What the schoolbook leaves out

A schoolbook can tell 1493, the sugar, and a flag, and still omit the living island. This page is a list of absences, each with a citation, not a rant. First: Taíno persistence. The Caguana courts are a National Historic Landmark, NRIS 92001671, Capa phase circa 1200 to 1500, listed in 1992 and designated in 1993. That is not a vanished prologue. The people who built bateyes did not become extinct because a nineteenth-century form dropped the word indio.

Second: the Black coastal towns. Smithsonian Folkways separates bomba and plena and places both in Afro-Puerto Rican communities. Loíza is a municipality, not a costume. Third: the dates of the language laws. Spanish became the sole official language on April 5, 1991; Spanish and English were restored on January 28, 1993. Title One, Chapter 5 still carries both acts. A chapter on "bilingual Puerto Rico" that omits those days omits the fight.

Fourth: the 2020 recoding. CentroPR records that White alone fell from 75.8 percent in 2010 to 17.1 percent in 2020. That is a questionnaire and identity turn, not a biological fact. A civics unit that treats race on the island as a stable pie is already out of date. Fifth: the parents of the food. Casabe is Taíno cassava bread. Mofongo is Afro-Caribbean mashed plantain. A box of "typical foods" that photographs only lechón has picked a poster.

What this list is not: a demand that every child memorize thirty essays. It is a demand that extinction, a single jíbaro face, and a vague "two languages" stop passing for the whole. The migration figures, María, PROMESA, and 1898 have other homes in this wave. Here the omission is cultural and civic. Caguana is on the federal list. Bomba is not plena. The laws have dates. The 2020 boxes moved. The bread and the mash have different parents. A schoolbook that cannot say those sentences is not finished. This diary exists so those sentences have a public URL, not so a rant substitutes for a citation.

Sources: NPS, Caguana NRIS 92001671; Leyes de Puerto Rico, Título Uno, Capítulo 5 (5 de abril de 1991; 28 de enero de 1993); CentroPR, serie de hojas de datos de raza y etnicidad de 2020; Smithsonian Folkways, bomba y plena. Freeze 2026-08-22.