¡Ayuda a esta luchadora a realizar su sueño!

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Dado que Gofundme NO PERMITE CUENTAS DE PUERTO RICO, la compañera Polly Attwood, de la congregación cuáquera Friends Meeting at Cambridge, está sirviendo de conducto para esta campaña. Ella transferirá los fondos a Ilka en Puerto Rico.



Because Gofundme DOES NOT ALLOW TRANSFERS TO PUERTO RICO, Polly Attwood, of Friends Meeting at Cambridge, has kindly agreed to serve as conduit for the funds raised. She will transfer the funds to Ilka in Puerto Rico.

“Deseo estudiar una Maestría en Trabajo Social para poder trabajar con mujeres como yo que tienen gran necesidad de ser escuchadas, visibilizadas y ayudarlas a sanar sus traumas y sus heridas.”

Ilka I. Cruz Rosario

Ilka I. Cruz Rosario obtuvo su Bachillerato de Estudios Generales con la distinción de Magna cum laude en junio del 2022 y es parte de la primera clase de doce estudiantes del Programa de Estudios para personas confinadas de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto Río Piedras.

Foto de Brandon Cruz.

El Gobernador de Puerto Rico le concedió el indulto total el 22 de diciembre de 2022.

Única egresada del programa que está actualmente en libertad.

No hay becas disponibles para estudiantes exconfinadas costear sus estudios.

Contribuye con los costos de su primer semestre de estudios en la UPRRP que comienza el 25 enero del 2023.

-alojamiento $3,000

-alimentación y transporte 3,000

-matrícula y cuotas 1,840

-libros y materiales 400

-cama y juego de comedor 1,000

-Escritorio, silla y librero 700

Total $9940

Esta campaña es auspiciada por:

Asociación Puertorriqueña de Profesores Universitarios. Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras.

Con el apoyo de:

Siempre Vivas Metro, Colectivo Ilé, APPU Cayey y el Seminario Evangélico de Puerto RIco.

Para conocer más su historia:

Discurso de la ceremonia de reconocimiento como Magna cum laude: “Universitaria sin rejas” en: https://claridadpuertorico.com/sera-otra-cosa-universitaria-sin-rejas/

Un artículo acerca de su experiencia universitaria: “La historia de una jerezana libre que hoy se gradúa tras culminar su bachillerato en prisión”, María de los Milagros Colón Cruz. https://www.todaspr.com/la-historia-de-una-jerezana-libre-que-hoy-se-gradua-tras-culminar-su-bachillerato-en-prision/

Entrevista en el podcast La sala de todas acerca del tema Abolir las cárceles en en: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1HrX9jAyLjtFZDLTV1W1eD

Foto de Brandon Cruz.

ENGLISH VERSION

Because Gofundme DOES NOT ALLOW TRANSFERS TO PUERTO RICO, Polly Attwood, of Friends Meeting at Cambridge, has kindly agreed to serve as conduit for the funds raised. She will transfer the funds to Ilka in Puerto Rico.

“I want to earn a Master’s in Social Work so I can work with women like me who have a great need to be seen and heard, and to help them to heal their wounds and trauma.”

Ilka I. Cruz-Rosario

Help this hero achieve her dream!

Ilka I. Cruz Rosario graduated with a B.A. in General Studies, Magna cum laude from the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras campus in June 2022. She is part of the first graduating class of students from UPR’s Incarcerated People’s Study Program.

Ilka is the only one of the 12 graduates who is currently not incarcerated. In late December 2022, she received an executive pardon from the Governor of Puerto Rico.

Ilka’s wish is to earn an MSW to put her life’s lessons at the service of those who need them, but money is a SERIOUS obstacle for her.

Her financial needs for the Spring 2023 semester--beginning January 25th--are:

-Housing $3,000

-Food and transportation 3,000

-Tuition and fees 1,840

-Books and supplies 400

-Bed and kitchen table 1,000

-Desk, chair and bookshelf 700

Total $9940

The Story of a Free Jerezana Who Graduates Today After Finishing Her Bachelor’s Degree in Prison

By María de los Milagros Colón Cruz

I have yet to hear Ilka Cruz Rosario say “UPR.” She always says Universidad de Puerto Rico with pride and reverence, like one who preaches salvation. It’s not necessarily that she thinks the University of Puerto Rico saved her. In prison, it was she who set her sights on the goal of earning a Bachelor’s degree and succeeded while she was still behind bars, on the strength of her own screams, tears, resistance and solidarity. Today, a week after having “served her time,” Ilka marched as a free woman to graduate with high honors from the University of Puerto Rico’s flagship campus.

The firmness of her voice isn’t enough to cover her nervousness. “It’s a clash of emotions, a tsunami… This is a very special achievement for me because it was a dream I started when I was 18 years old, and it wasn’t until now, at age 55, that it came true,” she said.

Life got in the way. Three decades, three children, eleven years in prison and, as she puts it, “skeletons in my baggage, on my back, that didn’t let me be the person I wanted to be.” But she did it. Today, she celebrates having earned her Bachelor’s in General Studies, with a minor concentration in Women’s and Gender Studies.

The Chance For a Future

UPR may not have saved her, but it provided her with a community and the tools with which today she is making history, as one of 12 members of the first graduating class of the University Studies for Incarcerated People program. This program was started by historian Fernando Picó, who burst the bubble of privilege that so often surrounds higher education, and argued that the University of Puerto Rico needed to go wherever there was someone who wanted to learn.

