The Role of Spanish Colonization in Preserving Latin American Indigenous Languages and Cultures

OPINION—It’s always entertaining to hear progressives declare that the Spanish colonized Latin America and obliterated its languages, as if many indigenous cultures uniformly operated with written systems. Most pre-Columbian societies in Latin America were oral societies. This posed inherent challenges to preserving their linguistic and cultural heritage which colonization further impacted the survival and interpretation of these traditions. Modern understanding of surviving pictographs, glyphs, and symbols is therefore inevitably shaped by subjective perspectives.

For societies with writing systems or other forms of physical record-keeping, documentation was greatly facilitated; however, this primarily benefited larger indigenous empires or a few well-organized smaller societies.

Yes, the Spanish engaged in warfare—both with and against indigenous groups—but ironically, their documentation efforts have become an indispensable resource for modern scholarship on pre-Colombian languages and cultures that survived their conquest. Loanwords in Spanish today bear testimony to the rich linguistic communication of indigenous societies, preserved through colonial texts. It’s worth noting that without Spanish record-keeping, we’d have far less insight into the intricate dialects and traditions of these oral societies.

While colonization undoubtedly came with atrocities, including bloody violence and losses of lives and many cultural traditions, blaming the Spanish for failing to preserve what oral societies themselves could not document is a reductive oversimplification that ignores the complexities of history. Oral traditions are invaluable for sharing stories and culture; however, physical record-keeping transcends the limitations of a human lifespan.

We can acknowledge the harms with coercive assimilation and the near-total destruction of indigenous languages and traditions, but we cannot dismiss the cultures and records that have survived or been expanded upon after Spain’s conquest.

SpaceX: Succesful Launch of the "Most Difficult Launch Ever"

SpaceX successfully launched (June 25th, 2019 @ 2:30 AM) with the Falcon Heavy for the STP-2 Mission and SpaceX successfully recovered two of three of the core boosters; two returned to Florida, while a third did not successfully land on a drone-ship in the Atlantic. 24 Satellites were deployed.

This mission from SpaceX was the first time they reused the side core boosters from previous launches, which arguably, has come with concerns such as if it could have been sustainable. Nonetheless, the Mission successfully deployed its payload which included an Atomic Clock from NASA and a new fuel will be tested for the Green Propellant Infusion Mission by NASA. The Falcon Heavy also successfully deployed a suite of satellites from the NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes technology that will help meteorologists and climatologists monitor earth's weather patterns with greater accuracy and predictions of major storms. Bill Nye also joined this launch with The Planetary Society which will use a solar sail to propel a small satellite into space within the next week. This was one of the first largest ride-share of US government agencies on one single launch, which includes a mission for the US Air Force.

This launch was expected to be the first time that all three boosters were to be recovered which would have been a major accomplishment for SpaceX and their main priority mission of bringing humans to Mars for colonization missions! Still a great mission nonetheless, and for one of their most difficult launches ever we hope to see even more from SpaceX!