My Cousin Talks Bad Like You: Relationships Between Language and Identity in a Rural Puerto Rican Community

This ethnographic case study uses participant observation and interviewing to explore the multiple, complex relationships between language and identities in a particular Puerto Rican community. Participants included students and teachers from a K–9 school-turned-community center in a rural municipality in Puerto Rico. Participants did not think that one had to be a native Spanish speaker to be Puerto Rican and English was not necessarily a threat to Puerto Rican ethnic identity.