the political topography of Spanish and English: the view from a New York Puerto Rican neighborhood

What constitutes a language boundary? When inner-city Puerto Ricans in New York talk with their non-Latino neighbors, the boundaries marked by English and Spanish are more fluid and negotiable than they are when those same Puerto Ricans talk with outsiders. A Puerto Rican woman may address a black friend in Spanish and then excuse the slip as a "mistake" ("I always forget she doesn't know Spanish"); Puerto Rican boys and young men may share Spanish emblematically (and, they say, deliberately) with black friends. These relationships become "Spanish-speaking" at such moments, and the boundary between "Puerto Rican" and "American" becomes blurred. In this article, I argue that the bilingual's sense of language boundary, English or Spanish, depends on the dynamics of relationships, on race, class, and gender as much as on ethnicity, and I describe the dynamics that make language boundaries soften or solidify within and outside a neighborhood. Hill and Hill (1986) argue that when Malinche people label an act of speaking mexicano or castellano, they relate their sense of linguistic code to the political, social, and economic structures that shape their lives. Similarly, New York Puerto Ricans use English and Spanish to label and locate acts of speaking within social, economic, and political structures. The complexities of relationships that people typify as English or Spanish must be seen in context. For example, inner-city Puerto Ricans generally deal with two classes of English speakers: poor, mostly black neighbors; and middle-class people, typically but not always white, in authority positions outside the neighborhood. Using English with poor neighbors is politically a different experience from using English with middle-class outsiders, because mistakes in the latter can put speakers at considerable risk. Extending Spanish to otherwise English-speaking neighbors signifies local equality. The use of Spanish by middle-class whites in positions of authority over Puerto Ricans, on the other hand, is likely to be seen as intrusive, and Spanish is much more likely to be treated as a boundary between "Puerto Rican" and "American." As physical geography is shaped by the rise and fall of land, the topography of English and Spanish is shaped by the equality or inequality of relations. When class and race are unequal, language boundaries are clear and distinct. When class and race are equal, language boundaries are negotiable. Gender creates subtle distinctions in the language landscape: Puerto Rican This article suggests that people build their sense of language around relationships as much as they build relationships around language. For inner-city New York Puerto Ricans, using English with one another and with black neighbors is a different experience from using English with middle-class whites. Bilinguals also construct ways to "share" Spanish with black neighbors whether or not those neighbors actually speak Spanish; men and women have different strategies for doing this. The linguistic ease with which Puerto Ricans and blacks form relations stands in sharp contrast to the linguistic risks that attend Puerto Rican relations with middle-class whites. [bilingualism, Latino studies, ideology and social structure, concepts of person]