Thanks to Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Americans may have to start wrapping their tongues and minds around a word that has nothing to do with abortion rights or the 2nd Amendment, but a lot to do with the country's evolving ethnic and cultural profile: Nuyorican.
Referring to a person of Puerto Rican parentage or heritage born and (usually) raised in New York City, or to the culture of that group, it's a term that the Bronx-born judge embraces proudly. The word, a phonetic hybrid of English and Spanish that's pronounced new-yoh-REE-ken, and sometimes spelled Neorican or Newyorican, is familiar to New Yorkers, especially those connected to the culture of the Lower East Side, the South Bronx or Spanish Harlem.
But it appears to have clanked off the ears of some non-New Yorkers who perhaps were hearing the term for the first time this week. Already, bloggers are feuding about the correct spelling of the word, which the Washington Post, among other outlets, has written as "Newyorkrican," a spelling that fails to recognize the redundant, hard-sounding "k" in "york," which no native Spanish speaker would be likely to pronounce.
However it's said, Nuyorican, both as a word and as a culture, is a rich blend of influences. And like any complex blend, it's not without a few tart elements.
Arnaldo Cruz-Malave, a professor of Spanish and comparative literature at Fordham College at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, said the term originally was a pejorative coined by Puerto Ricans living on the Caribbean island to identify Puerto Ricans living in New York, the preferred destination of those who moved to the mainland during the middle part of the 20th century.
"When I was a child, no one ever said, 'Oh, you're moving to the United States.' They said, 'You're moving to New York.' New York was the United States," said Cruz-Malave, who was born in San Sebastián in northwest Puerto Rico (many of whose residents actually moved to Chicago, he said).
Sotomayor's parents were born in Puerto Rico after passage of a 1917 law that automatically conferred U.S. citizenship on island-born residents, so technically they and others like them were not "immigrants" to New York. An estimated 800,000 people of Puerto Rican descent live in metropolitan New York City.
