The Native peoples of North America included a multitude of different groups with tremendous cultural and linguistic diversity. They spoke at least 375 distinct languages and differed in their rituals, beliefs and social organization (Mithun, 2001; Taylor, 2002). For example, in the Southwest, the Acoma, Hopi, Zuni, and other groups collectively known as the ‘Pueblo Indians,’ lived in sedentary agriculture-based societies. In contrast, the diverse Native groups along the Northern Pacific coast relied on hunting, fishing and gathering (Taylor, 2002). Native peoples did not think of themselves as belonging to ‘a common category until named and treated so by the colonial invaders’ (Taylor, 2002: 12). Enslaved Africans were also culturally and linguistically diverse; they included Ashanti, Fulani, Ibo, Malagasy, Mandingo and Yoruba people, among other groups (Taylor, 2002). In Chapter 5 we discuss racialization, the sociopolitical and ideological process in which people are lumped together within a single category, assigned a shared racial identity and treated as inherently different and inferior to dominant groups.
In 1521, Hernán Cortés, accompanied by thousands of Indigenous troops who were enemies of the Aztecs, took Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), the center of the Aztec empire. Amazed by the incredible riches of the Aztecs, and having heard rumors of gold farther north, Spain sent Hernando de Soto to explore Florida and the Southeast, while Francisco Vázquez de Coronado headed north from Mexico into the Southwest and the Great Plains. Everywhere they went, death and destruction went with them in the form of massacres, exploitation and/or disease. By the mid-16th century, the Spanish empire encompassed lands and peoples deep into North America, as well as in the Caribbean and South America. However, Spain did not settle all their newly claimed possessions to an equal degree. For example, although they explored the Mississippi River basin and claimed Louisiana for Spain, no permanent settlements were established. And despite Spain’s early 16th century claim to all lands touching the Pacific, Spanish settlement of the coast of present-day California didn’t begin until much later, in the 18th century.
Both in Spain and in its colonies, the monarchy and the Catholic Church were closely intertwined, and the conversion of Native peoples to Catholicism went hand in hand with their subjugation to the Spanish Crown. As such, and in light of the perceived need for loyal Spanish subjects, Spanish missions also played a key role in the Spanish colonial project. Spanish authorities hoped that Franciscan friars could help consolidate Spanish power as effectively, and less expensively, than could be done through military force (Taylor, 2002). The Franciscans established missions in Florida, California and the Southwest, in many cases close to existing Native villages. Present-day US cities that were founded by Catholic missionaries include San Antonio, El Paso, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, among others (Gonzalez, 2011). Many missions are still standing today (see Figure 3.3, and visit the California State Parks’ webpage for information about the 21 Franciscan missions in the state, at https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=22722).
Figure 3.3 San Xavier Mission outside Tucson, Arizona; the mission was founded in 1692 and the current structure was completed in 1797
Source: ©Jennifer Leeman (2012).
In some cases, Spanish and Native peoples formed alliances, but it was not a relationship of equals. Instead, Spaniards tried, often successfully, to subordinate Native Americans through a variety of forced labor systems and tribute arrangements, and colonists and missionaries vied for control of Native labor and souls (Taylor, 2002). Yet Native peoples resisted in a variety of ways, including outright revolt. For example, in what is commonly referred to as The Pueblo Revolt, almost 17,000 Native people participated in a well-coordinated uprising against the continued exploitation and abuse by the Spanish. This late 17th century act of resistance was the ‘greatest setback that natives ever inflicted on European expansion in North America’ and it forced the Spanish to show somewhat greater restraint in their exercise of power and domination (Taylor, 2002: 89).
In contrast with England’s North American colonies, which were made up largely of family units that segregated themselves from Native communities, most Spanish colonists were single men (Gonzalez, 2011). Sexual unions between colonists and Native women were common, and mestizos (their ‘mixed’ offspring) became a new social category, as did mulatos (‘mulattos’), the Spanish-language term that was used for the offspring of Europeans and Africans. In the Caribbean, racial ‘mixture’ was typically the result of Spanish colonists fathering children with the enslaved Africans who had replaced Indigenous slaves. In Mexico, Central America and the Southwest, Mestizos and Native people were more common than people with African heritage, but all groups are attested in the historical record (Bristol, 2007; Nieto-Phillips, 2000). In contrast with the more rigid racial categories of New England, ‘the increasing racial and cultural complexity of New Spain challenged the stark and simple dualities of the conquest: Spaniard and Indian, Christian and pagan, conqueror and conquered’ (Taylor, 2002: 61), as well as the Black/White binary. Spanish colonial society incorporated the notion of racial mixture into social and political hierarchies via the castas, the ranked racial classifications that determined everything from perceived social worth to legal and political privileges (see Chapter 5).
The encounters among peoples from Africa, the Americas and Europe obviously had, and continue to have, tremendous cultural, demographic, economic and political impact in all three places and around the world. In North America, despite the gross inequality among them, all three groups influenced the cultures of the others. For Taylor (2002: xii), ‘in such exchanges and composites, we find the true measure of American distinctiveness, the true foundation for the diverse America of our time.’ Because this is a book focused on language, we want to mention that some of these influences are also manifested linguistically. Numerous borrowings from various Native and African languages were incorporated into the Spanish spoken in North America and/or the Caribbean and, in some cases, around the world. Many of these are related to food, flora and fauna, or cultural expressions. African origin words include banana and chango (‘monkey’) (Megenney, 1983). In addition to the Taíno (Arawak) origin words mentioned earlier, others include aguacate, cacao, chocolate and elote (‘avocado, cacao, chocolate, corn’) of Nahuatl origin, as well as cancha, choclo and puma (‘field/court, corn, puma’) from Quechua. Scholars have also investigated the influence of Indigenous and African languages on the grammar and sound system of Spanish and the development of Spanish-based creole languages among African descendant populations in the Americas, as well as the impact of Spanish on Native languages (e.g. Lipski, 2005; Stolz et al., 2008).
The brief history of Spanish exploration and conquest in the Caribbean and North America that we have presented in this section is, of course, also the history of the Spanish language in these same places. We want to point out that under Spanish colonial rule Spanish was the language of power, wielded by those who spoke it as another way to maintain their social and political privilege. Further, post-independence governments throughout Latin America continued to privilege Spanish and Spanish-speakers at the expense of Indigenous, African and African-descendant languages and peoples. In Chapter 5 we will focus more specifically on questions of ethnoracial identity and racialization. Here, we call attention to the elevated position of Spanish in order to highlight the broader principle that a language’s status is not a characteristic of the language itself but is instead tied to the status and power of its speakers. Further, the ongoing discrimination against Indigenous peoples and their languages in Latin America shapes the experiences of Indigenous Latin American immigrants in the US. In the next section we will explain how the formerly Spanish lands, together with the Spanish-speakers who inhabited them, came to be part of the US. This annexation also marks a shift in Spanish’s status in North America from a colonizing to a colonized language. Of course, the impact of that new status endures in the present-day subordination of Spanish in the US.