginning of September, I was lucky to come in
but at that time, they were only admitting us into night school, I wasn't
considered a part of day school, because it was a non-traditional program,
very non traditional program for academically and economically
disadvantaged students, of which I was both.

And so you had to go to school at night at Brooklyn College.

We were considered part of SGS and, our courses, were not credit bearing
courses. At the beginning, we would have to do a series of courses at least
about 14 credits before we could start getting actual credit for courses. So
it was more like a continuing education at that time, SGS was considered
School of General Studies.

So let me just back up a little bit and...you were a student at Boys High
School. Could you tell me a little bit about the makeup of the student body
and what your life was like at at Boys High School?


Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

Boys High School was at the time that I attended was about 85% Black
and Latino. We had maybe about 5% White and then some Asian students,
Caribbean students, the rest, but actually it was a population of minority
students, academically challenged.

What kind of courses did they teach you in high school about Puerto Rican
culture or history? I'm interested in that.

At the time, we didn't have much in terms of Puerto Rican studies or
anything about Puerto Rico. We had one chapter in, one sociology book,
which actually was called History and it was part of European history,
then part of the history of Spain. So we were include it as just part of a
property of Spain, and then the United States, but it was all covered in a
very small paragraph. Nothing to speak of.

And how did you feel as a Puerto Rican student at Boys High in the ‘60s,
in the 1960s, what was that like?

It was very difficult at that time, because at that time, I didn't really want
to be Puerto Rican. At that time, I had problems with speaking the
language. And I was only communicating with my parents in English and
they will communicate with me in Spanish. And to that extent, we got
along. My parents were involved in community activities so I didn't have
much of a background in terms of the history of Puerto Rico. The only
thing that we really did have was the music. And that, they played a lot of
different trios and different bands from Puerto Rico, but nothing without
much from here. So I didn't have a feeling of being Puerto Rican in the
sense of history and culture. I had the sense of the music and my friends
were all Puerto Ricans. So we didn't necessarily draw on the history and
culture of Puerto Rico. But we did have the parents who inculcated to us
certain values and things about the food or Puerto Rico, a little bit about
the history about the struggles that they had in terms of the economy, and
why they had to leave Puerto Rico because my parents had what they
called a Fonda. "Fonda" was a small restaurant in Puerto Rico, and they
were allied with the sugarcane factories. But when the sugar cane,
factories started failing and the economy started changing in Puerto Rico,
they had to close the "Fonda," and my father had to come to New York,
and he came at first by himself. So this is the type of thing that we knew
about Puerto Rico. It wasn't anything that was historical or cultural.

[00:05:41]

Can you tell me when you got your draft notice and what it felt like? Do
you remember the date that you got it and where you were and what that
felt like?


Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

The way the draft was working at the time was there was a lottery at the
federal level, and the lottery was pegged to the birthdays. So the individual
balls represented the birthdays, the month and the day of birth. So my
lottery, which came up, was for April 14th. And so my birthday was
actually August 15. But I was called with the group of people who were to
enter into the service, on April 14, so...

How did you feel when you got the draft notice?

When I got the draft notice I was very, very unhappy, apprehensive, at the
same time, I thought about not going and being a conscientious objector.
But that didn't work for me at the time. I also thought about going to
Canada, but I didn't, like many people of my time, not many, but a lot of
the people who were asked to go into the service and conscientious
objectors, they went to Canada. I didn't know anybody in Canada, being a
Puerto Rican, all the people I knew was in Brooklyn, New York. And the
other thing was, I wasn’t willing to go to jail. Because for 18 years, I tried
to stay out of jail. So I wasn’t voluntarily going to jail. So in my mind, I
had no options except to accept going into the service.

Why were you opposed to the war in Vietnam?

I was opposed to the war of Vietnam because I felt that it was actually a
war opportunity at the time, people were discussing why we were there,
and no one to give me a real good answer. It was a question of, versus
communism and democracy and I understood those concepts to a certain
extent. But they had very little meaning in terms of being a young man
from the ghetto in Brooklyn. So I didn't...I lost the answer the question...

Was your opposition to the war in Vietnam in any way connected to
feelings about the the relationship between Puerto Rico and United States?

My opposition did have something to, did have to do with the way Puerto
Rico is a colony of the United States. At that time I understood the
concept of being a captured nation. And that we were a captured people
and we were subjected to the laws of the United States. However, I was
living here, and so I needed to follow the laws. So I felt very conflicted
about going to the service. And I knew people who didn't go to the service
who were conscientious objectors. And so I was surrounded by people of
having varied opinions on so I was making up my own decisions about the
war.

Tell me, you were drafted and then where did you end up?


