"Language-status change happens when people become conscious of their own worth, when the democratization process matures and the notion of equality becomes more dominant."

IF LANGUAGES WERE COLORS, the Caribbean would be a rainbow. English, Spanish, French, Dutch, African languages and a whole spectrum of Creoles are spoken within its arc of islands. Linguistics, a cognitive science that draws from history, sociology, psychology, physics, physiology, geography, anthropology, literature, and political science, finds a wealth of data here.

Visiting professor Mervyn Alleyne, a linguist at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, is researching and teaching at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras for the 2003-2004 academic year. As a dialectologist, Alleyne studies language variation: how languages were formed, how they change, and why they change.

"Different dialects of the language have different prestige levels. One may say that there is a hierarchy of cultures. We also have a hierarchy of languages. Certain forms of speech are considered better, more elegant. But relationships between dialects have changed and are changing.

"Today, groups which have long been stigmatized for their speech are discarding some of the negative values which have been assigned to their forms of cultural behavior, including language. Language-status change happens when people become conscious of their own worth, when the democratization process matures and the notion of equality becomes more dominant. I'm interested in how the oppressed Creole languages of the Caribbean are struggling to gain recognition after centuries of stigmatization."

Alleyne offers evidence of language-status change in the Caribbean: "In the Netherland Antilles the Papiamento language [a Creole] has become a co-official language with English and Dutch. It's becoming widely used in literature. There are also signs, for example in Haiti and Martinique-Guadeloupe, that French Creole is being used in scientific discourse. Usually science is considered to be the highest point that a language can achieve in its development because only the most highly educated people use scientific language. It is associated with intellectual activity."

Visiting Professor Mervyn Alleyne is the author of The Construction and Representation Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World(2002), Syntax Historique Creole(2000), and Roots of Jamaican Culture (1997).

UPR Artist's Mosaic Caps Train Station

by Suzanna Engman

Fine Arts Professor Nathan Budoff with his students.

"I wanted people to think about what it means to be in the Caribbean–in Puerto Rico–to remind them that there is something that's really wonderful about it."

IF YOU LOOK UP in the Martínez Nadal Train Station, you'll be transported into a rainforest fantasy. The scene: a man with a billowing raincoat losing his grip on his briefcase and ascending into a blue, blue sky. He is surrounded by green parrots and tropical foliage.

"I wanted to leave it open-ended, attractive enough to generate interest and open to a number of possible interpretations," says Nathan Budoff, artist, Fine Arts professor of University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, Fullbright scholar, author, translator, doctoral candidate in Caribbean literature, and creator of the mosaic Con las cotorras ("With the Parrots").

The $316,000 public art project begun in 2002 now crowns the ceiling of the new Tren Urbano station in Guaynabo. Budoff hopes the 43-foot-diameter mosaic will remind commuters that we live in the Caribbean. "It's a comment about contemporary society's relationship to nature, or lack thereof. We live here and the way we live we could be living almost anywhere. I wanted people to think about what it means to be in the Caribbean–in Puerto Rico–to remind them that there is something that's really wonderful about it."

The project began as a 7-foot diameter painting. It drew Budoff into the Caribbean National Rainforest, El Yunque, to research the endangered Puerto Rican parrots he depicts and to a small town about an hour away from Venice, Spilimbergo, where the finest mosaic artists in the world have practiced the art of fabricating mosaics for generations.

Each piece of colored glass is about one-half by three-eighths of an inch. It took the Spilimbergo artisans three months to glue, piece by piece, the hundreds of thousands of glass pieces comprising the mosaic onto two-foot-square pieces of paper, forming a mirror image of the mosaic. The artisans also created a map of the two-foot-square sections so that they could correctly mount them in cement in Puerto Rico. Once a section was secured to the ceiling, the paper was removed and each of the pieces was adjusted to eliminate any seams or lines. Because of the strategic planning, the actual installation of the mosaic took only three weeks.

As the painting evolved into a mosaic, Budoff added foliage and changed some details. For example, when viewing Puerto Rican parrots up close in the Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Program aviary at El Yunque, he noticed some blue feathers in their wings. The parrots in the painting did not initially have these blue wing feathers, so he added them during a later stage of development.

The close-to-complete Tren Urbano project includes 10.7 miles of track and 16 train stations. Each station features at least one piece of art commissioned by the Proyecto de Arte Público de Puerto Rico. Con las cotorras is one of several mosaics.

http://www.artepublico.puertorico.pr