I. INTRODUCTION
I can’t remember the first time I realized I was multilingual. I’m not even sure if it ever came to me as a realization or if it had always been a solid fact of life for me. Until I was five years old, I lived with my mother in Puerto Rico in a house five minutes from the sea. I went to a private school in San Juan and spent my time doing finger paintings, taking naps, and learning the alphabet in Spanish (it was the same tune as in English, but with a few extra letters crammed in—Ñ and Rr and Ll). On the weekends and after school I rode around in my pink bicycle with my neighborhood friends, Genesis y Graciela, and picked at the bunches of yellow grass that grew in our backyards. When I went to my grandmother’s house (white, glass roof in the center, red furniture that smelled of old heat, plants growing from a garden on the floor), I sat in front of the big television next to the kitchen and watched Barnie in English because I knew my mother wouldn’t let me at our house.
For the most part, my life outside of the household was in Spanish. I went to school in Spanish, bit other girls over Barbie Dolls in Spanish, accompanied my mother to the grocery store (and hid behind her legs when she approached the counter) in Spanish, listened to my father yell at people over the phone in Spanish, watched my aunts fuss over my birthday parties in Spanish, heard my grandfather curse at my half-brother in Spanish (“¡ME-CAGO-EN-DIEZ!”). I lived in a U.S. territory and yet the external world had not a speck of English in it, except for the occasional sign in San Juan (usually near the airport and the touristy areas). The only reason our house was partially in English was because that was the language my mother knew best. She was the daughter of Cuban immigrants and had grown up in Miami—her Spanish came from having to speak to her parents, and also from the language classes she took in elementary school under the Miami-Dade County public school system. At night, she read me children’s books in English and when I watched television, I opted not to watch Sesame Street in Spanish because the dubbed-over version annoyed me (especially the unnecessarily high-pitched female voices). The Spanish spoken inside my household was to my father or my nanny—and yes, my mother too because she understood it. But most likely if she was speaking Spanish to me it was because she was angry (“¡Arranca por que si no te voy a dar una galleta!”). And so while the boundaries of where to speak English and Spanish loosely existed, there was no place where Spanish wasn’t allowed. When I chose to codeswitch between languages inside the house, there was no thought or hesitation behind it, it just happened.
The only times I spoke English outside the house other than to my mother were when my classmates, fascinated at the prospect of a language foreign to them in the same way I would find classmates to be in the United States, implored me to do so. (“Viviana habla ingles—¿Verdad Viviana?” “Sí.” “Dígano’ algo en ingles.” “¿Qué?” “Yo no sé—algo.” “Moon.” “¿Qué e’so?” “La luna.” “¿Y como se dice sol?” “Sun.”) I didn’t mind. On the contrary—I liked the attention. It would be the same way at my first elementary school in the States when they asked me to say something in Spanish for them. It was nice knowing something other people didn’t and it was nice to be able to show off. In the U.S. however, having grown up in Spanish in the public sphere came at a price. My mother had taught me English, yes, but there was no way to teach the slang that kids use, the words that a person learns only when they have grown up enmeshed within a culture. And so while for the most part I excelled in English class, I got stared at when I didn’t know the meanings of certain words—“brag” and “brat” for instance. When I acquired these words (usually rife with negative connotations), I incorporated them into my vocabulary with the kind of viciousness only an outcast who wants to fit in would be able to. Every kid who was mean to me bragged too much. Every kid who called me fat and ugly, who told me to go back where I came from was a brat.
My father continued to live in Puerto Rico with my half-brother after my mother and him split up. Even though I still went to Puerto Rico at least once every couple of months, I gradually lost my Spanish. Ordering food at a restaurant became an anxiety-filled exercise—I would say limonad instead of limonada and the waiter would stare. I forgot how to say the word bus and a family friend laughed thinking I was joking until she realized I wasn’t and she began to look at me like someone who had lost something. And I had. I couldn’t speak to my grandparents anymore. Well—I could but I was scared to. The way people stared when I messed up my Spanish, the way they were appalled at what my tongue had become was too gut-wrenching, too shameful. In Puerto Rico, the moment they sense you’re from the States, the moment they get the feeling Spanish isn’t your preferred language, they switch to English and when they do this there is this underlying sentiment of You are not one of us. It broke my heart. When we drove somewhere, my father and my half-brother would sit in the front seat of the car trying to force me into Spanish by refusing to respond to me unless I spoke it back to them. They always underestimated how stubborn I was. I kept my mouth shut and my silence always won. They would switch back into English. Life would continue on as normal, but every time there would be this yawning feeling inside—like there was a hole in my stomach whose edges I could feel with my fingers if I wanted to, this vacant emptiness where my Spanish used to be. I longed to be able to speak Spanish back to them.
I loved Spanish—I still do. I love how Caribbean Spanish sounds like it could be put to music. I love the way people curse in Spanish, yell in Spanish, tell one another they love them in Spanish. I love the way people in my family cut off their words and make new ones because of how fast they’re speaking. The long rolling R is among one of the most thrilling sounds on earth to me, as is the E when a person is calling to another (oyE, compadrE). Written Spanish delights me, especially menus on chalkboards with all the dishes listed out. One of my favorite spots in Puerto Rico is this beach with all these blue-box quioscos standing sand-speckled by the sea, partially because it’s a great place to get cheap frituras and partially also because of the menus—dangling behind the counter next to roaring fans pegged to walls, typed up in sketchy Microsoft word font on dirty laminated pieces of paper, handwritten on fold-outs sitting proudly on the gravel parking lots outside storefronts.