Crecensio Morales

Well the first day I went to the service was here, at Brooklyn, Fort
Hamilton Brooklyn, that was the induction station. Actually, I was, got
there late because my friends were throwing me a great going away party,
and they all decided that they were going to accompany me to the draft
station. We entered there and of course, the first thing was I had some drill
sergeants screaming at me, and I'm saying, you know, don't scream at me.
And then he screamed louder so then I knew I had to shut up. And they
put us in lines. And, they took us to the first station, the health stations
where we were examined, and it was my first experience going through a
very structured environment. And so I felt very uncomfortable and ill at
ease and I really wanted to rebel. But I understood that if you rebelled at
any point, you were going to wind up in jail. So I didn't do that. Went
through the process of induction, which was inspection of all parts of your
body to giving you clothes that don't fit, boots that don't fit. You go from
there and you’re assigned to bunkers of 40 people in 40 beds. And it's the
first time I have a group environment to sleep in and there was one that
was very uncomfortable and something that I was almost very angry that I
was going to rebel, but I guess I thought the better of it and just went
along with the program.

Once I was inducted, we went from there to Fort Dix for basic training.
And then the basic training. We went through all the things of modifying
our behavior, learning how to do things the army way. You brush your
teeth the army way, you take a shower the army way, you shave the army
way, everything was going to be the army way. And everybody was going
to look alike. And the whole purpose of it was to break down all your
civilian attitudes and habits, as the drill sergeant would say, says you're no
longer a civilian. You're now in the army, you're the property of the
United States government, and you will conduct yourself in a manner
accordingly. And so they gave us all this basic training. A physical
training was arduous for me, because at that time, I was a little bit heavy
as I am now. But I went through the whole process, and I could see that it
was hard for me, but it was harder for a lot of other individuals. And I saw
individuals who physically broke down and emotionally broke down. And
so I saw that I needed to take control of my situation and control what I
could. So after basic training, I was sent down to Fort Campbell,
Kentucky. They did not give me any advanced training. So when I went to
Fort Campbell, Kentucky, they sent me down to work in an office.

And from that, they gave me orders after six months, that I was going to
be sent to Vietnam. And my first thing was, but what is my father going to
say because my mother had died, he's alone. And he seems to be, I guess,
outwardly okay with it. He wasn't like, overly excited or anxious or
expressive, expression wise, he didn't express much. But I could tell it he
had some concern about it. I had some concern about it but my philosophy
was, I lived through the streets in Brooklyn, and they didn't break me


down and if I can survive here, I'll be able to survive anywhere. And that's
my attitude that I went with. When I went over to Vietnam. I went over to
Vietnam, first as a private. When I got to Vietnam, I was made a Corporal
and during my stay in Vietnam, I made it to the rank of Sergeant, which I
did in the shortest amount of time possible. And in Vietnam I was sent to
do supply clerk but I actually spent my time on the perimeter of the camp.
I was sent to camp, well, I entered Vietnam through Cameron Bay, which
is in the south. Since I didn't have any specific training, it seems that the
government didn't want to invest money into me so they just sent me as
cannon fodder, as they say or Individual replacement is the technical term
the army used. I wasn't sent over as part of a company. I was sent as an
individual and my experience was that as an individual, you're going to go
into different places, and each one of those places have different needs or
they would accept people and none of them would accept me.

[00:15:45]

I went from there, from Cameron Bay to Long Binh, from Long Binh to
Bien Hoa from Bien Hoa to Nha Trang from Nha Trang to Tuy Hoa, from
Tuy Hoa to Qui Nhon, so finally I went to the worst station of the whole
division of the army that I was in, the 52nd combat Aviation Brigade, and
Pleiku which is in the central highlands of Vietnam. We were 40 miles
from the Cambodian border. Our camp was basically Cobra attack
helicopters, and Huey gunships and my job was really to protect the
hardware. So I was sent that night to do this camp security, which I did on
a post with two other individuals. We had a machine gun, we had grenade
launchers, and we had, M-16s. And we had also access to claymore mines.
So we were one little, tough, little post. And we were like, about several
hundred yards from the next post. And we were right on the front of the
line of the perimeter of the camp overlooking the valley. And sometimes
we would be looking down the valley and at night, we would just have to
go through an exercise of firing into the valley to make sure that there was
no one out there to attacking the camp.

The camp was attacked a couple of times, actually, I saw actual rounds of
mortar rounds coming at me while I was in the back of the camp, and so I
had total experience while I was there, and I was there as one individual. I
was not there as part of any company and being the only Latino assigned
to my specific company, it was particularly difficult because I had a range
of individuals with different opinions from different parts of the United
States. And it was really one of the first times that I really experienced
discrimination in to the extent that I experienced a level of hate that I'd
never experienced before. And so my experiences in Vietnam were varied.
It went from, "oh don’t... we don't like you, we don't like Puerto Ricans,
we" ...they didn't even know what a Puerto Rican was. They thought that
when I had my flag from Puerto Rico, which has one star and then the
stripes, they thought that was actually Texas and that I was Mexican.


Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn
had on you?

Crecensio Morales

Okay, because it was the Lone Star State right, Texas is the Lone Star
State.

So you experienced this discrimination in Vietnam, as a Puerto Rican.

