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The use of Latin was one of the most important consequences of the conquest of the so-called New Spain. Alphabetic writing, the literacy process, was the essential weapon of the Spanish conquest. The book 'Quand les indiens parlaient latin' ('When the Indians spoke Latin'), by Serge Gruzinski, is an exciting work that reveals this little-known story.
The history of the use of Latin as a means of communication in New Spain served to promote the Christianization of the population and was used by the conquerors to try to understand and adapt a completely unknown language, Nahuatl. “Without alphabetic writing and without all the knowledge that Latin requires, this society would never have existed. Without writing there is no colonization of America,” says Serge Gruzinski, professor of the history of Iberian globalization, guest of Escala in Paris.
After the fall of Tenochtitlán, in 1521, little by little a new alphabet was imposed with everything that it represents: sounds, letters, writing. There was a qualitative difference with India and the Far East, which had their own books or libraries. The challenge was enormous because the conquerors found themselves with “a challenge that they did not have in Asia or Africa to create the first European colonial society. Education is essential not so much to civilize people, but to form indigenous elites capable of serving as intermediaries between the few colonizers and the indigenous masses,” observes Gruzinski, who has written more than a dozen books.
“Spanish colonization found its most effective weapon in the duo composed of writing and paper, they would be used permanently,” describes the guest of Escala in Paris. For Gruzinski, “the text is not only a way of circulating information, it is a way of legitimizing colonization.”
In 1530, just nine years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, acceptable oral communication had been established between teachers, that is, the Franciscans, and the students who were the descendants of the rulers of Tenochtitlan, the author says, and all this in just one decade.
“The process is as fast as what I call the digital or numerical colonization that we are experiencing. You have to calculate a generation to go from one system to another. And it is the young indigenous people educated with Latin, alphabetic writing, who were later the adults who also served as intermediaries,” Serge Gruzinski tells us.
When we ask our guest how and why the teaching of Latin disappeared, Serge Gruzinski remembers: “Latin disappears because these Latinized indigenous elites disappear in the midst of the creole or colonial elites. In the 17th – 18th century, there was already a close relationship that existed between indigenous masses and chief elites, and Latin disappeared because these chiefs preferred Europe, they preferred acculturation, 'Hispanization'.
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