The present work seeks to identify sources of the persistent link between the Spanish language and national identity in Puerto Rico. By examining mass media discourse in the 1940s as a turbulent period of language policy conflict between Puerto Rico and the U.S. federal government, I suggest that the federal imposition of language policy without the consent or approval of local politicians or educators was influential in the construction of national identity that included language as a major defining factor. Local elites reacted to the colonial hegemony by defining Puerto Rican identity in opposition to American identity. The construction of identity in the 1940s is characterized by a cultural conception of nation that redefined national symbols, such as language, in social rather than political terms in order to avoid disturbing the existing colonial hegemony.
2016. The battleground of metaphors: language debates and symbolic violence in Puerto Rico (1930–1960). Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 2:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
2011. LANGUAGE OFFICIALIZATION IN PUERTO RICO: GROUP-MAKING DISCOURSES OF PROTECTIONISM AND RECEPTIVITY. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 8:2 ► pp. 176 ff.
Shenk, Elaine
2015. El engañolyel cuco: metaphors in the nexus between language and status in Puerto Rico. Language and Intercultural Communication 15:3 ► pp. 324 ff.
Shenk, Elaine
2017. ‘So yo creo que es un proceso evolutivo’: Language ideologies among Puerto Ricans in southeastern Pennsylvania. Multilingua 36:6
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