There was a time that, I had another experience, which, during my one
period of time there, there was a lot of strife between African Americans
and the White troops and that happened in various camps in Vietnam and
there was some violence. And one day, actually was night time, I was
stationed with two individuals, they were many a White company that I
was in and we were told that there was a group of African Americans
running amok, supposedly running amok, and they were beating up White
soldiers, which really was a hoax. But when it happened at the moment,
we thought it was real. And I was very conflicted about it, because I'm a
minority, how am I going to go out and be fighting against other minority
people. And at the same time, I have to think about self defense and being
with a White camp. That was one of the issues that I had to deal with.
Other one was a one time I went to the EM club, the Enlisted Men's club
and there was a White soldier and he was slapping a Mexican-American,
young man who didn't speak a lot of English, and he was slapping him in
the face and I told him to stop it. And he told me, "Chico doesn't mind."
And I said, well, I mind. And we wound up fighting that day. But it was a
question that I couldn't tolerate, the question of that discrimination against
people.

On the other hand, when I was traveling around from the different camps,
I could go from one camp to another and as soon as I came off, say, the
helicopter or the bus, whatever means of transportation and I encounted
the first group of Latinos, they immediately saw me and they would wave
to me say, come on, come on. And they will have me sit down and we
would eat food that they prepared cause a lot of the Latinos, or Puerto
Ricans who couldn't speak a lot of English they had them do jobs that
didn't require language, and one of them was to be a cook. So we had a lot
of Puerto Ricans, men who do our cooking, then that translates a lot of
Puerto Rican men, after grad...leaving the service to become people who
were good cooks, my father and other people that I knew, uncles, they
were great cooks. So they learned that.

So overall, what was the greatest impact that your experience in Vietnam

The greatest impact that was, first of all, that I didn't want stay in the
service. And I was being solicited right down until the very day. I didn't
want to be in the service. The other thing was to come back to the states
and not having had any real training in any kind of profession, other than
being a security guard. And the other part of it was that on the out-


Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Tami Gold

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

processing the sergeants and were telling us that, when you get to the
airport, you should watch out that there are people there that are going to
beat you up because you're a soldier. Don't wear your uniform, because
people will beat you up. They hate you out there, and they tried to instill
this fear in the soldiers and this animosity against people who were either
peace activist or even different, and from the Hare Krishnas. They were
telling us the Hare Krishnas, who are people who follow Buddhism, that's
why....the Hare Krishnas, they follow Buddhism, that the people were
going to beat us up also. So they were doing some kind of absurd
propaganda to try to get us to get back into the states. So it was a thing of
being not prepared to come back.

So when you came back. You came you, you were opposed to the war
before you went, then you were there, had your experiences there. When
you came back, were you still opposed to the war? And what, did you find
the activists being hostile to you?

I was opposed to the war before I went in there. I was opposed to the war
while I was in there, and I wore my peace activist sign. And I was,
expressed my opposition, to, when I was there. And I was opposed to the
war when I left and when I came back here, and I joined some of the
activities against the war. I didn't join the Vietnam Veterans Against the
War, because I was already tired of being in a military organization. So I
didn’t join, but I was opposed to the war and I did participate in anti war
activities and protests.

[00:24:57]
When you talk about the war, can you say the Vietnam War?

Yes. Okay.

Can you just say that part again, just that one part, I was opposed to the
Vietnam War before I went and...

So I was opposed, I was opposed to the Vietnam War, before I went to the
war, and I was opposed to the Vietnam War while I was there, and I was
opposed to Vietnam War, afterwards, and I joined protests against the war,
against the Vietnam War.

Tell me about how you went back to Brooklyn College. When did you go
back to Brooklyn College?

I left the service in December of '71. I entered Viet...., | entered Brooklyn
College after I left the service in 1973. So, I left at '68 came back in 1973
and that's when I started school.


Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

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Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

And what was the environment on Brooklyn College campus like for you
when you came in 1973, coming as a Puerto Rican who had an experience
of being in Vietnam.

When I came back to Brooklyn College in 1973, it was a little bit different
because they had already established a Puerto Rican Studies Department.
And so I gravitated towards the Puerto Rican Studies Department. And I
knew people who are working there at the Puerto Rican Studies
Department. So I had a place to go and talk to people. Aside from that,
there was no other places in Brooklyn College that actually I was able to
find any information that would help me go through the process of being a
student there at Brooklyn College.

So it was the Puerto Rican Studies Department that gave you the
counseling that you needed to be a student?

The Puerto Rican Studies Department helped me quite a bit because it
helped me navigate the structures and the administration of Brooklyn
College. At the same time, it gave me a group of support, people who
supported me and cared that, whether I came to school or not. And so that
was important to me. And it was important to me to do well, because I had
people who had faith in me and had permission to do something better.
And I wanted to contribute to my community.

Is there a particular person that was really looking out for you in the
Department that you could talk about?

