Varieties of Spanish in The United States - (PG 177 - 180)

164 CHAPTER NINE
Spanish in Toronto, Canada, a scenario offering many parallels with Salvadoran

Spanish in the United States.
Notes
1. The early work by Canfield (1953, 1960) is quite accurate. Geoffroy Rivas
(1975, 1978) contains some rudimentary observations on pronunciation. More
recently, quantitative aspects of Salvadoran pronunciation have been studied by
Lipski (1985d, 1986a, 2000a).
2. Martin (1978, 1985) analyzes a similar construction in Guatemalan Spanish as a syn-
tactic calque (loan translation) from Mayan.
3. The most complete study of the Salvadoran lexicon is by Geoffroy Rivas (1978).
Other sources include Geoffroy Rivas (1975), the early and normative studies of
Salazar García (1910), the limited lexical studies of Schneider (1961, 1962, 1963)
and Tovar (1945, 1946), the study of the Quiché/Maya element by Barberena
(1920), and glossaries found in several literary works (González Rodas 1963;
Rodríguez Ruíz 1960, 1968; Salarrué 1970).
4. Rivera-Mills (unpublished manuscripts). Rivera-Mills notes the similarity of the tag
vos with the use of the tag vocative dude in English (also used by many of the same
third-generation Salvadorans when speaking in English).
Copyright © 2008. Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved.
Lipski, John M.. Varieties of Spanish in the United States, Georgetown University Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utpb-ebooks/detail.action?docID=547807.
Created from utpb-ebooks on 2024-04-15 23:25:30.
10
Nicaraguan Spanish
in the United States
The Nicaraguan Diaspora
Nicaraguan Spanish is the third largest Central American
variety of Spanish represented in the United States (after
Salvadoran and Guatemalan), but in areas where Nicaraguans
are a majority, it is naturally the prevailing variety. The
largest single Nicaraguan community in the United States is
found in Miami, especially in the Sweetwater-Fountainbleu
area, at the extreme west end of the city. In this zone, entire
shopping centers, apartment complexes, and schools are
owned, inhabited, or frequented exclusively by Nicaraguans.
Another large Nicaraguan settlement is found in Los
Angeles. Considerable numbers of Nicaraguans are found in
Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, New York, and other large
urban areas, but without the coherence of ethnically
unique neighborhoods. Groups from Nicaragua’s Atlantic
(Caribbean) coast—traditionally speaking West Indian

Creole English and/or Miskito—generally live in other
areas. Some Miskito fishermen have taken up residence
around Port Arthur, Texas, while a considerable number of
black, English-speaking Atlantic coast residents live just to
the north of Miami, especially in Opa-Locka.
On July 17, 1979, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the belea-
guered president of Nicaragua, gave up struggling against
rebels trying to topple a nearly forty-year-old dynastic dic-
tatorship and fled the country. Political power was immedi-
ately seized by the spearhead organization of the armed
resistance, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional
165
166 CHAPTER TEN
(FSLN), a group that took its name from Augusto César Sandino, a Nicaraguan
nationalist hero who had fought against the U.S. military intervention in
Nicaragua in the 1930s and who—after having been tricked into a peace
accord—was murdered by order of Anastasio Somoza García, the first member of
the Somoza family dictatorship. For the next eleven years, the Sandinista move-
ment would totally dominate Nicaragua, taking over the economic, political,
social, military, cultural, and educational structures of the country. Among the
most interesting aspects of the Nicaraguan political transitions—from Somoza to
the Sandinistas to the post-Sandinista regime—are the changes in public language
usage, both gradual and abrupt (Lipski 1997). A few political terms that arose
during the Sandinista regime have made their way into Nicaraguan popular cul-
ture, and even Nicaraguan sports language has been influenced by the regime
(Ycaza Tigerino 1992). The presence of Cuban advisors in Nicaragua may also
have left more than passing memories. A more recent examination of Nicaraguan
popular Spanish usage (Peña Hernández 1992, 73) uncovered instances of non-
inverted questions such as ¿Qué tú dices? (What do you say?), a typically Cuban
construction previously unknown in Nicaragua, instead of the more usual universal
Spanish format ¿Qué dices tú? or the Central American ¿Qué decís [vos]?
Members of the FSLN had seized power with the departure of Somoza, and
although they enjoyed broad popular support at the beginning, they were in
effect only the armed vanguard of an ideologically more heterogeneous and con-
siderably less left-leaning Nicaraguan population. As the Sandinistas’ Marxist-
Leninist ideology became apparent, as ties with Cuba and the Soviet Union
broadened, as hostile relations with the United States became the order of the day,
and as increasingly totalitarian control of the population sank in, rejection of the
Sandinistas as heir to political power became widespread. In 1984 Nicaragua held
presidential elections under the supervision of United Nations observers. The
Sandinista candidate, Daniel Ortega, won a decisive victory. Although international

