The U.S. has served as an imperial power in the Western Hemisphere since the 19^th century. The Cold War era was no exception, but rather an apex of interventionist foreign policy toward sovereign nations across the Caribbean, Central, and South America. In return, Latin America has been a leading producer of decolonial thought and revolutionary praxis since the 1950s, with education serving as a significant site of resistance to and negotiation with U.S. hegemony. Yet what happens when we focus our attention on what Carlos Alamo-Pastrana calls "the seams of empire," the people and locations that defy neat categorization as empire or colony, metropole or periphery? Puerto Rico is such a place. As a former Spanish colony with a distinctly Latin American cultural identity, it has also remained under U.S. jurisdiction since 1898. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but also arguably colonial subjects without representation in Congress or the ability to vote for president. Starting in the early 1950s, the newly formed Puerto Rican Commonwealth became a particularly strategic "laboratory" for American-style development. Its postwar economic program, Operation Bootstrap, served as a model of capitalist takeoff for the non-aligned and decolonizing Third World, with education the "cornerstone of development." Owing to this role, Puerto Rico also became a self-proclaimed "crossroads of the Americas," where U.S. and Latin American thought met and clashed. Hundreds of officials from the region came to visit the "island of how-to-do-it" throughout the 1950s and '60s, while Puerto Ricans traveled abroad sharing the Bootstrap model with the world. At the same time, around a third of the island's residents migrated—primarily to New York City—during the height of the American Civil Rights Movement. Education also became central to those struggles, as Puerto Ricans brought experiences from the Caribbean and Latin America to bear on the fight for first-class citizenship in the metropole, in conversation with the domestic Black Freedom Struggle. This paper will argue that through Puerto Ricans' colonial-transnational trajectories throughout Latin America and the U.S., many became leading figures representing U.S. interests in the hemisphere, but also channeling strains of Latin American political and educational thought onto U.S. soil, influencing the political culture and policies of the metropole in profound and lasting ways. To make this argument, I will discuss two key figures that represent this phenomenon: Jaime Benitez, former chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico and a strong representative of the Puerto Rican liberal establishment's border-crossing Cold War Pan-Americanism, and Antonia Pantoja, an influential New York-based Puerto Rican education activist and community leader. Using organizational, institutional, and personal papers, newspaper clippings, and published works, I will discuss the ways that both figures crossed colonial and national borders in thought and practice to produce a distinct approach to bilingualism and multiculturalism that had lasting impacts on education policy across the Americas. Ultimately, this paper aims to uncover previously unrecognized contributions of Latin American decolonial thought to the U.S. education system only made visible through a transnational framework.

In 1934, the Second Inter-American Conference on Education was held in Santiago, Chile, with the attendance of delegates from almost all Latin American countries, along with the United States. Evaluating the event, Revista de Educación, the Chilean educational official journal, stated that the Conference had demonstrated “a cultural vigour that is making America aware of its own personality. The scientific power of Europe is viewed with respect, as is fair, but no longer with the humble feeling of inferiority of other times (...) The Continent prepares its intellectual values so that it can investigate for itself what its educational system needs, taking advantage of European stimuli, but without slavishly sticking to them, as was done before.” In a scenario in which transnational organizations in the educational sector still did not have the degree of influence they acquired after the Second World War, this conference can serve as a point of reference for presenting some thoughts on one of the many topics that arose during its sessions: the formation of character and personality. Thus, this paper aims to explore the discussions and conceptualizations about both concepts and emphasize the arguments that, in the 1920s and 1930s, sought to identify and define a specifically Latin American childhood and youth idiosyncrasy. Therefore, based on the approaches of Chilean pedagogical authors, the aim is to identify both the arguments that highlight the specificity of local and Latin American childhood and to detect the circulation of similar approaches in neighbouring countries.

In July 1941, the eighth International Conference of the New Education Fellowship (NEF) occurred in Michigan, USA. This was the first NEF international conference outside the European continent and the first to take place during a war period, as the NEF was founded in 1921, with the post-war scenario being one of the factors that motivated its creation and shaped its principles. However, the 1941 conference had very peculiar characteristics that differentiated it from previous ones. Among them, it is possible to point out the war scenario, which in turn had an impact on the low participation of European educators, an increase in the Latin American presence, and the support of US government bodies in holding the conference. These elements together signal an inflection point. With the suggestive theme of "Education in a world of nations" (Programme, 1941) and an opening text in the program booklet written by Nelson Rockefeller, then Coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), the 1941 conference was a space of entanglements between political and educational actors. Although it is possible to trace connections between the NEF and the Rockefeller family even before the conference in Michigan (Rabelo, 2021), the involvement of the OIAA in Latin American education was not restricted to the 1941 conference. Actually, funding an event with the potential to deepen connections with "the other Americas" was just one of the investments made by the OIAA, which included a wide range of projects towards Latin America (Cramer, Prutsch, 2012; Sadlier, 2012). Nonetheless, the OIAA was not alone in the effort to get close to the neighbors. Pulling the thread of actors supporting the NEF conference, other groups, such as the Department of State and the Pan-American Union, come to light. Taking the NEF international conference in 1941 as a starting point and the OIAA as a hub - a node with many ties, as described by Barabási (2003) - this paper aims to explore the intertwining between political and educational actors linked to Latin America, which, despite not being restricted to the context of the Second World War, got new nuances. The transnational perspective enhances this analysis by making it possible to explore networks that unite different institutions, agencies, and educators. The idea of the nation-state in this context is essential but not restricted to geographical borders once the entanglements involving state and non-state actors are vital to this discussion (Roldán Vera, Fuchs, 2019). The primary sources are correspondence, reports, and publications, mostly available in the Nelson Rockefeller collection at the Rockefeller Archive Center and part of the New Education Fellowship's and Progressive Education Association's papers.