There wasn't a particular person in the Puerto Rican Studies Department.
Matter of fact, at the beginning of the, when I started going to the Puerto
Rican Studies Department, in spite of the fact that there was people there
who helped me and gave me information, and even I had some people who
helped me with some of the courses because they had gone through it. I
didn't feel that there was a collective consciousness of being a unit. It was
a group of individuals in a particular place and doing different things. And
that was between the students. The faculty, I didn't have a lot of
interaction with them. Because at first I couldn't take Puerto Rican Studies
courses, because I had to take an academic probation curriculum. Again, I
came into a situation where I was studying to do non-credit courses, to try
to get my skills to the level that I needed to, to be successful.

But at the same time, you said the Puerto Rican Studies Department was
important that it was there and that you felt that it provided you a space.

The Puerto Rican Studies Department had, the, some resources that were
important for me to utilize. They had access to materials that


Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam sporn

Crecensio Morales

supplemented my knowledge of Puerto Rico. They had curriculum...let me
go back to this.

[00:29:49]

It was a real confusing year, when I came back to Brooklyn College in the
Puerto Rican Studies Department. When I had returned, the department
was working, but it was lacking leadership. The chair people had resigned
and there was empty space at the level of chairperson. Therefore, courses
were being given, but it felt that there was no unity there. So while,
individuals helped me, the department as a whole could not. So I felt that
there was a need for us to begin to work with, disappointed because, let
me do that again.

I felt that there was a need that to work with the Puerto Rican Studies
Department, that there was a place for me to take my skills to take my
knowledge that I could apply to assist in the department while at the same
time I could benefit from being in the department.

When you came back to Brooklyn College, did you get involved in the
Puerto Rican Alliance?

When I started working with the Puerto Rican Studies Department, in
terms of the committees, the recruitment committee and the curriculum
committee, I joined those committees. Even though there was no
chairperson at the time. There were individual instructors who were in
those areas and they were in charge of those. So I started gravitating to
those people and I started working with those, and through them, I got to
learn about the Puerto Rican Alliance. And then, as I started working with
the issue of the leadership of the Department of Puerto Rican Studies, I
started to realize that we needed to get the Puerto Rican Alliance directly
involved in the activity because at one point, it was Puerto Rican Alliance
doing one thing, at the other side, it was Puerto Rican Studies Department
doing its thing. I felt that there was a need that the Puerto Rican Alliance
needed to support the Puerto Rican Studies Department to get a
chairperson in the position.

What was...what was your role in in the takeover of the President's Office?
Saying that there were, it got to a point where students took over the
President’s Office because of controversy over the Puerto Rican Studies
Department. Can you tell me about that?

It started, our struggle started in, Okay. We first had a problem that the
Department needed to have a leadership and we were working with the
Puerto Rican Alliance, to try to find out what was the process for electing
somebody to be a chair. And we had our understanding that Puerto Rican
Studies would be able to do that itself. But what happened is that the


president of the college, constituted a search committee and didn't allow
the Puerto Rican Studies Department to participate in the search
committee, at first. And then when they allowed us to be in the committee
and we demanded that the Puerto Rican studies, the Department be, were
represented as the majority of members of that committee. The majority
made some recommendations to the President as to the chairperson, the
administration decided that they would have their own person come in and
override the decision of the committee that was constituted by students
and faculty of Puerto Rican Studies, along with college faculty.

When that happened, it was decided that we needed to take some kind of
direct action, and that we could no longer continue business as usual
within the college, that this college could not continue to roll over the
students’ decisions and that the students’ desires and the needs of the
students, therefore, we went to the Puerto Rican Alliance. And we said
that we needed to start making pickets and protests and things like that.
And we constituted a Central Committee of individuals from the
Department, from PRA, and from other student organizations. And this
Central Committee decided that, along with the protests, the peaceful
protests that we had, we had to have a little bit more militant actions that
would bring attention to the and put pressure on the administration to at
least listen to our (thank you), to listen to our demands and to adhere to
what we were talking about. We constituted a small group of individuals
that formed the first group of individuals that would enter into the
President's Office and asked for a meeting of the President.

[00:35:33]

When the President did not allow us to meet with him, we opened up the
door and we asked all the students that were downstairs protesting to come
upstairs and to come meet the President. At that point, we entered into the
President's Office, and we said politely to the Secretary, "this is a takeover
of this office, please put all your stuff way, lock it up. And you take the
rest of the day off, and we're going into the President's Office." and that's
when I went out into the balcony of the President's Office with the
megaphone and announced to the campus that we presently have control
of the President's Office, and that we will not relinquish it, until we meet
with the President, he hears our demands. And that took a day, before the
president even came in, we received a lot of threats that the police were
going to come they were going to eject us from the campus and when that
was sent out to the student body. Instead of students running away, the
student started coalescing, and coming together, and they joined the picket
lines. And they formed the first line of the defense for the students who
were inside. When the President finally came and said he wanted to solve
this, we said, well you're going to listen to us and we began giving his
demands.


