H.R. 2499 Puerto Rico Democracy Act of 2010

Abstract

In 2010, the U.S. House of Representatives passedThe Puerto Rico Democracy Act, a bill that ostensibly focused on the authorization of a plebiscite on the Island’s future political status in relationship to the United States. Nevertheless, the final text included language policy on (a) ballot language, (b) official language legislation, and (c) language ideologies favoring English as the “language of opportunity ”. Using CDA, this paper examines the House discussion of the bill on April 29, 2010, as found in the Congressional Record Proceedings and Debates of the 111th Congress. The paper focuses on how the discussion of the bill shifted from political status issues to the inclusion of language policies to be imposed on the Island, the role of the Burton Amendment in shaping these policies, and the ways in which the construction of identity with and through language was both promoted and erased on the House floor.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.