“I am a woman empowered and transformed by knowledge and university studies,” says Ilka, although she recognizes that her individual success is also an achievement for the country, a first step in something larger than herself, towards the possibility that more incarcerated people may be rehabilitated this way.

“I’ll say it again, university studies are fundamental and essential as part of a real, genuine rehabilitation for an incarcerated person. It doesn’t just change your mind, but your way of being, as a better woman, mother, sister, niece, granddaughter… in every stage of our lives.”

Daring to Hope

The University of Puerto Rico may not have saved her, but it gave her back the hope she lost in the early hours of November 11th, 2010, when she was imprisoned.

“I remember the words of the social worker telling me, in prison jargon, that I didn’t even have the right to a lower-level bunk bed. But everything changed one afternoon in 2014,” Cruz recounted at a pre-graduation ceremony. I listen to her and wonder what four years must be like, living in pure hopelessness.

That afternoon, “the officer sent my compañera Coral Campos (another graduate) to ask, cell by cell, who had graduated from high school. I asked why she wanted to know, and she answered, in a sarcastic tone, “like we’re going to go to college.”

Like we were going to college.

Many officers in the Puerto Rico Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, not to say the penal institution as a whole, looked incredulously at the University of Puerto Rico’s daring to enter that space, and skeptically at the capacity of incarcerated people to study.

“I took this pilot plan (the program) as a challenge to myself, to do better, breaking all the stereotypes I had learned from the evil of patriarchy: that I needed to be subordinated, mistreated, that I wasn’t worth anything. And I started to cultivate my real, genuine inner voice,” Ilka said on June 1st, at a ceremony honoring the 12 people who today have graduated together with all the other gallitos and jerezanas (UPR Río Piedras men’s and women’s sports team names).

When Opening Your Mouth Is an Act of Power

The University of Puerto Rico may not have saved her, but Ilka freely admits it helped her regain her voice, the same one that moves between two languages, that schools in the United States tried to silence for speaking Spanish, and that schools in Puerto Rico called “nonsense” because she mixed Spanish and English phrases and syntax.

In Paterson, New Jersey, where she grew up, “white supremacy and social prejudice for being Hispanic, Boricua, wouldn’t let me speak Spanish. They scolded me, saying ‘You’re stupid. We don’t speak Spanish here. Shut up.’ That experience, unfortunately, was repeated when I returned to the island and teachers would tell me mija, speak properly.”

But her “University of Puerto Rico family,” as she calls the group of professors and program staff, introduced her to a “world without hierarchies,” where her difference was not cause for discrimination, where each person’s experiences and voice had the potential to become their strengths. And so was born her senior thesis, Lectura, escritura y liberación: narrative personal académica sobre la experiencia universitaria en la cárcel. (“Reading, Writing and Liberation: A Personal Academic Narrative of University Experience in Prison.”)

Healing and Gender Studies

The University of Puerto Rico may not have saved her, but it helped her heal and better understand her place in the world. That’s how she tells it. Healing. Especially, thanks to the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

Her work from feminist theory transformed her and “achieved my self-realization as a woman.”

“I am a living example of an intellectual who is located in the corner of oblivion, behind bars, and whom nobody has wanted to listen to. Thanks to university education, specifically Gender courses, I have had access to decolonial feminist epistemological challenges that have helped me develop my voice, my own thinking, and contribute to knowledge, liberate myself and heal my body.”

There four women who graduated today, among the 12 participants, also completed the Minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. Ilka thinks this isn’t enough; every UPR student should do the same.

From Punishment to Rehabilitation

“I don’t agree with prisons,” Ilka says unambiguously. It’s not that she thinks there are better means than imprisonment; she has lived it.

“Let’s put all the money in education. Let’s get kids off the streets, not let them be dropouts. I think we need to break all the prejudice there is about a boy, a girl, and I really think if we put more money in education, there will be less crime,” she says.

A week ago, when she finally left prison after 11 years, Ilka was surprised by a strange emotion.

“I thought I was ready, but I needed to decompress, shake off the beating of all those years I was behind bars, with the barbed wire and people watching me with keys. Everything was punitive, punishment, pressure, down to the last moment because they told me I’d be out May 11th, and it wasn’t until a couple of days before the 22nd of June. I had to shake that off. There, I cried in my uncle’s arms, and I said goodbye. Goodbye to that period,” Ilka remembers.

“Now I have a new genesis, a new rebirth, a new opportunity my God is giving me, and I’m going to take it, I’m going to embrace and cherish it like it was my last breath.”

It’s not that the skeletons she was carrying in her trunk disappeared just like that. Maybe they don’t weigh so much on her now. Maybe now she can see her wounds from a distance, with more compassion. Maybe what matters is that, behind bars, she began to thirst for a different future, embraced the dreams of her 18-year-old self, made them come true, and wants to build on them her life project. Isn’t that what rehabilitation is supposed to be?

“Now, for the Master’s degree,” she says with a smile. She wants to be a psychologist, and sees herself offering services to incarcerated people.

“A student who doesn’t feel part of the University of Puerto Rico, being a University of Puerto Rico student…” She pauses. “I don’t know where that identity crisis is.”

I think of my own experience. I call the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras campus Iupi. My relationship to the University is definitely different; bittersweet, although also transformative. Beyond being a factory for producing professionals in the most popular or necessary discipline at any given time, I wonder if the restorative capacity UPR displayed in this project is in every classroom.

I think of that university Picó was trying to build, the one that now made history.

“I want to keep conquering the world of knowledge, and cross the threshold to the Master’s degree. And in conclusion, once a jerezana, always a jerezana.”