That was the initiation of a two year struggle to try to get a chairperson of
the Puerto Rican Studies Department. We picketed again, and gave
him...gave back the office to the President and we said we want to have a
meeting and we set up some meetings. When those meetings were not
given to us, we started to have another picket line and protesting and that
happened for a week, he would not meet. So our small group of forward
students, went in to the Bursars Office and announced to the Bursars
personnel, "this is a takeover, we want you to be feeling safe. Please put
your stuff away, nothing will be destroyed, nothing will be broken. But
you will have to leave the office for the day." And so we took over the
office, we had the students secure the property, make sure none of the files
are done. We asked faculty members to come in and to be witnesses to the
fact that this was nonviolent, that it was not destructive, that we were, this
was an act of civil disobedience that we had decided that business as usual
could not be conducted on this campus until the demands of the students
were heard and addressed.

And so at that time, we began to paper over, we used the newspaper from
the King's Men of Brooklyn College, which were in the bins for free, and
utilize them to cover the windows, so that we could not be seen from the
outside. And we utilized the telephones of the school to call up different
campuses and notify the student organizations that we needed their
support, and that we needed people to come to join our picket lines. We
broadcast that throughout the City University, then out to the State
University, and we even had student organizations contact the University
of Puerto Rico and even in the Sorbonne in Paris, and we got responses
from all over, telegrams that they sent copies to us that demanded that the
administration addressed the students’ demands and that there will be a
peaceful solution to the issues that were presented.

So at that time, we started getting a lot of support. The administration
decided that yes, they were going to meet with us, but what they were
doing, it was a stalling tactic and they were getting....(pause)

[00:40:14]

Oh, they were just starting to get injunctions. They went to the courts and
they got injunctions against the students demanding that we leave the
offices otherwise we would be arrested. We said that we will not leave the
offices and more students joined us. The Veterans Organization joined us,
Student Government joined us. We had White student groups join the
protest. So we had a whole community of individuals that formed a
defensive posture for the students who were inside.

Therefore, they could see that the whole campus was involved, and that
this was not a question of self interest but of community interest. The


Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

community needed to have students involved in almost every committee
of the college, including employment and curriculum.

Do you remember some of the slogans or chants that people were saying?
You are inside the office holding, holding the office, occupying the office?
People were outside, what kinds of chants were they saying, do you
remember?

There was rallying cries that we utilized, "The people united will never be
defeated." We said that, "Aw, beep, beep, We will not be beat." We had
one against the President, which was, "Kneller, you liar. We'll set your ass
on fire." And that actually came about because one day, during one of the
protests the students came, and brought an effigy of the President, and
they took the effigy and hanged them in the quad. And somebody actually
set it a fire, in the middle of the quad. A little bit dramatic, but for us, it
was a question of sending a message rather than actually really doing
actions of that nature cause we had already proven that we were doing acts
of civil disobedience and that we were not doing things of violence.

Were you arrested?

We were arrested after the third night of occupation of the Bursars Office.
We actually had, four in the morning, while students were outside,
protesting and guarding and observing. We had faculty observers, we had
lawyers, we had prior notice that they were going to send in the police to
arrest us. But in fact, what happened is that the police allowed federal
marshals to come in and be the ones who actually arrested us. Maybe
because they realized that we were not criminals, that this was the act of
civil disobedience. But they arrested us and took us to the court directly
from the college. And at the court, the administration presented all sorts of
propaganda and lies, utilizing flyers from different organizations accusing
us of being a communist movement and being violent, all of which was
not proven by the actions and the history of our actions.

We were sentenced to, students were sentenced to three months probation.
And the faculty was sentenced to six months probation. We had about five
faculty members and 39 students, and one of our students yelled out, "We
are now 44, we are now BC44." And from that, when we were sentenced
to the three months, we told our lawyers to tell the judge that if the faculty
is getting six months probation, that the students demanded that they be
sentenced to six months probation. And the judge says fine, they gave a
student six months probation each. We came back to the campus after
being sentenced. And as we came by subway to Flatbush Avenue station,
we were met at the station by students who all joined us as we started
entering campus. And to our amazement when we entered the campus, the
whole campus was full of students greeting us, and one of our students,


Crecensio Morales

Willy Rodriguez, came out and said, "We are BC44, we’ve come back to
give you more." And that was one of our chants that we utilized when we
went into the second occupation exactly six months after the probation
was...

(pause)

[00:45:48]

So, Willy Rodriguez said, "We are BC44, we come back to give you
more!" And the chants started rising from a mountain of students, "BC 44.
We've come back to give you more!" And exactly six months later, we
started our pickets again. And we started going around the campus and we
had a group of students and we went back into the Bursars Office and took
over the Bursars Office. And since down the hall, there was the Registrar's
Office, we said we're going to, we took over the Registrars Office. So at
one point we had control of the whole first floor, right hand side of the
building of Boylan Hall. We had control. And we started negotiating with
the administration and we told the President we want to have our
Department not entered in by police while we are negotiating. We also
wanted to have our interim chairperson, while the permanent person was
being sort of selected, but we already had somebody in mind, because one
person that we really had in mind and that was another slogan that we had
was...