Because I wasn’t old enough to go outside the house on my own, I spent a lot of my time in Puerto Rico indoors, or in the general neighborhood, or at my grandmother’s house while my father was at work. This has changed—I am now eighteen and am able to go places on my own, and so, quite strangely, it is only now that I have been able to discover my island. The last time I was in Puerto Rico, I decided to walk Old San Juan with my little brother for the first time in years. I expected Puerto Rico as it always was—people calling to each other in the streets, stray dogs and cats, ruffled pigeons at park benches, the chalkboard fold-out menus, fritura carts, salsa drifting from open windows, older people sitting outside of Panaderías in plastic chairs, piraguas being sold under red-and-yellow umbrellas, cramped shops with handmade items. I expected above all a world in Spanish. I knew, of course, there would be tourists, but the Old San Juan of my memory had never been so overrun that the Puerto Rico I knew was erased. In my memory there was still the wonder and the love. In my memory I ran around chasing pigeons in the park with other children while the sun set over El Morro—all, all in Spanish.
The Old San Juan of today is not the Old San Juan of my memory. We went at around noon on a weekday, my brother dragging his feet behind him. The stores were, amazingly, in English. The street signs were of course in Spanish because they had to be, but there was not a single fold-out menu or storefront or restaurant that put Spanish first. The menus were made up of neat red books set outside on wooden podiums, and the Spanish names of dishes were treated as secondary to the English ones, in small, italicized font. The shops were primarily tourist shops as well as big, expensive America brands that I could never imagine anyone from the area being able to afford—Tommy Hilfiger, Coach, and Guess (among others). I walked around for hours and only saw one metal fritura cart, parked sadly away from everything else without customers. People were quiet—the one time I heard people yelling it was two American guys arguing on a sidewalk in English. After a couple of hours, I gave up, defeated. I did the tourist thing. I bought a skirt and some jewelry. I asked my brother what had happened—had it always been this way and I just hadn’t noticed? No, he said. It had been bad for a couple of years, but it didn’t used to be this way. Now things were sad. Old San Juan wasn’t home anymore. It had always been where the cruise ships docked and released tourists into the city, but the difference was that now the tourism had overrun everything—it had overrun us. It had accidentally made a place I used to play and speak to people in Spanish a place for the foreigners and the foreigners only. Somehow it had made English king.
For a long time, I couldn’t pinpoint why it was the lack of Spanish signage that disturbed me most—until I learned that public signage is a sign of power when it comes to language. Font size, language order, and the choice to use a secondary language on signs all mean something. The way language presents itself in an urban space is no accident—it is an external representation of underlying conflict. In the case of Old San Juan, this conflict is obvious—it’s foreigners vs. natives, the U.S. vs. Puerto Rico, the tourism industry vs. small businesses. When I was making the decision to do a project on public Spanish, this was the first thing I thought of. I realized I had every right to be disturbed at the lack of Spanish in a place where it was meant to be, but I couldn’t just travel to Puerto Rico to do my project on that, especially when I was confined to the location of New York City. I was stumped. I continued to be stumped until two days before my project proposal was due. Then I had a breakthrough.
I was chatting with a Peruvian friend of mine about Washington Heights because I’d never been there before, and since he was a PhD student without campus housing that was where he lived. He was absolutely appalled I had never been. According to him the people were friendly, it was a great place to get fantastic, cheap Dominican food (El Malecón, which I have yet to go to, apparently makes half a chicken with rice and beans for only $8.00), and there was Spanish everywhere. Except—he said—near the Columbia University Medical Center at 168th street. From around 125th until there, the Spanish was booming. Near CUMC the Spanish abruptly disappeared. It eventually came back a couple of blocks later, but it did so with a lot less frequency. It wasn’t until 200th street that the amount of Spanish regained normalcy. When I heard this, I got excited. If this was true, it showed something about the nature of official institutions and minority language—it showed the existence of language boundaries as physically manifesting themselves within urban space. And if this could be seen through signage, it was something I would be able physically prove through photographs. I asked him if he was absolutely, positively sure about what he had said about the Spanish near CUMC, and he was. I told him about the project I was doing, and he suggested I get off the subway at 157th street and walk up Broadway until I hit CUMC, and see what I found there.
Two days later I submitted my project proposal, and it was accepted. I was going to walk Broadway from 157th to 171st street, photograph all the Spanish street signs, interview people about the frequency of public Spanish in Washington Heights, and I was going to do it in one month.
And so the fieldwork began.
