Varieties of Spanish in the United States:

2. Overview of Scholarship on Spanish in the United States

14 2 Overview of Scholarship on Spanish in the United States Introduction The bibliography of research and scholarship on the Spanish language in the United States is large and is growing rapidly. It is also scattered across a wide range of monographs, anthologies, periodicals, and conference proceedings , spanning a period of more than a century. To a great extent, the course of scholarship on U.S. Spanish has followed the social and political currents that molded twentieth—and early twenty-first—century America, and it is most productively approached from the perspective of attitudes towards diversity and difference in a nation beset by war, depression, civil unrest, and the struggle for basic human rights. Each of the remaining chapters contains an appendix of fundamental bibliographical references, but given the inextricable bond between scholarship on U.S. Spanish and U.S. social history, the present chapter offers a necessarily brief but hopefully useful journey through the research milestones that culminate in the broad spectrum of scholarly writing about U.S. Spanish found in the first decade of the twenty-first century.1 Early Twentieth-Century Scholarship on U.S. Spanish Writings on the Spanish language in the United States appeared sporadically in the late nineteenth century, in the form of newspaper columns and comments in popular magazines (e.g., Bourke 1896), but linguistic scholarship on U.S. Spanish as known in academe is a twentieth-century phenomenon. The fact that Spanish was not officially acknowledged, and that it was in effect a “captured” language at times under siege, had little impact on early scholarly treatments, with a few noteworthy exceptions. In 1906 E. C. Hills published in the newly founded periodical Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) an extensive article on “New Mexican Spanish,” appropriately situated in a journal which then as now combines studies of the English-speaking “self ” and the xenoglossic “other.” Following this wellwritten but little-cited beginning, the most complete linguistic descriptions of a U.S. variety of Spanish came in the pioneering studies of Aurelio Espinosa (1909, 1911, 1911–12, 1914–15, 1925, 1946, 1975). Espinosa did most of his research before New Mexico became a state; as an exotic territory unknown to most Americans—even today people in other regions of the country believe that New Mexico is a foreign nation—New Mexico was unabashedly Spanish speaking. Espinosa’s first scholarship, derived from his doctoral dissertation completed the same year, was published in the inaugural issue of the Bulletin of the University of New Mexico (1909), the organ of a university that itself was in its infancy and that was founded by and for the newly arrived Anglo American settlers. Two years later (1911) Espinosa published a popularizing description of New Mexico/southern Colorado Spanish in Santa Fe. Significantly, these seminal studies were written in English and directed at a non-Spanish-speaking readership; the scholarship is nonetheless first-rate, and at no point is Spanish referred to as anything but the natural and inevitable language of New Mexico. Astoundingly, in the year New Mexico gained statehood (1912), the president of the University of New Mexico, Edward Gray, published an article in the University of New Mexico Bulletin titled “The Spanish Language in New Mexico: A National Resource,” assuming a stance that moved beyond academic curiosity-seeking and liberal posturing . That few others shared his views is exemplified by an article that appeared in another New Mexico journal just a few years later (Morrill 1918) titled “The Spanish Language Problem in New Mexico.” This was the year after Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship, after having lived in political limbo for nearly twenty years. In the first issue of Language—the journal of the recently founded Linguistic Society of America (1925)—Espinosa, the theoretical linguist, published an article on syllabic consonants in New Mexico Spanish, a tantalizing phenomenon that was not taken up again by linguists until Lipski (1993b) and then Piñeros (2005), by that time operating at a level of theoretical abstraction unheard of in the roaring twenties. Two years later Espinosa (1927–28) again published an article in OVERVIEW OF SCHOLARSHIP ON SPANISH IN THE UNITED STATES 15 Language, this time a linguistic description of New Mexico Spanish based on folk tales, which reflected the founding of the LSA, with its strong admixture of anthropological orientations and descriptive linguistics. That New Mexico Spanish was...