Puerto Rican culture: a Caribbean island that argues with itself in two languages

Where the accent comes from

Puerto Rican Spanish is a Caribbean variety and it descends chiefly from Andalusian and Canarian Spanish, because those are the people who came.

Most farmers and commoners arriving between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries came from Andalusia, and particularly from Seville, which is why hablado becomes hablao and dedo becomes deo in both places. Syllable-final s weakens to an aspiration or vanishes: los dos becomes lo do. Syllable-final r is pronounced as l, which is the single most recognisable feature of the accent.

The Canary Islands made the larger contribution, and the resemblance is close enough to be startling: a Puerto Rican in Tenerife or Las Palmas is commonly taken at first hearing for a Canarian from another island. Canarian influence is strongest in the speech of the central mountains, where it blended with what survived of Taíno.

What survived of Taíno is more than a curiosity. Hamaca, huracán and tabaco went from Taíno into general Spanish and from there into English as hammock, hurricane and tobacco. On the island the language survives most visibly in place names, which are everywhere: Arecibo, Bayamón, Caguas, Guaynabo, Jayuya, Luquillo, Mayagüez, Vieques.

English arrived as policy. After 1898 the army and the early colonial administration tried to impose it, and between 1902 and 1948 English was the language of instruction in public schools for every subject except Spanish itself. Forty-six years of that produced a great deal of borrowed vocabulary and did not displace Spanish, which remains the mother tongue and the home language of the great majority. English has had a fluctuating status as a second official language depending on which party holds power, which is a fair description of the whole relationship.

What the drums carry

Bomba is the island's oldest musical tradition and it was developed in the seventeenth century by enslaved West Africans and their descendants on the sugar plantations of the coast, most notably at Loíza, Mayagüez, Ponce and San Juan. Its roots trace to the Asante of Ghana and the word itself comes from Akan and Bantu.

What bomba was for is not decorative. Cane workers who shared no common language used the drums to express sadness, anger and resistance, to mark baptisms and marriages, to communicate, and to plan rebellions. The first written record of it dates to 1797, in the account of a French botanist travelling the Caribbean.

The music absorbed everything that passed through the Caribbean. Contact between enslaved populations from the Dutch colonies, Cuba, Santo Domingo and Haiti built up sixteen distinct bomba rhythms; the yubá rhythm typical of Mayagüez came with Haitians brought during the Haitian Revolution. The instruments are the barriles, barrel drums, with the subidor or primo leading, maracas, and the cuá, two sticks struck against the wood. The defining feature is a dialogue: the lead drummer follows the dancer rather than the other way round.

Plena grew out of bomba in southern Puerto Rico around the turn of the twentieth century, in the working-class neighbourhoods of Ponce and particularly the barrio of San Antón, which its own lyrics name. Where bomba has sixteen rhythms, plena has one, and its indispensable instrument is the pandereta, a round hand drum in several sizes, the smallest of which improvises over the others.

The difference is what the words do. Plena lyrics are narrative: they report events, comment on politics, and carry sarcasm, irony and humour. Puerto Ricans call it el periódico cantado, the sung newspaper, and a contemporary bandleader describes it in the same terms. It was pushed back against and censored in the 1920s and reached the mainstream in the 1930s, and the songs that came out of that period, among them Que bonita bandera, are still sung.

Both traditions remain rooted where they started. A contemporary bandleader puts it plainly: in Puerto Rico, the Black and humble communities are where bomba and plena are found, without a doubt.

How the mountains got a different sound

The interior produced its own music and its own instrument.

Música jíbara is the country music of the mountains, and its instrument is the cuatro, a guitar-shaped stringed instrument with, in its modern form, five double courses of strings. It is unique to Puerto Rico, and it has relatives across Latin America. In older examples the body was made from the dried fruit of the native higüero tree, the same material used for maracas and güiros.

The jíbaro, the smallholder of the mountains, became the island's self-image in a way that a coastal or urban figure never did, which is politically interesting given that the coast is where most of the population and nearly all of the economy sit. The music is the durable part of that. The cuatro travelled with migrants, appears in plena, and was played alongside brass during the salsa boom of the 1970s specifically to make the sound audibly Puerto Rican.

Why the culture has two addresses

Most of the migrants who left Puerto Rico from the end of the 1800s onward had rural roots, and they took the cuatro with them. The earliest cuatro records were made in New York and sold back to the island and outward to Puerto Rican communities across the United States, which is the direction of travel that has defined the culture ever since.

