The present work seeks to identify sources of the persistent link between the Spanish language and national identity in Puerto Rico. By examining mass media discourse in the 1940s as a turbulent period of language policy conflict between Puerto Rico and the U.S. federal government, I suggest that the federal imposition of language policy without the consent or approval of local politicians or educators was influential in the construction of national identity that included language as a major defining factor. Local elites reacted to the colonial hegemony by defining Puerto Rican identity in opposition to American identity. The construction of identity in the 1940s is characterized by a cultural conception of nation that redefined national symbols, such as language, in social rather than political terms in order to avoid disturbing the existing colonial hegemony.