We are a group of five high school students and we are planning a podcasting project with our Spanish teacher, Carmen Welton. If we raise enough funds, we will go to Puerto Rico this February to study how different individuals' lives are affected by the unique status Puerto Rico has, not as a country, not as a state, but as a commonwealth of the United States. At the very least, we will travel to New York City and explore the neighborhoods that are home to thousands of Puerto Ricans. But first, we need to raise money from outside collaborators to support us in creating our podcast. We attend a small private boarding school and there are not a lot of extra funds available for such ambitious projects. We also believe that an important piece of language education is understanding how to organize and finance travel abroad. 

On our trip, we will record our interviews and when we return to Williamstown we will take what we have gathered and create a podcast. Our goal is to be able to present our podcast to a wide audience, and perhaps to have it broadcast nationally. We believe, as long-time students of Spanish language and Hispanic culture, that Puerto Rico is an unknown and enigmatic piece of the Hispanophone community. It's relationship to the U.S. is complicated, politically, and fraught, socially. The way it can be treated, for example, as a stepping stone by undocumented immigrants trying to enter the United States from Latin America poses both logistical and ethical concerns that as far as we can tell no one really seems to take particularly seriously. Our government spends a fortune on defending the Mexican-American border and that situation receives a lot of public attention. But Puerto Rico is simply not on the average American's radar unless they vacation there. As the U.S. becomes increasingly diverse and embraces its history with Latin America, Puerto Rico offers an important context through which we might better understand this connection. We hope our project will help to raise awareness about the U.S.-Puerto Rico relationship, and encourage others to think critically about how the U.S. interacts with the Spanish-speaking world.

We are keeping a blog to track our progress and to contextualize the Puerto Rican situation further. Please visit it for updates on the project and to learn more about what options are available to the Puerto Rican people in regards to their political status: http://podcastingpuertorico.tumblr.com/