How do you speak Taíno? Indigenous Activism and Linguistic Practices in Puerto Rico

Abstract

This paper analyzes emergent speech practices among Taíno activists in Puerto Rico. While historical narratives of the Caribbean and conventional knowledge have largely presumed that the Taíno, an indigenous population of the Caribbean, have been extinct, several persons in Puerto Rico are actively identifying with and mobilizing around this ethnic category. One of the Taíno‐identified challenges in such mobilization is that the Taíno language is no longer spoken and there is very little documentation from which to reconstruct it. Within this context, I consider the myriad ways in which Taíno activists understand what constitutes speaking Taíno and how this becomes emblematic of Taínoness. Such practices range from a reliance on speaking in what is understood by many Taíno as a Taíno style of Spanish to some Taíno organizations’ attempts at reconstruction through their studies of still spoken Arawakan languages.

Voices in a Sea of History: Why Study Language in the Caribbean

“…One final example of creativity in voicing identity claims involves efforts to reclaim an indigenous Taíno identity in Puerto Rico. Sherina Feliciano‐Santos (2017a, 2017b, 2019) describes a range of linguistic innovations, from reconstructed Taíno vocabulary to an emerging Taíno stylization of Spanish, through which Indigenous activists seek to catalyze a political and social movement to counter “authoritative” historical narratives that declare that Taíno people did not survive European conquest of the island. Their efforts at what is often called linguistic revitalization advance their claims to what is regarded in Puerto Rico as an “impossible affiliation.” What they seek to refigure instead is an immanent discovery of one's Indigenous identity that any “ boricua ” (the borrowed Taíno word for the island and its residents) is always on the verge of making.…”

Music, Language, Aurality: Latin American and Caribbean Resoundings

“…Yet, as Tucker (2019) or language does in politics and social life. Movements of cultural and linguistic heritage often take on heterogeneous voices with different relations and effects (Garrett 2007, Feliciano-Santos 2017. Recognition and representation, when achieved, have their own political consequences that are not necessarily contained by the structure of heritage regimes-again, the capacity of aurality to overflow boundaries.…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2017: It Could Be Otherwise

“…A significant number of publications this year describe Indigenous approaches to sustaining and revitalizing language practices endangered by legacies of settler colonialism, many with attention to how the epistemological and ontological logics for so doing differed from those made dominant by those same legacies (e.g., Ahlers ; Berk ; Dlaske ; Feliciano‐Santos ; Graber ; Newmark, Walker, and Stanford ; Saft ; the “Collaborative Linguistic Anthropology Matters: To Native American Communities” [3‐1190] panel at the 2017 AAA meeting). For example, Ahlers (, 49) notes how linguists’ assessments of a speaker's competence in an endangered language often focus on the speaker's ability to produce morphological paradigms closely mapped to a “prototypical paradigm” characterized by “few if any irregularities.” However, in a discussion of morphological irregularities in a corpus elicited from Kawaiisu elders, Ahlers notes that though linguists interpreted this variance as resulting from “disruption of intergenerational transmission of linguistic knowledge” that had “hindered the acquisition of this paradigm,” the elders themselves “conceptualize[d] the selection among alternative forms” as a “critical ground for the expression of individual identity and style” (50).…”