II. 157TH ST—164TH ST
When you get off the 1-train at 157th and Broadway, the road extends like one long two-pavement corridor with a divider in the center, a street gallery of English and Spanish signage that goes on and on until it splits in two at 169th street between Broadway and St. Nicholas Avenue. In terms of linguistic life, it appears at first surprisingly barren. It is—however—New York as you expect it. Newspapers float in the streets, people walk and talk on the phone purposefully like they have somewhere specific to be, taxis slow down slightly to make left turns at crosswalks before speeding back up again, there are trucks with produce, buses, wire-mesh trash cans, creased paper ads pasted to the poles of streetlights, people in suits, people in sweatpants, the constant glimmer of movement behind store windows. The first establishments on either sides of the street are a Boston Market and a T-Mobile, and they are long, wide rectangles of English (alternately red, gray), but a few steps down the block the Spanish begins, little stores cramped in next to each other advertising everything from Mexican food (OKAY TO GO! SOLO PARA DELIVERY) to cejas con hilo at threading salons, from exchange rates at money-changing establishments (Giros en minutos) to smoothies (JUGOS NATURALES) and laundry services (Servicio El Mismo Dia). It is gradual at first, and not necessarily on both sides of the street, but by the time you get to the 160s, the amount of Spanish is overwhelming.
The first time I got off at this subway stop, it was 9:00am on a Monday, the sky was gray, and there was barely anyone on the sidewalk. I was strangely nervous about what I would find. Even though I had gotten off at this stop at the word of the Peruvian PhD student (who I trusted), I didn’t quite believe that the Spanish would be there until I saw it. Having seen how little Spanish there had been in Old San Juan the last time I had visited, I didn’t think there was any way New York could make up for the Spanish that hadn’t been in the place where I had expected it, where I knew it should have been, where my insides had wanted them to be. And so the first time I walked around Washington Heights I did so with a small thrill in my stomach, a delicate kind of awe that increased with every Spanish sign I encountered. To passersby on the sidewalk it must have looked weird how lovingly I gazed at everything, how much time I took to stop at every corner and stare. Most likely (it is New York, after all) no one noticed. I was caught up in my own new world.
The second time I came back, it was a sunny Wednesday afternoon in April and I had a camera hanging around my neck. Locals sat outside chatting in Spanish while sitting in beach chairs or on the front steps of barbershops (“Hay mucho tiempo que u’ted no he vino por aquí…”). The produce carts were out. Most were the kind of carts you attached to the backs of cars, but others sold their crates of fruit from the backs of their vans the way they did on the sides of highways in Puerto Rico (tires red-rusted, hood cracked open, a crude cloth hovered over the back on sticks to protect from the sun—once, I will never forget it, a man cut his father’s hair under the tent while his colleague sold my father coconut water through the car window). Outside the sidewalk of Delgado, the money-changing place on 157th, a man sold his fruit from cardboard boxes set up in front of a mini school bus loaded with everything you could think of—mangoes, pineapples, plantains, cucumbers, green globular apples that gleamed in the sunlight, plastic containers of fat purple grapes. I think it is this that gets me the most—the places selling produce. If I walk into any market with Spanish signage between 157th and 164th and I ignore the New York City outside the windows, I could be in Puerto Rico. The produce is the same, sheltered behind plastic curtains under yellow lighting. The Spanish is the same, the half-formed questions, the S’s cut off at the ends of words (“¿Y lo’ pepino’?” “Do’ por uno” “Mucha’ gracia’”). They even have six-packs of Malta India (a Puerto Rican staple that, when you drink it, makes you feel as if your teeth are being coated with liquid sugar) unrefrigerated, spilling out from the bottom shelf onto the floor.
As a test, I walked into Super Foodtown, a new American-style supermarket on the corner of 160th street and Broadway, which has absolutely zero Spanish signage on the outside of it, but is still in the midst of an area with the highest volume of it. Hearing Spanish here was a little harder. At a glance, I could tell that the workers and most of the people shopping here probably spoke Spanish, but they didn’t (or wouldn’t) do it in the same way, say, as the market on 158th or the Liberato Supermarket on 163rd (their Spanish signs take up half the block with huge, life-size font—SU NOMBRE JOSE LIBERATO / SU DESTINO VENDER BARATO). Everything spoken was in English, save for the few moments a customer spoke to the person behind the cashier in Spanish, or when a woman in a cheetah-print tracksuit started yelling at someone for taking her shopping cart (“Ey, ey, ey! That’s mine! ¡Eso e’ mío!”). It was as if the world outside the store had been put on mute for a moment, as if I had entered a hushed bubble made of velvet, broken occasionally only by the quiet question of a customer or women in cheetah-print tracksuits. The moment I stepped back out onto the sidewalk again the Spanish resumed—como si nada.
The camera attracted attention. I was catcalled around five times (English and Spanish) and stopped twice by people asking me why I was taking pictures. The first time it was two men asking me what I was taking pictures of outside of La Barca Restaurant on 162nd street (POLLO A LA BRASA, neon red lights). I was walking with my camera. They were standing outside the restaurant. I stopped in front of it and snapped a picture. They looked at me. I kept walking. The next sign was one door over so when I stopped again, they were only a few feet next to me. They were going to talk to me and I knew it. Even before they had opened their mouths, I knew it. I knew it because I saw it in their facial expressions, I saw it in their eyes, I saw the decision being formed in their brains.