observers reported the elections to be generally fair and free, the United States
rejected the results and intensified political and military pressure on the Sandinista
government. In 1990 Nicaragua once more held elections, this time under
preconditions and at a level of scrutiny that even the United States government
found acceptable. Although it was widely believed that Daniel Ortega would easily
be reelected, the Nicaraguan people opted instead for Violeta Barrios de
Chamorro, widow of a charismatic newspaper publisher who had been assassi-
nated for his opposition to the Somoza regime. Chamorro was supported by a
broad coalition of opposition groups, ranging from ex–National Guard members
who had supported Somoza to more moderate business leaders and even former
Sandinista combatants.
NICARAGUAN SPANISH IN THE UNITED STATES 167
Violeta Chamorro was widely viewed as the candidate of the reactionary for-
mer Somoza supporters—given the high profile of the former Somoza National
Guard and family business structure among the opposition groups—despite the
fact that her husband had presumably been killed under Somoza’s orders.
Observers on all points of the political spectrum assumed that the clock would
quickly be turned back on the social, economic, and political changes introduced
by the Sandinistas—in particular, a rapid abandonment of Marxist-Leninist
ideology and of a state-controlled economy as well as a return to unabated
capitalism were the assumed outcomes. It therefore came as something of a sur-
prise when Chamorro retained Sandinista military leader Humberto Ortega
(brother of the former president) as head of the Nicaraguan armed forces, and
when she did not undertake the expected purge of Sandinista officials in the new
government of “national reconciliation.” In many ways, Chamorro’s policies
pleased no one. Pro-Sandinista groups resented Chamorro’s redistribution of con-
fiscated land that had been handed over to peasants during the Sandinista regime,
while ultraconservative groups longed for a more decisive return to the privileges
of the past. Armed rebellion—by former anti-Sandinista guerrillas and disgrun-
tled Sandinista supporters—broke out on both sides, and during the early 1990s
it seemed that Nicaragua would sink back into the same self-destructive civil war
that had marked the second half of the 1980s. A succession of post-Sandinista
governments has done little to improve the lot of Nicaraguans, and as of this writ-
ing (shortly after Daniel Ortega had once again been elected to the presidency, on
a post-Sandinista but still leftist platform), the political situation can be best char-
acterized as an uneasy truce amid continued economic stagnation, sniping from
both political extremes, and little foreign investment.
Sandinista ideology quickly penetrated the area of public education, in particu-
lar with a reevaluation of rural culture, the beginnings of a literacy campaign, and
the formation of revolutionary organizations such as the block-by-block defense

committees, as well as Sandinista organizations of women, peasants, city workers,
and youth. In retrospect, the Sandinistas overestimated the average Nicaraguan’s
appetite for revolutionary rhetoric as opposed to a simple return to an untroubled
life and a freedom from political persecution. From the outset, conservative radio
stations (including those associated with the Catholic Church and those represent-
ing large business owners) took a dim view of the Sandinista clamor, and they
began calling for moderation in both language and content. Comparative studies
of the language used in Sandinista and private (almost by definition more conser-
vative) stations during the early Sandinista period show an increasing polarization
of language, not only in terms of revolutionary vocabulary and slogans but even in
the style of delivery, not to mention the overall program content. In 1980 the

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164 CHAPTER NINE

Spanish in Toronto, Canada, a scenario offering many parallels with Salvadoran

(Caribbean) coast—traditionally speaking West Indian

Sandinista candidate, Daniel Ortega, won a decisive victory. Although international

the formation of revolutionary organizations such as the block-by-block defense

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