The Effect of Linguistic Barriers in the Conquest of Latin America

In 1492, the European concept of the world was forever changed. The arrival of Christopher Columbus on the shores of an island in the Caribbean marked the beginning of a series of great historical changes, culminating in the Conquest of what today is known as Latin America. Although attempting to sail to India, Columbus and his crew arrived on the Caribbean island of Guanahani, as it was known to the Lucaya population inhabiting it. Upon landing, Columbus performed a crude, ethnocentric appraisal of the inhabitants of the island. Describing them in his diary as "a very poor people, in everything," and "a people who would better be freed and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force," Columbus had fascination regarding the peoples of the Americas, but little respect for the culture that they had established. Despite bringing the multilingual translator Luis de Torres on the voyage to North America, Columbus and his crew struggled to communicate with the native population - the first misinterpreted interactions of the many that would become a refrain in the relationship between the Spanish and indigenous peoples of the Americas. 


Consisting not only of dissimilarities in spoken and written languages, but also religious and philosophical perspectives inherent in the indigenous systems of communication, the linguistic differences between the Spaniards and the indigenous peoples of the Americas had two primary facilitating effects in the Conquest - the language barriers that existed between these two cultures allowed the Spaniards to construct rationales for the continued exploration of Latin America and genocide of the indigenous population based on economic and religious reasons and prevented the native peoples from resisting the Conquest.


After his arrival, Columbus wasted no time in a search for riches. On October 13th, one day after landing on shore, Columbus wrote in his diary,
 "And I was attentive and sought to learn whether they had gold and I saw that some of them wore a small piece suspended from a hole they have in the nose: and I was able to understand by signs that, going to the south or going around the island to the south, there was a King who had large vessels of gold and who had a great deal of it."

Numerable things must be taken into account when reading Columbus' diary. First, the diary is not an objective retelling of the events that occurred during the voyage, due to the fact that all events are narrated from the European perspective. Second, Columbus was under pressure from the Spanish crown to obtain results. Finally, whenever Columbus writes about his interactions with the indigenous people that he encounters, what he reports is the meaning that he can invent from their broken communication.

Upon his return to Spain, Columbus carried with him an assortment of the gold jewelry and trinkets that he found in the Caribbean. Columbus' report of the rich lands he had voyaged to was accepted with great enthusiasm in the Spanish ports, as well as by Queen Isabella herself. The monarch ordered that his voyages with "the aid of God be continued and furthered," herself intending to establish a factory on the island known as Española for the trade of gold, similar to what had been done in Guinea by the Portuguese. (McAlister 74-76)

While several theories exist regarding Columbus' motivations for abstracting the existence of massive quantities of gold based on so little evidence, speculation is ultimately fruitless. What may be stated with certainty is that actions were taken based on illegitimate interpretations of the communication that occurred between the indigenous people and Columbus and his crew. "[Understanding]... that there was a King who had large vessels of gold" would likely require more than a day's experience and contact with the indigenous people of Guanahani. A deliberate interpretation, exploiting the difficulties in communication between the crew and the natives, was made on the part of Columbus, providing Spain economic motive for the continued exploration and Conquest of Mesoamerica.

The interpretation of the existence of massive supplies of gold in Mesoamerica was not the only notable miscommunication between Columbus and the indigenous population. Peter Hulme, a professor of Literature at the University of Essex and a postcolonial theorist, argues that another misinterpretation on the part of Columbus resulted in the propagation of the concept of 'canibales' - savage tribes that practiced anthropophagy, the consumption of other humans - despite the fact that it is highly possible that no such people ever existed.

In a chapter of Colonial Encounters entitled "Columbus and the Cannibals," Hulme describes the way in which the term 'cannibal' arose from the strained communication between the indigenous people and Columbus. While much time is dedicated in this work to analyzing the blending of the Oriental discourse with information obtained and invented by Columbus upon his arrival, an accurate summation of Hulme's thesis is made when he concludes that "Columbus's 'record', far from being an observation that those people called 'canibales' ate other people, is a report of other people's words; moreover, words spoken in a language of which [Columbus] had no prior knowledge and, at best, six weeks' practice in trying to understand." The effect of this miscommunication between the native population and Columbus created the idea of cannibals and may have contributed to the religious tensions between the Catholic Church and the indigenous peoples of Latin America by promoting the idea of savage native religious and cultural rituals.

Advancing to the 16th century, the way in which these initial miscommunications would be exploited becomes clear. Arguing in 1550 for a so-called "Just War" against the indigenous population of Latin America, Spanish theologian and philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda cited acts such as immolation of others as human sacrifice to characterize the cultures of the native peoples as barbaric and demanding 'civilization' in the form of enslavement. While acts such as these did occur, the characterization of all tribes in Mesoamerica as tribes partaking in these customs is both incorrect and unfair.

Sepúlveda argued that war should be brought against the inhabitants of Mesoamerica for four reasons: that the state of barbarism that the indigenous people were found in justified the Conquest as a way of saving them from such a state, that the war against them would be justified as a punishment for the crime they had committed against the Natural Law by practicing idolatry and human sacrifice, that the war against the indigenous peoples would help to restore order to the world by reinstating the Natural Law, and that declaring war would facilitate the conversion of the indigenous population to the Catholic religion (Losada 16-38).

