Hispanization Policies in Colonial Jujuy

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the manner in which the linguistic policy imposed by Spain on its American colonies through laws, royal decrees, ordinances, and provisions of the legal corpus of the Indies was implemented in Jujuy, Province of Tucumán, in the Viceroyalty of Peru.

In the process of colonization, the metropolis imposed its language, religion, and culture. Along with the conquerors came members of religious orders, who were entrusted with the evangelization and Hispanicization of the Indigenous population. Unfortunately, this aspect of the colonial history of Northern Argentina had not been addressed by historians of language or education, nor by civil or ecclesiastical historians, until well into the eighteenth century.

We lack reliable documentation on the implementation of language policies during the early colonial period. In archival documents from the end of that century, we found provisions issued by the central power that forced Indigenous people and Spaniards to speak only “Castilian” and prohibited them from using American languages.

The analysis of these texts was framed within Louis-Jean Calvet’s conceptualization (1997: 44) of the types of management that arise in linguistic situations: one derived from the social practices of speakers, and the other corresponding to governmental intervention in those practices. This double functioning was verified by comparing colonial historians’ descriptions of the linguistic behaviors adopted by the inhabitants in response to royal mandates with the coercive discourse of the documents studied, in which the Spanish Crown turned language into an instrument of domination.