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Puerto Ricans, Bilingual Voting, and Legal Activism in the 1970S

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Puerto Ricans, Bilingual Voting, and Legal Activism in the 1970S City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2018 Suing for Spanish: Puerto Ricans, Bilingual Voting, and Legal Activism in the 1970s Ariel Arnau The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2602 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] SUING FOR SPANISH: PUERTO RICANS, BILINGUAL VOTING, AND LEGAL ACTIVISM IN THE 1970s by Ariel Arnau A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2018 © 2018 Ariel Arnau All Rights Reserved ii Suing for Spanish: Puerto Ricans, Bilingual Voting, and Legal Activism in the 1970s by Ariel Arnau This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in History in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ___________________ ____________________________________ Date Clarence Taylor Chair of Examining Committee ___________________ ____________________________________ Date Helena Rosenblatt Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Thomas Kessner Robyn Spencer Lorrin Thomas Victor Vazquez-Hernandez THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Suing for Spanish: Puerto Ricans, Bilingual Voting, and Legal Activism in the 1970s by Ariel Arnau Advisor: Clarence Taylor This dissertation examines how the legal activism of a Puerto Rican group of activist-lawyers and community members contributed to the reshaping of voting law and language policy during the 1970s. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) coordinated a series of lawsuits in Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia during the early 1970s. The decisions in these lawsuits provided the legal framework to rewrite federal voting rights law during the Voting Rights Act (VRA) reauthorization hearings in 1975. These cases resulted in vastly expanded opportunity to vote for all language minorities in the United States. These civil rights victories were challenged by the English Only movement during the 1980s. Again Puerto Rican lawyers, activists, and elected officials in the Northeast coordinated efforts to prevent English Only laws from becoming law. iv Acknowledgements: I want to express my deepest thanks my dissertation advisor Clarence Taylor for shepparding this project through its early rough drafts to its completion. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee Thomas Kessner, Lorrin Thomas, Victor Vazquez-Hernandez, and Robyn Spencer. I also want to thank Ana Ramos-Zayas for her contributions during the early phase of the dissertation process. I also want to say thank you to Andrew Robertson and Herman Bennett for their support and encouragement. Support for the writing of this dissertation came from Edwin Melendez and the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueño at Hunter College. Through Edwin, I had the privelage of being named an Inter Uuniversity Program for Latino Research (IUPLR) Mellon Fellow. The training, guidance, and comraderie I received from Meghan Hammond, Ana Baez, Marilu Medrano, Yvette Martinez- Vu, Tatiana Reinoza, and Ryan Hamilton was transformative at a time when I was still reeling from just having become a father. I would be remiss, of course, if I did not express my thanks and love to my wife Amy Eusebio and my daughter Anastacia. Without those two, nothing else matters. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Acknowlegements iv List of Tables vii Introduction 1 Puerto Rican Voting Rights and the Origin of PRLDEF 21 Broad Shoulders 51 Big Apple 84 Brotherly Love 118 From Courtroom Activism to Federal Law 148 Backlash 176 Conclusion 210 Bibliography 222 Index 237 vi LIST OF TABLES Table 3:1: Percentage of Puerto Rican and Chinese students in Select New York City School Districts Table 4:1: Median Family Income and Percent below Poverty in Philadelphia: 1970 Table 4:2: Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia living in high concentration Census tracts Table 4:3: Percentage of Puerto Rican Population by Pennsylvania Census Tract – 1974 Table 6:1: Proposed Federal English-Only Resolutions 1983-1999 vii viii Introduction In November 1980, Nelson Diaz, a Puerto Rican lawyer in Philadelphia, sat at his desk and opened a hand-written letter. The letter he received was in response to an article he wrote in the Philadelphia Bulletin on November 7th. The author of the letter reacted with ire to Diaz’s defense of bilingual access to important social and political resources such as Spanish-language translations at the Social Security office, bilingual education in the public school system, and most importantly, bilingual access to voting. Why all the concern about the Hispanics? If they treasure their language, why did they leave these beloved associations? … when they [early European immigrants] came they learned the language