10 - Los amarres de la lengua: Spanish Exiles, Puerto Rican Intellectuals, and the Battle over Spanish, 1942–2016

Summary

CILE 2016

In mid-March 2016, King Felipe VI of Spain and Víctor García de la Concha, director of the Instituto Cervantes, delivered speeches at the Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española (CILE, International Congress on the Spanish Language) held in Puerto Rico. Their remarks upset quite a few writers and academics from the island and its diaspora. García de la Concha noted: “It's the first time that a CILE has been held outside of the Ibero-American community of nations. But we by no means find ourselves in a strange country. Many sociolinguists agree that the United States provides the firmest base for Spanish to affirm itself as the second language of international communication in the Western Hemisphere, after English” (2016: n. pag.). For his part, the king enthusiastically explained that “on Sympathy Island, as Juan Ramón Jiménez called it,” Hispanics feel at home because the local language, “alternating with English, is spoken with an accent that sounds like a blend of Andalusia and the Canary Islands.”

Predictably, Puerto Rican intellectuals were outraged at this characterization of Puerto Rico and its vernacular. The writer Eduardo Lalo, seeking to invert the colonial logic of the conference, called such remarks “palabras vacías y bárbaras” [empty and barbarous words] in a local newspaper column (2016: n. pag.). Towards the middle of his column, Lalo addresses the king and García de la Concha directly, reminding them of the belligerent origins of the island's relationships to the United States and Spain: “Spain ceded this land in the Treaty of Paris as war booty, without defending, or even minimally considering, the fate of its inhabitants” (emphasis added).

A few days later, a Spanish newspaper of record, El País, published an interview with writer Luis Rafael Sánchez, a member of the Puerto Rican Academy of Language, who declared that Puerto Ricans see Spanish as “nuestra última trinchera” [the last of our trenches]. He added: “el mestizaje es nuestra carta de resistencia, junto con el idioma” [our mixed race and language are the trump cards of our resistance] (Cruz 2016: n. pag.).

Certainly, the official remarks of the monarchy and a powerful cultural institution were the products of opportunism, not of any desire to comment on the island's complex political situation.