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			The Case of the Disappearing Language What's English got to do with politics in Puerto Rico? By Antonio Barreto After the three-and-a-half-hour flight from Logan, you might think you’re in southern Florida, only without the alligators. You drive down Ashford, or Kennedy, or Roosevelt Avenue. You see the billboards advertising Coca-Cola, Burger King, cell phones, or the latest Hollywood attraction. Little by little, though, you start to see the indications you’re “not in Kansas anymore.” The speed limits may be recorded in miles per hour, but the distances between towns are posted in kilometers. At the neighborhood Texaco, you buy the same unleaded gasoline you would in Chelsea, but here it’s sold by the liter. From a distance, the red stop signs look like they do in Providence, but as you inch closer you read pare. You have entered the borderlands—like San Diego, Brownsville, or Miami, a wondrous, mixed-up frontier dividing and uniting Anglo North America and Latin America. You’re in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I was born there. And in 1998, I went back, to investigate what appeared to be a true political mystery. By the time I left, I’d learned a lot about the ways politics and language can collide. Culturally, Puerto Rico is considered part of Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world. Commercially, it’s an extension of the North American economy. Politically, its status is complicated and ambiguous. Although the treaty that ended the 1898 war between the United States and Spain expressly conferred Puerto Rico’s sovereignty to the U.S. government, it failed to spell out the island’s final status as a political entity. Today, U.S. federal laws apply within this American “commonwealth,” but its inhabitants, all of whom are U.S. citizens, have no say in the federal legislative process. Just as Puerto Rico’s present seems contradictory, so do its visions for the future. Puerto Ricans are divided on whether to seek statehood, march toward independence, or remain a commonwealth. They also disagree sharply on the degree to which, or even whether, their cherished Spanish language would endure under these various alternatives. Since 1898, the issue of language has loomed large in Puerto Rico. U.S. federal officials aggressively promoted the island’s linguistic assimilation throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, in 1902 they made English one of the island’s co-official languages. For decades, Puerto Rico’s major political parties avoided the issue of bilingualism. Politicians supporting statehood, for instance, knew only a small percentage of the commonwealth’s population spoke any English at all. Still, they feared how the U.S. Congress would respond if Spanish were declared the sole official language. The pro-commonwealth party also hesitated to endorse official unilingualism, fearing their pro-statehood rivals would brand them “closet separatists.” Then, with little warning, the uneasy equilibrium was shattered. In spring 1991, Governor Rafael Hernández-Colón, a staunch commonwealth supporter, signed into law a bill that declared Spanish to be Puerto Rico’s sole official language. Like many observers, I was astonished by the move: Opinion polls had already indicated it would not be popular among voters, and, as anyone could have predicted, it elicited a stinging rush of criticism from Congress. Seven years later, still mystified, I traveled to Puerto Rico in search of answers. I was able to speak with former governor Hernández-Colón at his office in the southern city of Ponce. When asked what had motivated him to champion unilingualism, he expressed great concern over the deterioration of the Spanish language in contemporary Puerto Rico. He also expressed a great love for the local vernacular, which he believed a vital component of the island’s cultural identity. Hernández-Colón’s strongest political opponents, the statehood supporters, had often threatened to turn any changes in language policy into a major political issue. I asked whether those threats had caused him to reconsider his support for unilingualism. He shrugged off the suggestion, insisting he never allowed his rivals to shape his administration. Still, I knew this three-term governor had had several opportunities to support official unilingualism and, until 1991, had refused them all. What he told me didn’t really explain his abrupt, controversial shift in policy. But a possible explanation came from his co-partisan, Ronaldo Jarabo, Speaker of the House in Puerto Rico’s legislature from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. I met with the former speaker at a Denny’s Restaurant in San Juan, near the University of Puerto Rico’s main campus. Jarabo pointed out that no analysis of Puerto Rico’s language issue could be complete without looking at its connections to the island’s status quandary. Talking with pro-statehood and pro-independence lawmakers helped me understand the full extent of those connections. Roberto Rexach-Benítez, a long-standing pro-statehood member of Puerto Rico’s Senate, said the 1991 law, though “stupid” from an electoral standpoint, was a deliberate attempt by the pro-commonwealth party to sabotage the statehood movement. Former senator Fernando Martín, Puerto Rican Independence Party vice president, concurred, saying he knew his party’s support for unilingualism would have a detrimental effect on the statehood cause. How could a simple language law affect the U.S. Congress’s policies toward Puerto Rico? In the course of my research, I discovered every major political actor on the island believed the U.S. government makes a strong connection between the English language and cultural identity. That assumption is historically valid. Many U.S. officials, in fact, equate bilingualism with political instability. The most frequently cited example is Québec, Canada’s only French-majority province, where more than a century of confederation did not prevent nationalism from flourishing. Governor Hernández-Colón recognized U.S. trepidations over language and took a political gamble. He hoped his declaration of Spanish as Puerto Rico’s official language would summon the specter of a Caribbean Québec, even a tropical Northern Ireland. He and other pro-commonwealth leaders knew their endorsement of unilingualism might cost them their races in upcoming elections. At the same time, they hoped it would also kill any chance of the U.S. Congress’s supporting statehood for Puerto Rico. My research showed Hernández-Colón’s gamble paid off. Congress held several hearings on Puerto Rico’s status during the 1990s, and each time numerous House and Senate members invoked the example of the 1991 unilingual act. The concerns boiled down to: What if a future State of Puerto Rico enacted a similar law? What would happen if a culturally distinct state openly displayed nationalist fervor? So although pro-commonwealth forces did lose political power from 1992 to 2000, they ensured Congress never seriously entertained the idea of giving statehood to Puerto Rico. And because Washington has never been inclined to endorse the option of independence for Puerto Rico, the island’s political status quo endured, if only by default. The language debate in Puerto Rico is, on its surface, a story of culture and politics on a Caribbean island. Yet, deep inside, it is also a tale about language’s role in American identity. This may help explain why Congress refuses to offer the Puerto Rican people a final say in determining their political future. Puerto Rico’s status ambiguities allow U.S. officials to spell out important and obvious dimensions of American culture and identity for the island. And so Puerto Rico has begun its second century as a Spanish-speaking U.S. territory, with little local support for independence and little federal support for statehood, still locked in a sociocultural and political zone of neutrality between Anglo North America and Latin America. Amílcar Antonio Barreto, an assistant professor of political science, is the author of Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics (University Press of Florida, 2002), The Politics of Language in Puerto Rico (University Press of Florida, 2001), and Language, Elites, and the State: Nationalism in Puerto Rico and Québec (Praeger, 1998).