# A brief history of Puerto Rican Philadelphia With approximately 134,000 inhabitants within the city limits, Philadelphia has one of the largest Puerto Rican populations in the world aside from New York City and the island itself (cf. United States Census Bureau, 2016; Vázquez-Hernández, 2005). Puerto Ricans, who make up just under 10% of Philadelphia’s population, have been an integral subgroup in North Philadelphia since the industrial boom during and after World War II and the need for more unskilled manufacturing workers in large cities (Whalen, 2005b, p. 13). For example, the Campbell’s Soup Company in Camden, NJ, heavily recruited Puerto Ricans—no doubt in part due to the low wages the employer was able to get away with paying them (Whalen, 2001, p. 53). Once their contracts expired (and sometimes before), many migrated to Philadelphia, in no small part due to the influence of Reverend Enrique Rodríguez, who preached to the Puerto Rican workers in their barracks at the factory (Vázquez-Hernández, 2005, pp. 99–100). Soon after this first wave of migration, subsequent chain migration and the development of labor recruitment companies focusing specifically on Puerto Ricans in the 1950’s and beyond caused the Puerto Rican population in Philadelphia to grow considerably (Ericksen et al., 1985, pp. 15–20; Vázquez-Hernández, 2005, p. 100). The first areas populated by the Puerto Rican migrants in Philadelphia were near Spring Garden and Fifth Street (Whalen, 2001, pp. 183–184). In the 1950’s, there were entire neighborhood blocks made only of Puerto Ricans, enabling the recent migrants to interact in Spanish. A vibrant culture developed here, which led to the creation of various Puerto-Rican-owned businesses in the area that was eventually named ‘El Bloque de Oro’ and the development of cultural centers specifically geared toward Puerto Rico, such as Taller Puertorriqueño in 1974, which “uses art to promote development within its community and the Latino Diaspora and build bridges to the Greater Philadelphia region” (Whalen, 2006, p. 98; see also Stigale, 2013). Additionally, a number of organizations advocating for Puerto Rican issues—like affordable housing, family support services—were developed, including the Asociación Puertorriqueños en Marcha (APM ; Whalen, 2006, p. 86) in 1970 and the Hispanic Association of Contractors and Enterprises (HACE ) in 1982. In fact, personal narratives from middle-aged participants in the sample reveal that many pastimes of Puerto Ricans in the early decades were not significantly different from many of the interviewees in the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation (LCV; Labov, 1984), despite vast differences in economic opportunity: playing stickball and double-dutch in the alley or on the street, school fights, and taking public transportation (cf. Labov, 1984). Since the 1970’s, the Puerto Rican experience in Philadelphia has changed due to evolving external and internal pressures. In some ways, changes have been positive, such as the election of Puerto Rican representation in some local government positions (e.g, City Council, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives; cf. Whalen, 2001, p. 237) and the revitalization of the Bloque de Oro, which involved funding from both local and national businesses and organizations. One major aspect of this renovation includes the construction of El Corazón Cultural Center, a brand-new, much larger building for Taller Puertorriqueño—the primary arts and culture organization for Latinos in Philadelphia—which is better equipped with facilities to display visual and performance art exhibitions, offer art classes to the community, and provide after-school programs to local youths. These small victories were hard-won, though, and required decades of activism by Puerto Rican advocacy groups (e.g., the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican Alliance; cf. Whalen, 2001, pp. 237–238). Changes in the Puerto Rican experience have also been negative. These are, on the whole, corollaries of the continued financial struggle of Puerto Ricans, who continue to be the victims of implicit and overt racial discrimination in housing and access to employment opportunities in the city. This constellation of factors has relegated many members of the community to neighborhoods with high crime rates, low property values, and limited access to public transportation. Moreover, many have had to relocate due to rising home prices and urban gentrification. # The current social reality of Puerto Rican Philadelphia Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia co-exist among blacks in the northern and northeastern parts of the city, far removed from the employment opportunities and resources in Center City. In Philadelphia, a city whose phonology is otherwise extremely well studied, little research has described the Puerto Rican population’s participation in greater Philadelphia sound change. Philadelphia has one of the largest Puerto Rican populations in the world aside from New York City, and Puerto Ricans have been an integral subpopulation in North Philadelphia since the 1940’s, due to heavy recruitment by the Campbell’s Soup Company in Camden, NJ, and subsequent chain migration of Puerto Ricans in the 1950’s (Ericksen et al., 1985, pp. 15–20), so this is quite surprising. At the onset of the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation, the justification for their exclusion was that Puerto Ricans, like blacks, represented “the lowest echelon of the working class” (Labov, 2001, p. 48). A glimmering jewel in this linguistic desert is Poplack (1978a), who studied the speech patterns of middle-school-aged Puerto Rican students and evaluated their use of three phonological variables relative to the usage patterns observed for white and black speakers from that community. Poplack found not only that Puerto Rican children were adopting variables from both communities, but that their adoption of black variables was driven by local prestige (i.e., a popular boy with whom several of the Puerto Rican boys wanted to be friends). Socio-demographically, Puerto Ricans and blacks are more alike than Puerto Ricans and whites in Philadelphia. This said, the situation of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia is much bleaker than either whites or blacks. Among the three ethnic groups, Puerto Rican children under 18 are significantly more likely to live in a household below the poverty level—though the proportion for blacks (43.7%) is much closer to the statistic for Puerto Ricans (60.0%) . Moreover, Puerto-Rican (41%) and African-American (50.7%) households with children are more likely than white households (14.9%) to be headed by a single mother, and, of those families, Puerto Ricans are almost twice as likely as whites and a third more likely than blacks to have a household income less than \\$26,500. While 67.5% of whites and 55.1% of blacks owned a home as of 1980, only 38.5% of Puerto Ricans were homeowners. Of those who owned homes, 37.4% of Puerto Ricans lived in a home worth less than \\$31,200, compared to 7.5% of whites and 23.2% of blacks (Ericksen et al., 1985, pp. 48–60). Given the stark contrast between the social realities of Puerto Ricans and whites, one might reason that there is little chance for the two populations to interact, and a low likelihood that Puerto Ricans would be able to (or want to) acquire speech patterns associated with that community. Blacks are geographically and socio-demographically more similar, so it would seem logical to assume that Puerto Ricans will adopt a black vernacular. Indeed, the case in Harlem (Wolfram, 1974) would suggest that this is a likely outcome. However, adopting AAE speech is unlikely to afford much social mobility, and adopting white speech patterns may be necessary to broker success in low-paying, service-related occupations (e.g., hotels, retail). Moreover, research has shown that contact communities may utilize the same variables distinctly from the majority population to highlight certain indexical fields. Thus, it is not clear which patterns will emerge in the Puerto Rican community. The institutionalized mechanisms that suppress social mobility in minority populations also constrain the quantity and quality of interaction they have with speakers of standard varieties. However, these same mechanisms often place minority speakers in interior social classes—precisely the ones that originate and lead language change. Hitherto neglected minority speech patterns, such as those of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia (e.g., Poplack, 1978a; Pousada & Poplack, 1982), may hold critical insight regarding how language change propagates within diverse communities, and how language changes in-progress may be variably adopted within a minority sub-community. Consequently, such groups provide the key to a much more complex, diverse, and representative portrait of language variation and change.