Religious Influence and Adaptation of the Nahuatl Language
Imposing the Spanish language as a speaking and writing standard on the Aztecs was a multi-year process. According to Riegelhaupt et al., religion was one of the institutions that promoted the language of the colonizers, as “the clergy used Spanish to teach the Bible” (131). However, for Spaniard preachers to spread Christian propaganda effectively, they needed a safe and non-competitive environment. Colonial leaders achieved it via military violence and marriages with the Nahua nobility.
While the defense forces, native temples, and traditional infrastructure of the Aztecs were destroyed or adapted to the colonialists’ needs, the presence of the clergy was legitimized, ensuring the dominance of the Spanish in Mexico. The Spanish invasion radically affected the Nahuatl linguistic culture. Carmona states, “since the conquistadors did find benefits from using Nahuatl as the official Mexican language, Nahuatl continued to exist” (Carmona 10).
Notably, “people in the valley of Mexico speak the modern version of Nahuatl called Nahuan” (Rios Aguilar 840). Extensive mutual borrowings from phonetics to syntax occurred, but the Aztecs preserved their language. Nahuatl escaped the fate of a dead language and retained dialectical diversity, but lost the opportunity to become the lingua franca of Central America.
Spanish Narratives Justifying Colonization
Religion aside, the Spanish colonizers manipulated Aztec history to justify their imposition of a colonial regime, and the first instance of this happened during the dialogue between Cortés and Montezuma II. Cortés presented the Emperor of Spain as a prince from the origin myth of the Nahua people; the person who brought their ancestors to Mexico (“Cortés on Meeting Moctezuma” para. 11). The colonizers’ leading figure took advantage of the weakness of the oral tradition of storytelling, its high interpretability. The leader of the colonizers did it to justify the current presence of the Spanish in the Aztec lands and future colonial practices.
Cortés used other elements of the Nahua nation’s origin myth. Montezuma II trusted that the Aztecs had a suspicion that being generations away from their actual native land made the understanding and vision of the gods partially erroneous (“Hernan Cortés: from Second Letter to Charles V, 1520” para. 1). Cortés abused this and presented Christianity as the true faith from their homeland. By doing so, he successfully imposed the Christian faith right in Nahua’s capital, Tenochtitlan, during the early stages of colonization.
Colonial Supremacy and Legal Discrimination
The Spaniards as a nation saw themselves as the superior civilization in colonial times, especially concerning the colonized peoples. The Emperor of Spain established the Aztecs as his vassals and subjects in the first response to Cortés’s letters (Wiehe 49). It was a message from the Spanish ruler to his people in the Americas. He obliged them to impose the paradigm of Spain as the highest authority on the Nahua.
Although the Spanish Crown granted some rights to the Aztecs, the Spaniards still considered them inferior, and the legal field of that time demonstrated this. The Nahua nobility quickly mastered the law and jurisprudence and actively petitioned and complained to the Spanish judiciary to correct the injustice (McDonough 70). However, most were not accepted or considered because the Spaniards found it hard to believe the colonized peoples were as intelligent as they were. As one can see, personal prejudice has manifested into institutional discrimination and oppression.
Works Cited
Carmona, Emilia Camallero. “How the Nahuatl Language Survived the Spanish Conquest of Mexico.” StMU Research Scholars. 2021. Web.
“Cortés on Meeting Moctezuma.” American Historical Association. Web.
“Hernan Cortés: from Second Letter to Charles V, 1520” para. 1.” Fordham University. Web.
McDonough, Kelly. “Indigenous rememberings and forgettings: Sixteenth-century Nahua letters and petitions to the Spanish Crown.” Native American and Indigenous Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2018, pp. 69–99. Web.
Riegelhaupt, Florencia, et al. “A Language of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.” Nurturing Native Languages, edited by Reyhner, Jon, et al., Northern Arizona University, 2003, pp. 129-140.
Rios Aguilar, Daniela. “The Colonization of Mexico and the Effect on the Nahuatl Dialect.” Symposium on Undergraduate Research and Creative Expression, 2019, p. 840. ValpoScholar. Web.
Wiehe, Micaela. Making their Voices Heard-the Nahua Fight to Secure Agency 1575-1820. 2021. Missouri State University, Master’s Thesis.