of this new country. There was no bilingual education, no bilingual programs. The early settlers adapted to their new environment, learned the language and all helped to make America great. Now, recently, minorities have endeavored to control the earth. Why should reporters tell the difficulties of Spanish speaking voters? It will be to our regret and our own detriment if the United States becomes a two-language country. While you are concerned about your own people, give a little thought to the multitude of others who also long for the good things in life.1 Aside from reflecting the attitude of many conservatives in 1980s suburban America towards immigrants, this letter is particularly interesting because of its final request imploring Diaz to consider “the multitude of others”. What the author of this letter failed to realize was that the civil rights activism of Puerto Rican lawyers like Nelson Diaz and many others had a profound impact upon United States language and voting policy that would touch the lives of all of those who longed for one particular good thing in life … the ability to vote in their native language. The story of voting rights activism by Puerto Ricans across multiple cities in the United States during the 1970s is important because it broadens the scope of our understanding of the movement for Puerto Rican civil rights in American history. By claiming important court 1 Letter from Helen Body to Nelson Diaz, November 10, 1980. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Nelson Diaz Papers, Box 47, Folder 1. Underlined text comes from the original document. 1 decisions at the local level, Puerto Ricans paved the way for the institutionalization of bilingual ballots across the entire United States and helped reshape the nation’s language policy. Language policy in the United States over the course of the twentieth century has vacillated between two points of view: restricting the use of languages other than English in the public sphere or acknowledging the necessity of policies that allowed non-English speakers to participate in civil society. English literacy requirements for voting were enacted in the nineteenth century as a reaction to the growing numbers of European immigrants coming to the United States. By 1924, eighteen states had some form of English literacy requirement.2 The rationale behind this policy was that immigrants needed to learn English in order to assimilate and make informed decisions. Public schools that provided German-language instruction to students in states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio were forced to shift their curriculum to offer classes solely in English during WWI.3 In addition, schools in the American Southwest and California that provided both English and Spanish language instruction to students in the nineteenth century were all required to use English as their primary language by the dawn of the twentieth century.4 During the Cold War, foreign language acquisition was encouraged under Title III and VI of the National Defense Education Act, and schools in Miami, Florida (such as the Coral Way School) received federal and Ford Foundation funds to establish bilingual education programs for the city’s growing Cuban population.5 While the turn towards isolationism in the early twentieth century resulted in policy that steered the nation away from 2 Connecticut passed its English requirement in 1855; Massachusetts in 1857; Wyoming 1889; Mississippi in 1890; Maine in 1892; California in 1894; South Carolina in 1895; Washington in 1896; Louisiana in 1898; North Carolina in 1900; Alabama in 1901; New Hampshire in 1902; Arizona in 1913; Georgia in 1908; Oklahoma in 1910; Virginia in 1902; New York in 1921; Oregon in 1924. 3 Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 176–193 4 Victoria-Maria McDonald, Latino Education in the United States: A Narrated History from 1513-2000 (Palgrave- McMillan, 2004), 55-73 5 John Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), Kindle edition 2 foreign language acquisition, the need to look outside of the United States encouraged learning other languages. These shifts in United States language affected not only the fifty states but its territorial holdings as well. It was during the early twentieth century when the United States began to reshape language policy on the island of Puerto Rico in an effort to Americanize the island’s population. As early as 1902, territorial laws such as the Official Languages Act elevated the social and political status of the English language on the island. United States citizenship, conferred by the Jones-Shafroth Act in 1917, allowed Puerto Ricans to freely travel between the mainland and the island but only granted a second-class citizenship to Puerto Ricans; while they were citizens in name, Puerto Ricans could not vote in Presidential elections nor for the governor of their own island.
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