**THE PAUSE**
Before one person speaks to another in public, there is the Pause. We all know it. It is signaled primarily by (what I call in my head) a language of the eyes, and this is most noticeable when the two people are strangers. One person stares at another, there is a brief moment in which the decision is made to speak. There is a physical process to this, a strange kind of blankness in the face, a tension in the body, a silent breath taken inwards. The second person (at least if it is me) is generally aware of what is going on, sees it in their periphery and keeps it there while patiently waiting for the decision to be made. If the second person is me and the first person is a catcaller, I pretend like I haven’t noticed, I keep walking. If I judge the intentions of the person choosing to speak to me to be genuine, I stop, I turn around, I engage. But no matter who the two people are in a situation like this there is always the Pause, and the uncomfortableness of that Pause will be dependent on a couple of factors among many: (1) the ease of the person speaking—some people are more natural at engaging strangers than others, and sometimes the Pause is mercifully short and this is an indicator of a good conversation to come; (2) the identities of the two people involved (age, race, gender, ethnicity, possible accents involved, job—for instance, an older man talking to a younger woman is different from a younger woman talking to another younger woman); (3) the physical space the two people are inhabiting (Where are we? Street? Store? The front desk of a bank? Hospital? Hallway?); and (4) in this case, the question of what language is about to be spoken.
In Puerto Rico and in Washington Heights, this last one can be a great source of tension. If I am addressed in English perhaps they think I am white or Middle Eastern, perhaps they don’t recognize me physically as one of their own. Or they recognize me as Latina, but make the assumption I don’t speak Spanish or am uncomfortable with it. And while of course I shouldn’t take someone’s decision to speak to me in English personally (I do admit that English is where I am most comfortable), it can still hurt to not be recognized in that way. The last time I visited Old San Juan, a majority of the people behind the counters of the stores I walked into addressed me in English, and every time it felt like little bits of my insides were being chipped away. They thought I was a tourist. In their eyes I wasn’t Puerto Rican. On the other hand, if I am addressed in Spanish, I do a quiet, happy fist pump on the inside because I have been recognized for what I am, and like a true Puerto Rican I absolutely love telling people that I am Puerto Rican (which is usually the next question that is asked [¿Y de donde vienes?] when two people find out that they speak Spanish). However, this happiness can quickly lead to panic when I realize that while I understand what the other person is saying perfectly, I do not necessarily have the vocabulary to respond back in the way I would like to. I speak Spanish sin pensamiento—todo sale pa’fuera. I do not think about conjugating verbs in the moment, it just all flies out, and I pray that it is all correct and that the person I am speaking with is not judging me too harshly.
**BACK TO THE PROGRAM**
The man outside La Barca Restaurant addressed me in heavily accented English. His friend, I quickly surmised, spoke only Spanish and no English. This was my first time speaking directly with anyone in the area, so I wasn’t sure yet how languages worked here. I could tell they would both be more comfortable in Spanish, but I couldn’t tell if they knew I spoke it. So did I try speaking Spanish to them? Did I not? They had addressed me in English—should I continue in English or break into Spanish? When in the conversation would be a good time to do that? What if I started speaking Spanish, and then had to stop mid-sentence because I didn’t have the vocabulary to say I am studying the linguistic landscape of Washington Heights by taking pictures of signs in Spanish for my Conflict Urbanism class at Columbia? No way. I couldn’t do that. They would judge me like they did in PR. Nope-nopity-no, not happening. Throughout this conversation, I paid attention to their eyes. I realized there must be similar questions running in their heads, but they didn’t want to make the assumption that I spoke Spanish, so they didn’t. Of course, this is all conjecture, there’s no way to know for sure. But if there’s one thing I know it’s language tension, and here was a case in which I felt it.
In the end, I kept the conversation in English. The first man translated everything I said to the second man even though I could have done it myself (“Lo e’ta haciendo pa’ un proyecto de escuela. A Columbia.” “Ahhh—OK.”). I asked if I could interview them or someone in the restaurant about their Spanish and they said they weren’t sure because they were busy and they didn’t know if anyone would want to talk to me while they were at work. (This was indeed the case the next time I came up for interviews. When I asked to interview a man behind the counter of a burger place at 171st street, the Pause extended into infinity, so much so that he had served two customers before I realized he wasn’t going to answer my question and I awkwardly exited. This is why all of my quotes are either roughly reconstructed from memory or come from me standing in stores and on sidewalks noting down people’s conversations silently on my phone—as one does when one is screwed for source material).
Somehow the conversation turned to the restaurant and how long it had been there. The man told me wistfully it had been there for over twenty to thirty years and so had the other places on that block, but everything else had changed. There was a silence after he said that, and I could tell he thought it was important, and that he wanted me to think it was important too. But this was only my first visit to the area, I didn’t have the background knowledge to begin asking questions that might be related to gentrification, so I kept my mouth shut. I let the sadness last a while. I told them I had to get going. And then I left.
The second time I was stopped by somebody in the street it was also in English. It was on the same block (162nd) on the other side of the street in front of a barbershop called Hair Conexión. This time when I stopped to take a picture of the Spanish printed on the front of the window, the men were leaning against the wall, so to them it must’ve looked like I was taking a picture of them rather than the sign behind them.