Salsa came out of New York City's Puerto Rican neighbourhoods in the 1960s and 1970s, with roots in jazz and Cuban and other Afro-Caribbean music, and many of its lyrics document life in East Harlem and the South Bronx rather than on the island. Bomba and plena have had an active life in New York for just as long, kept going by performing groups and community events that embrace modern sound while holding to the traditional forms.

The language went both ways too. Island-born Puerto Ricans speak Spanish first; many mainland-born Puerto Ricans speak English first, and a great many move between the two in the same sentence. The first novel written in that register was published by a Puerto Rican writer in 1998.

What has grown is a culture with two addresses and no clear centre, which is unusual and which the island's own institutions have had to accommodate. Puerto Rican identity is not a property of the island alone, and has not been for a hundred years.

What the identity is defined against

The relationship with the United States makes national identity complicated in a specific way rather than a vague one.

Puerto Ricans hold United States citizenship and align with a distinctly Puerto Rican heritage, and the island's sense of itself is built substantially out of a set of oppositions to the mainland: Puerto Rican against American, Spanish against English, Catholic against Protestant, Hispanic heritage against British.

That structure explains several things at once. It explains why language policy has been a political battlefield for over a century rather than an administrative matter. It explains why the island competes separately at the Olympic Games and why that separate flag matters to people who also carry a United States passport. And it explains why cultural nationalism on the island is strong while support for political independence has stayed small: the two are answering different questions, and a great many Puerto Ricans hold the first without the second.

The island also sits inside a Caribbean exchange that the framing with the United States tends to obscure. Puerto Rican musicians helped build salsa alongside Cubans and contributed to the development of merengue with Dominicans. Recent Haitian and Dominican migration keeps adding to the mix. Across the water in the Virgin Islands, particularly Saint Croix, contact with Vieques and Culebra has produced a Puerto Rican patois mixed with Spanish, and film co-productions with other Latin American countries have shaped the conventions of Puerto Rican cinema. Several of the relationships shaping the island's culture run east and west across the Caribbean rather than north to Washington, and they get far less attention because no constitutional question hangs on them.

What the opposition does not describe is an island culture that is uniform. Puerto Rico is coastal and mountain, Spanish-speaking and bilingual, Catholic and increasingly Protestant, and its Black communities in Loíza and the coastal towns hold traditions the rest of the island has spent a long time alternately celebrating and ignoring.

What industrialisation did to the household

The clearest measurable change to Puerto Rican daily life in the twentieth century was not musical, and it was deliberate.

Before 1898 the colony was agricultural and most people worked sugar cane, tobacco or coffee, and that remained true well into the new century. Operation Bootstrap, begun in 1942, set out to convert the island to industry: government-built factories, a workforce moved off the land, and education organised around factory employment.

The social consequence followed the housing policy. To clear the shantytowns, the Puerto Rico Housing Authority built public housing on the United States model, which meant single-family dwellings sized for a nuclear household. The extended, multi-generational family that had organised rural Puerto Rican life was divided into units the buildings could hold. Links to extended family remain an important part of how Puerto Rican families work, and they were substantially weakened by a housing programme that was not designed to weaken them.

That is the pattern the whole century repeats. A policy is imported for a defensible reason, it works on its own terms, and it reshapes something nobody was asked about.

The fear that follows from it is stated openly on the island. The novelist Magali García Ramis has drawn the comparison with Hawaii, where the indigenous people were pushed aside and the culture marginalised except as goods sold to visitors, and where the Americans arrived, as they did in Puerto Rico, with their Protestant religion, their good schools and their hospitals. Whether that is the island's future is an open argument. That it is the island's fear is not.

Why the traditions are being rebuilt rather than preserved

The most interesting thing about bomba now is that it is growing.

After abolition, bomba was commercialised in the mid-twentieth century and absorbed into official folklore, which is usually where a tradition goes to be embalmed. In the 1990s performers took it back to the street in the form of bombazos, gatherings designed for anyone present to join, and in recent years young Puerto Ricans have taken it up in numbers, on the island and in the diaspora.

That is not preservation. A tradition that survives as folklore is one that other people perform for an audience; a tradition that survives as a bombazo in a plaza on a Saturday is one that the people present are doing. The distinction matters on an island that has spent a century having its culture described by others, and it is the reason the drums are the part of Puerto Rican culture that has never needed defending.