Puerto Rico’s Language Officialization Debates: Perspectives From a Mountain Corridor Community

abstract Language officialization legislation in Puerto Rico inspires significant political and academic debate, and the will of the Puerto Rican people is frequently summoned as supporting either the sole officialization of Spanish or that of both Spanish and English. Applying Bourdieu's legitimate language framework, this article examines perspectives on officialization articulated by members of a community located in the island's central mountain corridor. Using a critical discourse analytical perspective, the study shows how participants legitimate particular language practices and ideologies, and identifies both contrasting points of view and common ground between the participants' discourses and the broader discourses on the island.[Keywords: language officialization, Spanish, English, Puerto Rico, legitimate language, Bourdieu, critical discourse analysis]in april 2010, the u.s. house of representatives passed the h.r. 2499 puerto rico democracy act. Although focused primarily on the island's political status, the act also included specific language-related provisions, including the application of U.S. federal language legislation to the island (Congressional Research Service 2010)1. This move was the most recent in a series of U.S. efforts to control language policy on the island, actions that reach into the early twentieth century. Language legislation passed in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s echoes this intimate connection between language and political status, and suggests that debates on language officialization function, at least to some extent, as a barometer for political perspectives (Barreto 2001). Applying Bourdieu's (1991) legitimate language framework, this article examines perspectives on language officialization in Puerto Rico presented by members of a small community located in the island's central mountain corridor. Although English plays a more limited role in many mountain corridor towns than in the coastal areas of Puerto Rico, this particular community experienced significant contact with U.S. English-speaking voluntary service workers from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s. Using critical discourse as an analytical framework, this article examines responses of a subset of the community to (a) the call for a recognition of the clear supremacy of Spanish, as per the 1991 Law No. 4 and subsequent proposals to reinstate Spanish as the sole official language, and (b) the call for a recognition of Spanish and English as indistinct, as per the 1902 Official Languages Law and the 1993 Law No. 1. The paper compares and contrasts perspectives of community members with those who have been identified as the island's intellectual elites, as well as examines the ways in which the legitimation of language is carried out through ordinary Puerto Ricans' collective memory and practices.Language Officialization Debates in Puerto Rico (1990s - early 2000s)Spanish-English contact in Puerto Rico has been significant throughout the 20th century and continues in the 21st (Barreto 2000; Fayer, et al. 1998; Nickels 2005; Pousada 1996). Advocates for all three primary political status options-those of commonwealth, statehood, or independence-support the preservation of Spanish (Rossello 1991; Rua 2002).2 It is the weight and role of English that cause controversy. Following the U.S. invasion in 1898 and subsequent occupation of the island, Spanish and English were legislated to be used "indistinctly" in the Official Languages Law of 1902. Although the languages were designated as supposed equals, early U.S. administrators imagined that English would supersede Spanish on the island and set about eradicating it through processes of "Americanization" in which language policy figured prominently (Barreto 2000; Delgado Cintron 1990). English was established as the primary language of public school instruction, although educational policies changed multiple times during the first half of the 1900s (Algren de Gutierrez 1987; Comision 2004; Fayer, et al. …