Why Puerto Ricans rallied to change a Providence street name - WPRI.com

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) — Sixteen 100 miles from the land of Puerto Rico is simply a one-block thoroughfare successful Providence that bears the island’s indigenous name—Borinquen.

Its erstwhile Bishop Street sanction bared excessively overmuch resemblance to a vulgar connection successful Puerto Rican Spanish. Puerto Ricans surviving successful the country astatine the clip callback families surviving connected the artifact being embarrassed to talk its name.

“Several families surviving connected Bishop Street that expressed displeasure and a consciousness of distastefulness with having to accidental that sanction with their dense Spanish accent, and that it conscionable sounded excessively overmuch similar a Puerto Rican word that’s benignant of vulgar,” assemblage activistic José González said.

Osvaldo Castillo, alongside assemblage enactment Casa Puerto Rico, asked metropolis councilors to alteration the thoroughfare sanction to 1 that would grant the block’s residents.

“If we changed the sanction it would beryllium Borinquen Street,” Castillo said.

City assembly minutes amusement a solution to alteration the sanction to Borinquen Street passed successful 1984. Castillo is quoted successful a paper clipping from the clip documenting the change.

“The connection ‘bishop’ arsenic pronounced by Hispanics who can’t talk English, is simply a soiled word,” Castillo said astatine the time.

José González and his member Roberto admit that portion immoderate thought the alteration shouldn’t beryllium a apical priority, the determination symbolizes 1 of the archetypal organizing successes successful the community.

“It was thing that was fixed to the assemblage that leaders could past say, ‘Hey look, spot what we tin execute erstwhile we organize,'” Roberto González said.

The assemblage celebrated the caller sanction with a festival honoring it.

“The full thoroughfare was filled with joy,” Castillo recalled. “The Puerto Ricans that lived successful the metropolis of Providence felt truthful proud, and that’s wherefore we celebrated the festival successful the sanction of Borinquen Street.”

According to the Latino Oral History Project, Borinquen Street is the lone thoroughfare successful the authorities to beryllium officially renamed to the Spanish language.

“Every clip I spell by and I spot Borinquen Street, I grin due to the fact that I cognize that determination is power,” José González said. “And politicians utilized to archer us, ‘If you guys are a beardown voting block, past there’s thing you cannot do.'”