Although Sepúlveda never traveled to Latin America, three of the four justifications he gave for war against the native population are based on the purported barbarism of the indigenous peoples. It is clear that the myth of cannibalism and the ethnocentric interpretation of the rituals and religious practices of a few of the many indigenous peoples of the Americas greatly colored the European perception and attitude towards all of those living in Mesoamerica, and likely elicited support for and facilitated the enslavement, mistreatment, and dehumanization of the indigenous population as a whole.

Why is this so? What would be different if a Conquest were attempted today? The primary difference in modern times is global linguistic representation. When the discovery of the Americas occurred, there were no bilingual representatives to moderate the first interactions of the two cultures. What happened was that the representatives of Spain, such as Columbus, hurried to describe and classify the indigenous population in order to put them in a familiar conceptual framework. This would, perhaps, not have ended as badly for the native peoples as it did had there been a common language between the two cultures, and therefore the potential for correction and self-representation. However, little meaningful communication occurred during the important first interactions, and the Spanish representatives proceeded to invent meaning rather than exercise patience until actual communication could occur.

This invention served as a secondhand representation of the indigenous people, describing only their actions and lacking an explanation of their customs. The result of this was that the creation of the idea of a culture that was uncivilized to the point of not being able to represent itself in any meaningful way. It was in this way that the myth of the "barbaric indian" - that described by Sepúlveda - was created, as well as the very real social position of the "other" - the dominated, unrepresented society subservient to the dominating culture. The inability of the indigenous population to represent itself in the Spanish language was a primary facilitating factor in the Conquest of the Americas, as it allowed the Spanish culture to dehumanize and devalue the native people.

To this point, much has been said regarding the way in which the linguistic differences between the Spanish and the native peoples of Latin America affected the Spanish perception and treatment of the indigenous population, but nothing has been said about the way in which the linguistic system of the native population influenced the early Conquest. To study this, Aztec perspectives on time and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, will be analyzed from a religious and philosophical perspective.

Tzvetzan Todorov, notable French philosopher and postcolonial scholar, argues in "Montezuma and the Signs" that a primary facilitating factor in the Conquest of Mesoamerica was the inability of the Aztecs to perceive time in the same manner as the Europeans. Whereas the Spaniards perceived time as linear, the Aztecs believed in time that was circular or cyclic. As Kay Almere Read, a professor of comparative religion at DePaul University elaborates in her book Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos, "For religious people, the shape of "real" time is circular or cyclical, for it returns one to primordial archetypes of the mythic past by ritually repeating those original creations in the years present." Miguel León-Portilla, Mexican anthropologist and historian, echoes this sentiment in Aztec Thought and Culture, saying, "Both space and time are conceived not as empty stage settings, but as factors that combine to regulate the concurrence of cosmic events."

In other words, in the Aztec mind, only things that had happened in the past could occur in the present. There was no possibility of novel events occurring. In this way, the arrival of the Spanish was completely unforeseen and did not correspond with their deeply held beliefs about the possible and impossible. The Aztec language itself had little capacity for improvisation and description of novel events, with the most highly revered form of linguistic intercourse being the ritual huehuetlatolli, memorized speeches of different lengths that were applicable in a broad range of social circumstances. Todorov explains the effect of this aspect of Nahuatl thus:

"Masters in the art of ritual discourse, the Indians are inadequate in a situation requiring improvisation... Their verbal eduation favors... code over context... conformity-to-order over efficacity-of-the-moment, the past over the present. Now the Spanish invasion creates

Whereas the Spanish had preexisting ideas, representations, and descriptions of cultures dissimilar to their own, the Aztecs had little idea of what to expect of the Spanish due to geographical isolation. When put in the situation of having to use language to communicate and transmit novel information regarding the invasion, the Aztecs failed due to the esteem that they gave to ritual, unimprovised language, thus permitting the conquest.

Due to the inability of the Spanish and the indigenous peoples of Latin America to communicate at the beginning of what became the conquest, unfounded claims of riches in Mesoamerica were propagated, the myth of the cannibal and the characterization of the indigenous person as the uncivilized "other" in colonial discourse were established, and the Aztec culture made itself susceptible to attack and genocide. What exists at present is the Spanish record of the conquest, with little to no written indigenous record of the occurrences during that time period. Much in the same way the Spanish language served to characterize the indigenous peoples as a whole in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Castilian language persists, coloring the judgments and opinions regarding the conquest to this day, while the languages of the native populations of Mesoamerica dwindle in prevalence, relegated, as they were in the conquest, to the role of the "other."

Works Cited

Columbus, Christopher. "The Log of Christopher Columbus." 1492.

Hulme, Peter. "Columbus and the Cannibals." The Postcolonial Studies Reader. Edited by Ashcroft, et al. New York: Routledge, 1995.

León-Portilla, Miguel. Aztec Thought and Culture. Trans. Jack Emory Davis. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Losada, Ángel. "Introducción." Introduction. Apologías. Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1975. 11-39.

McAlister, Lyle N. "Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492 - 1700." Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Read, Kay Almere. Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos. Indiana University Press, 1998.

Todorov, Tzvetzan. The Conquest of America. Trans. Richard Howard. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.