This happened a couple of times throughout my field work—sometimes people asked to not be photographed (one man sitting outside a store on a beach chair asked me this while I was setting up the shot, but then his friend came up in the viewfinder, clapped him on the back, and told him in Spanish to shut up and smile because he looked good and wanted a picture taken), and sometimes there were children purposefully lunging in front of the camera, in which case I told them I was only photographing signs and not people (“Aw man!” one kid shouted, “That’s messed up!”). At one point, a truck driver stopped at a red light asked if he should smile as I took a picture of the Liberato Supermarket on the corner of 163rd, and I laughed as I told him he was safely out of the shot but could smile if he wanted to. In the case of the men outside the barbershop, they stood still as if posing, then the man on the right (beard, headphones, red baseball cap, he could’ve been one of my dad’s friends) called out as I was walking away—“Where are you from?”
“It depends,” I said, making the split-second decision to turn around, “that’s a complicated question. But I’m Puerto Rican.”
“¿Así que habla’ e’pañol?”
“Sí, pero no muy bien.”
“¿Y como eso?”
I explained as best as I could my language situation, switching in and out of Spanish when I thought I might not be able to complete a sentence. I did so nervously, waiting for his face to assume the blank expression of someone pained at having to deal with another person sucking at their language. This never came. He treated me normally, nodding along, sometimes attempting English himself (which I could tell he was bad at). Then when he realized I understood everything and that I only had trouble with speaking the vocabulary myself, he kept everything in Spanish, adding little phrases in English here and there almost, it felt to me, as a kind of courtesy. But not the kind in which he was trying to help me because I was bad at Spanish, but because it felt right in the moment, like the kind of codeswitching I’d done as a kid in PR. We talked for over an hour—I told him I’d lived in Puerto Rico for five years, that my family was Puerto Rican except my mother who was Cuban, that I currently lived in Maryland, and that I went to school at Columbia and was doing a project about Spanish in Washington Heights. “You should come up here to speak Spanish,” he said multiple times after I said I was wary about taking Spanish classes at Columbia because they tended to be taught only by Spaniards—“Aquí hablamo’ el e’pañol de verdad.” Like most people I talk to outside of the context of Columbia, he expressed shock that I was only eighteen (“E’ qué habla’ como si fuera mayor.”) Throughout this interaction, he would greet multiple of his friends coming in and out of the shop, hugging them and giving them fist bumps. At one point, he forcibly included one of them in our conversation (the guy looked to be about in his early twenties) by asking him “Ey, how old you think this girl is?”
“I don’t know,” he said, leaning against the street sign next to him before looking me up and down, “Fourteen?”
“Noo, qué pasa contigo? She’s eighteen.”
“Ahhh—OK. ¿E’ que no tiene el cuerpo desarrollado, sabe’?”(In case you’re wondering—yes this did make me uncomfortable). “¿De donde viene’?”
“Ella e’ boricua y cubana.”
“¡Ooooooye eso e’ sangre caliente ahí!”
They asked me if there were a lot of Puerto Ricans near Columbia and I said no, that I was one of the only few I knew who went there.
“But you’re near Harlem, right? 116th? Aren’t there lots of Puerto Ricans there?”
I didn’t know how to explain the phenomenon of the campus bubble. How did I explain what it felt like to walk around a college campus nestled in the midst of a supposedly diverse neighborhood? How did I explain that if I walked only a couple of blocks north, I started finding people who looked like me, but when I stuck near Columbia I felt very much alone? That no, I couldn’t just speak Spanish there whenever I wanted to because when I did, it wouldn’t be because I was at home with it there, but because it was a second language to “practice” with people for whom it was an exoticism? That even when I spoke it to the one Puerto Rican security guard in my building, it was only in small phrases, a kind of joking flavoring of English that I included because I could, but never anything serious? And anyhow there was always a somewhat-strange look on his face when I did that because the fact of the matter was that the Spanish was out-of-place because it had no home there.
I didn’t try. Rather, we talked about how old I was when I entered college (“¿Diecisiete? Wow”) and the fact that I was majoring in Creative Writing (“I hated English. No podía con la gramática y todo eso—almost flunked,” the twenty-year-old told me. “I wanted to drop out of high school, pero mi mamá no me dejaba porque she told me I couldn’t live in the house no more if I did that so I stayed for her. Didn’t go to college though”). Eventually, the twenty-year-old left and I told the man who had initially stopped me that I had to get going, that I had the rest of the street to photograph, but I might see him another time. (I indeed would, loitering in the same spot at the same time on a different week, this time with his daughter hiding behind his legs, staring at me with huge dark eyes in much the same way I used to do in front of strangers. He would offer to buy me a pastelito de guayaba at the nearby bakery, ask me whether I’d be coming back, and I would tell him I wasn’t sure, that it depended on whether or not I needed more material. He would reiterate once more that I should come up to practice my Spanish because their Spanish was the best Spanish there was, and I would laugh uncertainly, making no promises. I never did go back after that, although I did buy my own pastelitos—eight of them that same day).