"Sanchez, si! Lugo, no!" Our chant was, "Sanchez, si! Lugo, no!" We, the
department and the students, want Maria Sa4nchez as our Chairperson, and
we rejected the administration's candidate, Elba Lugo and we had taken
over the Bursars Office, they threatened to bring in the police and take
over the Department of Puerto Rican Studies. And we formed a blockade
and decided that we will not allow them to bring in and seat that
Chairperson by force of police into our Department and the students rally
and stopped the police and the Chairperson and the President from
bringing her and seating her in the Chair in the Department of Puerto
Rican Studies. And the students stayed firm, we started negotiating with
the President and we said we'll give you back the Registrars Office, if you
let us have the other office across the hall. And we utilized that office to
create the Office of the Institute of Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn
College.

So we had the Department of Puerto Rican Studies and the Institute Puerto
Rican studies. And now we had the interim chairperson. At that point, we
started negotiating and one of the things that we did is we were
negotiating with the President all through the night, I was part of the
negotiating team. And we said that we have people downstairs in the
offices, and they're very hungry, and it's late at night, we haven't eaten.
And they said to us, well, we can't get anything at night around here and
we said Juniors restaurant, on Dekalb Avenue, on the other side of


Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Flatbush, is open 24 hours and you can get the food and they did get us the
food. They got us hamburgers, french fries and sodas, and everything from
Juniors, came from the Juniors and that paved the way for us to be able to
then negotiate further, but the struggle didn't stay right there. We had more
pickets.

[00:49:27]

Finally, at the end of the semester, they decided that they would allow our
Chairperson to sit at the head of the Department. It was a long struggle
that we had over two years, but we had decided that the self determination
of our department and the cause of the Department should be decided by
the students of the Department and the faculty of the Department and not
by the administration, and that our curriculum, should also reflect that, that
is the decision and the Department on that basis started growing
fantastically, and student participation, the curriculum was revised. We
had more input from different people from different campuses and
scholars in the field of Puerto Rican Studies that added to the scholarship
of the Puerto Rican Studies Department and which allowed the
Department to get national recognition for being one of the most advanced
Departments of Puerto Rican Studies.

That's an awesome story, an awesome victory.

It was a struggle at which we had casualties, we did have along the way
from 1968, throughout, we had students who didn't make it through their
courses but sacrificed themselves. We had students who died because of
the emotional distress that they suffered being arrested in '68, which is
something that we were able to avoid in the struggle of '73, '74, '75.

Ihave a question. You mentioned before that you didn't want to go to jail
and that's why you went, when you were drafted that you decided you had
to go because you didn't want to go to jail. When you came back to
Brooklyn College in '73,'74, you were leading a struggle and got arrested
what made the difference? Why were you willing to get arrested for this
struggle over the self determination Puerto Rican Studies Department?

We, at least my personal decision for thinking about getting, allowing
myself to get arrested was that this was a struggle that I felt personally
invested in. That I felt was one that was worthwhile to pursue, that I felt
that it was for the betterment of our community and for the empowerment
of our community, the Puerto Rican community. And that would allow us
to institutionalize the Department of Puerto Rican Studies, so that it will
become a permanent place and recognized as a permanent part of the
Brooklyn College and the larger academia community.


Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

So, what would you say? Are there any other important anecdotes or
stories that you would say about the your activism at Brooklyn College, in
the Puerto Rican Alliance? Were there some really other special moments
maybe not where you were being arrested or protesting, but some of the
other kind of work that you did was there anything in these in these...

We were able to do a lot of things that we would never be able to do
before through the struggle. And that is to be a permanent part and a
recognized part of the community of the student body of Brooklyn
College, and also being part of the academic life of Brooklyn College.

We were able to do things like have our food cooked in the Student Union
building, although some of the administrators of the Union building didn't
think that our food and our cuisine was actually that flavorful and the
aroma permeated the student building and that was one thing that could
never happened before, but they had to recognize that there was different
cultures, and that those different cultures you had to respect their, the way
people live. And so we were able to share that with the rest of the
community and not be ashamed and have people be proud of what we
were doing. We had dances, where we were able to have Latin American
music, and even Latin American and Salsa bands come into the campus
and be funded by Student Government and by the administration, and do
cultural activities that were sponsored and funded by Brooklyn College,
which was never, happened before. We were having representation within
the student body, and we even had a Student Government President
elected that was Puerto Rican through the support of the Puerto Rican
Alliance, and other student organizations. So we were able to work
collectively as part of the whole community in Brooklyn College and not
be isolated and not have any power within the community.

[00:55:50]

I was a person who was not given a lot of chances, or, not seen as capable
within the academic community, and not acceptable to be in the university
level, to graduating with three majors within Brooklyn College and then
going on to do a Masters of Science in Education degree. And so it
showed at least me as one person, and that there were many more other
individuals who are lacking the opportunity or the resources, but with the
proper motivation and proper resources were able to succeed. And I think
that's my life story.

