1. In the United States, "Deaf" with an uppercase D often refers to social groupings and cultural identifications resulting from interactions among people with hearing loss, while "deaf" with a lowercase d denotes the audiological condition of hearing loss (e.g., see Erting and Woodward 1979, on the distinction). Because the convention is not used in Spain today, and because much of my material deals with a time in which the convention did not exist, I use the lowercase term when referring to the Spanish deaf community.

2. Deaf communities may constitute cultural minorities or subcultures as well (on the American deaf community see, e.g., Padden and Humphries 1988). In view of the considerable common ground shared by many deaf and hearing people, however, recent discussion has questioned whether the deaf community might not be more appropriately viewed as a subculture—see, e.g., Turner 1994. Similar questions can be raised regarding the Spanish deaf community.

3. For early work on the topic see, e.g., Stokoe [1960] 1978; and Stokoe, Casterline, and Croneberg 1965. For more recent work see, e.g., studies in Siple 1978, 1990-1991. For Spanish Sign Language, see Rodríguez González 1992.

4. The matter is further complicated by the fact that one can be both a member of the deaf community and a member of another minority group. To borrow the words of an anonymous reviewer for the University of California Press, deaf people "form a solidarity [that crosscuts] ... other solidarities: e.g., a person may be deaf, a Catalan, a feminist, a banker, and a Catholic simultaneously and share subcultural traits with other members of those groups."

5. Pinedo Peydró 1989b, 70.

6. Ley de normalización lingüística de Galicia (June 1983), cited in Siguan 1992, 89.

7. The authors of one work ask, "If a deaf person possesses very few or no significant symbols (i.e., no words [or signs] as such), no formal signing system, how does his/her mental experience of the world differ greatly from chimps or dogs who also lack a language? Mightn't he primarily inhabit the Umwelt (environment of physical objects which have no socially shared meaning/definitions) of all other animals but not the Welt (symbolic world of social objects) of man?" (Evans and Falk 1986, 6). On the infirmity model and some of its consequences, see Lane 1992.

8. Ramírez Camacho speaks of the "expressive limitation of signs," while Ciges maintains that they "will always be impoverished and insufficient" (Ramírez Camacho 1982, 106; M. Ciges, preface to Ramírez Camacho 1982, 9); Suriá mistakenly asserts that "ideas cannot be expressed nor understood with gestures" (Suriá 1982, 40). Evans and Falk write, "Were we to put signs on a continuum of language ability, it is toward the lowest end where we would place them regardless of how well done,'' adding that ''when either [speech or hearing] is absent, the formation of 'mind' as we commonly think of it is rendered extremely problematic," and "to us, the manual signing of language is a type of deprivation" whose use " may deprive one of thought at its most abstract levels" (Evans and Falk 1986, 35, 22, 26).

9. E.g., see Poizner, Klima, and Bellugi 1987.

10. Located in the outskirts of Madrid on the Carretera de Vicálvaro, this establishment is Spain's largest public deaf school and the direct descendant of the Royal School for Deaf-Mutes, which first opened in 1805. Although recently threatened with closure as a result of the educational policy of "integración," the school remains open at this writing. When I conducted my research there in the late 1980s, all the instructors were hearing save one, Gustavo Angel Lorca, the art teacher.

11. According to Lourdes Gómez Monterde, who recently left her post as technical advisor to the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture for a teaching position at the Centro Público de Educación Especial de Sordos, the school's present administration is deeply interested in pedagogical reform, including a bilingual approach to deaf education that would use both Castilian and Spanish Sign Language (Lourdes Gómez Monterde, personal communication, September 17, 1996).

12. Lane 1984, foreword, xiii-xiv.

13. The count duke of Olivares (1587-1645), prime minister to Felipe IV, quoted in Siguan 1992, 25.

14. The statute for the Basque Country was not proclaimed until the end of the republic, and it was in effect for only a few months, until the region was occupied by the so-called Nationalist Movement. Galicia was incorporated at the onset of the war into the territory controlled by the fascists; consequently, the value of its statute was largely symbolic.

15. The information concerning public telephones was provided to me by my friend and colleague Eduardo Dias, who found himself in Barcelona in 1949.

16. The point is made in Siguan 1992, 70.

17. Constitución española, 1978, Titular preliminar, Art. 1-3.

18. Spain's present-day situation stands in sharp contrast with that of the United States. Although neither the U.S. constitution nor any law establishes English as the official national language, "English only" advocates, motivated in part by the recent influx of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, lobby for a constitutional amendment that would make English the sole official language of the United States. In November 1986 voters in my home state of California passed a constitutional amendment making English the official language of the state and instructing the legislature to "take all steps necessary to ensure that the role of English as the common language of the State of California is preserved and enhanced."

19. In the autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and Valencia, Catalan is an official language. In the Basque Country and in part of Navarre, Euskera, or Basque, has official language status, as does Galician in Galicia. The statutes of three other communities, Asturias, Aragon, and Andalusia, also contain articles referring to linguistic particularities of their communities, but in these areas the sole official language is Castilian. In the Valley of Aran, which forms part of the autonomous community of Catalonia, Aranese enjoys a special status—see the text below.

20. In the Basque Country and Navarre, children have the right to primary instruction in the language of their choice.

21. That 55 percent of the inhabitants say they are able to speak Aranese is reported in a 1986 survey by T. Climent, Realitat lingüística a la Val d'Arán (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Institut de Sociolingüística Catalana, 1986), and cited in Siguan 1992, 265. Siguan attributes the population figures to "the latest census" (Siguan 1992, 265). The valley is situated in the Pyrenees on the border between Spain and France, and the survival of its language is due to its isolation; until the relatively recent opening of the Viella tunnel, the area was completely cut off from the rest of Spain, with which it sustained regular communication only during the summer months.

22. Deaf people in Spain are not counted in the official census, nor are users of Spanish Sign Language. According to Spain's National Confederation of the Deaf, there are some 120,000 deaf people in Spain today, and of these, 10,000 are affiliated with deaf associations. The confederation assumes that members of this latter group are users of Spanish Sign Language (these figures were kindly provided to me by Ana María Marroquín González). Oliver Sacks, noting that deafness affects about one one-thousandth of the population, estimates that in Spain there are some 40,000 congenitally deaf people (Sacks 1994, iii). In 1992 the Ministry of Social Affairs put the number of Spaniards with some kind of serious hearing limitation at 929,325; 118,953 of them were completely deaf, 365,225 were deaf in one ear, and 531,573 had serious difficulties in following a conversation without a hearing aid (figures from the Instituto Nacional de Servicios Sociales, supplied by Marroquín González).

23. A recent work on Spanish deaf history by Gloria González Moll is a case in point. I agree with this author's observation that "the history of deaf people is a question of perspective and as long as we do not use the appropriate perspective, the deaf person will continue to be a 'marginalized being,'" but her point of view nevertheless differs significantly from the one adopted here. While affirming her belief in the value of human diversity ("el valor de la diferencia ... aplicado a cualquier tipo de ciudadano"), she compares deaf people not to other linguistic minorities, but to individuals who are blind, dyslexic, marginalized ("sea ciego, sordo, disléxico, marginado''), thus evoking the familiar infirmity model of deafness (González Moll 1992, 21). González Moll's book did not come to my attention until my own research had been completed.