BY LANCE OLIVER
© 1997 Hispanic Link

GUAYNABO, Puerto Rico -- The Clinton administration is on record: Puerto Ricans should not be required to speak English for the island to be admitted as a state.

That statement, made by Jeffrey Farrow, the administration's point man on insular affairs, has brought the White House down on the opposite side of the issue from members of Congress such as Rep. Gerald Solomon, R-N.Y. Last year Solomon scuttled a bill on Puerto Rico's political status by pushing an amendment that would have required Puerto Ricans to give up Spanish for English to earn statehood.

A new version of that bill, sponsored by House Resources Committee Chairman Don Young, R-Alaska, is back. Testifying before the committee March 19, Farrow described as divisive and unnecessary a line in Young's bill that says English must be the "common language of mutual understanding'' in Puerto Rico under statehood. Farrow's testimony was the most concrete statement yet from the Clinton administration on the sensitive issue of language.

The administration's opinion was just the most newsworthy development on a day in which Puerto Rico got more attention in Washington than it usually enjoys in months. While the House heard more than five hours of testimony on Young's bill, a bipartisan array of co-sponsors introduced a similar bill in the Senate.

Both bills would hold a congressionally sanctioned plebiscite in Puerto Rico on the status issue next year, 100 years after the island passed from Spanish to U.S. rule during the Spanish-American War.

Farrow's comments provided a boost to statehooders. The language issue is a key barrier to statehood. Nearly half of Puerto Ricans support statehood, but that support dwindles dramatically if a condition of statehood is that they must use English in dealing with the government and their children must be taught in English in the public schools.

The wording in Young's bill may not go that far, but the amendment proposed last year by Solomon would -- and the New York Republican, whose district is not far from Quebec, has supporters for his position that a common language is essential for the United States to remain cohesive. Solomon said he plans to push for the same amendment this year. In the most oratorical and forceful statement among the hours of testimony, Puerto Rican Independence Party President Rubén Berríos Martínez also raised the issue of language, culture and nationality. "Puerto Rico is a mature, fully developed, Spanish-speaking, Latin American-Caribbean nation,'' Berríos said. "To argue that Puerto Rico is not a nation is as absurd as to argue that blacks in the United States were not humans before abolition of slavery.

"Is Congress willing to face a Caribbean Quebec if a majority for statehood becomes a minority for statehood in the next generation?'' he asked. The one thing the pro-independence and pro-statehood factions agree on is that Puerto Rico's current status is colonial.

"The main issue here is civil rights, whether we can keep 3.8 million people from having their civil rights,'' said Gov. Pedro Rossello of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party. The pro-commonwealth faction, trying to salvage a status arrangement that preserves U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans but does not submerge the island into the United States culturally and politically, offered a new definition of the commonwealth status. But the odds are stacked against the status quo.

For his part, Young is determined to resolve the status issue. Under his bill, plebiscites would be held every four years, approximately, until a majority of Puerto Ricans choose either statehood or independence, the two options Young -- and nearly everyone else in Congress -- consider as permanent, non-colonial statuses.

If Young succeeds, the bills now in the Congress could turn out to be the biggest thing to happen to the island since U.S. troops landed at Guánica in 1898 and soon thereafter put an end to four centuries of Spanish rule.

It's also possible the bills could get bogged down in the many issues yet to be resolved. If that happens, Puerto Rico -- "the world's oldest colony,'' as Resident Commissioner Carlos Romero Barceló calls it -- will begin its sixth century as something less than a full equal among the nations of the world or among the states of the union.

Lance Oliver of Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, is a regular contributing columnist with Hispanic Link News Service.