Award of Excellence: Here I Dreamed
More than half of Puerto Rico’s public schools have closed their doors in the last 10 years. Government officials justified the “consolidations,” saying hurricane damage and declining student enrollment necessitated them. In the years since, some schools have found new life as community centers, while others have been leased or sold. The majority of buildings, however, decompose like rotting corpses, their bones swaddled in nature’s eerie embrace, remnants of past lives slowly disintegrating into earth.
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“Here, I dreamed,” reads graffiti scrawled on the wall of a roofless classroom at Escuela Jose de Diego in Vega Baja — a reminder of what could have been. In spaces where children once imagined their futures and teachers built homes of learning, old visions are now laid to rest. Just as Puerto Rico is changing, so too are these empty buildings, the deaths of their past lives as schools creating space for new beginnings.