Do you think that your involvement in this movement for the Puerto Rican
Studies and for against the war, the whole time period you were a
Brooklyn College student, do you think being involved in those


Crecensio Morales

Pam Sporn

Crecensio Morales

movements had something to do with your success as, in graduating with
these degrees?

Being involved in the struggle was a learning experience for me and an
empowering experience. One of the things I did was work with Puerto
Rican Alliance organization, and I was doing the newsletter for the Puerto
Rican Alliance. So I was able to do my writing skills and do my
journalistic writing within that and get other students involved, and
empower them to be able to express themselves and express their own
opinions. It also helped me to work within the organization. And so we
had different parts of PRA. Among them was our Communications
Committee, our Finance Committees. That taught us how to work with
organizations and raise money. We also were able to do sports and
participate in the intramural sports of the campus. We had our own little
team called "Mofongo."

"Mofongo" actually is a Puerto Rican dish made out of, mashed plantains,
which is very good. There's just been us thinking about Mofongo, was that
it was also a time to for fun, and that's what that allowed us to do when we
were doing sports.

We you a teacher afterwards? What it what did you do as a career after
you got out of college?

After I got out of college, I worked for a time with Brooklyn College as an
Assistant in the Writing Lab. The Writing lab was a place where students
could come and get work and assistance on their essay writing and reading
skills from, that was a temporary job and from there, I went to ASPRIA of
New York and I worked there as a basic skills instructor and from basic
skills instructor, I worked at City College, and I became the Director of
the Student Support Services Program at City College. And from there I
went on to be Deputy Director of ASPIRA for all the programs in New
York City and then I decided that I would do a degree in counseling. So I
got my Masters of Science in education in Bilingual Counseling from
Bank Street college, which I utilized to go and work in Long Beach in
Long Island at the request of the community organization, "Circulo
Hispanidad," they were working within that high school community to get
a bilingual person but they did not, the administration said they couldn't
find anyone. But I was contacted by Professor Nadal at Brooklyn College,
and he informed me of the need for a bilingual person to work with the
Latino community in Long Beach and I accepted the challenge. And I was
there for 24 years and I worked with students from all different countries,
not only Latinos, and it empowered me to work with students who had
very little language skills and had fears of the building and administration,
of high school administration and I was able to work with them and


Tami Gold

Crecensio Morales

Tami Gold

Crecensio Morales

Tami Gold

Crecensio Morales

empower them and help them graduate in larger numbers. And I created,
developed the ASPRIA Club in Long Beach, which was there for 24 years
and even after I left and retired that club is still organized and working
because the students feel very much part of it culturally, and because it
empowers them for the future.

[topic transition]

[01:01:40]
What do you mean you stayed out of jail that 18 years?

The reason I didn't want to get arrested to go to Canada or go to Canada to
avoid the draft was that for 18 years, I tried to stay out of being part of the
prison population where we are very well represented. But I was running
with people in the community who were actually called...Let me rephrase.
Okay.

The reason I didn't want to go to jail or I stayed out of the jail for that
time, was that in my community there's young people, the lives of young
Puerto Ricans, young Puerto Rican's destiny was either to drop out of
school, go to jail, do drugs, and all of those things I had stayed out of and I
didn't want that type of life for myself. So I didn't want that type but I
didn't want to go to jail, just because I wasn't going to the service, because
I thought I had better chances of surviving Vietnam then I did of having
the streets.

I just want to ask, what were the streets like in Brooklyn? I didn't live in
Brooklyn, what were they like? Were they really tough?

The streets in Brooklyn when I was growing up, was a place of very little
opportunity for recreation, for education. It was a place where people
basically were unemployed. Or they were in gangs at that time and the
drugs in my community, Brooklyn was impoverished and...(background
audio).

When did you realize you were Puerto Rican?

I was, my experience of, when did I realize I was Puerto Rican? I realized
I was Puerto Rican when I first left (pause)

I'm thinking about when I first had to defend myself as being a Puerto
Rican. And that was when I went to down south and to Fort Campbell,
Kentucky. And I was confronted first by some white soldiers from the
south, who were looking at me as a person from another planet. A
stranger, a foreigner, someone who didn't belong, and they treated me that


Tami Gold

Crecensio Morales

way and they isolated me, and they left, me as an individual, so I was not
able to interact there.

[01:05:08]

I started realizing that I was Puerto Rican because I met other Puerto
Ricans down there, and they didn't speak English, and I didn't speak
Spanish, but we knew we had something in common. And that was our
heritage and where we came from the families. So that exposed me to
being Puerto Rican.

