It has long been claimed that several phenomena found in Afro-Caribbean Spanish point to the prior existence of a uniform pan-Caribbean Spanish pidgin or creole. The ultimate source of this contact vernacular presumably was the pidgin Portuguese `reconnaissance language' used along the Coast of colonial West Africa.

As Lipski (1994) recognizes, this sweeping monogenetic claim, if substantiated, would totally reshape our understanding of the formation of American Spanish. He and the majority of Hispanists have, however, rejected the monogenetic hypothesis because, as they point out correctly, none of the evidence adduced can convincingly resist alternative analyses (e.g., spontaneous innovation or peninsular origins). Schwegler (1993) insists that the discovery of a even single "deep" grammatical Afro-Portuguese feature in Caribbean Spanish will automatically validate the monogenetic theory.

Concentrating on bozal Spanish (Cuba, Puerto Rico, etc.), Palenquero (Colombia), and Chota (Highland Ecuador) Spanish, this paper presents two such "deep" (Afro)Portuguese features, thereby offering a unequivocal evidence in favor of the monogenetic pidgin/creole theory.

The data to be examined include reflexes of the Afro-Portuguese 3d person singular pronoun ele (< Port. jle `he' and jles `they') and "strange" double negatives of the type "NO hablo inglis NO" `I don't speak English'. These grammatical items may comfortably be qualified as "deep" features. As Arlotto (1972) and others have recognized, pronouns are rarely borrowed, and if so only in intense and prolonged contact situations. The pronominal data (some of which were collected in situ) discussed in this talk promise, therefore, to be uniquely helpful for proving the genetic relationship between the putative Afro-Portuguese pidgin/creole and the speech varieties in which they are found.