As for the Spanish signage, it continued on unabated until 164th street. Then there was a shift. The establishments were more obviously English-oriented. A dentist’s office, an H&R Block, American-style cafés and bakeries, a pizza place, a gourmet deli. Two restaurants with Spanish, but more sit-down places like the kind you might find anywhere in midtown regardless of linguistic landscape. To see if there was a corollary shift in terms of the amount of Spanish-speakers in the area, I walked into the Wendy’s at the end of the block and found a similar hushed-bubble experience as with the Super Foodtown—except here the customers were more obviously varied, a healthy mix between Latinos and people I could tell were associated with CUMC (students with backpacks, people in business attire, etc.). When Spanish was spoken it wasn’t at the counter, but amongst families at their own private tables (“¿Quieren una soda o una limonada?” “Un Sprite, por favor…”). When I walked back out again, I found myself at 165th street and Broadway, the official beginning of the CUMC campus.
Here there exists a boundary. Here is where things turned different.
III. 165TH ST—168TH ST
Castle. Tall. Stone. Beige. White. Window. Glass. Clean. Squares. Bank. Window. Statue. Wide. Walk a tunnel open air. Spotless. Green. Park. Block. Fence. Park. Smooth. Field. Here is where the children play. Laughter (maybe—wait til school lets out). Mound. Walk. The leaves move like wind chimes. Grass. Trim. There’s even flowers here. Center. Bench. Welcome! Long, wide, glass. Fish bowl. Cement. Block. “MORGAN STANLEY ADULT EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT.” Entrance—Entrada. “Adult EMERGENCY →.” Exit—Salida. Walk square, four sides. “NewYork-Presbyterian Columbia University Irving Medical Center.” Taped, bottom door, small, crinkled, how long have you been here, friend?—OFICINIA DE SERVICIO DE MEDICAID SE MUDO AL SEGUNDO PISO/ #2 // MEDICAID SERVICE OFFICE MOVED TO 2ND FLOOR. “WELCOME TO WASHINGTON HEIGHTS HEALTH CENTER.” No smoking within 15 feet of this building (No es permitido fumar entre 15 pies del edificio). MEDICAL CENTER →. Ambulances. Parked. Waiting. Wait a second. Map. Information Desk | Información. Ahhh—OK, here it is, aquí e’ta’ (in the head of course, we’re in a different bubble now, remember? Across the iridescent soap boundary so to speak). Visitor’s Entrance | Entrada de Visitas. ¿Y donde mi gente, donde, donde? Students, bags, backpacks, earbuds. TODOS LOS PAQUETES ESTAN SUJETADO A INSPECCION. Walk&talk, do you want Starbucks? Bicycles parked on the sidewalk. Swipe to get in, yes your Columbia ID works here. William Black Building, 168th street. Photograph, photograph, snap-snap-snap, turn around. Security guard. The Pause. Name tag reads: Rivera.
***“Excuse me, miss, what are you doing here?”
“Oh, I’m just looking to take some pictures. I’m doing a project about Spanish within the Medical Center. Is that okay?”
Apparently, it wasn’t. The security guard kindly explained to me a previous instance in which someone had wandered around the Medical Center with a camera and had ended up taking pictures of some rats he wasn’t supposed to and causing a whole lot of trouble. I’d have to visit a building across the street to get permission to take pictures inside the building if I wanted to do that. At some point he asked for my ID to make sure I was a Columbia student, and when he saw my name he smiled. “Prado-Nunez?” [They don’t print accents on your ID unfortunately] “You Puerto Rican? I’m Puerto Rican too.” I’ll admit I was a bit taken aback. After being addressed in English the entire time, I hadn’t expected to be identified so quickly and so accurately by name alone. I told him, like I had told everyone else, where I came from, what my project was, and what I was doing here. I asked him if he’d like to be interviewed at some point about Spanish and his relation to it, and he said he’d love to, he gave me his name and phone number. He didn’t speak Spanish to me—at least not fully. He spoke it in bits and bobs the way I did to the security guard on my own campus, as a kid of dressing, a flavoring. But there was that tension again. He explained his level of comfortableness with Spanish and it was somewhat similar to mine. He’d grown up speaking it with his parents and he wasn’t exactly perfect at it, but he knew enough to get by. Still when he did include it I could see him looking at me, trying to judge whether I understood or not, but he didn’t break into Spanish with enough conviction for me to know whether or not he was completely fluent so I never did it myself.
But boy did he love to talk. He told me about his life, that he was a Vietnam War vet (gone away eighteen, came back, friends dead) and that he’d grown up not too far away on Amsterdam Avenue when everything was still Puerto Rican. Lots of Dominicans nowadays, he said. Not that he minded. We were all Latino here. I asked him—did he ever see people from the neighborhood come up here? No, not really. He told me he’d never been aware of his socioeconomic situation growing up, had never thought himself as very poor or as very rich. Now he knew, of course, that he’d been down on the lower end, but that was fine with him. They’d always had enough and that was good enough for him. He talked a bit more and eventually, I managed to pull myself away from him and began looking at the other buildings.
Besides, we were somewhere different now. This wasn’t outside on the street down in the 160s where vendors sold fruit from carts and blasted bachata from radios. We were indoors. The walls were made of marble, and the room was relatively empty. It echoed. There were words carved into stone and revolving glass doors and people in uniform. The few people lingering about in the lobby, I could tell, didn’t speak Spanish, and even if they did it was probably their second language, they hadn’t grown up with it like we had. We existed in this moment on a campus that spoke English. As I had walked outside to get here, I hadn’t heard a single conversation in Spanish, not one. Clearly we were in a space where it wasn’t appropriate—or if not appropriate, not exactly encouraged. And so we stuck to English.
