Language, religion and unification in early colonial Peru

Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Spaniards’ penetration into the New World resulted in their coming into contact with an enormous variety of languages that escaped the limits of all previous knowledge and experience. These languages had no apparent kinship with the ones of the classical world, and so could not be easily deciphered using traditional tools. Unable to renounce the conceptual bases which sustained the entire authority of the “Old World” over the “New,” humanists and theologians constructed bridges and established continuities, amending and enhancing ancient cosmology and sacred history in order to accommodate the American variety. In some cases, like the Jesuit Joseph de Acosta in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Madrid, 1590), the new reality brought about certain ruptures with ancient knowledge and nurtured a new perspective positing experience as the source of knowledge. With this brief, contextual backdrop in mind, the following pages examine the intersection between the Spanish experience of American polyglotism and the politics of unification that accompanied the advance and consolidation of empire. The objective here is to reconstruct an imperial discourse about the role of the Castilian language in the Indies in relation to native languages. This discourse was not always explicit; those who defended and represented empire believed in the natural superiority of Castilian and thus saw no need to defend or contextualize its use. With this in mind, the present essay addresses the following set of questions.