Berkeley Review of Education

In 2014, Puerto Rican educators were recruited to teach in Oklahoma City Schools. What resulted in a seemingly small labor migration illuminates a deeper understanding of the actual relations among colonial experiments. It functions as no minor illustration of the centrality of educational labor experiments to the militaristic, capitalist, and other relations between the United States and its occupied territories. In this article, we observe educators as migrant laborers, whose lives are shaped by a nexus of colonial forces and whose labors and migrations suture two “forgotten places” (Gilmore, 2008) through new formations. We seek to understand how a “fly-over” state and an archipelagic possession are both related and central to educational colonization, how educational colonization is a labor project, and how all of this maps emergent analytic possibilities. How does this labor migration help us understand the unlikely interplay of two contexts in the colonial project? Through news articles, testimonio, ethnographic interludes, and archival data, we examine how we might newly understand the role of education and educators in the larger network of colonial relations.