While crossing the street, I heard my first bits of Spanish—two female security guards laughing and walking out of the building I was about to enter. And even though it was there and it was joyous, there was a sense of privacy to it. The Spanish was for themselves and for themselves alone and even though it was public, it was also strangely not-public at the same time—like the families who spoke Spanish only amongst themselves at Wendy’s. The students who walked around them skipped them over with their eyes as if the interaction weren’t happening. Here there were bubbles within bubbles.
I explored the 170s a bit, bought some pastelitos at a bakery. When I was walking back down the street to head for the subway station back to Columbia, I encountered the same security guard leaving the building for home (jacket, no uniform). Naturally, he stopped me at the curb, and he talked to me (again) for nearly an hour. We talked about security at Columbia and how they’d cracked down after a recent incident (“What’s the world come to nowadays?”). I heard a random story about him dancing with a woman in a club on his last vacation in Puerto Rico, and then he said he’d like to take me to dinner at some Puerto Rican restaurant he knew (at this point, even though I realized he could have meant it in a grandfatherly sort of way [he was a little old dude after all], there were alarm bells going off in my head and I resolved to most definitely not use his number to contact him for an interview. So this too was the last interaction I had with a person I met in the neighborhood).
I could tell he was well-loved within the CUMC community—multiple times medical students in scrubs came up to him and said hello or hugged him. But—interestingly enough—when he spoke to other security guards or maintenance crew workers, he kept his sentences entirely in Spanish, with little bits of English thrown in instead of the other way around. I realized there was the possibility that he could have spoken completely in Spanish to me earlier and had chosen not to—for what reasons, I did not know. I realized there were unspoken rules here about public Spanish that perhaps made phenomena relating to the Pause infinitely more complicated. Spanish here was a decision. Of course, it’s always a decision when there are two languages involved, but here it was even more so because Spanish was the one that was out-of-place. Here there was no easy codeswitching between languages, it didn’t just happen the way it did for me inside my house in PR, or with the man standing outside Hair Conexión. The ease was gone because the illusion of language equality was also gone. There was a lack of fluidity that went hand-in-hand with a more profound sense of otherness. This was something I would discover to be specific to the CUMC area when I crossed the boundary at 169th street for the first time.
IV. 169TH ST—171ST ST
The Spanish was back. It was more hesitant, but it was back, much more so than it had been on 164th street. 168th couldn’t have been more all-American if it had tried (except for one sad pharmacy in Spanish across from CUMC)—Starbucks, Bank of America, Mike’s Bagel, Shana’s Nail and Spa, some grill called Coogan’s. Then at 169th, the Spanish began to reappear—there were bilingual signs glued to the insides of windows, a MetroPCS had a sticker near the door (Se Habla Español), and outside on the sidewalk, there were vendors planted beneath umbrellas selling lotion, pairs of earrings, phone chargers (PARA TODOS TIPOS DE TELEFONOS). Midway through the block, the street splits in two between Broadway and St. Nicholas Avenue, and there is a wide gray triangle of cement, a strangely open space in what becomes, on both sides of the street, a more gradual progression of shops. I walked both sections of the split from 170th to 171st and both had similar levels of Spanish, gradually building and building all the way to 172nd. If I had kept going, the Spanish probably would have increased. We were back to Farmacias painted blue and white, yellow food markets (CERVEZAS FRIAS…), pink bakeries with the dishes listed out in English and Spanish, threading salons, a single barbershop with EL REINO DE SAINT NICHOLAS printed in orange across the front. The bakery on 171st and St. Nick was colorful, but faded out like it’d been there a while and if you looked through the windows, there was a constant line of customers and a fan going in the background, just like PR. I am hesitant to say it was as if the disparity of CUMC had never occurred because the frequency of Spanish signage had definitely decreased in comparison to the other part of the street. It was more like the public Spanish in the area had taken a blow to the stomach and was in the midst of a geographic recovery—slowly but surely, block by block, shop by shop, street vendor by street vendor.
Even though people continued to stare as I took pictures of places, I wasn’t stopped again and no one engaged me in conversation. Instead I tried something different. When I walked past the pink bakery on 171st and saw the sign for pastelitos ($1.00 each, $0.75 [100] Para Fiestas), I walked in. I stood in line. I don’t think I was even planning what language I would end up speaking, but clearly there was no English here. The people in front of me ordered in Spanish and the woman behind the counter answered in Spanish. The group of people sitting at the high stools in front of the windows also spoke Spanish quietly to one another, and unlike when I had first gotten off the train at 157th this was no longer a new phenomenon for me. The presence of Spanish here for me was as natural as if I were in PR, and when I got up to the counter—“Dos pastelitos de guayaba, por favor. Y un pedazo de flan también.”
