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.