All my life. I had a sense of living in the culture, but I didn't have the
culture living in me. And so I didn't understand really what it was to be
Puerto Rican. I was Puerto Rican in name, but not in feeling and living as
a Puerto Rican. So it was when I went down south that I actually had to
decide, you know, I am Puerto Rican. Before that, I didn't feel Puerto
Rican. I didn't want to be Puerto Rican. Because of my experience in
elementary school. I was a little kid in the second grade speaking Spanish
to one of my little friends in the yard in the school and the principal and
this great booming voice came over and said, "Stop speaking Spanish.” He
said, "You are in America. You cannot speak Spanish here. You will not
speak Spanish," and that caused a trauma in me that I went back home,
and I couldn’t tell my parents what had happened. And from that day on, I
didn't want to even speak Spanish. I didn't want eat Spanish. I didn't want
to be Puerto Rican. And it wasn't until I knew that I had to defend myself
in the army, like much later on in my life, that I had to decide, you know
what, I am who I am, and I'm proud of being who I am. I'm proud that my
parents are Puerto Rican. And the saying says, "My parents are Puerto
Rican, my friends are Puerto Rican, so I'm Puerto Rican too.”

How do you feel now? I mean how do you feel about where we are? How
do you feel about where the struggle is?

I feel that we are on a different stage in the struggle, we are in the stage
where we have a history that we, a known history that we know. We have
people in our community who have different positions that would never
had before, that they have access to governmental administration building
services. We have a whole different community with a whole lot of
different possibilities. But it's now a question of that. We've lost the
organizational part of our struggle. We've gone through a phase where we
were very strong, and we were a movement. And it was a movement
where people were actually consciously deciding to be part of the
movement. At this time, I don't see that we have that. We have a different
struggle now. We have a lot of things that we have to re-learn and re-do, a
lot of re-education.


Crecensio Morales

Tami

Crecensio Morales

Tami Gold

Crecensio Morales

It was interesting that when we were given the subpoenas, we were told
that the police would come in and arrest us. And it was the faculty and the
lawyers who decided that the police can be brought into the campus at that
time, even at the behest of the administration, that they would have to go
through a lot of procedures before anyone could be arrested on campus for
protesting. So that is why they brought in the federal marshals. The
purpose of federal marshals was to avoid that confrontation. And it was
also because the reaction of the people to seeing students arrested by
police and possibly beaten by police, that made the administration refrain
from bringing the police in.

This is my last thing. Puerto Rico has been hit really hard, economically
and by a global climate crisis. I feel a lot for Puerto Ricans on the island. It
feels devastating. What do you feel about the situation, specifically the
island?

[01:10:04]

Most recently the Hurricane Maria and Irma devastating Puerto Rico is
something that is so shocking and so emotionally distressing to me and my
family and all my friends who even have knowledge of, they are not even
Puerto Ricans, but they realize that this is a situation that was dire for
Puerto Ricans. But my feeling was that Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans
have been through a lot, they have a long history of struggle. They have a
long history of going through changes. Unemployment during, when the
factories works had shut down, the economy changed in Puerto Rico.
When the police had gone through the early ‘50s and had repressed the
Puerto Ricans and even had fought against the Puerto Ricans
demonstrating or putting their Puerto Rican flags on they could be beaten
or arrested.

Puerto Ricans have gone through the community here in New York, and
Chicago, and they've started with very little, and we've come a long way,
the Puerto Rican community has a lot of resources within themselves and
this is what I think we need to begin to re-instill that we bring that to the
consciousness of the Puerto Rican people. And we can see that the island
is coming back and so that shows you that we can survive anything. That
the Puerto Rican people, so I have a very positive vision of the potential
and the way that Puerto Ricans have dealt with adversity.

[topic transition]

[01:12:15]
I didn't hear you, what?

We had to put together, Puerto Ricans, bathrooms in the Registrars Office.
So we had to wall off part of it and utilize the, the place because we
couldn't come out with the Registrars Office. Because once we got out, we


Tami Gold

Crecensio Morales

wouldn’t be able to get back in. There was just, there was all sorts of
things like that. We have to we had to utilize the wastepaper basket as part
of the bathroom facilities. Yeah, because we couldn't get out of the offices.
While well if we got out of the offices, we couldn't get back in. So it was
decided, you know, and then we had to decide who would get arrested and
who would not because we didn't want to have the leadership decapitated,
totally. We realized that most of the time it was that the police would try
to criminalize the movement and the arrest the whole leadership of the
movement. So that's why only 44 people got arrested. Because we
consciously made this decision that this part of our movement would be
sacrificing in this way and we know that the people would be sacrificing
in another way. So we didn't feel any ill will to anyone for being arrested.
And we just said that, that's part of what we do.

And what about..."Que bonita bandera..." did you sing that?

Oh, we sang, "Que bonita bandera..." and we sang, "Temporal, Temporal,
aqui viene el Temporal," and a lot of songs that were Plenas from Puerto
Rico that we were able to do. That helped us also be motivated but also
learn more about the culture also and the spirit of struggle. This was a
struggle that went before us and that we inherited and that is our legacy
that we need to continue to instill and empower our community.

Can you sing any of those songs?
I don't sing (laughter) I don’t sing unless you sing. You want to sing?
"Que bonita bandera, Que bonita bandera, Que bonita bandera es la

bandera Puertorriquefia. Mas bonita afuera, mas bonita afuera, mas bonita
a fuera si la otra no estuviera."

[End of recorded material at 01:14:58]