Puerto Rico Makes the Switch to Spanish

Anthropologist Ricardo Alegria earned a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and a doctorate from Harvard, but one subject that always gave him trouble was English.

“I personally was famous at the University of Puerto Rico for the many times I flunked English,” he said. “Because I abandoned classes. I thought it was an imposition on me. It was stupid, but it was the attitude of many Puerto Ricans, that we thought of English as a political imposition.”

In Puerto Rico, questioning the supremacy of Spanish can be akin to burning the flag. For in this hybrid land of salsa and shopping malls--Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony for 400 years before the United States took over in 1898--the mother tongue is a powerful symbol of cultural identity.

It is also a political punching bag in the endless debate over whether the island of 3.6 million Latinos in the Caribbean, next door to the Dominican Republic and 1,000 miles from Miami, should become the 51st U.S. state.

Now the government has enacted a law making Spanish Puerto Rico’s sole official language, wiping out an 89-year-old statute that had put English and Spanish on equal footing.

U.S. government agencies, including the federal courts here, continue to operate in English, and the Puerto Rican government has long done business in Spanish, so the so-called Spanish-only law is having little practical effect. But the political fallout has spread from San Juan to Washington, with warnings that it could damage Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States and possibly bury the statehood movement.

From the pastel colonial houses with wrought-iron grillwork in Old San Juan to the lechon asado (roast suckling pig) served at roadside stands to almost any conversation overheard in the street, visitors to Puerto Rico quickly discover the island’s affinity for Spanish.

After the language law went into effect on April 5, the Prince of Asturias Award in Letters, a Spanish literary prize, was awarded to the people of Puerto Rico for strengthening the language, and Spain’s King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia flew in to congratulate the governor. The government declared that an annual holiday for a Puerto Rican folk hero would also be known as Spanish Reaffirmation Day.

“Language is more than just speaking; it’s the way you think,” said Alegria, director of the Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean and founder of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture.

“We make love in Spanish; we talk to God in Spanish. . . . It’s vital for the culture.”

Alegria, who has written extensively on Indian and African influences on Puerto Rican culture, was the first to testify in favor of the Spanish law during legislative hearings last year.

He says that it rectifies what he regards as the injustice of the 1902 law giving English equal status, which was enacted four years after the United States gained Puerto Rico as booty at the end of the Spanish-American War.

At that time, Alegria says, the U.S. government imposed English on Puerto Rico in an attempt to Americanize its new colony. A key aspect of the policy was to force public schools to teach in English even though most students understood little of the language.

The 70-year-old anthropologist recalls that as a schoolboy he used textbooks with pictures of blond children who “didn’t look like us” and apples, which don’t grow in the tropics. Portraits of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington hung on classroom walls, and Three Kings Day, a post-Christmas religious holiday throughout the Spanish-speaking world, was a regular school day.

He remembers one teacher as “a very nice woman from the United States who didn’t know Spanish. She’d say: ‘Well, boys, tell us your names.’ Everybody made up names. We didn’t learn anything.”

With dropout rates soaring, schools reverted to Spanish in 1948, four years before Puerto Rico became a U.S. commonwealth.

Despite the attachment to Spanish, English is widely used in Puerto Rico, and many the language law gives the impression that anti-American sentiment is stronger on the island than it really is.

A poll published in June by El Nuevo Dia, an influential pro-statehood newspaper, found that 63% of Puerto Ricans thought the Spanish law was a bad idea, with only 31% favoring it and 6% undecided.

The poll, which was done by the independent firm Kaagan Research Associates, said statehood supporters opposed the law by a whopping 83% to 15%, with the rest undecided. Polling methods and the survey’s statistical margin of error were not stated.

After nearly 100 years of U.S. domination, the American influence on Puerto Rico is obvious to foreign tourists from the moment they arrive at San Juan’s airport to be greeted by a U.S. Customs officer.

The capital itself is chockablock with Pizza Huts, Burger Kings and Ponderosas, two of the main highways are Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy avenues, and the local currency, of course, is the U.S. dollar.

The four major TV channels all broadcast in Spanish, but another carries CBS network programming, and Puerto Ricans get 28 American cable channels, all in English. Most participants on the midday call-in show on WOSO, the English-language radio station, are Puerto Ricans, and most letters to the San Juan Star, the English-language newspaper, bear Latino surnames.

A steady flow of returning “Newyoricans” (Puerto Ricans from New York) has helped sprinkle Puerto Rican Spanish heavily with English slang. Teen-agers milling outside a disco might say they are rapeando , hangeando or maybe just gufeando --rapping, hanging out or goofing off.

Yet, no more than one-quarter of the population is fully bilingual, a result--even government officials admit--of inferior education, even though the teaching of English as a second language is mandatory in the island’s 1,700 public schools.

Critics say that legally enshrining Spanish as the language of Puerto Rico’s government conflicts with the island government’s stated policy of broadening English fluency. High-paying jobs in Puerto Rico often require English fluency, and inability to handle the language is the reason most often cited for the widespread economic and social problems of the 2.5 million Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland.

Puerto Rican doctors, lawyers and business executives typically speak good English, and many of them send their children to private schools that emphasize bilingualism--and charge about $2,000 a year.

At the 1,300-student Perpetuo Socorro Academy, one of San Juan’s top-rated private schools, English instruction begins in kindergarten. Teachers lecture in Spanish but use American textbooks, and by the fifth or sixth grade, students have no trouble juggling the two languages.

“We started on the basis that our students were to be educated to live and work in an American environment even if they stay in Puerto Rico,” said the Rev. Armando Alvarez, director of the Roman Catholic academy, which was founded by American nuns in 1917.

He says parents like the school’s Spanish character, which is lacking in the island’s several all-English private schools. “But at the same time, they’re happy that when students finish here, they can go on to any Ivy League school in the States and graduate with honors and be on the dean’s list and have early admission to Harvard.”

Gov. Rafael Hernandez Colon, who speaks flawless English, says his government is committed to improving English instruction in the public schools. He points out that the law contains many exemptions to avoid problems dealing with the federal government or U.S. businesses.

The governor rejects comparison to English language laws passed by 16 states, which he says don’t allow exemptions and discriminate against non-English speakers. “This is not something against English; it’s for Spanish and our identity,” he said.

The governor’s Popular Democratic Party favors Puerto Rico’s nearly 30-year commonwealth relationship with the United States. Under the semicolonial status, Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but they pay no federal taxes and cannot vote in presidential elections. The island also receives $7 billion a year in federal money, giving Puerto Ricans one of the highest standards of living in Latin America.

Statehood supporters say the law has less to do with culture than with political maneuvering. It was introduced by the governing party at a time when Congress was considering a proposed referendum to determine whether Puerto Ricans want the island to remain a commonwealth, opt for independence or become a state. Legislation authorizing a referendum died in a Senate committee in February, largely because of concerns over how well a Spanish-speaking, culturally distinct state would fit in.

Former Gov. Carlos Romero Barcelo of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party says proponents of the language law are trying to encourage the idea that Puerto Rico is too different to be accepted as a state.

“They’re trying to establish cultural separation instead of promoting better understanding between Puerto Rico and their fellow citizens of the 50 states of the Union,” he said.

Statehood leaders say they will revoke the law if the party is returned to power in the 1992 election, which at this stage is an open question.

In the meantime, it’s official: Puerto Ricans speak Spanish.