Sixteen Puerto Rican schools were named for Muñoz.
By 1961, two out of three eighth graders had fallen more than three years behind in reading; by 1963, when there were 179,000 Puerto Rican public school students, only 331 received high school academic diplomas, and only 28 went on to college.
"I couldn't communicate with anybody," she says, and classmates called her names because she was the only Puerto Rican in school.
The title story, which draws its name from the fight song of Columbia University, chronicles the tragedy of a Puerto Rican high school dropout who becomes a janitor at the university and strives to be part of the Ivy League world.
One day while working for an article in El Diario, a friend of Muñoz Rivera brought a newspaper informing that all education in Puerto Rican public schools would be taught in English.
And now, a moment of televised silence (if you turn the volume down) to mark the passing of Robert Hegyes, former portrayer of the small screen's reigning 26-year-old Puerto Rican Jewish high school student and sideways role model.
He said his son Daniel cried and refused to enter the public preschool where he was originally enrolled, but has settled in since coming to the Puerto Rican Action Board's school on Drift Street in New Brunswick.
Yet Puerto Ricans have no high school leagues and are limited to amateur teams that play on weekends.
Nearby (at KM80 on the Panamerican Highway), Miriam's Quetzals (doubles from $60 B&B) provides old-school Costa Rican hospitality: simple, pretty mountain-top cabins in gardens thick with birds and moss, and comida tipica (plenty of fabulous rice and beans, eggs, plantain, juices) in the no-frills restaurant-with-views.
