Caribbean Spanish influenced by African American English

This chapter presents a new US Spanish variety termed “US Afro-Spanish” (USAS). USAS likely originated in East Coast communities with racially diverse Spanish-speaking Caribbean immigrants in intense contact with Anglophone African Americans. We explore USAS’s status as a Spanish ethnolect/in-group sociolect, documenting its phonetic and phonological bases through acoustic analyses and demonstrating its salient morphosyntactic features. As urban US-Caribbean Latinx youth navigate intricate social networks, we hypothesize that they reject sociocultural markers of “whiteness” to intentionally extend stigmatized “black” linguistic indices across a bilingual repertoire of English and Spanish, thereby constructing new identities as 21st-century American youth of color.