I’m not going to say it happened without me thinking about it because there was still that split-second before I got up to the counter, that pin-drop-in-the-stomach moment where I suddenly made the decision to speak Spanish. But it wasn’t a deliberation like it would have been in Puerto Rico—in that case, the sentence I was planning on saying would have been painstakingly plotted out the moment I got in line, I would have had to have imagined each word coming out of my mouth, taken into account the moments where I might stumble, where I might accidentally under-enunciate due to nervousness and end up sounding unintelligible. Now, it had just burst out, and the woman behind the counter sensed no awkwardness, no discrepancy. She reached for the pastelitos, wax paper in hand, asked me again if I wanted a slice of flan or a whole flan (“No, no—solo un pedazo, por favor”), and rung me up without so much as blinking an eye.
Because I couldn’t resist (the clothes were cute, and they had a two for $10 deal on rompers), I walked into the store across the street (LOLA K—VENTA AL POR MAYOR). As I went through the clothes on the rack, a woman who worked there asked if I needed any help. It might’ve been in English (I don’t remember), but I know that when I spoke back to her it was in Spanish, with English mixed in for the parts of the sentences I couldn’t complete. I asked her if there was a dressing room, and she said there wasn’t so she let me try on the rompers over my clothes. “E’ que son todo’ tan mono’,” I said. “Sí, sí, muy bonita,” she laughed as I zipped it up and walked to the mirror. “Se ve muy bien,” she said as I awkwardly kneeled to be able to see myself in the mirror (it only reached above-the-knee-height), “It looks good on you.” After I bought the clothes I wanted to buy (“Die’ dólare’ por favor”), I thanked the woman as I left and told her I hoped she had a nice day (“¡Sí, sí, que tenga buen día!”)
I walked out into the street with my paper bag of pastelitos, my flan wrapped in plastic, and my new rompers tucked into my backpack. I realized that for the first time in a long time, I felt comfortable. Not only with my Spanish, but with the space. I was walking around an area where people looked like me, but also where I knew they wouldn’t judge me based off of the language I chose. And if I spoke Spanish (like I wanted to even though it scared me) and messed up, there would be no otherness. They would accept it and move on. It was strange and exciting and thrilling: in that moment I felt more at home in Washington Heights than I did in Puerto Rico or Columbia or anywhere else. I didn’t know anyone, but I felt like I could walk around here for hours. When I took the subway and got off at the stop back to campus, I felt happy, like my mouth was buzzing with all the Spanish I had been depriving myself for years. I knew I would be back—not only for fieldwork, but to visit stores, to go to restaurants. Maybe I’d even come back here just for the Spanish. I wasn’t sure. But I now knew that there existed a place where I could speak and be freely, and it was a nice knowledge to have, to walk around with, to carry inside oneself. I couldn’t wait to be back.
V. CONCLUSION
Boundaries are funny things. In the case of Washington Heights, the physical boundaries of language are unquestionably rigid in urban space. In one instant there is Spanish and orange and music. Then you cross a street and the world is castles and parks and medical students. In one area there is the comfortableness of language fluidity and in the other area there isn’t. But why is that? If I wanted to defy this, couldn’t I march into the CUMC area and speak Spanish to whomever I wanted to and consciously defy what the space is telling me to do? But that’s the entire point—it is the mere fact that the decision would have to be conscious that shows the existence of a boundary. Boundaries are markers of the internal becoming external—the people who walk and talk and live in the space from 165th street to 168th street are different from those in the rest of Washington Heights, and this manifests itself through signage, through language, through produce carts in the streets vs. public parks, through the wear and tear of certain pink bakeries vs. the long cleanness of big blue windows. But while these boundaries definitely exist, they are also in the curious state of being simultaneously there and not there. There are bubbles, exceptions, moments of individual decision.
When I finally decided to speak Spanish at the bakery in 171st street, part of it was in response to the space around me, but part of it was also a decision in my head to let my language of choice be free in the moment whereas before I was restraining myself, trying to define when my languages were appropriate and when they weren’t. The decision to have freedom, to possibly break boundaries is within individual power—even though the boundaries themselves may be discouraging to us. I am, however, wary of in any way implying that boundaries are something we should be actively fighting against because the truth is that different groups of people exist, and the fact of their difference isn't something to be ashamed of. Instead it is something of which we should be aware. We should, for instance, in no way pretend that the physical and linguistic disparities between official institutions and the rest of Washington Heights don’t exist because they do and these are disparities that affect people. We should navigate space with the knowledge that there are these disparities and that they are complex, in flux, complicated in much the same way we are as people. These few blocks of Washington Heights revealed something to me: that humans have the capability of being simultaneously right next to each other, but also incredibly far apart; that individual people are wonderful and magnificent and make their own decisions in reaction to the world around them, but are also at the mercy of that world whether they are aware of it or not. We are what we are. And this is something that—if we look, if we unpeel those layers of surface-level interaction, if we take the time to truly see—lives and breathes in the spaces around us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Viviana Prado-Núñez was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in a hospital with a 4.0 Google review rating and a view of the ocean. She has never seen Star Wars, eaten a grasshopper, or fallen in love, though she hopes to do all three of those things in the future. Previous publications include The Best Teen Writing of 2014, Quarto, 4x4 Magazine, and her self-published novel, The Art of White Roses, for which she is the winner of the 2017 Burt Award for Caribbean Literature.
Columbia College, 2020, Creative Writing