Dominican immigrants in Puerto Rico: A distinct speech community?
The Dominican Republic (DR), an independent nation-state, and Puerto Rico
(PR), a territory of the United States (US) whose residents are US citizens, have been
linked for centuries through geography, history, culture (food, music, sports), religion
(Catholicism), and language (Duany 2005). Since the 1960s, they also have been linked
through the large-scale migration of Dominicans from the DR to PR. Since 1966, 118,
999 Dominicans have entered PR as legal immigrants while an unknown number have
entered PR illegally or have overstayed their tourist visas (Duany 2005). In 2000, 78% of
the Dominican born population was located in the San Juan Metro Area; the vast majority
of which was located in the municipality of San Juan and concentrated in the urban
centers of Santurce, Rio Piedras, and Hato Rey so that San Juan had the second largest
number of Dominicans outside of the DR after NYC (Duany 2005).
Given the close geographical, historical, cultural, and religious ties between the
DR and PR and the popular perception that Dominicans and Puerto Ricans share norms
of language production in their use of similar dialects of Caribbean Spanish, one might
believe that Dominican immigrants, particularly in San Juan, integrate with Puerto
Ricans to form the same speech community. Instead, this poster develops the argument
that Dominican immigrants form a distinct speech community.
Spanish is not the only language that plays a role in PR; currently English and
Spanish have co-official status. As Pousada (1999) points out, however, since fostering
English is linked to assimilation while defending Spanish is the hallmark of nationalism,
“overt popular support of English acquisition coexists with covert popular
resistance”(p.33). In contrast, faced with possible pressure of learning English as one of
the requirements for illegal immigrants to become citizens, Dominican immigrants may
not participate in the same set of shared norms and evaluative behavior with respect to
English, and its relationship to Spanish, that Puerto Ricans do.
Morgan (2004) discusses a perspective on speech community that refers to the
notion of language and discourse as a way of representing, the use of language to
construct relationships and identity. In PR, Dominican immigrant identity is constructed
through the press. In two recent articles, Primera Hora (June 19/20, 2006) addressed the
death of the urban center of Rio Piedras through focusing on crime, abandoned buildings,
the homeless, and a lack of cleanliness. Neither article mentioned the most salient aspect
of Rio Piedras, the presence of Dominican immigrants. In contrast, through ethnographic
fieldwork and rapid, anonymous interviews carried out in Rio Piedras at the same time
the articles were written, we were struck by the vitality of Rio Piedras and the presence of
Dominicans selling fruits and vegetables from the stalls in the Plaza Mercado and
vending, shopping, and socializing in the streets of Rio Piedras. Thus, represented by the
press as invisible, Dominican immigrants are excluded from the Puerto Rican
community at large and from the speech community. This poster contributes to research
on speech communities, Dominican immigrants, and Puerto Rico.
Reference List
Duany, J. (2005). Dominican migration to Puerto Rico. CENTRO Journal, 17, 242-268.
Morgan, M (2004). Speech community. In A. Duranti (Ed.), A companion to linguistic
anthropology (pp. 3-22). Malden, Mass: Blackwell.
Pousada, A. (1999). The singularly strange story of the English language in Puerto Rico.
Milenio 3, 33-60.
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